Memories of Orkney, part 2

Read the beginning of this story.

I will not account for the trip day by day because it will be repetitive, but I will point out some highlights. To begin with, I was, as mentioned earlier, a bit anxious about sharing a room with a stranger, but I decided to be positive and proactive, so the moment my roommate Shelley and I stepped into the room, I offered to make tea, and while we had tea, we chatted and told each other about what we did when we didn't go on walking tours. Shelley's luggage got lost at her connecting airport, which is always a good conversation starter. It turned out she was a retired lawyer with specialism in children's rights so we even had some common point of interest. She was from Arizona and had lived in Canada. At dinner that night we all introduced ourselves more properly: a couple from Oxford (non-academic), a father and a pregnant daughter from Denver, a lady from Texas, another from the UK. All nice, all eager and experienced travellers. This was what I had hoped for: people my age or older (except the pregnant daughter) who go on walking holidays and can afford relatively expensive trips are the kind of people I can deal with. There are certain unwritten rules for such travel, for instance, rotating seats in the van. When someone's luggage is lost everyone supports and shares whatever can be shared. And it was an interesting and diverse bunch of people so there were no problems finding subjects to talk about. Shelley had brought her flute! She and I got along well: we conversed a bit, then opened our iPads and let each other be; we had no arguments about who would shower first, and we didn't mind seeing each other walk about the room in pyjamas. If I ever travel again, I would prefer a single room, but I now know that I can share with a stranger if necessary. I think it helped that four of us were elderly single ladies, and three other people were also at the same stage in life. Everybody hinted at high blood pressure, and nobody was concerned about other people farting. 

The days were intensive. We had early breakfasts and sat in the van by 8, to drive or to take a ferry to one of the islands. We had packed lunch: the horrible triangular sandwiches, but I hadn't expected anything else. At least there was a variety of them, and you could choose the evening before. Dinners were exquisite, but very late for me; some were in our hotel, some in local pubs. Maybe other people stayed up for a while, but I collapsed directly after dinner.

Most walks were coastal and highly enjoyable. The trip was ”grade 2”, or easy, and I had no problems keeping pace. The weather changed dramatically, but we were all well equipped, and when it started raining – and once even hailing – we simply put on our waterproof trousers and walked on. 

Some days, or portions of days, were warm enough to wear three layers of clothes rather than six. So you had to carry stuff for all occasions. On walks like this, you always come to a point, some time in the afternoon, especially if you are wet and walking uphill for ages, when you start asking yourself why you are doing this, voluntarily and at high cost. When you no longer are able to appreciate anything around you and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. There isn't much else you can do, because you cannot lie down on wet ground and have a tantrum, and you are also pressed for time because you need to catch the last ferry. Then suddenly it goes over, and life is great again. For me at that time, worrying about where to put my foot meant I had no time worrying about other things, which was exactly what I needed. And it was good to know, as we compared notes during evening meals, that everybody was dead tired – in a good way. 

As I said, I had not done my homework properly, but even if I had, Orkney is full of surprises. I have travelled a lot, and Orkney is not like any other place. It was much larger than I had anticipated. All islands are different, and none is like Mainland – that has a fresh-water lake and marshes! The scenery is stunning everywhere, with stone arches and other remarkable stone formations, like the Old Man of Hoy. Wildlife is abundant. All those thousands of birds on the cliffs – precisely like an Attenborough film. We did see puffins. We also saw all kinds of cultural stuff: Neolithic, Iron Age, Vikings, standing stones, WWII. I didn't know Orkney was so important strategically.

 

Even in a really tiny area – Orkney has a population of 22,000 – there is a competition between the capital, Kirkwall, and the next largest city, Stromness, that boasts of being more cultural. My Orcadian friend is born in Stromness so when we met in Kirkwall she immediately drove me

to Stromness because it was more interesting. It had a book store that carried local children's authors. I bought a few. And suddenly Farewell to Stromness made sense.

Already by reading Orkney Tapestry I realised how close it was to Norse culture, most tangible in place names. Kirk is obviously the same word as church, but closer to Nordic kirke/kyrka. Ay in many island names: Rousay, Birsay - is Nordic ö or øy. Brogh is borg, castle. And so on. I was perhaps the only one in our group who appreciated it. On another matter, my travel companions thought it weird that it was still full daylight at ten in the evening, while for me it is of course perfectly natural. 

 

All walks were remarkable, although Hoy was probably the highlight for me. Generally, I felt I got good value for my money, and I also got precisely what I needed most at that point: total break and peace of mind. Our guide was nice and knowledgeable, and he very cleverly planned our walks and visits to cultural sites to avoid crowds (there were huge cruise ships coming in every day). And I got role models in single female travellers!

