The Human Development Index

One part of Europe that we have so far missed out is Scandinavia so with January Ryanair weekend flight bargains to Norway, Sweden and Denmark this was the perfect opportunity.  There were a lot of destinations to pick from and after comparing all the options we finally choose Norway.  We could have flown to the capital Oslo but it turned out that the airport is almost seventy kilometres from the city, which would have meant a lot of travelling in a short space of time, so we decided upon Haugesund instead, a city on the North Sea coast in between the two better known destinations of Bergen to the north and Stavanger to the south.

Norway is a country where there is a high quality of life. Published on 4^thNovember 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011) the Human Development Report places Norway at the top based on three principal criteria – a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living

One of the reasons that we have tended to avoid Scandinavia is because of the notoriously high cost of living and the lofty prices relative to southern and eastern Europe but with flights at just £12 return (ok, plus the ludicrous £10 administration fee of course) we calculated that we could afford a couple of days of sky high northern European alcohol and restaurant prices without too much pocket pain.

The reason that Norway in particular is so expensive is that after World War Two, thanks to shipping, the merchant marine industry and a policy of domestic industrialisation the country experienced rapid economic growth.  Then, from the early 1970s, there was further accelerated growth as a result of exploiting large oil and natural gas deposits that had been discovered in the North Sea.

Today, as a result Norway ranks as the second wealthiest country in the world in monetary value, with the largest capital reserve per capita of any nation.  It is the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, and the petroleum industry accounts for around a quarter of its gross domestic product. Norway has rich resources of oil, natural gas, hydroelectric power, forests, and minerals, and, after the People’s Republic of China is the second largest exporter of seafood in value.  Following the financial crisis of 2007–2010, World bankers declared the Norwegian krone to be one of the most solid and reliable currencies in the world.

Because of this happy position Norway is one of the priciest countries to live in or visit and regularly features in the top five places where you can quickly run up an overdraft.  For residents a high proportion of income is spent on housing and the monthly groceries for example for a typical family costs roughly £1,000. For Visitors dining out is an expensive luxury and a typical three star hotel in Oslo costs a whopping £150 a night, starting at the smallest hotel room and definitely without a balcony or a view.  Alcohol, however, is the real killer (financially not medically) because the Government slaps on punitive taxes to stop people from drinking and the price of a bottle of spirits is four times that of the United Kingdom.

Norwegians can only by wine and liquor from special liquor outlets called Vinmonopolet (literally, wine monopoly) and there are normally only one or two of these in each city, depending on its size so some people living in the countryside have to travel great distances just to buy a bottle of wine or alternatively they just brew their own.

It’s not all bad news for Norwegians however because high prices go hand in hand with the country’s high standard of living. Hourly wages are extremely high to attract workers that would get the same pay in Norway’s oil or fishing industry and consequently products in the shops and supermarkets are expensive but to Norwegians, their pricey lifestyle is just something that they have come to terms with.

Haugesund (Norway) – The Axe Factor and the Vikings

On 28th March 845 ths Vikings  sacked the city of Paris.

In January 2010 I visited the very spot that they probably set off from on their marauding mission.

It was a depressing morning, the Norwegian city of Haugesund crippled under the weight of a leaden grey sky, as we set out in a northerly direction along the black granite coast towards Haugesund’s most famous visitor attraction, the Haroldshaugen Norges Riksmonument a couple of kilometres outside of the city.  We joined a handful of local people in brightly coloured ‘North Face’ kagools and stout hiking boots who were wandering along the coast line cinder path stopping occasionally for no apparent reason to stop and stare out into the cold grey nothingness of the North Sea.

We found the monument and it struck me as a bit strange for an Anglo-Saxon to be visiting a monument that commemorates the Viking Age and a starting off point for longships full of heathen bullies on their way across the North Sea to rape and pillage a part of England where I now live.

The Vikings were Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe and the North Atlantic from the late 8^th to the mid 11^th century.  These Norsemen used their famous longships to travel as far east as Russia, and as far west as Newfoundland, and as far south as modern Spain in a period known as the Viking Age.

Whilst we tend to retain the school boy image of them as beasts in horned helmets it actually becomes increasingly evident that Viking society was quite complex and popular conceptions of them are often in conflict with the truth that emerges from archaeology and modern research.  A romanticized picture of Vikings as noble savages began to take root in the eighteenth century, and this developed and became widely propagated for over a hundred years.  The traditional view of the Vikings as violent brutes and intrepid adventurers are part true, part fable but no one can be absolutely sure of the accurate ratio and popular representations of these men in animal skins with deadly weapons remain, for now, highly clichéd.

Haraldshaugen was erected during the millennial celebration of Norway’s unification into one kingdom under the rule of King Harald I and was unveiled on July 18^th 1872 by Crown Prince Oscar to commemorate the one thousand year anniversary of the Battle of Hafrsfjord. Truthfully I found it a bit disappointing I have to say, a seventeen metre high granite main obelisk surrounded by a memorial stones next to an empty car park, a closed visitor centre and an empty vending machine but I’m sure I am being unfair because places such as these are not really meant to be visited in January.

