I’ve given a lot of thought to whether or not there are any names that need changing in this description but finally decied that they should all remain. I have however deleted one or two things that were originally here - after all fair comment is one thing but there’s no need to be offensive about it.

Moose Behaving Badly                                                   (c) Robert Hale

    The Shakespeare, an imitation English Pub tucked away in a corner of Heathrow Terminal Three is all phoney beams, mock antiques and printed portraits of the Bard of Avon. In spite of these trimmings its determined display of illusion is destroyed completely by the modern lighting and the ventilation ducting clearly visible through the lattice of the ceiling. At nine fifteen in the evening it was almost empty. There were one or two customers stretching out their single drinks until their flights were called and a single barman who was pushing a towel around the surface of the already spotless bar. The beer I was drinking was theoretically Boddingtons although it bore the same resemblance to the brew normally bearing that name as water bears to wine - that is it would require divine intervention to turn one into the other. As I took another gulp at my second pint Rachel came flying back into the bar. I had met her at the check in and we had decided to have a drink to kill some of the extra time caused by a fifty five minute delay to the Tromsø service. By my calculations there should have been about another thirty minutes left.
    "They're closing the Gate now !" she said grabbing her bag from the chair and turning back to the door in a single fluid motion. I gulped down as much beer from the glass as I could manage and followed her out. None of the red jacketed members of the Tromsø Domenkirke Oberchor who had been around when we entered the bar were in sight. That was a bad sign. We half ran down the corridor towards gate six. Sure enough they were just checking in the last passengers. Hastily we presented our documents and trotted down to the plane. Ten minutes later, still a full quarter of an hour before the monitor had said boarding would begin, we were in the air.
It was only a short flight and even taking the hour time difference into account we were touching down at Tromsø Airport at three O'clock in the morning. The sun was low in the sky so that rather than the middle of the night it looked and felt like early evening on a Summer day. We were processed quickly and efficiently by a bored official who would clearly have preferred not to be working the Graveyard Shift. Outside we gathered around the man and woman who were carrying an 'Explore' sign. The cathedral choir pushed their way out of the building and soon we were the only ones there. I looked around at the group. It was larger than I had been expecting. Counting in the three people that I knew had come in on earlier flights who were already at the first camp site there were twenty four customers and two leaders. It seemed a mixed bunch. Their ages ran from about twenty to about seventy and although it was too early to form any proper impressions of them some looked as if they would be eager and determined hikers while others looked as if the walk out to the bus might prove fatally overtaxing. The tour leaders introduced themselves as Herman and Lizzie and led us to the bus.
The drive out to the camp was through some typical North European scenery with wooden buildings clinging to the shoreline and snow capped peaks rising behind them in the distance. The sky was cloudy and stripes of sunlight fanned out above the water. I couldn't believe that it was still only three thirty a.m.
At the camp the tents were already up and a light drizzle was falling. We were quickly and more or less randomly paired up and allocated tents. I found that I was to share with a bearded man who was probably in his late forties or early fifties. He introduced himself as we unpacked our sleeping bags and almost from his first words I knew I had once again drawn the short straw in the tent-mate lottery.
    "My name is Ned." he started in a flat monotone "And it's only fair to warn you that I snore."
    "That's OK" I answered, "I have ear plugs."
He hadn't heard me, being  apparently unaware of the normal convention that a conversation is two people taking it in turns to speak. He was going on.
    "I have snored ever since I had an altercation with a drunken Scotsman on the London Underground. I had just asked him if he would stop smoking as we were in a non smoking compartment when he turned violent."
I was desparately tired and  tried to ignore him as I got ready for bed. Relentlessly he plodded on with his anecdote. By the time he was describing the medical reconstruction that had been needed to his nose I was developing a lot of sympathy for the Scotsman who I felt had shown commendable restraint. I inserted the ear plugs and left him talking to himself.
He was still talking when we got up for breakfast.