Whenever I travel I typically get enthusiastic about the place and determined to come back. There is a lot more to explore in Orkney, and I even had an idea for a walking seminar, but I knew even then that I would probably never go back. Today, as the world has changed, I definitely know it will never happen. Therefore I am incredibly lucky to have done this trip, getting everything I had hoped out of it tenfold.

Travel home turned out to be a nightmare, but I won't tell you about it. 

 

Memories of Orkney

Facebook has been reminding me of my trip to Orkney last year, and I have realised that I never wrote up this story although I shared pictures on the go. Staying at home with slim chances of travel in the observable future, it may be a good idea to re-live the experience. I will use my travel diary, but inevitably add reflections from today's vantage point.

It all started five years ago when I made acquaintance with an Orcadian at a conference. Of course I knew vaguely about the existence of remote islands off the northern shores of Scotland, but they hadn't really been on my list of places to visit. Talking to this colleague got me fascinated, particularly as she mentioned Island Studies. Imagine, there was a discipline called Island Studies! I have always been intrigued by islands of all kinds and sizes, although I don't perceive Great Britain as an island. Many years ago when I studied Scandinavian languages I considered specialising in Faeroe Islands and becoming a unique expert in all things Faeroese: language, history, culture, even politics. It didn't happen, but some twenty years ago I was invited to Faeroe Islands to lecture – sadly it clashed with another commitment. In Sweden, I have been to many islands, large and small. I went to Iceland twice. I visited Madagascar some years ago. I wandered on Inis Mor off Ireland's west coast when I was at a conference in Galway. There is something special about islands – I have written an academic paper on the topic.

Listening to my new colleague triggered my imagination, and of course like you do at conferences she invited me to come and give a talk. Then we forgot about it. Or almost. Every now and then I looked up Orkney and considered a self-guided trip, but it always felt intimidating, and there was always something in the way. Two years ago there was a conference in Orkney that I wanted to attend, but it clashed with another conference I was running. Last spring I realised that I would be moving away from the UK soon, and it was now or never. Self-guided still felt daunting, and I checked travel agents for small-group walking tours with reasonable comfort. All trips were unsurprisingly fully booked except one space in the end of May and a couple in September. September seemed too far away, and I am glad I didn't opt for that since by September I had already moved back to Sweden. End of May is still term time, and I was not supposed to be away from Cambridge during term time, but I decided that if I told my students discreetly that I wouldn't be able to meet them for supervisions for a week we could keep it between ourselves. I booked the trip, paying in full since it was less than a month in advance. I wanted a single room, but it wasn't available, and I had to accept it, booking last-minute. That last space seemed like destiny.

As I have mentioned some times before, I am not good at preparing for travel when it comes to reading guidebooks, but this time I wanted to make the most of it so I started, as you do, by trying amazon and getting 600 hits. It felt hopeless so I asked my Orcadian friend for recommendations. The best was The Orkney Tapestry, by George Mackey Brown, a book worth reading regardless. It provided more or less everything essential I needed to know about my destination, while also being deeply personal and engaging.

I read the travel agent's brochure and studied various maps. Orkney consists of seventy islands, and we were supposed to visit several. It was exciting. It was right in the middle of a very difficult period in my life, and I was looking forward to a break far, far away from everything and offline. I was tremendously anxious about travelling on my own, among strangers. I had done it dozens of times in the past, but recently I had preferred company, just to be on the safe side. I do have a condition, and I am not young anymore. I was, however, confident that I was in good physical shape after extensive power walking.

The trip started in Inverness, and I first considered taking the night train, but I didn't want to run a risk of not sleeping properly and be tired in the morning. So I booked a B&B in Inverness, arriving in the evening and having a good rest. In the morning I walked to the station, worrying that I wouldn't find my guide. I always worry about silly things like that. I was hugely worried about the crossing because guidebooks said it could be rough, and I have bad experience of rough seas.

I found the guide and my travel companions, just eight of us. I was going to share a room with one of them, and while we drove up to John O'Groats, I looked at them, hoping that my roommate would be nice. People going on demanding walking holidays are usually nice.

To be continued. 

African diaries, part 6: Okavango Delta

Read the previous chapters of this story: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

As I said before, the Okavango Delta was what made me interested in this trip in the first place, so I was excited when we started getting closer. From Etosha we had a 600km drive, first till Grootfontein where we replenished our supplies, then north to Rundu and further east into Caprivi Strip. But very soon after we left Etosha we crossed the Red Line, which is a sad page in Namibia's history. 

