A Cycle Tour in Sweden and Norway, 1963

I recently retrieved from the back of a drawer a small notebook with a blue cover. I knew it was there – I’ve had it since 1963 – but I’ve only rarely taken it out to look at it, maybe once every five years. But a few weeks ago I thought I really ought to make a copy of it, a back-up in case of accidents. The obvious choice was to make a digital copy which could easily be duplicated, so I scanned the pages and re-typed the text.

The notebook is the diary I kept during a five-week cycle tour in Sweden and Norway which I did in the summer of 1963 when I was 18. Looking back and re-reading what I wrote I get no impression of the young man I was then. Although I can sense a time-line, some kind of continuity between the person I am and the life I lead now and how things were then, the line is tenuous in many places. The 18-year-old is the both the same person and very different. The account is almost entirely factual, matter-of-fact in tone. I must have deliberately chosen not to write anything personal, though why I don’t know. Instead I seem to have been obsessed with food, the condition of the road surfaces, and the nationality of fellow youth hostellers because I recorded these all the time. So while I’m still able to remember something about this journey I wanted to fill in some of the background which is missing from the bare account I wrote back then, nearly 50 years ago.

Another documentary source is the map I took with me. It’s a complicated folding map covering the whole of Scandinavia in four sheets bound together. My bike ride fits on one of the sheets, which is at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (1cm = 10km) and on which I drew the route I (we) took. Thanks to Google Maps I’ve been able to digitise the route. I still have my old youth hostel card (do they still have them?) on which I collected stamps from the hostels where we stayed.

And then there are the photos I took using a folding bellows camera my father had lent me. I can’t remember the make, but it was Eastern European – possibly Leica. It used 120 film, and for reasons I can no longer remember I decided to take colour transparencies rather than prints. Too big for a standard slide viewer, these pictures have lain in a drawer ever since until early this year (2012) I had them scanned and digitised by SLX Photographic. They’ve survived remarkably well (with the help of a little restoration) and I’ve put them into a slideshow.

In the summer of 1963 I was still at school, due to go back for a final term to sit for an Oxford scholarship and a place at the university starting in 1964. My companion was a school friend, Jan L. I don’t know whether Jan had done much cycling before, though I don’t think he was a novice. I already had several cycling holidays under my belt and the previous summer I had ridden solo through the Benelux countries for three weeks, a feat celebrated by the national letters GB, B, L, NL, D carefully stencilled in big red Letraset letters on my white rear mudguard. My bike was a lightweight Viking “Severn Valley” which I had paid for myself and of which I was very proud. Bikes then mostly had only 5-speed blocks at the back and triple chainwheels were virtually unkown, so my “double-clanger” at the front gave me 10 gears. My wheels were, I think, steel rather than alloy (no bad thing for the roads we were to meet) and had narrow-ish tyres – an inch and a quarter to my best recollection.

I don’t know why we chose Sweden for our holiday, but it had been agreed for long enough for me to learn the basics of the language and a small vocabulary from “Teach Yourself Swedish” earlier in the year. Ironically Jan had a Swedish passport as his father was the Swedish Consul in the London Docks, but he had never been to Sweden and didn’t speak any Swedish. This meant plenty of confusion when we checked-in to youth hostels or cashed travellers’ cheques. Maybe our choice had something to do with me being able to get a free passage on a boat. My father had contacts in the shipping industry at the time and was able to get the two of us a berth on a small cargo boat from Newcastle to Nyköping on the Baltic coast of Sweden south of Stockholm. We hadn’t made any definite plans but had a rough idea that we would cycle up the Baltic coast as far as we could, maybe to the Finnish border, and then see where we felt like going from there.

Our plans changed after a few days as we experienced the cost of living in Sweden. The numbers don’t mean much fifty years later and I can’t recall how much money we took with us, though for some reason the figure of £60 each sticks in my mind. Anyway, we found that just buying food and paying the cost of youth hostels would use up our cash in only a few weeks. We’d heard that food and accommodation in Norway would cost about the same number of kronor as we were paying in Sweden, but in Norway a pound would get us 20 kronor instead of only 14½ in Sweden. [I checked these exchange rates in the Financial Times for August 1963. It shows how memory falters: I couldn’t really remember the numbers but had a vague idea it was 10 and 6 kronor respectively. The point about relative costs still stands though.] So that’s why after a few days we left the Baltic coast and headed inland to cross into Norway, and probably why we became obsessed with road surfaces.

