Time passed and many things happened since the last time I wrote here.

The spring was flourishing on Alta, and I was preparing the last leg of my journey to Norkapp. The rivers were opened, which meant it was too late to attempt an offtrack straight way through the vidda. Crossing the rivers meant using the bridges, and using the bridges meant skiing on the side of the road. Furthermore, between Olderfjord and Honningsvåg, the road hugs the steep shore. And last but not least, Nordkapp is situated on an island which is connnected to the land by a more than 6km long submarine tunnel!!

It was obvious that I had to drop the pulk.

I took my time in Alta while thinking about how I would do it. I wasn’t obsessed by Nordkapp as an end to the trip, nor as a performance act to acheive a great epic.
But hearing a lot about a place makes you curious, and this is how I felt. Some abstract conception you have the opportunity to turn into acts. Thinking about some place and… just go there.
This essence of freedom isn’t due to physical detachment. Skiing through Scandinavia won’t make you free if you’re running behind an ambitious obsession. Nor will the ascent of a difficult mountain be.
As time goes on, I realise how my teenarger’s ideas about achieving happiness through extreme mountaineering experiences didn’t lead me on the way I was looking for. Probably there is no way, just a state of mind.

I entered a shop and rented a bike, fastened bags on it and dropped as much of my gear as I thought was reasonable. I had never travelled on a bike, I was especially glad of having the opportunity to do so, and felt even thankful to the snow to have melted…

Leaving Alta was not that easy, because I had to go away from the friends I had discovered there.
I can say without any doubt that loneliness was what weighed the most on my journey, and I can’t stand it anymore.

However, to be alone decuples every feeling. Landscapes are incredibly beautiful, mountains so impressive, doubts so deep…
I remember the very first days of my trip in januar as the more intense. Climbing up from this deep valley the bus had left me in, I thought every trip had to begin with a first step. And that step was towards a mysterious, cloudy height I had dreamed about for several months. A complete withdraw from the world, filled with void and emotion…
Several days of lonely skiing in the never-ending white-out didn’t bring me an answer about why I was playing that game of renouncement blended with exaltation.

From my diary:
“In these times, it seems to me that the sky, the earth, even the mind dilute in this withish unconsciousness. Here and there emerge some black islands, ultimate markers of reality… or would all this be no more than a cottonous dream?”

But I left Alta. I was planning for a six days trip to Nordkapp and back.

Cycling was a great experience. The speed is slow enough to enjoy the landscape you go through, fast enough to see it change. Carrying everything you need with you isn’t a problem with some rear bags.
I felt a bit restricted however, because I had to move in one dimension, that means staying on the road, where I used to be able to choose my way in two dimensions when I was on the skis. But nevermind.
Also, in the mountains, every meeting is meaningful, because of their extreme rarity. You can’t go by somebody and look to the floor like you would do in the subway, would you? You have to stop and share.
While cycling on the street, people just look at you curiously through the window of their car.
Authenticity. Paradox: lonelyness and sharing.

All along the road I met reindeers grazing on the beach.
When I was coming nearby, some animal would lift the head, see me and think “Oh, there comes my keeper on his snowmobile. Let’s go away!”.
Reindeers have a peculiar behaviour. They always stay in group. As long as noone moves, everything goes fine. But if one takes an initiative, like running away because it saw a supposed snowmobile, all the others look at themselves and think “See, he is doing somethink! He must be right! Let’s follow him!”
And this ended up in moving hundred of reindeers, all along the 80 km long shore, straight into the mountains…

Passing through the submarine tunnel was especially exiting. I had very little information, and I had been told that it was forbidden to cycle inside. But I had decided I would do it anyway, because I’m fed up of these infantilising statements about what you shall do or not for your own safety. There are hardly no cars driving on that road, and I don’t see why it would be a problem to do it.
So I was prepared to go full speed around the fence, but there came no toll and no fence, and I even thought I had reached the wrong tunnel. But the road began to go down and down, and there aren’t a lot of tunnels around plunging 200 meters below the see.

Driving incredibly fast down to the center of the earth was completely exalting. If you’re around Nordkapp one day, I recommend you to find a bike and try it. It is really steep and very, very long. Especially when you have to climb up again.

Then the long tube eventually spat me out, there was the toll plaza. The fence opened in front of me, while I just had the time to see a sleepy employee pushing on the button.

It was around 1 o’clock in the night and I thought of takink a little sleep (can this be called a night, it is nearly as bright as the day…). Pitched the tent in front of a beautiful fjord on the soft lichen, what a dream.