We walked back along the same route and into the suburbs of the city which felt rather like a deciduous tree coping in its own way with winter; barely existing, hibernating, waiting, watching for the first signs of spring.  The people with pale complexions, weary streets, grass burned brown by frost and houses battered and besieged and firmly closed to the outside world, a city beaten to the edge of submission by a winter that was still only part way through.

A Life in a Year – 31st December, Top Ten Blogs of 2011 (2)

My top ten most hit blog pages in 2011 on my Travel Blog have mostly surprised me.  I say hit blog pages rather than read because I am neither conceited enough of sufficiently naive to claim that a hit equals a read.

None of these blogs are my particular favourites and if I was asked to compile my own top ten list only two of these would be included.

No. 1

Norway, Haugesund and the Vikings.  

I travelled to Haugesund in January and visited a Viking monument and blogged about it.  This post has had 8,900 hits which is nearly 6,000 more than the post in second place.  7,200 hits have been recorded from the single word ‘Vikings’ in various search engines!  I have concluded that this is because there are a lot of people using the search engines to find content about the Minnesota Vikings American Football Team and they are probably disappointed when they come across my page about a wintery day spent next to the North Sea in Norway. Without any shame I have exploited this opportunity by adding a paragraph about the Minnesota Vikings to the blog.

No. 2

Krakow, Wieliczka Salt Mine

2,930 hits. I posted this in April 2010 after returning from a visit to Krakow in Poland.  It was a good trip but I am not sure why so many people would hit on it.  It is not as interesting as my trip to Auschwitz or the Crazy Mike Communist Tour.

No. 3

Greece 2010, The Colossus of Rhodes

2,415 hits.  This is a post that records the penultimate day of my holiday to the Greek Island of Rhodes in September 2010.  I previously posted a page about the visiting the Colossus in 1999 but it has just not attracted the same amount of interest.

No. 4

 Royal Garden Party

2,135 hits.  This one has always been popular especially around the Spring and Summer when invitations to the Royal Garden Party are going out and when people are wondering how to get one or what to wear if they have one.  I am not surprised that this is in the Top Ten!

No. 5

Pula, Croatia

1,965 hits.  A bit of a mystery to me how this one gets so many visits.  I have blogged two or three times about Roman Amphitheatres – Rome, Arles, Merida, Segobriga and about larger Croatian cities at Dubrovnik and Split but this one gets the hits and I don’t know why?  The Pula is the national currency of Botswana so perhaps they are intended as exchange rate enquiries?

No. 6

Cofete Beach

1,790 hits.  My favourite beach at Cofete on the island of Fueteventura in the Canary Islands. Not really surprised by this one because it had a picture of a lady with no clothes on and thousands of people seem to be looking for pictures of naked ladies on a beach!

No. 7

Mount Vesuvius

1,685 hits.  A bit of a surprise because this is the account of a day trip to Mount Vesuvius whilst on a holiday to Sorrento in 1976 with my dad. From my memories of the same holiday I posted several blogs about visits to Capri, Naples, Pompeii, The Amalfi Drive and Rome but these have only achieved a handful of hits between them.

No. 8

Norway, Europe’s most Expensive Country

1,585 hits.  This was a second blog about my trip to Haugesund in January 2011. It contains some interesting facts and figures which might explain the number of hits that it has received but I am not really convinced that this is the reason unless top European economists were using it for research puposes!

No. 9

Love Locks and the Ponte Vecchio, Florence

1,370 hits. This one has consistently received a high number of hits and I cannot explain why.  It is an unremarkable blog about a day trip and visit to the Italian city of Florence.  I would have expected my blog about the Leaning Tower of Pisa to get more hits than the Ponte Vecchio, although there seems to be a lot of restaurants called Ponte Vecchio and this might explain it?

No. 10

Spartacus, Freedom Fighter or Bandit?

1,330 hits. I have posted a number of historical blogs but this is the one that has generated the most interest – perhaps because of the US TV series.  Not as good, in my opinion, as my posts about Spain’s national hero – El Cid!

If you have read one of these blogs or any of the 640 others on my site ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’, then Thank you very much!

A Life in a Year – 4th November, The Human Development Index

One part of Europe that we have so far missed out is Scandinavia so with January Ryanair weekend flight bargains to Norway, Sweden and Denmark this was the perfect opportunity.  There were a lot of destinations to pick from and after comparing all the options we finally choose Norway.  We could have flown to the capital Oslo but it turned out that the airport is almost seventy kilometres from the city, which would have meant a lot of travelling in a short space of time, so we decided upon Haugesund instead, a city on the North Sea coast in between the two better known destinations of Bergen to the north and Stavanger to the south.

