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Published: October 1st 2022
Me, Grenen
"The Top of Denmark"Dear All
I write this blog entry about my time in my second Scandinavian country visited this summer. After two weeks in Norway, having had an amazing time, enjoying stunning scenery at every turn, and happily encountering really friendly people, it was sadly time to leave. Whilst sad, I was also excited to start the next chapter of my summer travels. I was also quite ready to leave the accommodation in Arendal. While it had all the right amenities, with a great amount of space, a nice quiet location, and an absolute bargain at around £28 per night for a one-bedroomed flat with kitchen, bathroom and living room (seriously, I still can't believe this price for anywhere, let alone Norway!), there was still something about it that didn't make me feel completely comfortable there. I did not meet the owner, and he hardly communicated at all prior to, during, or after my stay there. All I heard was footsteps upstairs in the middle of the night, and lots of snoring. The bed in front of the door to ensure it couldn't open in the middle of the night helped me feel better, but I was still happy to leave.
To take the local bus to Kristiansand on the Saturday morning, I awoke at a much respectable 6.10am rather than the initial 5am planned had I taken the Intercity bus. It was a pleasant journey along the lovely Norwegian coast in those parts, and I still had a nice two hours to explore Kristiansand, Norway's fifth largest city at around 110,000 people, before my onwards ferry journey to Denmark. The city was neat and orderly, with the whole central area made up of gridiron streets. It was founded in 1641 by Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway, at the time when the two countries were in an uneasy union. It began as a garrison town, and has had much of a military history due to its strategic position overlooking the Skagerrak Strait which links the Baltic with the North Sea and beyond. As such, the city's central coastline is dominated by the lovely old Christiansholm Fortress, which I included on my pleasant walk around town, along with a beautiful part of town called "Posebyen". This quarter was once home to French sailors who used to rest in the port, hence the French name "reposez bien" which developed over time
into "Posebyen". The area had a romantic, whimsical feel to it, with its whitewashed shutter-board houses, blooming flowers, and pot plants a-plenty - it certainly had a French feel to my mind.
After my pleasant walk through town, I headed to the port area to board my Fjord Line ferry onto Denmark. This one was much quieter than my previous ferry experience full of teenage Norwegian footballers. It seemed they were now heading back to Norway, as the ferries which were arriving were absolutely full of them again. I felt sorry for the regular passengers on these Norway-bound boats, but felt quite happy to be escaping the crowds as my quieter ferry began its journey.
A short three hours later, the ferry arrived at a small town on the northern tip of Denmark called Hirtshals, which seemed to be the main Danish sea link to the outside world - the port area was huge! It was late afternoon, and the air felt warm and muggy compared to the cool, crispiness of the Scandinavian peninsula. The first thing I noticed was the land was just flat - this was highly noticeable after the mountains and valleys of Norway. Denmark
is in fact one of the world's flattest countries, like a pancake - its highest peak is a mere 165 metres! Most of my home city of Sheffield is higher above sea level than anywhere in Denmark. It was actually my second time in Denmark, after having spent time in and around lovely Copenhagen in February 2019. After having gotten used to speaking Norwegian for two weeks, it was also a bit of a shock to now be exposed to a different language. Prior to my February 2019 visit, I had done a similar amount of Danish language learning on DuoLingo, but after having subsequently tried a bit of Swedish, and then with this Norwegian foray, I was a little rusty. Fortunately these three languages have so much in common that they're almost like dialects of each other, and are generally mutually intelligible, so I had a bit of an advantage still in communicating in Danish. I could just about read it, but listening to it is just so different to Norwegian. I find it a fascinating language, it is so unusual to hear, and sounds to me like English spoken backwards and with marbles in your mouth! Other Scandinavians
Unusual Climbing Tower
Bus from Arendal to Kristiansand say the Danes speak with a potato in their mouths, and I could understand this sentiment. My first few interactions in the country were in English, but as my confidence grew and I switched to Danish, I actually quite impressed myself. Buying tickets at a museum there, the girl at the counter asked for my postcode in Denmark - when I said I didn't have one as I live in England, she said she thought I spoke Danish so well that I must live in Denmark - what a serious compliment!
So as mentioned, Hirtshals is a huge port. A bus took the few foot passengers to the town's train station, over a mile away. I wasn't sure how I'd get back to the ferry departure point again when I departed a few days later, other than walk the mile-and-a-half with my backpacks. A train left as soon as I arrived at the station, which took me to a small request stop just outside the town of Hjørring called Herregårdsparken Station. From there it was a 15-minute walk through a grassy area and then wild woodland to my Air BnB accommodation there for three nights. This place had a
Dyreparken
Kristiansand's top tourist destination, "The Animal Park", or "Zoo" much better feeling than the last one, with lovely attentive owners. The accommodation was in a lovely cabin in the couple's garden, but the bathroom was in the main house so I had to go across a small patio to go to the loo in the middle of the night. I got wet a couple of times as it rained in the night whilst I was there, but still it was a lovely little place to park myself for a few days.