The next day I cycled some kms further to Honningsvåg, where I met Vincente and friend who welcomed me in their apartment. That was really great to meet them here, my latest and most northern camp.
Can’t describe Honningsvåg’s anarchist headquarters here in just some words, but if you’re around (and managed to get out alive of the steep tunnel of course), I definitely recommend you to take a rest there!

Honningsvåg with its 2,500 inhabitants might look like the end of the world. Until recently, before the construction of the tunnel, the only way to get there was by boat, and like in many other places in Norway, a ferry was doing the connection with the end of the road on the other side.
However, one day of stay there convinced me of how petrol discovery, global fishing and tourism economy changed deeply the face of the island in only fifty years. I thus had to drastically review my ideas about the apparent seclusion of the place.

Honningsvåg is also an important stop for the cruise boats sailing along the norvegian fjords. Between 10am and 3pm is rush time.
The human shipment is immediately thrown on the land and pushed into the busses: let’s go for a chronometrical bus drive to Nordkapp, having in the ears the formatted guide’s speech. I can hear the thousand times repeated jokes raising their laugh waves, exactly like the highly unpredictible sound records added to those profound tv series.
The one hour stop on the cape’s tourist station is meant to be time enough to fill with pictures and souvenirs without getting bored, and after this deep discovery of the country, they return satisfied to their boat for the rest of their journey.

I turns out that both my hosts were working as bus tourist guides, and I hope to the company’s incomes that they are good at hypocrisy.

Obviously, there is hardly no divergence between nordkapp’s tourism industry and the method used by the reindeer keepers, here in the north of Norway, to drive the animals from the winter pastures to the summer grazing areas on the islands. Reins are driven with the truck, then taken out and kept between two fences on their way to the boat nearby.
There is, however, a crucial difference. Reindeer keeping can claim authenticity.

Probably I shouldn’t emit this despised judgement on account of the special way I reached this point after months of intensive travelling in the country, while others are clever enough to find an easier solution.
But I can’t accept that curiousity, culture and pleasure get turned into that industry.

On the next morning, I left early enough and took the road to the cape. In the last steep ascent, the bunch of busses overtook me, but I came on time to be welcomed there by the guides crew!
We had a coffee together and this was probably the best way to crash there on the northern point of the trip.

Nordkapp is really, on a strictly natural point of view, a wonderful place. While driving there, with the ocean on both sides, you feel like surfing on the prow of a ship, narrowing and narrowing until you get eventually projected above the ocean some hundreds of meters below. Taking a look down, you can see the waves crashing on the bottom of the impressive cliff, and it seems so far away that it looks unreal.
Geographically, Nordkapp is not the northern point in the area, but, in my opinion, there is no fake to be found in that, as the place is meant to be no more than a symbol…

I pitched the tent and stayed overnight on the cape, running around in underwear with my camera everytime a good light was to be seen. The weather is really changing every five minutes up there, that’s not a legend, so you have to seize the opportunities.

Apart from the beauty of the place itself, I didn’t feel any special “ending” emotion being there, nor did I feel my heart pulse faster. I don’t think that one more “last” step will bring an end to such a trip, and I was prepared for that.

I was looking to find a conclusion but there is none. Just that I had four very intense months, that I felt the strongest emotions I could ever imagine, and that I was about never to come back.
After hundreds of kilometers, I only begin to understand the reasons that drove me into the project… It might sound like nonsence, to generate a projet whose goal is to understand itself, but this is how it goes…
The long winter is gone, and I’m feeling more and more the will to turn back south to the things I left behind.

While I was leaving for this journey, I knew it would be a complete discovery, but I was not prepared for the trip to be that deep.
Saying that the way is mainly covered in the mind would be trivial. It was so clear to me from the beginning on, that I hardly brought maps when I left.
I don’t care about the mountains I’ve been through. I don’t care about the snow, the skis and the pulk. They could have been flippers or a skateboard.
 
I had a great opportunity and I made a great use of it. I would like to thank all the ones who made this possible.
I hope I have shared enough, with the people I met on the way, with the ones I stayed in touch with, through this blog. This has not been an easy task, because I felt I needed to withdraw in some way, and I would like to apologize for being so far away.

There will be no conclusion because things will continue going their way. I never believed life bits could be kept apart. Authenticity is a state of mind that gives birth to the travel. A trip like this can’t be ended brutally. It will just continue spreading its results over time.
The way is very long, and this is just a step.

Thanks to everyone!

Nico