Passing time

The other day I discovered that my current passport was, for all practical purposes, full. So I went to the police station to get a new one, and now I'm waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, I'm stuck in Norway...

My passport number four will arrive in the mail in a few days. Until then I can only sit at home and read, blog and go for walks. I've finished today's walk, so here's a bit of blog for you. 

It's about my first passport. It may not have much interest to others than myself, but here it is.

That's what it looks like today. The poor thing. There's no reason to criticize it. Try traveling around the world and swim through flood water following a cyclone in Fiji, and see what that does to you. I guess you too would look a bit worn out after that.

Inside the passport I'm quickly introduced. There's no national ID number or anything. There's only one Bjørn Christian Tørrissen from Norway, so there's no need for it.

It's mentioned that abusing the passport is illegal and punishable. I wish they would mention a few suggestions for how one can abuse a passport.

I was in high school when I got my passport, but as I moved to attend the university in Trondheim, I upgraded my profession from "pupil" to "student". Oh, the vanity!

Apparently I was "dark blond" when I was young! If so, that's only because Norwegian by definition have to be fair-haired. And for some reason, I did NOT have any "special peculiarities". Harrumpf! I'm left-handed, AND I was/am a pretty skilled Minesweeper player!

Ah... The passport photo. Always so flattering. The photo in particular, shows me wearing a nicely patterned sweater, I'm smiling with my mouth open, the photo is taken not straight from the front and my face covers less than 25 percent of the photo. This would never be accepted as a passport photo these days.

Oh, and we forgot to include my fingerprint. Details, details. :)

I love how the passport is valid in all countries, with no exceptions. I just wonder what kind of exceptions anyone would ever have in a passport? "This man is a recovering alcoholic, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to enter Ireland or Russia!"?

Finally, we can see why there's no need for a national ID number. This passport simply claims that the carrier of the passport is the very same person as the one depicted on the photo. That should do it.

(I'm almost ignoring the fact that the authorities have managed to misspell the German word "bescheinigt".)

Most immigration officers will completely ignore the advice about adding visas and stamps in a chronological order. We can see this already on the first page.

My first stamp was collected when I entered the USA at the right here on 23 July 1995, well in advance of the Australia visit to the left. I was traveling more or less at random from the east coast to the west coast on a Greyhound pass, as a prelude to a school excursion to California.


The three other stamps are Australian ones. The visa to the left I had to send my passport to the Australian embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, to get. On a six-months long trip around the planet I entered Australia through Darwin on New Year's Eve 1996, following a Christmas in Bali. Six weeks and thousands of bus kilometres later I left the country from Brisbane.

Pages 10 and 11 are all about Nepal. I got my visa in no time straight from the consulate general, a rich man who took pity on me when I showed up at his office early on the same day that I was leaving Norway.

When I arrived in Nepal, I discovered that they had pretty steep mountains there, so I had to extend the visa (the right-side, sideways thing) with a week to be able to get uphill and back down completely. It didn't cost much money, but I spent quite a few hours in a queue to get it.

From Nepal I continued to Thailand. Four days before my visa there expired, I moved on to Malaysia. Two weeks of that seems to have been enough for me, as indicated by the Singapore visa here.

On page 13 I fly to Jakarta and Indonesia. Because they left lots of empty space on the page, the Fiji immigration control three months later hastily decided to stamp me out of their country on this same page. I suspect that this was partially because they were eager to get rid of me. I was all wet and smelly after having swam, using my backpack as a raft, to the airport through brown and muddy flood water.

The airplane from Fiji evacuated me to Los Angeles. If they had told me at check-in that the plane was stopping in Honolulu for fueling, I probably would have gotten off there. But they didn't.


Before I arrived in Fiji, I had been to New Zealand for two or three weeks, as evidenced by the stamp on page 15. And with that, the documentation of my around-the-world trip in 1996/1997 is finished.