Over breakfast our leaders introduced themselves more fully and we also introduced ourselves to each other. It was even more mixed than I had thought. There were two German teachers who lived in Cork in Ireland, Connie who was seventy three and retired, Diederik a Belgian Police Officer and his wife Natalie, Tony a New Zealander working on a farm in England and so on. Ned, who insisted on conversing in speeches a Catering Porter who had done loads of Explore Trips (or as he put it 'if Explore gave an additional discount for every fifth trip instead of simply giving a five per cent discount after the fifth trip which then remains constant no matter how many more trips you make I would by now be eligible for free trips - I have been travelling with Explore since the company was formed and actually own one of the original design Explore T-shirts which are very rare and difficult to get hold of.')
Introductions and breakfast completed we dismantled the camp site and loaded it onto the bus.
The plan for the day was straightforward. After a morning in Tromsø we would drive to our second camp site at Soloy where we would be staying for just one night. I passed the journey looking up Tromsø in the guide books and the information sheet that Lizzie had circulated. It was, I discovered, the northernmost University City in the world and the place from which most Northern Polar expeditions began. This latter fact accounted for one of its nicknames - 'the gateway to the Arctic'. The other much repeated phrase was harder to justify. A German traveller, allegedly impressed by the town’s vitality and cultural depth, is supposed to have dubbed it 'the Paris of the North'. It struck me that pleasant though the town is this description has more of the tourist bureau's hyperbole about it than any kind of historical truth. I wondered how the Parisians would take to the knowledge that they inhabited 'the Tromsø of the South'.
Herman dropped us at the foot of the cable car which takes visitors to the top of the Storstein Mountain overlooking Tromsø and we crowded into it and rode up. From this vantage point the view was marvellous and we could see the whole of the island of Tromsoya on which the bulk of the city is located. The multicoloured buildings, enhanced by the peculiar architecture of the Arctic Cathedral and the Polaria centre - one a set of concrete triangles and the other a giant row of tumbled down dominoes - looked like an especially splendid model village, or perhaps the toy town layout of a particularly artistic model railway enthusiast.
At the edge of the viewpoint I scanned the town both with the naked eye and with binoculars but the illusion that I was looking at something designed and built to look pretty rather than a bona fide town remained firm.
It was a strange sensation stamping boot prints through the crisp crust of the snow that lay in apparently unmeltable patches in the hollows while the sun was shining down fiercely enough that I had left my fleece on the bus and I felt no discomfort in just a T-shirt. Julian, even hardier than the rest of us, had only shorts and a T-shirt. I couldn't work out why the snow remained there.
After a while we took the cable car back down and walked across the long bridge that joined Tromsoya to the mainland to get something to eat. At the near end of this we paused to look more closely at the architecture of the Arctic Cathedral which, as promised by the Lonely Planet guide book, was certainly striking. It is built as a series of triangles, the largest at the front, the smallest in the middle and rising again at the rear. Were it not for the even stranger Polaria, clearly visible across the water, it could easily have been the ugliest building ever designed. It was the architectural equivalent of the furniture sold in Ikea.
In town, after a very brief glance at the market, we split up and looked for food. Without quite knowing how it happened several of us ended up in Burger King eating junk food and drinking coke. The Englishman abroad always knows how to sample the local cuisine to it's best advantage.
When we rejoined the bus it was not long before we were on our way to Soloy. There was a coffee stop at Heia in the Balsfjord Kommune at the Norwegian equivalent of a motorway services where reindeer soup was served from a large tureen bubbling away in the middle of an enormous tepee, and there were a few delays due to roadworks but the constancy of the sunlight robbed us of any sense of time passing so that we left Tromsø in mid afternoon, drove for several hours and arrived at Soloy in mid afternoon.
The Soloy camp site was by another beautiful fjord with more snow capped mountains in the distance and more gaily painted wooden buildings along the shore. In the strange Scandinavian tradition of roof insulation many of them had turf and grass growing on top of them. Camp was quickly reassembled and the cooking team were immediately set to work. Some of the rest of us gathered on the balcony of the kitchen block and had a couple of drinks curtesy of Colin's bottle of duty free scotch. .
Much later, after dinner and a lot more talk and a few more drinks, I looked at my watch. It was already gone midnight and it still felt like mid-afternoon. This was going to take a lot of getting used to.
