Today was one of those road-trip days when the journey itself turned out to be every bit as interesting as the destination.
We left our lovely farmhouse B&B outside Ystad after breakfast and began heading east along Sweden’s southern coast, with Karlskrona as our eventual destination.
Our first stop was Ales Stenar, high on the cliffs above the little fishing village of Kåseberga. It is Sweden’s largest and best-preserved stone ship setting: 59 huge stones arranged in the outline of a ship 67 metres long, sitting in a magnificent position looking out across the Baltic.
Getting the suitably atmospheric photograph, however, required patience. A French family with very young, and increasingly tantrum-laden, children had managed to position themselves more or less permanently in the middle of every possible shot. We gradually became part of a small international community of waiting photographers: Germans, Danes and Finns, along with a few retired Swedes, all hovering discreetly and pretending not to be waiting while very obviously waiting. Nobody tutted. Nobody asked anyone to move. We simply maintained the shared conviction that eventually our moment would come.
And eventually it did. For a few precious seconds the stones were empty, cameras were raised almost simultaneously, shutters clicked and an extraordinarily well-coordinated little United Nations of tourists got the atmospheric photographs we had all been waiting for.
Having demonstrated such exemplary patience, we felt we had earned fika. Back down at the little harbour below the stones, that meant a cardamom bun for me and a vanilla bun for Mark, eaten beside the water while a small delegation of local birds made it very clear that they regarded sharing as part of the Swedish fika tradition.
Next door to the café was a smokehouse, which of course demanded investigation. Inside was an extraordinary array of smoked and cured fish: eel, mackerel, salmon and goodness knows what else. Obviously we couldn’t simply look. We emerged with a little snack and wandered back towards the car eating gravadlax and hot-smoked salmon sticks. A cardamom bun followed almost immediately by cured and smoked salmon may not be a conventional elevenses combination, but road trips have their own rules.
Then it was on to Simrishamn, another ridiculously pretty little Swedish coastal town, with pastel-coloured houses, cobbled streets and a harbour full of boats. From there we continued along the coast, stopping at Lotta Fort where, despite the increasingly unpromising weather, we did a little birdwatching. We sat in a small hide while the rain came down outside, with the birds obligingly close enough that we hardly had to work at it.
Afterwards Mark was trying to remember the old song All the ducks are swimming in the water. He succeeded sufficiently well that it has now been going round and round in my head for most of the day. Thank you, Mark.
Kivik came next and proved to be one of the real delights of the day. It sits at the heart of Sweden’s apple-growing country and we spent a very happy time at Kiviks Musteri, the wonderful cider and apple factory surrounded by orchards. Sadly there was no cider tasting, but we did leave with three bottles of pressed apple juice, each made from a different variety of apple. A pleasingly restrained outcome, all things considered.
Kivik itself provided several other little discoveries. We had already noticed on a number of Swedish houses what looked like small double mirrors fixed outside the windows. It turns out that these are skvallerspeglar, or gossip mirrors, angled so that someone sitting comfortably indoors could see who was coming up and down the street without having to peer obviously out of the window. Essentially, the nineteenth-century Swedish equivalent of a Ring doorbell, although presumably with considerably more effective neighbourhood surveillance.
We also came across a statue of Fritiof Nilsson Piraten, the much-loved Swedish writer and storyteller who spent his summers in Kivik. One of the pleasures of travelling is discovering people who are household names in another country but almost completely unknown to you.
From Kivik we continued north to Åhus, another handsome little town with a medieval centre and harbour, where we stopped for coffee. Here came another unexpected discovery. Åhus is the home of Absolut Vodka. Not merely its historic home either: every bottle of Absolut sold around the world is still produced here. Sadly, the visitor experience is no longer open to the public. Probably just as well, given that I was driving.
Then came a much more personal detour.Just beyond Åhus is Rinkaby, a name that will mean rather more to Scouts of a certain generation than it does to most people. This was the site of the 22nd World Scout Jamboree in 2011, when more than 40,000 Scouts from around the world gathered here. I spent quite a bit of time at Rinkaby during the Jamboree, working alongside the Swedish team, so it felt rather strange to be back fifteen years later.
The site is a military training area, so this was very definitely a visit to the edge rather than an expedition onto the old Jamboree site itself. Photography is prohibited and we were careful to respect that. But I could see the wooden barracks hut where I was billeted with the Swedish team during the event.
That brought back a few memories. For a couple of weeks a World Scout Jamboree becomes an enormous temporary city: tens of thousands of young people, flags everywhere, endless activity and friendships being made across languages and cultures. Then everyone goes home and the fields become fields again. Fifteen years later, one little wooden building was enough to take me straight back.
By then the rain had properly set in, so thoughts of further diversions were abandoned and we pointed our grey and increasingly rain-soaked Audi towards Karlskrona.
Thankfully, by the time we had checked into Hotell Aston, the rain had stopped. We set off on foot and had a delightful wander around Karlskrona, Sweden’s great naval city. What struck us most was just how quiet it was. The streets and huge squares were almost deserted and the whole place had the slightly strange feeling of being out of season, despite it still being August. We subsequently discovered that the Swedish school holidays had finished only a couple of days earlier. It really did feel as though somebody had flicked a switch marked SUMMER OFF.
Dinner was at Kajen 22, down by the water. Mark had a very good seafood pasta accompanied by a pear cider, while I had a pepperoni pinsa and a beer. And, before anyone corrects my spelling, pinsa is indeed what it is called: the Roman cousin of pizza rather than a Swedish inability to spell it.
We also got chatting to the young couple who own the place. They opened Kajen 22 only a year ago and, judging by what they told us, it is already doing roaring business. It was lovely hearing them talk with such obvious pride and enthusiasm about the place they had created, particularly when the rest of Karlskrona had seemed so extraordinarily quiet.
Our hotel for the night, meanwhile, turns out to have one final story to add to an already fairly eclectic day.In October 1981, Karlskrona suddenly found itself at the centre of one of the most extraordinary incidents of the Cold War when the Soviet Whiskey-class submarine U137 ran aground in a restricted military area in the Karlskrona archipelago, close to one of Sweden’s most important naval bases. For ten tense days the world’s attention was fixed on this corner of Sweden and the episode inevitably acquired the nickname “Whiskey on the Rocks.”
Journalists descended on Karlskrona from around the world, and among the places accommodating them was the hotel in which we are sleeping tonight. According to the Aston’s own account, both Swedish and Soviet journalists were staying here, without either group knowing that the other was in the building. The episode earned it the local nickname Ubåtshotellet, the Submarine Hotel. The naval connection has continued over the years and is now proudly part of the hotel’s story.
So we have ended the day sleeping in a hotel that once found itself hosting journalists from both sides of a Cold War confrontation involving a stranded Soviet submarine.
Not something we expected when we set off from Ystad this morning.
Ancient stones, a remarkably patient little United Nations of photographers, competitive fika birds, smoked fish for elevenses, an irritatingly persistent song about ducks, coastal birdwatching in the rain, Swedish apples, nineteenth-century gossip technology, Absolut Vodka, a return to the site of a World Scout Jamboree fifteen years later, an almost deserted naval city, an enterprising young couple running a thriving waterfront café and finally a Cold War submarine.
Not bad for a day that was principally supposed to involve driving from Ystad to Karlskrona.