Norway is a country where there is a high quality of life. Published on 4^th November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011) the Human Development Report places Norway at the top based on three principal criteria – a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living

One of the reasons that we have tended to avoid Scandinavia is because of the notoriously high cost of living and the lofty prices relative to southern and eastern Europe but with flights at just £12 return (ok, plus the ludicrous £10 administration fee of course) we calculated that we could afford a couple of days of sky high northern European alcohol and restaurant prices without too much pocket pain.

The reason that Norway in particular is so expensive is that after World War Two, thanks to shipping, the merchant marine industry and a policy of domestic industrialisation the country experienced rapid economic growth.  Then, from the early 1970s, there was further accelerated growth as a result of exploiting large oil and natural gas deposits that had been discovered in the North Sea.  Today, as a result Norway ranks as the second wealthiest country in the world in monetary value, with the largest capital reserve per capita of any nation.  It is the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, and the petroleum industry accounts for around a quarter of its gross domestic product. Norway has rich resources of oil, natural gas, hydroelectric power, forests, and minerals, and, after the People’s Republic of China is the second largest exporter of seafood in value.  Following the financial crisis of 2007–2010, World bankers declared the Norwegian krone to be one of the most solid and reliable currencies in the world.

Because of this happy position Norway is one of the priciest countries to live in or visit and regularly features in the top five places where you can quickly run up an overdraft.  For residents a high proportion of income is spent on housing and the monthly groceries for example for a typical family costs roughly £1,000. For Visitors dining out is an expensive luxury and a typical three star hotel in Oslo costs a whopping £150 a night, starting at the smallest hotel room and definitely without a balcony or a view.  Alcohol, however, is the real killer (financially not medically) because the Government slaps on punitive taxes to stop people from drinking and the price of a bottle of spirits is four times that of the United Kingdom.

Norwegians can only by wine and liquor from special liquor outlets called Vinmonopolet (literally, wine monopoly) and there are normally only one or two of these in each city, depending on its size so some people living in the countryside have to travel great distances just to buy a bottle of wine or alternatively they just brew their own.

It’s not all bad news for Norwegians however because high prices go hand in hand with the country’s high standard of living. Hourly wages are extremely high to attract workers that would get the same pay in Norway’s oil or fishing industry and consequently products in the shops and supermarkets are expensive but to Norwegians, their pricey lifestyle is just something that they have come to terms with.

A Life in a Year – 28th March, Plunder, Rape, Pillage and the Vikings

On 28th March 845 ths Vikings  sacked the city of Paris. In January 2010 I visited the very spot that they probably set off from on their marauding mission.

It was another depressing morning, the city crippled under the weight of a leaden grey sky, as we set out in a northerly direction along the black granite coast towards Huagesund’s most famous visitor attraction, the Haroldshaugen Norges Riksmonument a couple of kilometres outside of the city.  We joined a handful of local people in brightly coloured ‘North Face’ kagools and hiking boots who were wandering along the coast line cinder path stopping occasionally for no apparent reason to stop and stare out into the grey nothingness of the North Sea.

We found the monument and it struck me as a bit strange for an Anglo-Saxon to be visiting a monument that commemorates the Viking Age and a starting off point for longships full of heathen bullies on their way across the North Sea to rape and pillage a part of England where I now live.

The Vikings were Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe and the North Atlantic from the late 8^th to the mid 11^th century.  These Norsemen used their famous longships to travel as far east as Russia, and as far west as Newfoundland, and as far south as modern Spain in a period known as the Viking Age.

 Whilst we tend to retain the school boy image of them it actually becomes increasingly evident that Viking society was quite complex and popular conceptions of them are often in conflict with the truth that emerges from archaeology and modern research.  A romanticized picture of Vikings as noble savages began to take root in the eighteenth century, and this developed and became widely propagated for over a hundred years.  The traditional view of the Vikings as violent brutes and intrepid adventurers are part true, part fable but no one can be absolutely sure of the accurate ratio and popular representations of these men in horned helmets remain for now highly clichéd.

Haraldshaugen was erected during the millennial celebration of Norway’s unification into one kingdom under the rule of King Harald I and was unveiled on July 18^th 1872 by Crown Prince Oscar to commemorate the one thousand year anniversary of the Battle of Hafrsfjord. Truthfully I found it a bit disappointing I have to say, a seventeen metre high granite main obelisk surrounded by a memorial stones next to an empty car park, a closed visitor centre and an empty vending machine but I’m sure I am being unfair because places such as these are not really meant to be visited in January.

We walked back along the same route and into the suburbs of the city which felt a bit like a deciduous tree coping with winter; existing, hibernating, waiting, watching for the first signs of spring.  The people with pale complexions, weary streets, grass burned brown by frost and houses battered and besieged and firmly closed to the outside world, a city beaten to the edge of submission by winter and still only part way through.