In Scandinavia the difference between day and night is solely in the direction of the sunlight so that when I woke up I was able to tell that it was morning. More or less the whole of today was to be taken with travel. First there was a longish drive, then a thirty minute ferry journey, then another drive finishing at Kablevag on the Vesteralen Islands. A couple of stops to stretch our legs helped, the second one being the picturesque town of Svolvaer which is the largest town on the Lofoten and Vesteralen Islands. According to the guide books there are many excellent galleries for arts and crafts but the bulk of souvenirs that I could see were tacky and hideous statues and models of Trolls. The Norwegian Troll making industry must be one of the largest money making concerns to come out of Scandinavia since Abba. These revolting items come in sizes ranging from lucky charms to garden gnomes and can be found in picture books, on tea towels, on decorative plates and on T-shirts. They are uniformly grotesque regardless of the medium and I could not imagine anyone, local or tourist, wanting to own one.
Kabelvag when we reached it turned out to have let our fishermen's sea-houses to a group of Serbian refugees and we had been relocated. We were more than happy to oblige. The 'huts' that we had been moved into were modern wooden chalets with comfortable furniture, a shower with a heated floor, a fridge to keep our booze cold and a view across another fjord that was breathtaking. Sadly this temporary new arrangement meant that for two nights not only would I not be camping but I would also be separated from my tent-mate. As a replacement I found that my new flat mates were to be Colin, Martin, Julian and Tony. As Colin had already shown his willingness to share his spirits and the rest of us were of a like-minded generosity I decided I could probably put up with it.
We strolled up to the bar and checked out the beer prices. Having expected it to be about seven pounds for a pint the actual price of about three pounds fifty was a pleasant surprise and we had a quick couple of bottles before dinner. After dinner we returned. The bar was unexpectedly crowded. The reason was immediately obvious. Tonight was the world cup quarterfinal between Brazil and Holland. We couldn't get in en mass so we sat at a table outside with Andrew filling in a running commentary for anyone interested in the game from his vantage point near the door. Herman being Dutch we naturally cheered for Brazil.
More Whisky at the 'hut' helped to ease my difficulty in sleeping in the light and combined with the knowledge that we could sleep late in proper beds it soon pushed me into a deep and dreamless sleep. When I awoke I was unsurprised to find that it was light. In the kitchen of our home from home one of the others, more energetic than was decent, was boiling a saucepan full of eggs and cutting sandwiches ready for lunch. Lacking any sensible reference point I checked my watch and found that it was already nine. We were starting our hike at ten so it seemed prudent to get up and take a shower. The 'cook' turned out to be Julian who was consulting with Colin on whether the twenty minutes would be long enough to boil the eggs or if it might be wiser to leave them for another ten. I bimbled around getting ready. Shower. Check. Shave. Check. Shit. Check. Wash Hands. Check. Make Sandwiches (Cheese and Salami). Check. Snaffle the extra egg. Check.
Pretty soon it was ten O'clock and we drifted out to meet Herman who, in theory at least, knew the route of the walk. There were more people there than I had thought would go - about two thirds of the group seemed to have gathered. Herman, with more than a touch of the German concentration camp guard about him handed out extra heavy bottles of water to anyone not carrying the proscribed minimum of three litres and we started off.
The walk led from the camp past a row of wooden houses and across the main road. We crossed carefully - visibility on the totally empty highway being no more than about ten miles in either direction - and continued on a broad path past a pond. About fifteen minutes later I was beginning to tire of this wide flat boring track. Herman had been striding out ahead of us and now we saw him turn and come back to take a previously unnoticed side trail that angled relatively steeply up. Most people followed him, a few decided to take the easier walk around the lake shore. I started up the hill. Soon those of us on the harder walk were scattered along a fair section of hillside. Colin and Amanda, both of whom clearly had ancestors with an indecent affection for mountain goats, were way ahead appearing - when they could be seen at all - only as distant patches of colour and motion against the green hillside. Along the way we lost some of the others daunted either by the prospect of the hike or by the scrappy piece of paper with its hand written instructions that Herman was using as a map.