 

 

Although we weren't asked to leave the bus and walk through a pool of disinfectant then (we were later), you could see the change in the landscape immediately. During our long drives from place to place, we saw few traces of human presence. Just vast expanses of desert, with the few exceptions that I have described. North of the Line, there were endless villages along the road, some looking quite poor, some better, but it was as if we entered a different world. Which was of course exactly what we did.

We saw signs for primary schools along the roads, few and far between. I asked Dumi whether there were any school buses, and the moment I asked I realised what a stupid question it was. Of course there were no school buses. Haven't I heard and read reports from my colleagues' and students' field work in Africa? Dumi said children sometimes had to walk ten kilometres one way to school. Sounds terrible, but on the other hand they did go to school. I may be naive and old-fashioned, but I believe in education. The children we saw along the roads were walking to or from school, rather than herding cattle, like we saw in Madagascar. Namibian adult literacy rate is 80%.

Apart from villages there wasn't much to see, so I slept a bit. We reached the camp at 3.30 which felt a blessing. The camp was on a high river bank, with a great view. On the other side of the river was Angola. 

There was an optional boat trip, about which Dumi said contemptuously: ”You will see absolutely nothing”. But some people went anyway, and they were allowed to alight in Angola for three minutes and take a picture of themselves with a piece of paper that said: ”Illegally in Angola”. In retrospect, I should have done it – just my thing. Instead we went to the bar and had beer (Anton) and juice (Kory and me) and watched another glorious sunset. Because of the river, the landscape was almost rainforest, and the frogs were singing, and there were lots of birds.

In the morning we drove south to Botswana border. We would cross Nabimia-Botswana borders three times in three days, each time painlessly, but I have a traumatic relationship with border crossing. This will be a deviation, but I must explain. Growing up behind the Iron Curtain and then travelling between Sweden and Russia, being searched at the Finnish border each time, nervous that something was wrong. Feeling humiliated travelling by car to France when I had to get transit visas for every country we passed (the Germans were particularly nasty). Feeling humiliated at JFK because, in my US visa stamp, they had crossed out the standard “multiple indefinite” and written ONE ENTRY. It got less stressful when I got a Swedish passport, and since then I have crossed from USA to Mexico and back, from USA to Canada and back (on one occasion I crossed twice, going to Niagara Falls first in the morning and then at night), and I even crossed from Germany to Austria before it joined EU. You get used to it. Having now lived in the UK for nine years, I am more used, once again, to passport control, wherever I travel, but it somehow feels different when it is an actual border, overland. It is all wired somewhere in my brain: border crossing = danger. And now I have all these stamps in my brand new passport. For Zimbabwe, we had to pay for the visa. Dumi looked at me with some anxiety, until I explained that although I live in the UK, I have a Swedish passport. Zimbabwean visa costs almost twice as much for UK nationals.

Back to the first Namibia-Botswana crossing: apart from two forms to fill, it was very straightforward, and we walked across the no-man's-land from one checkpoint to the next. Then we had another hour's drive, and we were now in Botswana time zone, losing an hour. I couldn't figure out whether it made me more hungry or less. Lunch was by the river and boat station at Sepupa. We were leaving our truck there, taking only daypacks and water canisters, and going by boat to an island right in the middle of the Delta. (Well, not really, rather on the edge of the Delta, where the Panhandle opens into the Pan).

We also met our new guide who introduced himself as Frog. I thought it was funny, but people have all kinds of names that have funny connotations in other languages. However, it turned out that Frog was his artist name. He said his real name was unpronounceable for Europeans (it had about fifteen different clicks in it), but he had chosen Frog to reflect his character. Later in the camp, we were all asked to choose animal names that he could remember, because our names were unpronounceable for him. Fair enough.

Anyway, Frog was our Botswana guide, and he was taking us into the Delta. Before we started, he asked us to sign a liability disclaimer. One of us wondered what exactly the implication was. Answer: “If I tell you not to jump into the river, and you jump into the river and get eaten by a crocodile, it's your responsibility”. Later, on the island, he told us that the password into nature was “respect”. Password, you know, he said, what you need to get into your computer. Password into nature is respect.

Our supplies and cooking equipment went in one boat, and we all went in another. This is me, in my silly hat, on the right.

Photo: Susanne Trudsø

These three hours going on a boat through the Delta are among the happiest of my entire life. This was what I had come for. Sure, we saw come crocs and a few hippos and masses of interesting birds. 

 But the boat ride itself, through tributaries that meandered this way and that so eventually you lost all sense of direction; waterways that narrowed and opened again. I know I have dreamed it many times, exactly like this. I enjoyed every second. I think many of my fellow travellers were bored. 

