We tried leaving Alta for Tromso, but after 2,5 hours of a lot of cars and none stopping we decided to just head south.  It took another 1,5 hour before someone stopped. For the shortest ride of our trip, 2 km only, but it was encouraging, especially thanks to the strawberries we got from the young woman who picked us up. From the bus stop we were dropped at we didn’t have to wait that long again to get a ride to Kautokeino, in a huge Chevrolet, driven by a guy attending a Christian meet-up.  He only talked a little bit about Christ and the gospels his friend had made were actually a good way to learn some more Norwegian.   After walking and waiting a bit a guy stopped. A friendly dog in the trunk.  He was on his way to Rovaniemi, which meant we could go along for quite a while.

We found out he was actually going for a weekend of hunting. Nice to find out for two (mostly) vegans. Well, at least killing the animals you eat is more sincere than having a huge machinery do it for you. We were dropped in an abandoned tiny village and decided to continue a bit more, even though it was 22:30 or so.  Of course it was still light, we hadn’t seen more darkness than the blinders would give us in 5 days. Surprisingly, a couple stopped, and then I had made a mistake. I left the bluetooth GPS device given to me by Marcus on my bag. So I lost it there. It was much faster in getting a satelite fix than my N810 so I slightly miss it these days.

Then after 25 minutes driving we were really dropped in the middle of nowhere and killing mosquitos decided to set up our tent.  In the morning we heard “nok nok” and some Russian but we didn’t feel like inviting the millions of mosquitos in our cozy tent. Later we got a ride from a Norwegian on his way to buy a fridge. At the crossroads two friendly Finnish women picked us up. They were totally into fishing. We were dropped at a city at the Northern coast of Finland where it took us not too much time to get a ride to Oulu.

I had sent a bunch of texts to our potential host in Oulu but hadn’t received anything back.  I decided to give her a call when we were 50 minutes away from Oulu.  Apparently none of my messages had come through.  The same thing happened in Denmark, where my messages never made it to the recipient. I will have to file a complaint with Vodaphone, especially if they still dare to charge some ridiculous amount of money for sending less than 160 bytes.  She was actually on her way to a festival close to the spot where we found our ride to Oulu.

In the meanwhile, our driver told us he was driving all the way to Lahti, 90 km from Helsinki.  Since our back-up plans in Oulu were not working out either we decided to head to Lahti and see if we could still hitch to Helsinki from there. Our driver had to drop off his trailer at his summer house, which freaked out Erga a little bit since it was not even on my GPS map.  We got there around midnight.  There was a gas station and a big mall.  And lots of mall rats. With scooters.  And “no picknick”. We had some food anyway, thanks to the supermarkt guard. Then we tried a bit of hitching. No luck. So we pitched our tent in a little bush next to the highway.  Next morning, oh well, a bit later, we started hitching. I guess it took 2 hours (not looking at the time) before a car stopped.  Not going south.  We decided to take the ride anyway and the friendly old man showed us how pretty the little village used to be.  We wereropped and started walking in the direction back to the highway (but more south).  Again we were picked up by a friendly old guy and then we had to walk even more.

After hours of walking and thumbing we were getting slightly desperate, less than 80 km away from Helsinki. Then finally an angel stopped.  She was a very friendly nurse who had been looking for berries in the forest. We hugged goodbye at a metro station in Helsinki.

We finally were able to take a shower and clean Anu’s fridge.  We quite a few days in Helsinki, first at Anu’s, then at Laura’s.  Dumpster dove quite a bit and made delish food, vegan soup, pancakes.  I finished the garam masala and bought some new.

The ferry to Tallinn was a forebode for the internet situation in Estonia.  You can find (unprotected wireless) internet in almost every street corner and apartment. Apart from Andros’ place. I had to plug a cable into my newly bought Acer Aspire One. We cleaned out his junk room so we had a very comfy place to sleep. He also had a car and loved to drive around people all over town. Yesterday morning he took us to a good spot to hitch out of Tallinn.

The first driver was an IT/artist guy who drove us to Parnu. When we got there we had some baked goods and it started pouring down.  We were almost tempted to take a bus.  It appeared to cost more than 10 euros per person though, and the rain, well, hitchhiking in the rain is good for character building and practicing bad Russian.

We found a local bus eastward and when I thought I saw a gas station we got off.  To find out that we could have gone 4 more stops. But we saw a lot of trucks coming our way and started walking there, almost drowing in the rain.  We decided to ask at a gas station and my bad Russian appeared to be very useful. We found a ride to the border with a friendly Latvian Russian guy.  The radio was all about the war in Georgia.  In Russian though, but we had already been drowned with news about the war in Tallinn.  People are very concerned here. I’m glad Marian didn’t take the plane to volunteer and report the mayhem.

