Safe Return Doubtful

I’ve spent the last few days at the beach at Grøtfjord which is about forty minutes from the town of Tromso. When I arrived there were just a handful of other vans.

The local community asks for 10 euros to stay directly on the beach. A rarity for this summer, the local people tell me, in that on Friday the sun shone, and the temperature climbed to a pleasant 21C, and on Saturday even a little bit warmer. Consequently, lots of Tromsonians, who have barely seen the sun this summer, let alone a midnight sun, came out to enjoy it. Grøtfjord got busier, but not a lot, maybe 50 vehicles or so, a mixture of tourists in campervans and motorhomes, a few in rental vehicles with tents, and the majority, local people with families for a beach day. 

We are in the last few days before there will be a sunset. Here, that will be on 27th July, and it will be the first since 14th May. Local people like to take a stroll in the early hours of the morning, and maybe a picnic or a barbecue, but this year there hasn’t been much opportunity to do that in clement conditions.

There’s been a Dutch couple here, also in a green campervan that I have chatted with a few times, walking our respective dogs. They are on a sort of late middle age gap year, and just a few weeks into it. They will travel through Europe and include Turkey and Morocco in the winter. It’s always fun to exchange travel stories and pass on tips of good places to stay. 

This afternoon two Eritrean families arrived to camp just next to me. It wasn’t long before the young children, less than 8 years old, were playing with Rua. It had started because he had stolen a sock from the smallest when she went to the water’s edge. The parents got talking, and offered some of their rather grand lunch they had brought with them. They lived half an hour away and had done for 15 years when they arrived from Eritrea. On a government sponsored initiative, one of the guys trained as an engineer at Tromso University and now works in the Hydroelectric industry. The other worked on tunnel construction, another huge industry here. Their wives have both worked in Healthcare since 2011. It did take them a while to settle, the two cultures are very different. The day they left Asmara it was 40C, an April day. They flew into Tromso which was -15C.

It’s a quiet weekend on the sporting front for my tastes. I watch a bit of Hundred cricket, though I really don’t like it. It’s a chance to catch up with reading, and there have been some books that I think have a good chance of a Booker Longlist nomination that I wanted to read before that announcement is made, on this coming Tuesday (27th July). 

I’ve also had a look ahead at my schedule for the next couple of weeks. It is likely to be around the end of August when I head south, though with another week or so north of the Arctic Circle in Finland and Sweden. I will need to make an appointment at a Swedish Government Office as part of the visa extension application process. The furthest north I can do that is in Lulea, so at some stage in the next few weeks I will arrange that. 

We will move on from here tomorrow morning, Monday, to stock up at a supermarket before the next destination, which will only be a short thirty minute journey away.