Upon arrival, I still had a couple of hours left to explore lovely little Hjørring, and throughout my journey it was excellent to take advantage of the long summer daylight hours in that part of the world. Hjørring is a cute little Danish town of around 25,000 people, with a small quintessentially Danish area near the town centre, complete with a Danish-style flat-faced and stepped-towered church, and really beautifully coloured old 19th century houses, mostly yellow with black timbers. There was not a tourist in sight, and I thoroughly enjoyed my wander having the whole place to myself.
The next day I very much enjoyed my first full day in Denmark. I took the train to
Me
Kristiansand nearby Aalborg, Denmark's fifth largest city, but first got off in its suburbs to explore the wonderful Lindholm Hoje ancient Viking burial ground and museum. The Lindholm Fjord is geographically amazing. It is a waterway which cuts the top slice of northern Jutland off from the rest of the mainland, and once served as a regional Viking highway to cut out the rough waters lying off the northern tip of northern Jutland. It also served as a launching point for raids upon England in the 8th and 9th centuries. It was hard to imagine that such barbaric marauders came from such a peaceful-feeling place nowadays. Lindholm Hoje is an ancient Viking settlement with adjoining burial ground, and was an important location in the Lindholm Fjord Viking super highway days. I enjoyed a fascinating walk around the burial ground - the burial areas were topped off with stones in the shape of a Viking ship, presumably to send the recently departed on their way to the next life, probably Valhalla. The hillside was covered in these groups of Viking-ship-shaped mounds, and I found my stroll through them evocative of a bygone era. The adjoining museum was very interesting too, and gave
a good feel for what life must have been like in an ancient Viking village. Again, it was fascinating to see how these vicious Viking marauders lived their more peaceful, settled lives when they were not invading England.
From here, I took a short bus ride into town, and spent a couple of hours exploring lovely Aalborg. It was a very lively place when I was there, presumably due to it being a beautifully sunny Sunday, there were indeed plenty of people out and about. There was also a(nother!) cruise ship in town, this one from Norway and fittingly called "Viking", which probably made the place even busier. My pleasant walk took in the main church in town, the Budolfi Kirke which was unfortunately closed during my visit, and lots of cute side streets with beautifully coloured buildings, again most commonly yellow with black timbers. I had a takeaway hotdog from a local 7-11 for lunch, noting that the prices, although still pricey, were notably cheaper than in Norway. I was no longer in the world's third most expensive country, but rather its eighth, and felt a little jubilant at that.
On my train back to Hjørring, I
Rådhus
Kristiansand got talking to a very talkative young man studying to become a teacher. It seems like he wanted to practise his English, and didn't seem to cease practising it. Although rather talkative, it was still pleasant to meet him, and the lady next to him also ended up joining the conversation. They both agreed how unusual Danish sounds, and how speakers just eat up their consonants to make lots of extended vowels and glottal stops. It also sounds to my mind like an English person speaking English, but in a very cool way, too cool for words.
If that wasn't enough for the day, I still had energy left in me to borrow my accommodation owner's very comfortable bike to cycle a 13-mile round trip to the coast at nearby Nørlev Strand and back. Denmark has many cyclists, with its flat topography making cycling very easy, and although there was a slightly more uphill slant on my way back which made it tiring towards the end, it was a very enjoyable ride! The beach and surrounding sand dunes at the end of it was also very much worth it - it was breezy, rugged and other-worldly, and it seems
as though much of Denmark's coastline is made up of long stretches of remote beaches and dunes. I had a lovely evening back in my garden cabin later, contemplating just how much I was able to fit into my first full day in Denmark.
For day two, and my last full day on this brief Danish stopover, I was up in and around a place even further north called Skagen, at the very northern tip of the country of Denmark. They call it "Toppen av Danmark", or "The Top of Denmark", for obvious reasons! The country of Denmark is mainly made up of two islands to the east, Zealand and Funen, and a part of mainland Europe to the west called "Jutland" - it is where we get our English word "to jut out" from. Jutland actually looks like an arrowhead on a map, I call it the arrow of Europe. It seems that Jutland may be just one giant sand spit for the western coast of Europe, which makes sense as the North Atlantic Drift and Gulf Stream must bring all the eroded sand from Western Europe's coast and deposit it there. As mentioned, much of Denmark's coastline
seems to be made up of sandy beaches backed by sand dunes, and then topped off by forests with sand in their soil. On this northern tip of Denmark, the sandy beaches running up the west side of the Jutland peninsula and those running up on the east side meet at a fascinating piece of sandy land. This is a beach surrounded on both its western and eastern side by the sea, and which extends for about a mile further north from the more substantial mainland to the south. This sandy extension ends in a spit around three metres wide, which you can walk along right to the top of Denmark.