The path climbed in a series of ragged zigzags until we reached a point where it started to descend into the hollow before the next hill. Here those of us remaining, apart from Colin and Amanda who were tiny specks in the distance paused to look for the trail. The choices were not promising. Down, apart from leading away from the peak which was our destination, led into what was clearly a flat wet bog. Up, on the other hand, led to where our faster colleagues were waiting but across a trackless hillside. We chose up and a few minutes later discovered why they were waiting. From here the choice was even less promising. Down was a steep grassy slope leading nowhere up to the left was virtually unassailable and up and straight ahead led across a steep and pathless rock face before climbing over a couple of hundred yards of loose looking boulders. For most of us returning was unthinkable. Rachel, Carol and Lynn - accompanied by Herman - obviously thinking a little more clearly, didn't find the retreat nearly so unthinkable and so the party split again.
The rock face proved to be slippery but not impossible and the boulders while loose and treacherous were negotiable so that soon proud of our achievement and ashamed of our stupidity in equal measure we had attained our goal and stood at the top of the peak to take in the magnificent view. Sadly as we had climbed the mist had descended to meet us so that our magnificent view was of the grey and dull inside of a cloud. Eight of us, the five from our hut plus Amanda, Diederik and Natalie had made it. Now we huddled on the top of the peak and ate our lunch, sticking an Explore sticker to the rock to prove we had been there.
There was a general agreement that none of us were prepared to take the path down that we had ascended. It would be far too tricky. Besides from this vantage point we could see where the real path lay and that was so much easier that we felt rather stupid for not having searched harder for it on the way up.
We descended and within ten minutes had reached the point where we had gone wrong. It was less than a hundred yards up the hill from where we had gathered after starting to descend. In clearer weather it would have been blindingly obvious which way to go. Only the mist had prevented our seeing it. We started to backtrack down the path.
Thursday was a travelling day with a ridiculous five a.m. start. We got up at about four thirty, marvelling at the fact that it was miraculously light and tried to work up some enthusiasm. Our spirits were dampened by the prospect of a lunch consisting of more sandwiches of plastic cheese and plasterboard bread. As an experiment I threw a piece of bread out to the gulls who disdainfully ignored it as it frisbeed out across the lake landing in the water with an audible splash. When it had soaked for a few minutes one of them, braver than the rest, attempted to attack it. It resisted all of his efforts to break it up with either beak or claws and only when he managed, with difficulty to carry the whole slice a few feet into the air and dash it against the rocks did it break into pieces small enough to swallow. Of course once it had swallowed them it couldn't take off at all and simply sat on the rocks looking reproachfully at its torturers.
According to the write up we had a 'spectacular drive ... inland through the mountains to the green forests'. The reality was a long tedious drive, a short tedious ferry journey and another long tedious drive.
By now, ignoring completely Herman's day one instruction to choose different seats on the bus each day, the crew who had climbed the mountain, augmented by Andrew who hadn't, had occupied the block of seats at the back of the bus for the duration. The time passed with increasingly inane conversation and Andrew's constant renditions of every novelty record from the last thirty years. His word perfect 'Ernie - The Fastest Milkman in the West' was a quite remarkable treat. Especially on the third or fourth time of hearing.
We broke for lunch in Narvik a town of mind numbing ugliness shortly before Sweden. Even the official North Norway tourist magazine struggles to find something good to say about it. It goes on and on about the skiing in the area and recommends the war museum as a 'popular tourist destination' but otherwise can only find a walk along the railway track as a 'delightful trek' to while away the time. I sat down by the fountain eating a sandwich bought with twenty five Kronor borrowed from Martin and watching an extremely improbable Scotsman in full Highland dress performing a selection of popular songs on the bagpipes. Forty five minutes in Narvik was about forty four and a half minutes more than required.

