Sat, 16 Aug 2003

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 09:53 CEST 21/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Sverige/Sverige 2 ( all photos )

Through Malmö Again ( No photos )
Awake bright and early, we drove down the road to a servo to put some of the expensive fuel in Rosie and some caffeine in us (still no gas, so we can't make our own).
Next, we drove the remaining hundered or so kilometres to Malmö, finally joining up to the motorway where we had driven a month earlier. I had a recollection that there was Campingaz available in the caravan park we stayed in there, but after a detour there it was apparent my memory was doing strange things.
From there, it was a drive across the Øresund Fixed Link and onwards back into Danmark.

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 12:18 CEST 21/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Sverige/Sverige 2 ( all photos )

South from Stockholm ( 1 photo )
I was the one to do the manly thing and go and discover that the showers had no hot water this morning. Liz declined to find out for herself, taking my word for it.
Hitting the road, we found our way out of the confusing jumble of roads heading basically south-west towards Malmo along the E04.
By this stage of our trip, we had decided that we weren't going to take any side-trips unless they were really worth it. For one, we had already spent about two weeks longer in Scandy than originally intended (no real problem, but there is plenty more to see before we go home in November), but more worryingly, Rosie was starting to chuck wobblies at the wrong time - literally.
Several times she has started to shudder at speed, sometimes we can save it by pushing the clutch and trying to rev it back, but usually it is a stall. Not good at 100km/h. This is not really too suprising, since we have driven her about 20,000km since we bought her, and done nothing other than add water and a little oil. I suspect the fuel system is at least part of the problem, as the problem is much less apparent when we use high-octane (98) fuel instead of the normal 95 or even 91 stuff. As an aside, last I heard, 91 is the norm in Oz and 95 is the expensive premium unleaded. We don't really want to have to pay for 98 unless we really have to.
Although we pulled in to one small town when it was particularly bad and rang our insurance company, the general feeling was that we didn't want to be stuck in a crappy small town for days again, and would rather push our luck and try to make it to Hamburg.
It was a horrible rainy day, although we had some great views as we drove slong the shores of Vättern, a big inland lake north of Jönköping. It was a little lost on us, however, as we were more worried about the van suddenly deciding to die on us.
We dropped into a service station to gather some sausages, bacon and whatever we could manage to bbq for dinner.
Even though it was relatively early for us, we had come a long way and decided to pull in when Rosie was playing up on a single-lane road with no safe place to pull over should she stall.
We ended up cooking on the bbq and deciding to stay there in the road-side stop for the night, saving ourselves some money and having a reason to get up in the morning (the noise) as a bonus.

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 11:15 CEST 21/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Sverige/Sverige 2 ( all photos )