At the bottom of the page there's a stamp from Germany. Back in the days before Schengen, we got those. I was going on a work trip, to Lotusphere, an IT conference in Berlin. I traveled on a cheap Widerøe flight straight from Oslo pretty much to downtown Berlin, the historic and now closed airport of Tempelhof.

And that's the entire contents of my first passport! A rusty paperclip scar (from the swimming through the flooding) and an old address finished up the document. My traveling, however, had barely started!

Soon I'll be back with another exciting blog entry about my second passport! :)

My Cape Verdict

Green Cape Catering to people who aren't content with going on just yet another developed beach around the Mediterranean, the tour companies every year keep on adding at least one or two destinations to new and sunny, albeit slightly odd, destinations. Last fall, the new thing on the menu of cheap direct flight holidays from Norway was Cape Verde. On the second plane to leave from Norway, I found a nice last minute discounted seat. I paid about 380 euros for a roundtrip flight to Africa and a basic, but perfectly good hotel room for a week.

Is this my basic hotel with a swimming pool? Not necessarily.

I was dropped off on the island Boa Vista. I risked being imprisoned in one of the giant all-inclusive hotels on the island, but I was lucky and got a room at a smaller hotel in the centre of the "capital" of the island, Sal Rei.

The village has a population of only six thousand or so, so it doesn't have more than just a few facilities. There's a barber that charges three Euro for a haircutr. And there are a few shops, where most of the items on sale are cheap imports from China. "Gleat qality goodds!", the shopkeepers proudly claim, pretty much all of them being Chinese as well. If there is a more certain way to tell that you're now in proper Africa, then I don't know about it. Except for great herds of wildebeest and zebras, of course. But they aren't very good swimmers, so there aren't any of those in Cape Verde, located 570 kilometres off the western coast of North Africa.

Cape Verdean Wilderness

Cape Verde is located well inside the tropics, but you don't need to worry about excessive heat. It's a windy place, emphasized by the lack of forests. A few modest volcanic peaks pop up to an altitude of a few hundred metres, but even they do not offer much protection from the winds attacking from the sea, often from all sides at once. In this flat, yet rocky land, not much will grow.

Other islands in the Cape Verde archipelago are very different, but Boa Vista seems to be just a collection of rocks put on top of some meager pasture. Which is fine, but it certainly keeps the temperatures down. Having experienced the heat of Senegal and The Gambia, that feels like a blessing. Still, do bring sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen!

I felt completely safe on tiny Boa Vista. That is, until the police came over and warned me to really be careful. I don't know how real the threat is, but the advice given was to avoid walking alone, especially on deserted beaches. You would think that with just six thousand or so people around, it should be possible to shake out the bad seeds, but apparently they have problems with that. Typical foreigners! Nah. I bet they're just like everyone else, there's a small risk that bad things can happen here, just like anywhere else, yet most of the people you will meet are nice ones.

A friendly, yet unpredictable neighbourhood in Sal Rei, Cape Verde

I still went for walks straight out of Sal Rei and into the wilderness, and I never saw any criminals. If I saw anyone at all, they were generally goat shepherds, smiling as widely at me as anyone possibly can.

Inside and near the village of Sal Rei, however, I can imagine that some strange and not necessarily only pleasant things can happen. Behind the fairly proper buildings along the streets near the waterfront, I found a total poor people's ghetto, fairly new but still rapidly decaying. All the buildings have tin roofs and walls of concrete blocks, laundry with numerous holes hanging on the roof and garbage floating on the ground. It didn't seem like they had connected to the electrical grid and the sewer system quite yet. After sunset it got really, really dark there, and if you step into a turd, it's origin may well not be of the canine kind, to put it that way.

Mind you, everyone I met were happy, polite and smiling, waving at me and saying hello. Still, when lots of people live like that, there's bound to be a few of them seeing the potential in having relatively rich European walking around their home.

The best day during my week on Boa Vista was probably when I rented a car and drove around the whole island. Or maybe it wasn't so much a car, but more a small tank with four-wheel drive and some pretty impressive battle wounds on the sides, the front and the back.