It was this amazing place which I was heading to first, taking a train from Hjørring to the town of Skagen, and then a bus to the place where the spit of sand begins, called Grenen. From the bus stop, it was a thirty-minute walk along the east coast beach, to meet the west coast beach a little bit later at this amazing finger of sand. I was hoping to have the place to myself, but this ended up being a little overly optimistic. It seems as though
the whole of Denmark was there, with a constant stream of people heading up and down the sandy finger, ending up with around 30 people at a time on the final three-metre wide spit. It was a spectacle to see this fascinating landform, and quite another spectacle to see this constant string of people along it. When I arrived at the tip, I managed to ask a lady to take a photo of me, and I miraculously appeared in it with no-one else around me - well done lady! I spent just a short while on Denmark's northernmost tip, as with the 30-minute walk there which I made into a 20-minute speed-walk, and then back again, I wanted to get back in time to take the hourly bus again on to my next destination - I thought a quick one hour at Grenen was better than a drawn-out two hours. I made it back in time for the next bus, and headed to the lovely and very well-to-do part of Skagen called Gammel Skagen, or Old Skagen, also known for some reason as Højen.
Gamle Skagen was lovely. Again, there were lots of yellow houses, and it seems the
Danes sure like their houses yellow. There was also a slight whiff of poshness in the place, and the Lonely Planet describes it as the Danish Cape Cod. Having been to the real Cape Cod earlier in the year at Easter, I have to say that I was in complete agreement with this. The sand dune landscape, crashing waves, posh houses, and posh people - a Danish Cape Cod it certainly was! As it was my final day in Denmark (out of admittedly only three), I opted to splash out a bit for lunch. Rather than a hot dog or supermarket sandwich, I had lunch at a swanky place called Hyttefadet, or "The Dish Cabin" in English. There I enjoyed a typical Danish dish called an open sandwich, or smørrebrød, with smoked salmon and pesto, parting with £20 for the luxury. It was worth it though, it was certainly delicious!
From Gammel Skagen, it was a mile-and-a-half walk to my next destination for the day, the amazing Den Tilsandede Kirke, or "the sand-buried church". Due to the many beaches, sand is such a common feature of this part of the country that it has often covered houses, farms and
villages. Here, it buried a 14th century church in the late 18th century, and only its tower remains after the rest was demolished due to it not being operationable. I took some evocative photos of this quite famous sight in northern Denmark, and paid the small entry fee to climb its very narrow spiral staircase for lovely views out over the surrounding sand dunes from above.
I then took a bus back again into Skagen, where I had an hour to spend before my final bus back to my accommodation. If Kristiansand and around is the summer holiday destination of Norwegians, it seems Skagen and around is the summer holiday destination of the Danes. Every Dane and his dog seemed to be there, making for some very packed shopping streets and cafes. There was a nice holiday vibe and atmosphere, and the lovely sunny day enabled me to take some nice photos of the streets of Skagen.
Finally, it was time for my bus, the number 99, to take me all the way back to Hjørring again, a journey of around an hour-and-a-half through some lovely, again flat, Danish countryside. The number 99 is a summer-only bus in
Posebyen
Kristiansand them parts, which plies the tourist sights of Northern Jutland, and served me well on this final bus journey. It only runs around four times a day, but I must have seen it around four times already over the previous two days on my various forays through that part of the world. It seemed a very elusive, yet oddly commonly seen, bus route for my time there, and I actually got a little excited that I was about to take it myself!
Back in my accommodation again, my short stopover in Denmark had come to an end. It was a small and cute time in what is to my mind a small and cute country. My three days there were really a means to an end, connecting my ferry from Norway to my onward ferry to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, but it was nice to explore a little more of Denmark, and also see the country more within the context of the Scandinavian region as a whole. Sweden and Norway seem mighty northern neighbours, whilst Denmark seemed a bit more of a little 'un, with equally important ties to Germany and other EU countries as to its Nordic
Posebyen
Kristiansand counterparts. And again, what a language - if anything, I enjoyed being in the country just to listen to the language!
The following day I was to take a 31-hour ferry across the North Sea to begin a whole new chapter of my summer travels. It felt as though I was going from the civilised and developed, to the wild and rugged, and I was really excited! I'd also never been on such a long ferry journey before, nor with my own cabin. I was looking forward to a bit of downtime and rest to be honest, as a kind of sit down and contemplation of what I'd experienced so far, before the intriguing Faroe Islands opened themselves up to me.
So, until the next time, thanks for reading, and all the best for now!
Alex
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Drinking in all there is....
Dave here....always impressed by how much you are able to experience in your travels. Very well planned and carried out to perfection. Very much looking forward to your next blogs.