Stockholm ( 54 photos )
(Continued from Finland)
We awoke in a new country - ok, we had been to this one before, but not this part of the country - the capital Stockholm.
Driving off the ferry, our first task was what to do with the van so we could have a look around the city. For this we have typically two options - either find a central and usually expensive caravan park, or park in a parking lot somewhere.
First attempt was stopping at an "i", which we managed to find in Centralstationen, but which was next to useless.
Next option, we pulled out one of our many caravan park guides, and located a very central "Autocamper" park. This is different to a normal caravan park in that it is effectively a big parking lot with a mobile toilet/shower block dumped on the side. In this case, the receptionist even wore a shirt with the name of the parking company - obviously they worked out they could get a bit more money from a not-quite-central car park by turning it into an Autocamper.
It was located under a bridge on one of the 24,000 or so islands which make up Stockholm, Långholmen. As you can imagine, that many islands leaves plenty of room for bridges, and plenty of stress when you miss the turn-offs and can't turn around again for several kilometres. Stockholm easily gets the award so far for Most Difficult City to Navigate via Vehicle.
After a quick chat with the helpful attendant, we got out the GPS and started the first of what turned out to be around twenty kilometres of walking that day, heading towards the Old Town of Gamla Stan.
This part is located on its own island (there's plenty of them to go around), and is the oldest part of the city. We had lunch in a nice café along the main touristy yet attractive narrow cobbled street, Västerlånggatan. This runs almost the length of Gamla Stan, and from it various interesting narrow side streets run, creating a confusing tangle of cute little places.
After a look through some of the shops, we found ourselves at Kungliga Slottet, the 'new' royal palace. In terms of number of rooms (608), it is the largest in the world. We had no real intention of going in there, but happend to be in the right place at the right time to see the highly ceremonious changing of the guard. This consisted of plenty of horseback instrumentalists playing standard pomp music and lots of yelled military commands of the type you don't even expect to understand when they are in English, let alone Swedish.
Wandering a little further, we stumbled across the base of the visible-from-everywhere Tyska kyrkan (German church). It was closed for restoration, but it added fuel to the fire in our minds attempting to understand yet another language!
After not managing to be in northern Sweden at the right time of year (winter) to see the Ice Hotel, we decided that a stop into the summer showroom of the place, the Ice Gallery was worth it. The Hotel is just what it sounds like - an entire hotel built solely out of ice, including bar, cups, beds, everything. They can only keep it going in winter, so we didn't bother taking a side-trip to see it when we were up that way. The gallery attempts to give you a taste of it, with a bar, cups and some general carvings inside what is basically a big fridge (-7 deg C). They provide furry warm coat things which were quite happy to wear, although the room was much smaller than we expected. It completed its task, however, of making us want to go the hotel should we ever make it back at the right time of the year.
From there the rain started tumbling down, so what else to do other than duck into a bar and watch people outside get wet.
After it died down, we wandered across Vasabron bridge into the new part of town, the only part on the mainland (ie. not an island). We found our way to the hideously ugly Sergels Torg (central square - most of the locals hate it too), where there were plenty of people. Most were young kids on school holidays partaking in skating demonstrations with loud music, etc.
Here, we went up to the eleventh floor of one of the buildings (good view!) where the Australian Embassy is located. There we found out some more details about my requirement for a Schengen Visa, and chatted to a girl who had just moved to the city from Sydney to be with her boyfriend. She didn't speak the language much, and we were all happy to hear each other's accents for a change! She had joined a club for the apparently two thousand Aussies and Kiwis who live in the city, centred around the Dancin' Dingo Aussie Pub.
Next to the tourist office to find about internet cafés, but it was next to useless and full of loud-talking Americans, so we gave that a swerve. The internet café near there wouldn't let us plug the laptop in, but pointed us one Metro stop north to Hötorget, where we found a dark and dingy place lit only with uv-lighting which was more than happy to take our money and let us plug in.
We spent an hour or so updating the journal, sending emails and chatting to various people from home. I also got in contact with the only person I "know" in the city, Jonas Salling of Salling Software, whos piece of software Clicker has won many awards and I have helped out testing with a little. We carried our converstation on in sms.
Next target was Djurgården, a couple of islands to the east which we had read about in various places (Bill Bryson and Lonely Planet) and wanted to see. Basically entirely given over to parklands, museums and a zoo, we walked there along the waterfront Strandvägen past some amazing monuments which used real-time information on everything from wind speed to air pollution and pollutants in the water to display huge colourful graphs.
The island was great with lots of pretty gardens and the like, and our random wanderings eventually found us at Skansen. This was the world's first open-air museum with old houses and the like, but we had only one thing we wanted to see. When buying our tickets, we asked the guy "Do you have any moose?". We were damned if we were going to leave Scandinavia without seeing one. He said "Is that all you want to see?". We answered basically yes, and he laughed and sold us some tickets.
The enclosures here were amazing - so much space, all interesting shapes and sizes, and the animals were actually mostly visible! We saw bears and foxes in the same enclosure, the bear digging around his den while the foxes got as close as they dared. Fascinating watching just that, could have done so all day. But, we had to find this Moose.
And find we did - a big, huge thing much bigger than we had expected, with huge fuzzy horns. Didn't move much but it was nice to finally see one after all the trouble we had been, and driving close to 10,000km with signs for at least half that distance saying "Watch our for moose"!
On the other side of the enclosure was the female and two babies asleep. She was quite interested in Liz, and the babies were cute enough to want to take one home. Until they grow to eight feet tall, that is. Also notable were the funny boars play-fighting and wolves doing very little.
Finally satisfied, we needed to address our rumbling stomachs. This was done at Djurgårdsbrons Sjöcafé, on a pontoon floating on the river under the bridge joining to Djurgården. We had some great meals and a glass of wine, feeding the inquisitive ducks right next to us what we couldn't fit in ourselves.
Wandering all the way back through town and out the other side at Kungsholmen, it was time for Liz and I to part. From here, Liz wandered back to the Autocamper across Västerbron bridge, only getting a bit lost in the rain and darkness.
I met up with Jonas, and spent a nerdy few hours discussing various bits and pieces over a few beers (had to buy him something for the great software he has written which he basically gives away for nothing). He has gone from writing things on the side to being able to support himself off it, which is amazing for any independent software developer these days.
We went back to his office, where he showed me the next secret version of his software on his massive monitors (a prize from Apple) and pre-release Ericsson phones. Gadgets galore!
From there, I followed Liz's path back to the van, a little darker and rainer, and a lot longer than it had looked on the map. Still, there we were, safe, sound and thoroughly exhausted, but feeling we had seen Stockholm plenty well enough.

(customised)