Click to view in Google Maps

Thanks to Google Earth I can see that our route took us through some areas which even now are seriously remote, on roads which are still only thin lines on the map. I would probably be more worried now than we were then, sheltered by our ignorance of what could go wrong. There were several days when we were riding through isolated, unpopulated, near-wilderness country with few resources or services.

Let me explain about the road surfaces. Once we started heading inland we were surprised to find that tarmac roads were rare. Instead we found ourselves cycling on what we were told were “oil-gravel” surfaces. These seemed to be something like a mixture of sand and gravel sprayed with a heavy oil. As the surface became more compacted, slippery and eroded, maintenance vehicles which we christened ‘juggernauts’ were sent out to harrow and level the surface. While suiting cars and lorries, these roads were hell for bicycles with narrow high-pressure tyres. They were easiest when well-compacted, though this also meant they were full of ruts. When the juggernauts had been along it was like trying to cycle on the beach. In wet weather – and we had a lot – spray from our wheels carried a slurry of fine sand into all the moving parts of our chains and gears, where it acted as a high-quality abrasive. Once the water drained away it could, and did, leave moving parts locked solid.

[I now read that in the early 1960s Norwegian engineers were developing just this kind of surfacing, which became known as “Otta Seal”. See Wikipedia for an American overview, or this full guide from the Norwegian Road Service.]

All that hard work meant we must have been rather fit. I don’t think either of us trained before the trip although I used to cycle regularly. By the time we were ten days in we were able to take a 136 mile day (to Dalholen, 17 August) in our stride. We hadn’t planned to ride that far, but you’ll have to read the log-book for that story! I only record being ill once: an upset stomach at Åndalsnes which it seems made me “bloody fed up”. Even so I managed to climb 850 metres (2800 feet) up the Trollstigen on a virtually empty stomach the next day.

One curiosity was the border crossing on 16 August. In 1963 traffic in Sweden still drove on the left, while in Norway they followed most of Europe and drove on the right. We crossed the border in a remote area on an unmade road. Two concrete traffic islands, a cairn and a “cross over” sign were the only border markers, and the tyre tracks in the gravel formed a neat “X” between the traffic islands. It was another four years before Sweden switched on H-day (H for Högerkörning) from driving on the left to driving on the right.

Having cash to pay our way was something we had to plan for. There were no credit cards or ATMs in 1963 and like most of my acquaintances I didn’t have a bank account. The only way to take money abroad was in cash or travellers’ cheques. Shops and hostels didn’t accept the cheques so they had to be cashed at a bank: there weren’t many banks on our journey and those that there were kept short opening hours. Between us we managed to stay solvent, despite Jan losing his wallet.

One last memory – the kit. Neither of us took much: I only had a single saddlebag. It was made of strong black canvas, not waterproof, and it had to carry everything for five weeks, plus any food we bought en route. I guess in modern terms it might have been about 20-25 litres capacity. I’m embarrassed to think how smelly we must have been for much of the time!

Click to open notebook (18.5Mb)

So there it is. I’m glad I’ve put this page together and preserved my diary but I don’t expect or encourage anyone to read it. To be honest, it’s boring: it doesn’t tell you much about anything. If you do decide to look at it though, there are a few notes below on some of the more cryptic or obscure references in the text. Alternatively you can look at our route on Google Maps, where the info-box for each day’s route has a link to the individual page or pages just for that day, and smaller copies of any photos taken on the day.

Explanatory notes:

bomp-bag

a light bag slung over a cyclist’s shoulder (a musette).

double-clanger

double chainwheel

fast-disappearing Lapp

A joke. We saw people in Lappish costume but as Jan said, such sights were fast disappearing.

flicks

The pictures/cinema/movies.

fly-over

aircraft which passed overhead. I was almost out of my teenage phase of being a plane-spotter but it seems I couldn’t resist noting down any registrations I saw.

juggernaut

Large road maintenance vehicles used to rake and level unsurfaced roads. Not popular with cyclists.

noshup

An unspecified rough-and-ready meal, probably some kind of stew.

ph

Photo. (I kept a record of where I had taken them.)

pølser

frankfurter-type sausage.