The rental lady gave me a faint map of the island, with some strange dotted lines that looked like they could just as well be stream beds as roads. When I left civilization, I discovered that some of them actually were rivers AND roads. To get to the spots I thought would be most interesting to see, I just had to drive wherever the ground looked least threatening, whether there were any wheel tracks there or not. Great fun, but a bit exhausting after a while.

Not built by the old Romans, it just looks like it was.

One whole circuit of the island turned out to be about 100 kilometres long, and it took almost exactly ten hours to complete it. That included no long breaks for eating anywhere, because there weren't really anywhere I could find food on the east side of the island. Fortunately, the landscape was enough of a distraction to let me ignore the rumblings from my stomach.

I barely saw another car throughout the day, so I was really glad the engine made it back to Sal Rei. As the only car on eastern Boa Vista, I was a pleasant encounter for a shepherd there who wanted to hitch-hike a bit. He didn't seem to know exactly where he was going, but he was beaming with joy from sitting in a car.

After a while he suddenly asked me to stop and said "Whoa! I have to go over there and check out those goats. I'll be back in a few minutes!". To make sure I didn't take off again without him, he left behind an ancient leathery backpack, presumably filled with his greatest earthly treasures. He returned, we continued, and a little while later he decided he had been sitting in a car enough for that day, and walked out into the wilderness again.

All in all, my week on Boa Vista was fine, although certainly not spectacular. It's just enough time to get used to all the stray dogs, to try all the courses served in the little outdoor restaurant in the town square, and to learn the names of all the "artists" from Senegal and Guinea-Bissau who patrol the streets in search of tourists willing to buy works from their home villages on the African mainland. Maybe the Chinese running the shop in the corner store has learnt your name as well, having initiated some conversation after you have stumbled into his shop a few times in search of bottled water and salty chips for rehydration following your long, warm walks.

A man and his dog

If you want to visit the island, I think you should consider not staying in the all-inclusive hotels. You'll be perfectly fine in one of the small guesthouses run by families in Sal Rei instead.

Ok, so maybe that means you will have to endure a few authentic power outages and a Friday and Saturday night filled with helplessly melancolic dance music coming from accordions and drums very close to your room, but that's not really a big problem. You should still sleep better there than in a large hotel, knowing that the money you spend are going almost straight into the pockets of people who really need the wealth you bring, instead of being exported to some hotel chain's bank account in a far-away tax haven.

If you just want warm and sunny weather, and you're tired of the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands, Cape Verde will do the job for you. If, however, you travel with lots of dining and shopping in mind, I think you'd better head elsewhere. Unless you collect African drums, postcards turning yellow, or small wooden figurines made from endangered species of trees, that is. They've got plenty of those.

Summing up my experience: Decent place to go for a week, but I'll probably not return.

2012 from the other side

Almost a full day of 2013 has passed, and I still can't see what was so bad about 2012 that we had to change it, really. Ok, so maybe 2013 is new and shiny, but I can see little further ahead than the guy just under here, so I thought that for now, maybe we should concentrate on looking back at my version of 2012 instead of looking forward.

The year started out nicely. The nice hotel we were supposed to stay at in Kuala Lumpur was overbooked, so we were transferred to another even crazier hotel. It was so posh that even the TV remote lived in a leather case of its own, and we had to pick pillows for the bed from a pillow menu. The place was so overly luxurious that there was even no full wall separating the bed from the bath tub and the toilet. That's clear evidence that an obnoxious, overpaid interior designer has roamed here freely, and that only happens at the best hotels. Still, New Year's Eve in Kuala Lumpur was excellent.

From there we headed for the woods, to the Cameron Highlands. Those hills have the perfect climate for some extensive tea plantations. The farming creates a surreal landscape, and wandering through it was among the highlights of the year to me. If you get tired, just head for the nearest tea house and order their strongest, sugary iced tea, and you'll soon be hyperactive again.

