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Fishing boats at Gamborg. Fyn, Denmark

Looking back over the photos I took in Denmark, one would be forgiven for thinking that the country contained little except small fishing boats and wharves. Somehow, nearly half of the images relate to waterfront, watercraft and jetties of various descriptions. Perhaps this islander has been missing the sea while living in Paris?

Wharf at Moesgard beach, south of Århus

My three days in Denmark only provided a short glimpse of the country, but I liked what I saw (OK, I’m an avowed Nordophile). Apart from anything else, the Danes seem to be the best drivers in the world – I didn’t see a single speed camera or cop, but everyone stuck to the speed limit.

Countryside in central Jutland

The real highlight of my visit was meeting up with Sigurdór and his family. We’ve been friends on the internet for something like five years, but never met in person. Somehow it turned out that the midpoint between Paris and Reykjavík was a trampoline in the garden at Hingeballe.

Copenhagen

A short few hours in Copenhagen on my last day was not enough time to really get a feel for the city, but sufficient to convince me to return for a longer visit sometime. Although I’d probably come home with another bunch of photos of little boats.

Sailing boat at Svenstrup. Fyn, Denmark

Beside the Norsminde Fjord. Jutland, Denmark

On the beach at Løkken. Jutland, Denmark

There is nothing new in stating that Norway is one of the most spectacularly beautiful countries on the planet. Fans of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know, of course, that Norway was in fact designed by the Magrathean engineer Slartibartfast, who won an award for it. I can confirm that the award was well deserved.

There’s not much more to say about our short trip to Norway’s western fjords in July, except that the photos and videos we made don’t do the landscape justice. And it’s important to note that it’s not just the fjords that are beautiful – the drive there and back from Oslo was  equally spectacular.

On the way north, we drove up through Hagafoss and over the Route 50 to Aurland – one of the most scenic drives I’ve ever done. And on the way back (via the Lærdal Tunnel, the longest road tunnel in the world at 24.5km), we crossed through the equally beautiful Hemsedal, over 1000m plateaux that reminded us of the central North Island or the McKenzie Country in New Zealand.

It also helps that Norway is ridiculously prosperous thanks to offshore oil, a small population and wise investment. The Scandanavian social model of high taxes, state-supported infrastructure and generous welfare system finds its apogee in Norway. It also has some of the lowest speed limits in the world – all the better for enjoying the scenery!

If you’ve not been to Norway before, save some money and make the time. You will never regret it.

If you spent a couple of days in Helsinki as a tourist, the city might well seem a little austere… the imperial Russian architecture of the central city with its wide, windwsept boulevards are a real contrast to the cosy, canal-side ambience of other Nordic capitals like Stockholm and Copenhagen.

I was lucky enough to be staying with friends who live locally, who showed me a different side of the city, despite the overcast rainy weather. If you know where to go, Helsinki is quirky, friendly and just slightly surreal.

The central city is very compact, but the suburbs stretch for miles in all directions… Helsinki really only started growing in the late 1960s, and intelligent city designers have interspersed housing with parks and an extensive network of cycle tracks. Getting around by bike is a breeze.

Cycling into town on Saturday morning we came across a most un-Finnish sight… an American football team practicing in a park in Kumpula.

On Sunday we took the ferry to the fortress island of Suomenlinna and I tried out a traditional Finnish game called Möllky, which (unsurprisingly for a country which is mostly covered in trees) involves throwing a bit of wood at other bits of wood.

Unfortunately, some of the best Helsinki experiences couldn’t be caught on camera. There are DEFINITELY no photos from Mari and Jacob’s sauna!

And unfortunately it was too dark in Siltanen (a bar on Hämeentie near the centre of town) to document one of the weirdest nights out I’ve ever experienced… the entertainment included a DJ in Native American headdress telling us all to play football in the afterlife, a novelty folk duo from Jyväskylä singing about buying pot plants, an apparently-very-famous Finnish movie star performing karaoke to classic early 70s rocksteady records, and a nostalgia DJ who played Finnish disco hits. Apparently the words to the Finnish version of “I Shot the Sheriff” translate as “I’m taking the train to Mikkeli“. Well, I don’t know about Mikkeli, but I’d like to be back in Helsinki one day soon.

The blog has been silent this week while I’ve been travelling in northern Europe. Now I’m back home, I hope to write several catch-up posts about the experience, including photos and videos. I’ll just need a few days to get it done!

Morning on the Aurlandsfjord, Norway

The eastern suburbs of Paris are not generally reputed for their beauty or their sehenswürdigkeit.  One exception is the town of Joinville-le-Pont, sitting astride the Marne river just on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes.

The town includes the Ile Fanac, a wooded island in the middle of the river, on which stand a number of fine fin-de-siècle homes.

The calm, regulated waters of the Marne make this area an ideal place for rowing, and Joinville-le-Pont has become something of a French Henley-on-Thames, with rowing clubs sprinkled along the riverbanks.

Joinville-le-Pont was an early centre of French film production, and just across the river you can still see the studios of Pathé Frères, regularly used by film-makers such as Jean Renoir and René Clair in the years before the Second World War.

Finally, a wander up the river and under the A4 autoroute brings you to Chez Gégène, one of the last guingettes still operating in the Paris region. These riverside restaurants and cabaret venues were originally set up outside the city walls to escape the taxes and prohibitions of Paris itself.

