Gdynia, Poland to Vimmerby, Sweden. August 2 to 4.
Throughout the journey my foresight and planning ahead had ranged from about zero to three days. Hospitality stays through online communities typically require connecting in advance but sometimes, and especially in Iraq, spontaneous offers would come up on the roads. The days when I had woke up with no accommodation for the following night had not bothered me much as there had either been cheap accommodation with cycling distance or good chances of finding friendly locals to help.
Entering Sweden I had known this to change drastically. Neither would there be any cheap hostels nor spontaneous offers, and I in my own country simply could not afford to travel as I had. Thus, for the first time, I had the full week set ahead of time with a mix of Couchsurfing, Warm showers, Airbnb, extended family and an old friend to provide shelter all the way to the finish line in Stockholm.
The ferry from Gdynia took me to Karlskrona in the southeast corner of Sweden where I had never been before. The first host in my home country would be my last of many Russian connections made in my journey. I have written about some of these meetings, especially in chapters 31 and 43, and being hosted by Anna, her family and her friend Natasha was a perfect end of that little side story and I felt as welcome and cared of as I could ever be. Of course, they are people like any other, and usually my interest is drawn to personality, not nationality. Perhaps my particular curiosity for Russians comes from the fact that the part about "people like any other" doesn't seem to apply to them in this day and age.
At the time of writing, the only flight connections to Russia from Europe go via Turkey, and are thus very inefficient in terms of time, money and fuel consumption. Open land borders are also scarce, currently there is one operating crossing in Estonia where you can only cross by foot. Anna and her sons live in Karlskrona for many years, but Natasha was just visiting over the summer. Despite living in St. Petersburg, just over 1000 kilometres away as the crow flies, she could expect multiple days of travelling, questioning and waiting to get home. She later told me that the crossing alone took seven hours.
There was a sadness about her, well hidden. On the surface she smiled of courtesy and of empathy, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that there was much that she had buried deep within to be able to carry that face. When I asked about family she hesitated for a moment.
The only person I ever wanted to have a family with was crossing the street when he was hit by a car and died.
That's just life, I suppose.
After a pancake brunch the following day, it was again time to hit the road. The sun was out and before leaving we captured the fresh morning in the yard. Obviously I saw what I wanted to see but if ever so slightly, if only for a moment, it seemed that our meeting had rekindled Natasha's spirit. As for Anna and her sons Stefan and Stanislav, they all spoke Swedish and had truly integrated in Swedish lifestyle along with their dogs, Marusja and Dunja.
Karlskrona lies in the small and narrow province Blekinge. Soon I entered the much larger and historically significant Småland. Cycling through the woods and passing the small fields that the farmers of old had made for themselves, my mind went to some of the most known literature from Sweden. The many stories by Astrid Lindgren and "The Emigrants" by Wilhelm Moberg were all set here and are among my favourite fictions. And while they are indeed fictional, they are known to depict most accurately what life in this place used to be and perhaps nowhere in Sweden do the lives of old common folk show so much in the land itself as in Småland.
The country is full of rocks and in order to make a field to plough and sow, they needed to be removed. The stones, unless they were too big, were often stacked to make walls separating one farmer's land from the next. The walls can be several metres wide and the province is full of them. The moving of rocks crippled, shortened and claimed many lives and even then the soil beneath could often not feed the mouths left. You may not believe it today but it was not long ago that Sweden was among the poorer nations in Europe where starvation was not uncommon.
The second night was spent with my first Swedish hosts, Susanne and Otto. Their grown daughter, a cyclist like myself, had encouraged her parents to start to host cyclists now that their kids had moved out and as there were few other hosts in their part of the country. I'm most happy that she did and most grateful that they listened for I could not think of a better day than I had with Susanne and Otto outside Nybro in south Småland.
After a typical Swedish summer evening barbecue, we drove to Kalmar, a city by the coast. There was a cover band rock music festival in town, and while we walked on the pier and looked at a sand art competition, we heard the sounds of "Made in Iron", "ZZ Tap" and other more or less clever tributes to the big stars. On our way back to the car we bumped into friends of Susanne and Otto and suddenly we found ourselves not heading back at all, but instead helping them out to finish their stock of beer and wine. As I day by day closed the distance not only to family and friends but also to her, the woman that I was still heartbroken from, the past kept haunting me on the roads. Rock'n'roll, alcohol and friendly folk provided welcome distraction. Or, perhaps more accurately, they pulled me out of my distracted head, and into the moment.
The next morning, just before I left, Otto showed me his garage of motorcycles. I could count to five of them and he went from one to the next, telling where it came from, how old it was and how it was, or was not, used. When he came to the last two he grew quiet for a second and his thoughts seemed to go elsewhere. After a while he spoke in his composed manner:
Of course... these two have a more solemn history. They belonged to my two brothers.
In some ways Otto was the perfect image of the Norse man. A stoic of few words, the comings and goings of things seemed to make little mark on his calm aura. But even where nothing seems to stir, be it in a quiet Swedish village or inside a man called Otto, there is trouble that might not show.
I continued my journey through Småland toward my only paid accommodation in Sweden, a simple cottage outside Vimmerby. The host Krister had lived an exotic life and could be considered to be part of the "green wave" movement of the 70's who moved out from cities and chose alternative lifestyles in the countryside. Of particular interest to me, he had written a memoir about his soul searching throughout his life. I have not yet gotten around to read his book "The Empty Circle" but as an aspiring author who is doing some soul searching himself, I look forward to read the story about a fellow Swedish traveler who has been looking for something without quite knowing what.