Abisko was a pleasant wooded camp site with only two drawbacks. The first, had we only realised it, was no more than a dry run for Finland and Enontekio. This was the abundance of mosquitoes who descended on as like school children on an ice cream van the moment we stepped out of the bus. The second was the fact that the ground consisted of about a quarter of an inch of top soil on a bed of stones ranging from gravel to boulder and dispersed randomly around the site. Pitching a tent became a Herculean labour involving repeated attempts to find some gap down through this layer without bending the pegs in half. When we had eventually completed the task I left Ned filling in his diary (I could just imagine it ‘we made camp at exactly 3:17, and while pitching the tent bent three of the pegs at angles of 45, 57 and 63 degrees. Bob trod on the tent whilst still wearing his boots and I was forced to admonish him. I believe he appreciates my helpful hints on camping technique’.) and went for a walk.
We were on a camp site just outside the actual limits of the Abisko National Park which occupies a massive 75 km² at the South of Lake Tornetrask. The camp included a small museum, a large and expensive looking hotel and a shop. In the hotel I asked about the best way down to the lake and soon found myself on a path which might have been muddy and slippery had not the Swedish authorities seen fit to cover its entire length with a wooden walkway. It made things easier but it felt like cheating. It was rather like the wheelchair friendly concrete path by which you descend into the Carlsbad Caverns. That had struck me as being a peculiarly American thing to do and now walking along this pine footpath I pondered on how un-Scandinavian it all seemed. The walk led down to a bridge over the tumbling torrents of the river and then, at last, dispensed with the artificial path in favour of an easy dirt track following the rocky riverbank. Here I started to meet others from the group, mostly heading in the opposite direction although Andrew, Rachel and Denise were there pottering about more or less at random. We stood taking pictures of the river for a while until it started to rain and we were forced back to the camp.
Before dinner a few of us decided to have a look in the hotel bar. It was comfortable and serene, decorated mainly in pastel blues and pinks. The chairs were deep and luxurious and the atmosphere relaxing. If not for the fact that the beer was approximately seven pounds a pint it might have been ideal. We drank our (small) bottles of lager with an economy and thrift that would have done proud a Black Country Granny spending a whole night over a single glass of stout in the snug of her back street local. After dinner a few of us gathered at the point where the camp dropped away sharply to run into trees and undergrowth and followed another time-honoured tradition of Black Country Grannies. We drank the spirits that we had brought with us. Colin still had some of his whisky left as did Julian. Tony had an unopened litre of Gin. I contributed my as yet untouched litre of Tequila. By the time we had had enough belts to be feeling a little tipsy Martin had joined us. He sat down on the bench that had thoughtfully been placed there for us and had a drink. We decided that the Tequila was just too raw to drink unmixed and the original four of us went up to the shop to buy some Orange juice and some snack food. In the shop we ambled around drunkenly but amiably watched with some amusement by the girl at the checkout. Among the food and soft drinks and postcards and 'Moose-in-a-Cup' souvenirs was a board covered with little badges. One of them, of a distinctly wobbly looking moose caught my eye. On our bus journey to Abisko we had constantly identified every possible living creature from a Reindeer to a Rabbit as being a moose. Back at Soloy while we were having a drink we had seen a small creature which, being superb biologists, we had tentatively identified as 'a sort of stoaty-weasely thing' but we eventually decided to call it a moose anyway on the grounds that it would save confusion. Now I examined the badge closely.
    "This Moose looks pissed" I declared.
The others came and looked and confirmed that it indeed seemed to have drunk too much. Fifteen Minutes later without knowing quite how it happened the four of us had formed the Lodge of the Pissed Moose and were all sporting nice shiny new badges. We went back to the camp to find Martin and present him with his badge which I had bought with the money I owed him from lunch. After all how could anyone not want to join our elite society ?
Down by the tents we continued getting louder and drunker. By now we had been joined by some of our other Moosey brethren - namely Diederik and Natalie and Amanda and Rachel. Diederik, in spite of his lack of a badge was elected as the president of the Belgian Moose - joining Tony who had already been named as Kiwi Moose - and Natalie, Amanda and Rachel were christened as the Moosettes - a name vaguely conjuring up images of all girl backing groups for sixties soul singers. When all of the booze, including half a bottle of Southern Comfort that Rachel had managed to dig out, had gone we discovered that it was actually quite a long way on the wrong side of midnight and crawled away to sleep.

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