We didn’t leave Stockholm the time we expected. It happened a couple of days later. And even on that Sunday we were very late, I got stung by a bee in the last moment. We went to a hitch spot I found on Hitchbase, which was rather bad actually. We got a ride after a long while and ended up in Uppsala. But we didn’t want to stay there, so we hitched out while it was getting dark. Fortunately you can put your tent almost anywhere in Sweden, legally. While I was looking for a place for our mobile home a car stopped. A Peruvian, which was great for refreshing my Spanish a little bit. (Peruvian Spanish is a lot clearer than Argentinian or Spanish Spanish.)
We were dropped in a little village not too far and found a nice spot. After an hour or so it started to rain. And thunder, and pour down. It was the first (and so far only) real test of our tent. It held out perfectly fine. It was a little moist on the sides, but next time I’ll put the plastic ground sheet underneath the tent so that the water can disappear easily.
Time is different here. It’s 23:55 and it’s completely light out. Apart from the dark clouds. We made it all the way up to Alta, which is only 237 km from Nordkapp and 3000 km from where we started in Amsterdam a week and a half ago. When we woke up in the little village we tried hitchhiking, but there was almost no traffic and the few cars that passed us, well, they passed us. After a while we found a gas station and there was a guy with his daughter who we asked about the situation. He was so nice to go out of his way to drop us at the highway entrance.
Unfortunately there was not much traffic either, and well, it didn’t stop either. When we saw big dark clouds appear we decided to start walking. On the highway. A lot of traffic passed us, but as always, there is this one great person who decides to stop. We were dropped at the best gas station ever. We met two hitchhiking girls with amazing arm pit hair and we spent some time in swimming in the lake. It was beautiful. But then we had to find our ride to Umea, where we had two places to stay, and many people at the gas station gave us “the face”, not even an answer, just an empty gaze.
We tried walking out of there, but the next gas station according to the map software on my N810 was just a bunch of trees. So we had to walk back. And waited more. While I went to the toilet a car finally stopped, heading for Sundsvall. Again a non-Swedish driver. This one from the North of Iraq. He spoke many languages, but not English. So I had another great chance to practice my Swedish. He dropped us of at an amazing spot for long-distance hitchhiking.
There we met Josephine, a 17 year old barefoot first-time hitchhiker. She was on her way to some hippie festival relatively close to Sundsvall and missed the last bus (at 16:00 or so). She asked us if she could join us. Well, fine. I started “priming” on a little corner so that people could see me from afar and Erga and Josephine stood close to the bags at a good place for stopping.
After an unspecifed amount of time (I don’t really check the time anymore) a Norwegian car stopped. I told Josephine to talk to the driver and he was heading to Umea! We all got in the car and started driving, towards the town of the festival. Josephine appeared to be in a circus high school and had travelled to Egypt. It was great fun talking to her. Tomas, the driver, was a bit more quiet. Josephine was dropped and I moved to the front seat, talked a little bit and found out he was driving all the way to the North.
We decided to go for it! We dropped by at a big supermarket to spend our last Swedish Kronor on food, contacted our host in Umea. Jonas is probably the coolest truck driver I ever met. His fridge is vegan and his computer runs Ubuntu. Unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of time to chat. The next morning he had to leave to work early and we were picked up at 9:00 sharp by Tomas for our long ride North.
We met up with Linnea for a short lunch at the beach in Lulea. I had met her in Lima and it was nice to see her in her home town. We continued through endless forests, lakes and mosquito storms.
Today I’ve done a tiny bit of work on my favorite Wikipedias and as it happened Tonita has an acquaintance from Mali in Tromso. I spoke to him on the phone and we’re heading there after Nordkapp. He’s doing a PhD in anthropology and I guess he might be interested in WIkipedia in Bambara and/or Peul.
I also had the defend the existence of the latter (and several others). Someone proposed the deletion of a whole bunch of Wikipedias. I still think that wikis are a viable mode of development for Africa, and that Bèrto ëd Sèra overlooked the fact that free software and wikis are a radically different mode of production, a third way, that somehow blends in perfectly well with capitalism. And that native speakers set the rules on Wikipedias, not corporate white America. In my experience you only need 3 active contributers to make a Wikipedia blossom and I’m very willing to spend a couple of hours now and then until we find those contributors for Bambara and Peul.
Besides these serious issues we enjoyed the Alta Museum, the light, the hospitality of our host and merely being alive!
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