It wasn't long since my last visit to Singapore, but since we were in the neighbourhood anyway, I went back to check on them. The city state gets weirder every year. The latest is that now you can buy five storey Whoppers at Burger King, and in the steep Fort Canning Park, they've installed escalators... I'm guessing that the number of heart disease patients around there must be climbing. Clogged-up blood veins obviously havent been outlawed quite yet.

Back in Norway the winter was fairly mild. The season for hiking in the woods was a nice and long one, albeit it slightly wetter than we prefer. As early as late February we could start hunting geocaches along the Oslo fjord.

The old news of 2012 was that the Hobbit surfaced into popular culture, this time as a long-winded move trilogy. If you still think the movie moves too fast, try going to Killarney in western Ireland and hike the forest there. Everything moves real slow there, except for the clouds, and the surroundings are very The Shire-like.

I discovered that there were heaps of other good reasons as well for visiting Ireland in springtime. Wandering along the Cliffs of Moher was awesome. Basking sharks enjoyed the sun in the sea far beneath the trail, huge numbers of puffins squawked on the cliff ledges, crazy green fields collided with the crispy blue sea, and there were no fences to be bothered by.

As you get close to the edge of the cliffs, you quickly realize that it may be a good idea to keep some distance between yourself and the vertical sides of the cliff. A cozy amble can otherwise suddenly turn into a short and fatal flight.

The saddest days of the year arrived quickly and left agonizingly slowly. A death among friends should be exclusive to retirees and smokers, but that's unfortunately not the case. It's tough, but as long as you can embrace the feelings that come with it, shake it off and start appreciating being alive as much as possible, it's almost worth it.

Early in the summer my parents visited with me in Oslo. It's always a nice thing. Here we're on a walk in the forest, and I just told them that I'm moving to Afghanistan to work for Programmers without borders.

Fortunately, that wasn't completely true. I was just going to Italy to walk from Milan to Rome along the old pilgrim's route Via Francigena. It's a fairly long walk.

Walking that far isn't what Italians are into. They prefer to use their bicycles. I find that I see more when I walk, so I walked. In Siena, about half-way on my walk, I went to the City Hall and discovered that they were preparing for a large welcome party for me. I just had walked too fast, so they weren't ready for me yet. They were still inflating even more balloons as I continued my walk southwards, so I'm sure the next pilgrim had a grand welcome.

After about three weeks I was delighted to stumble into the Vatican, in the middle of Rome. The great feeling of accomplishment is among the better sides of life on this planet.

Throughout the year my travel sickness bag collection has kept growing. I only barely managed to keep these guys from the barfbag museum in Cobh away from my specimens. The new countries on my list this year were The Vatican, Kenya, Tanzania, Qatar and Cape Verde. I've passed 70 countries now, and I hope to add about 30 more this next decade.

I found time to visit the dentist as well. There weren't any cavities, really, but I was allowed to have my wisdom teeth rearranged slightly, to make them easier to brush. Without using any anaesthetics! Am I a (frugal) tough guy, or what?!

I have also had the pleasure of cleaning a few chinchilla cages this year. That's what you get for getting involved with someone who believes that rodents are animals that should be kept as pets, and that you need at least 30 of them in order to breed ever superior animals. I just hope that she will soon make some animals that are smart enough to start using a toilet properly.

This year I actually managed to go to Africa, and twice at that! The first time was to watch animals. The enormous herds of wildebeest, zebra and buffalo that roam the savannah between Tanzania and Kenya was the most overwhelming wildlife encounter I have had in years. Look out for lions and ticks as well, though!

My other trip to Africa was more to look at rocks and people. Cape Verde is the perfect location for that. Although people there smile, it's difficult to understand exactly why they do so. As a tourist you'll have a marvelous time in Cape Verde, but most of the locals are going through some tough times.

Scenery-wise, the greatest experience I had this year must have been when we started the day in a dense mist at the top of the Ngorongoro Crater, and then, as we slowly descended on a mud road into the crater itself, the clouds parted in a divine fashion, and more and more animals came into view. It was just breathtaking.