Photo: Susanne Trudsø

Finally we went into narrow channels where the boat hardly passed through, with tall papyrus plants on both sides. And then we were on an island, called Pepere (meaning “papyrus”), that you will not find on Google maps, as far away from everything as you can imagine. 

Have I mentioned that I have a particular love of islands? I have even written an academic paper on the subject. 

There were permanent tents in this camp and real beds with linen, which felt nice for a change. There were two local women who cleaned the tents. They were not invited to share dinner with us, but had to wash up, which made me feel bad. I asked Frog where they lived, and he said in a village eight hours away by boat. He himself also lived far away and only went home twice a month in tourist season.

After dinner we had a briefing. We were not allowed to walk around on the island (except between the tent and the toilet) because at night hippos, elephants and crocodiles came ashore. This wasn't a joke: we saw fresh footprints in the morning. If we did see a hippo or elephant we should not flash our torches at them because they would attack. “Respect” is the password. I wondered whether the animals knew it. There were also baboons who had learned to open tent zippers, so we were advised not to have food in tents.

All night, cicadas were singing.

We had late breakfast next morning, 6.45, and started at 7.10 which must be some secret local time. First a short walk across the island where we took mokoro, which is more like a punt than a canoe, maneuvered by long poles. Two people per boat, and a poler, who was friendly but not very talkative. There wasn't much need for talk because the scenery was amazing. 

Through a narrow channel of papyrus to the next island, where there were supposedly lions, leopards, buffalo, elephants and other animals. Strict orders: keep as close together as possible in single file (walking elephant paths), do as you are told. Indeed, within five minutes there was an elephant and no fence or anything between it and us. Frog told us to freeze. I had a short moment of contemplating death by elephant – probably very painful. It moved around us slowly, but didn't come closer. I cannot say how long we stayed there, motionless: maybe five minutes, maybe ten. Then it went away, and we could move on. I asked Frog later what he would have done if the elephant had attacked us, and he wouldn't say. Some people admitted having panic during the elephant encounter and said they hadn't quite enjoyed it.

We saw no other animals, but Frog showed us fresh footprints and fresh elephant dung. This was a different feeling from viewing animals from the safety of a car or bus. He also showed us some carcasses of buffalo and warthog, which the lions had killed only a week before. Completely clean of meat. I am not sure I would like to witness a kill.

We took the mokoro again, for a longer trip, and saw a lot of hippos in a lagoon. Hippos can hold their breath for seven minutes, so it's a bit like whale-watching: you see it go down, count seven minutes, and then out they come, not always where you expect. But because there we so many of them, we saw several at any given moment. We kept a respectful distance. 

Then we came back to our island and the camp and had lunch. Six people had upset stomach. I know it's common on such trips, but it felt awful, and I was mortally scared to get it too (I had a very mild round later). We had a couple of hours to rest, which was what we all needed. Then we gathered again – those of us who were ok – and Frog talked to us about the Delta, its animals and its people, and also its future, if Namibia builds a canal higher up the river to supply water for its own agriculture. Suddenly it all got into a larger context. 90% of water in the Delta evaporates. Maybe it makes sense to try and use it before it evaporates. But who knows how it may affect the ecology.

Then Frog took us on a short walk on our island. We saw two warthogs, but mostly Frog told us about trees and plants and their medicinal uses (particularly for upset stomach). Suddenly we were by a gigantic baobab. We must have seen it all along without realising it was a baobab, hidden behind other vegetation, because it was right by the camp (me for scale). 

 

Then we went out in a boat to watch the sunset over the lagoon (those crazy Europeans and their sunsets!). 

Next morning was another blissful boat ride through the Delta. It was very early and freezing cold, but I enjoyed the ride too much to mind the cold.

I had this strange idea. What if the whole experience was a simulation? A huge, well-designed augmented-reality game. So if we were to go on the same trip another day, there would be the same elephant encounter (and maybe you need a special bonus to see the lion kill), and the same hippos going down and up again in the same places. While the real animals have been dead since long time ago. This would make a good story, but I won't write it. It may be true, but we will never know.

I also kept remembering Ray Bradbury's short story “The Veldt” - the landscape and the whole atmosphere was inviting.

After the first full day in the Delta, when I had seen what I had come to see, I felt that I must come back and stay longer to see more. Then it felt that I had seen all there is to see. Or else I was so overwhelmed by all impressions that I could not take in any more. I would have liked to see lions and leopards, but apart from that – more papyrus, more water, more hippos, more of the same? As with deserts, mountains and other experiences: after a first taste, you may return to study it closer, but you may not. Anyway, we had no other choice than to move on.

To be continued