At the border we tried hitching. I asked 2 truck drivers, but they didn’t want to take two people.  I did see 4 very similar trucks and decided to try and ask them if they could take us. We where dropped next to a highway because they didn’t go all the way to Riga and through my GPS found out that we were at Salaspils. Walked a lot. Missed the last train.  Walked even more. Found a microbus for 1 lat (1,50 EUR) to the city. Happy. In Riga we were warmly welcomed with Leffe, food (but not veggy) by Inga, her roommates and two tiny black tom kittens who where very happy with the food.

Now we’re sitting in the Old Town hostel that was the focal point of the Riga Winter Camp 2,5 years ago.  There’s free wireless and I’ve done some Drupal hacking on my 1 kg laptop.

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!

and maybe some more kaltura

Unfortunately it was not convenient enough to blog with maemowordpy on my N810. So I’m writing this in Stockholm. Or well, in a really nice Summer house that is currently inhabited all the time in the Southern suburbs of Stockholm. It’s close to a beautiful lake. It’s actually not really suburbs here. There’s not even regular water. The pump broke and now we have to help ourselves with bottles and buckets.  It’s a great lesson on how not to waste water.

Hamburg was great. Despite the heavy rain. We met up with Matthias and Lena (who was at the CouchSerfing Collective New Zealand) and met some new friends.  We stayed with Julien, who is simply hilarious. A lot of parties and vegan pancakes. Again we left Hamburg a bit later. We quickly had a ride - before the rain came down, into sunnier weather. The couple (in their fifties) who picked us up told us they hitchhiked themselves in Norway, with their children.  At the gas station we immediately had eye contact with a woman and then it appears that she (Swedish), her husband (from Belgium) and children (bilingual) were heading to Denmark and they were happy to take us there. In the car we talked a lot. Then I found out that her husband was making a living through Drupal and that he had too many requests and he’s willing to pass on some work to a starting Drupalist!

At the lines before the ferry I walked around to find a ride towards Copenhagen.  I found a group of German kids (16, 17, 18 and 19 y/o) with big kanos on a huge Mercedes van.  They were happy to take us and then we found out that they were actually going to the North of Sweden. So we skipped Copenhagen. I wanted to see Sigurdas and Stockholm though.  We spent the night in our tent in the South of Sweden, which was quite comfy, woke up and continued with the German kids. They dropped us at a gas station where there was only one potential friendly car driver, who also took us to Stockholm.

Now it’s 14:00, Erga is preparing pasta and we’re planning on eating that and head North to Umea.

bonus vid preview

In the next 6 months I expect more of the same. I will probably spend al lot of time traveling.  Now I’m just waiting for my new light-weight tool to arrive in stores in Europe.

A week before I had left Amsterdam. To hitchhike to Avignon, 1050 km away, to meet up with Elsa and amylin (on the occasion of her birthday). I had planned to spend the night in my tent, that I had recently bought before going to the Berlin Beach Camp. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use it there, because of the physical signs of stress. (Instead I spent the weekend in an extremely luxurious apartment.) My hope however was to be in Luxembourg before sunset and hitch a ride with a car going down South.

As it usually goes, time flies and before you know it’s past 15:00 and you still have to head to a good hitchhiking spot. I prepared my sign “Belgie” in the bus, and because that it only took me three minutes to be picked up by a car driving to Antwerpen. Hitching through Belgium took a bit more effort (waiting times up to 30 minutes), but at some desolate gas station (on the highway) I saw a Dutch car and I asked a Dutch looking guy if I could go with him to Luxembourg. So I made it before 22:00 to the super gas station in Luxembourg, right before the French border.

After 30 minutes a car stopped, asking me about my destination. “Avignon.” “T’as de la chance.” I got in the car and was a bit surprised by the unlit dashboard. The Moroccan driver started driving and I was a bit more surprised. By the sudden changes of speed and the not so steady directions. During our conversation Aziz had asked if I had my driving license. Inshallah, after an hour and a half the driver stopped to pass the wheel onto me.  After 5 hours of driving I made it to Avignon in less than 14 hours.

Today the Bambara Wikipedia reached 200 articles. Thanks to the great work of Misbaho, who has started contributing regularly about a month ago.

There is also a discussion going on in the Afrophonewikis group, about setting up an African chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation specifically for issues related to Wikimedia projects in African languages, which was started by Ibou, who has continuously been doing great work on the Wolof Wikipedia.

The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.

“Roomware” is an application running in a defined space. For instance: linking people’s photographs to the screens of a club, sharing musical tastes with the DJ, finding other interesting people on your mobile phone, a photo booth activated by the entry tickets of two people, etc.

That’s all pretty awesome. On top of that, it’s free software, done by nice people and they even do fun geek stuff such as playing with glasses that track your motion…

It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever). You can click “love” if you like something and “ban” is even more useful. It’s especially nice to tune into your friends’ radios.  Feel free to tune into mine.

There’s even a client for my Nokia N810. Now we just need free wireless everywhere…