From the end of the 19th Century until the 1950s the guingettes were popular places for eating and dancing. But today, like the old brick Pathé studios, they stand as memorials to an earlier age of  entertainment…

The 14th of July (which NOBODY in France calls “Bastille Day”, by the way) dawned bright, promising a hot day with sun shining benignly down on the amassed weaponry parading down the Champs-Elysées. Shorts, sunglasses, sunscreen and digital cameras seemed the essential equipment to enjoy the day.

How wrong we were. As we took up our position in the roof garden of an office building just a block back from the Arc de Triomphe (friends with high places, naturally), and while snipers from the Gendarmerie stared at us through binoculars, clouds started moving in from the east, looming darkly over the Eiffel Tower.

The storm held off long enough for us to watch the French Air Force roar down the length of the Voie Triomphale, from La Défense to the Louvre. It was an impressive sight.

New Zealand’s airforce consists of a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters, a few transport planes that occasionally drop boxes of aid to cyclone-stricken Pacific islands and a part-time brass band. France has, er, a few more planes than we do:

And then, as soon as the jets got out of the way, the heavens opened. Paris was hit by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. We unsuccessfully dodged the showers and – strangely – found ourselves in a bar in time for lunch. We were wet, but seemed to be doing something right.

L’Ecluse specialise in the wines of Bordeaux. We ignored the bottle of 1979 St Pétrus on their wine list at €1227 and opted for a €25 Château Margaux instead. After drying out over a few glasses and an “Assortiment de cochonnailles” (a plate containing variations on pig), I sensed that the rain was easing and that I should make a dash for the métro.

My expectation of improving weather proved of course to be hilariously and liquidly wrong. As I reached the bottom of Avenue Georges V, another torrential downpour hit. By the time I took this video of a Leclerc tank rumbling onto the Pont de l’Alma, I was soaked to the skin.

The rest of the day was spent drying off, wandering around the Marais in the newly resurgent sunshine, and then heading up the tower of the American Cathedral (yes, more friends with high places) for a few drinks and to watch the fireworks over Trocadéro at 11pm. But that is another episode…

To complement our previous journey from south to north, yesterday we achieved the obvious second objective – to cross Paris from west to east, on foot. From Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes. It took us 6 hours, and we covered 14.2 kilometres.

We ignored the warnings of heatwave, and were surprised by lower-than-predicted temperatures.  A light rainstorm in the afternoon helped keep things manageable. The City of Paris, however, were taking no chances:  heatwave warnings were displayed everywhere on the public information screens.

The journey was documented in real-time via Twitter, but here are a few highlights in images:

Parc de Monceau, a welcome patch of greenery in the 8th arrondissement

Jeanne d’Arc defying the English outside Saint-Augustin (Paris 8e)

A very reasonably priced lunch at Bouillon Chartier

The Promenade Plantée offers a quiet green corridor for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the 12th arrondissement

As we reached journeys end at the périphérique on the eastern edge of Paris, the chimneys got more fanciful…

I was busy as a bee in Brussels over the weekend. It was basically my Belgian baptism: beer, bandes dessinées and bilingualism. It was, to be blunt, bloody brilliant.

Saturday morning sun among the guildhalls in the Grote Market

Hanging out at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée…

…and finding parallels between Hergé and Breugel at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts

When in Rome…

Saturday night with the guys from Batucada Sound Machine…

Sunday morning confronting the colonial past at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale…

…before a Sunday afternoon lost among the glass towers of EU officialdom…

…all achieved in less than 48 hours!

This was the view yesterday morning from the Pont des Arts, looking east to the Ile de la Cité. There were train strikes and I decided to walk to Châtelet RER instead of braving the Métro. The reward was this sight of the Seine, almost completely motionless beneath a clear summer sky.

Say the words “Forest of Chantilly” and you might immediately imagine one of those cutaway gags in The Simpsons where Homer says to himself  “Mmmmm….Forest of Chantilly“, and he daydreams of prancing through groves of swirly cream trees, grabbing mouthfuls of marscarpone squirrel while blizzards of cherries tumble from the sky.

However, the Forest of Chantilly is a real place: 6,000 hectares of woodland lying 40 kilometres north of Paris on the RER D line, and the trees are not made of the eponymous cream. I went for a walk through the forest on Friday, from Orry-la-Ville to the Château de Chantilly.

The Parc Astérix is situated nearby, and one could almost imagine Obélix hunting wild boar in these woods. But there is little sense of wilderness: the forest is a working source of sustainable timber and is still used as a hunting park as it was in the time of the French monarchy.

In the middle of the forest are the Etangs de Commelles – a series of large artificial lakes built by Cistercian monks in the 13th Century as fishing ponds. Chateaubriand wrote about the lakes in the 19th Century, and today they harbour a remarkable range of birdlife and a large population of water-rats, some of whom sat on the bank, watching me eat my lunch.

Chantilly is a major horse racing centre. On a nearby estate, the Aga Khan keeps half the bloodstock of France.  The forest is criss-crossed by long, straight galloping tracks laid down in soft sand, dedicated to training racehorses. Walkers must take care because these tracks are restricted to horses and their jockeys from 6am to 1pm.

If you follow the GR11 path towards Chantilly, you emerge from the forest at the “service entrance” to the Château.

The Château itself, once home to the Condé and the Montmorency families, is popular with tourists and school groups. The well-groomed parkland is a startling contrast to the solitude of the forest.

From the Château, you can walk around the edge of the racecourse, past the most impressive set of stables you’ll see anywhere, back to the Chantilly-Gouvieux railway station. From there, you can be back in Paris in 40 minutes.