The possibly strangest experience I had this year, at least outside my own head, took place closer to home. In the middle of November I joined a gang of hard core geocachers in recreating the horror movie "The Blair Witch Project" in the forests of Østfold. I can't tell you much about it without risking a curse on my life, but I'll tell you it was a wonderfully funny, cold and wet experience. Geocaching is a great hobby to, uhm... strange people.

That's life; a series of hindrances and challenges that generally can be overcome, although not always in the most elegant fashion. As long as you have fun and you learn from it, that's the way it should be.

A lovely, white Christmas in Norway ended the year for me. I was quite pleased with 2012. Would live it again. 2013 I hope to put to good use as well, and while I hope it will be different, I also hope it will be just as great as 2012. First, however, I foresee that I shall have to eat lots of half-price Christmas candy.

I found these words of wisdom at a cemetery in Ireland:

So there you have it. I wish a Happy New Year to all of you!

Scenes from another Christmas

This year I tried something new, spending Christmas in Southern Norway, as opposed to Northern Norway or being somewhere warm, traveling. It wasn't bad at all, and because I brought my camera, I can show you what it was like. We begin early on Christmas Eve in Nannestad, just outside Oslo. We're heading into the woods to hide a mailbox with some silly plastic toys inside. Don't ask why. It's been snowing all through the night, so it makes for a tiresome walk, but also for an enchanting view all around us.

Fortunately someone has been kind enough to plow ski tracks through the snow, where we can walk with relative ease a bit of the way.

Back from our mailbox voyage, Christmas officially starts as we eat the traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner, ribs. (Yes, there are vegetables to eat as well, but this meal is all about the meat!)

After opening our Christmas presents we head for Kvitfjell, north of Lillehammer. Rumour has it that there are more presents to be collected there! Of course, first we have to find our cabin... Easier said than done in these mountains.

Hooray! The rumours were correct! Inside the cabin we find a fireplace, a guardian dog and a Christmas tree with presents beneath it.

This year Christmas coincides with a full moon and nice weather. The nights are bright, and we can easily go for a walk in the forest at night, even without torches.

When the sun rises in Norway in December, it only does so slowly. Also, it's only those parts of the landscape that benefit from the colouring of a low-hanging sun. To make up for that, those parts get the loveliest shade of red that any sunlight can produce. It becomes the mountains of Rondane perfectly.

"Our" side of the moutains has to go for three weeks mid-winter with no direct sun at all. It makes the world bluish, but the colours from behind the hill can not be kept from us.

The more we zoom in on the photo above, the more colour we get.

It turns out that you can create amazing scenery using just the colours of white and blue. Nature has done a good job of it here, methinks.

If Disney were to do a remake of the photo above, I think it would look something like this:

Up at the plateau near the top of Kvitfjell, the winds of the mountain have suddenly turned this into a clouded world. This makes it hard to see much apart from the whiteness of the mountains.

The wind changes its mind and soon it's clear again. We look north towards some cabins on the other side of the valley. It's easy to see why they're wooden houses.

This view promises us that in just a couple of weeks we shall again receive the gift of sunlight even on this side of the mountain.

If this was a photo from an old fairy tale, I'm pretty sure that this would either be a troll turned into a rock, or a place with trolls living inside it. The peak is called Hestknappen, "The Horse Button". Sometimes the name of a place doesn't make much sense.

We take the dog for a walk to see the sunset. At first he's jumping around, delighted to be outside. After a few minutes of slow progress through deep snow, two pleading eyes make us turn our noses and snout back to the fireplace. But the view we enjoy can not be complained about.

This is what we saw to the north from the ridge of Kvitfjell:

As the sun sets to the west, a red moon rises to the east, somewhere behind the Rondane mountains. It's our last glimpse of the Christmas of 2012.

I hope you had a nice holiday as well! #8D)