wwoofing in Sweden 2010

Olchick and I spent yesterday doing our last minute tasks, tidying the flat and packing our things. We often ran across the yard carrying things between the kitchen and the flat with our heads ducked down against the rain.

Halland is nothing if not a wind resource and we have had sleepless nights twice this week from the wind launching horizontal rain at our window. The gusts would come in backwards through the bathroom air vent and cause the fan blades to spin up with a loud whirring sound. Once the front door, which is hard to latch, blew open in the middle of the night, startling us into immediate and uncomfortable wakefulness.

At 2320 we met our friend, Donald, in Laholm’s industrial estate with his huge, shiny Scania truck. We said our goodbyes to Jan Erik, who had kindly driven us to town, and soon we were on our way.

The truck was a delight to be inside. It had all the home comforts from calm interior lighting to a coffee machine. With good conversation and sandwiches at the ready, we settled in for our 11 hour road-trip.

There was not much to see at night. We passed a group of deer by the side of the road. Mice ran across the tarmac, incandescent in the lorry’s plasma discharge lights. After Jönköping we periodically saw lights from distant towns across the Vättern lake and strangely, at about 3 in the morning, we met a Sunday Driver, trundling along at 20kph under the speed limit and a day early on a completely empty road.

There was more to see after dawn turned the landscape from silhouettes into misty countryside. Around the Stockholm latitude there was a mix of forest and arable land, the houses increasingly being of the red-painted wooden cottage variety. After Uppsalla we were on the E4 and the landscape started to become recognisable. The fields lost their dominance and became patches between forest until finally the forest reclaimed its monopoly. The earth changed from sandy to rocky with the occasional giant boulder being swept clean by tree branches.

At our last rest stop, I got out of the cab and took a moment just to smell the air. The scent of pine was so fresh and pure, I felt as if it was cleaning the dust of 10 years of city life out of my lungs.

After about 11 hours we arrived in Hudiksvall with the feeling that we had come home. In all we travelled around 820km which is about the same distance as Calais to Glasgow. This marks the end of our first wwoof in Halland and the start of a short break with friends before our next placement in October.

At the top of this post I have included a peaceful late August scene showing sun breaking through the clouds at the end of a stormy day. In some way I this reflects a little of how I feel at the moment.

The forecast was quite clear. In a week of rain, today was going to be the only sunny day. Today was the day for our trip to Varberg.

Why Varberg? My mother’s mother’s father, Carl Johan Zell (or Säll as the family was later know), came from Varberg. That was the reason I chose Sweden as a place to spend a ‘year abroad’ in. Well my year abroad was in 2001 and while I was working two things happened – the first was that I met my wife and the second was that I fell in love with Sweden.

So here I am again in 2010 and this time I couldn’t resist the opportunity to visit Varberg. Which brings me to today, the only sunny day this week.

First up, was visiting the old Zell house. With help from Jan Erik and a couple of old photos we narrowed it down to a 1km square district of Varberg. I then checked the satellite photo on Google and found a matching roof-line. No Zell family living there any more, but I was amazed how little it had changed. If I added a bit of photoshop ageing to my photograph and made it black and white, you would find it difficult to spot the difference!

Olchick and I then walked around the corner to the beach. It is just a 3 minute walk from the house to rocks and clean cold ocean. Again nothing had changed, but then the beach is made of granite so I don’t know what I was expecting. I now have a picture of my wife Olga sitting in almost the same spot that Olga Eleanora Elizabeth Zell had her photo taken with her sister Hilda in the 1920s.

Next up was a visit to the two land marks visible in the old photograph my mother had given me of the old Zell cottage. Both were still standing, one was the old school and the other was the church in the centre of town. The school is a big, imposing redbrick building and the church is a beautiful white building with a copper roofed tower. This was nothing compared to the inside however. We both stood and gazed in amazement when we entered the church. There was a variety of rich but gentle colours, a sense of peace, and an attention to detail everywhere you looked.

Varberg’s city centre is remarkable. It has a number of interesting buildings and architecture, it has a lot of open space and trees, there are many shops but best of all it has a lively and inviting café scene with people braving the autumn air with their jumpers, coats and coffee.

Our main goal of the day was a visit to the Zell family grave. This was very interesting because at first we could not find it. We asked someone working nearby and it turned out that we had asked one of the administrators. He spent an hour with us in the office tracing paper records and checking his computer database. By the end of the afternoon we had found the location of the grave, and the names and addresses of two surviving relatives of the Zell family in Sweden.

Elated and tired, having walked quite some distance to the graveyard, Olchick and I got in the van for one last visit. You cannot miss the fort if you are in Varberg for the first time. A cold and penetrating wind was blowing inland and we slowly got cold as we walked around the old walls and took photos of the harbour. The sun finally set, spectacularly, over a desolate looking island called Skrivareklippan that contains a house on one side and a shack on the other. It is so flat that you can observe that there is clearly nothing else there.

It has been such a wonderful day, and so densely packed. Sometimes I look at these blog entries and they do not seem to do justice to the richness of experience. How could I have left out the lines of wind turbines on the motorway, or sharing salami and prawn salad sandwiches in the pickup, or the talkative man I met in the main square who randomly stopped and engaged me in conversation. How could I miss out Olchick and I finding that ICA have a free coffee dispenser for their shoppers. Coffee and sugar for tired travellers.

We took to the motorway feeling lucky and happy. With only four days to go, our trip to Varberg brought a sense of completion to our first wwoof here in Halland. This time the wind turbines were invisible but for the lamps flashing at the top and the motorway guided us back to sandkulla one last time.

Olchick and I have spent the last week renovating a room. After removing two walls we were given the task of replacing one wall and plastering over the joins in the wood before painting everything white. Our hosts went away for the week to do some work up north and visit people.

The week had a gentle start but we really started to get enthusiastic about finishing the room and by Friday everything looked like new. I put a last coat of oil on the benches I renovated and put them back out. Finally, I will spend the day tomorrow finishing work on the internet site and so within a couple of days all the loose ends will be tied up and we will be ready to leave.

I keep taking ‘just one last walk’ in the forest which, while small and constrained, is charming in its own way. My route takes me past an old hunting ‘nest’ which does not look as if it has been used for some time. It seemed rather melancholic in the bright cold light. It was the first time since summer I had to wear a jumper to go out.

Yesterday we had a small adventure. Catharina had said that there was an English man who had spent years doing up a very old farm house in Våxtorp and that he did not mind receiving visitors. So, rather nervously, but with an open invite we couldn’t resist, we drove to the old farmhouse. After a moment on the doorstep trying to convince them we were not selling anything, we got a warm welcome and hot coffee. The old farm was beautiful. Dating from the early 1700′s it is one of the oldest buildings in the area and is architecturally very distinct, with its foot broad oak beams and its thatched roof. The man who lives there is charming and with cigarette in hand, showed us his work on the house and the garden.

There has been a light rain most of the day today, not the kind that soaks you straight away, but enough so you avoid going out. Now we are only a week away from a complete change, we face the uncertainties of the wwoofing life again. With only a finite amount of resources, we take each step carefully and try to feel the flow of life and avoid getting trapped into anxiety. A seasoned traveller would laugh off most of our worries and so we keep reminding ourselves that every big adventure has its sunny days and its rainy days.