We wake early and Scot has been saying for weeks and weeks that he should get up and have a run in the morning. Well, this is the morning it happens. I am amazed, but I did prompt him this morning as it is a pleasant morning and it is a good area to run around. Off he goes and returns about half an hour later and then decides to jump in for a swim as the water really doesn’t feel that cold. I would have joined him but I can’t stomach water that has weed in it, and this place has the bottom covered in weed – not something I can bear. We get ready and take off for a trip around the bottom of Sweden where we want to end up around Malmo. It starts to rain again, which has been the case each day we have been in Sweden so far. We travelled west and drove through Kristianstad, Horby and down to Ystad and took the coast road through little villages. The countryside as we travelled through this part of the country has changed to be a lot more like Denmark with lots of grain, potatoes, corn and other crops being grown and not so many forests. It was a dreadfully windy day and as I drove, the van was being blown around on the road quite a bit. I could have a bitch about the older slow Volvo driver around the bottom off Sweden I got stuck behind, but it was actually a Renault driver….haha. It was actually quite slow going around the bottom as the speed it mostly 40km/hr with lots of speed bumps. The top side along here was that the houses were very quaint with lovely gardens and lots of colour. Obviously difficult to achieve by the beach but a lot of effort had been put in by most who lived there.
We stopped for the night at Habo Ljung which is just above Malmo and on the coast from Lund. We did want to stop at Malmo and have a look around, but we felt that there wasn’t enough time to do all that we want to and the scenery around this area was the most important part. The camping ground at Habo was very full and was right on the water front. We had a problem with their electricity points not being the standard ones which we have only encountered once before in Belgium, but they said to have a look around as there were other styles as well. We ended up parking up beside another GB campervan (Great Britain) which would be the first one we have seen since Luxembourg. The couple who owned it had a lovely retriever called Oscar who was quite adorable. Bill was English and Margrit was Finnish and they were on their way back from a long holiday in Finland. I am sure the universe put us beside them on purpose as we had moved from another spot. We got some great advice about the ferry we need to take from Sweden to Finland which will save us money and also on the areas in Finland that are best to have a look at. It seems we always get put near campers we can gain knowledge from for our onward journey which has been just fantastic.
We went for a walk along the beach front and out on the jetty. The water was very shallow for a very long way out. There was a lot of very smelly weed along the beach and everywhere in the shallow water. They had piled a lot of the weed up to obviously move it away. The dreadful part about the weed was it had a horrid pinkish colour and looked a bit like an oil slick had gone through without the oil. We wondered if it was a result of algae bloom which Denmark has also been having a problem with. It didn’t look safe to swim in close to the shore and the stench of it would put you off anyway. A great shame if they have a problem here as there aren’t a lot of places they can swim and this looked like it would be a popular place to swim. Along the shoreline of the south there are a lot of rocks and no easy access to the shore so any beach must be valuable to the residents. Another thing was the lack of any sign of fish anywhere of any size along the length of the jetty. Usually you would see some small bait fish. Our fishing friend Mick would have been very disappointed with this area – actually he would be quite disappointed by the lack of fish in most places we have been, except at Karlskrona where they did fishing excursions.
I like the way they charge for laundry here – 40sek for 3 hours to use the laundry and you can get as many loads as you need to done which ends up very inexpensive as opposed to Netherlands where we paid 8Euro for one load. That is the difference between $8 and $24. This is the worst campground we have been in for facilities. There are 4 toilets between about 200 or more campers and there was always a queue to go in. They were unisex so you can imagine the state they were in with that many people using them. The showers were the same in the morning. I am really un-impressed about this aspect. The wifi was equally shitty- only available at the café, so you had to sit in a seat outside it to get any connectivity and even with only 3 or 4 people on it, it was slow as. It makes it hard when we are trying to keep in touch with everyone and a lot of our time each night needs to be spent having a look at roads we will take the next day, where we will stay, how far we will travel, what there is to look at in areas coming up which all takes a lot of time, so I get really frustrated with it at times. Facebook is the hardest. You can sometimes look, but you can’t even like anything because you have not got enough reception.
It was finally my turn to cook which I did – instead of going out. I made a great pasta dish which proves I can actually cook, I am just not fussed on it. Scot did enjoy his night off for July….lol. I would have done the dishes but I was too busy doing the clothes washing :-).
Tuesday 28 july
We travelled from Habo and went up towards Gothenburg on the highway. We had a lot of ground to cover so the highway was really the only way to go. We stopped at McDonalds for a coffee as the other roadhouse’s coffee is just dreadful and at least McDonalds is bearable. I was shocked at the price of burgers here, not that I know how much they are in Australia as I have never bought one. But they were charging 70sek ($12aud) for a Big Mac and one with chicken – no idea what it was called was the equivalent of about $11. I can’t imagine they would sell any in Aus if they were this price, but I have no idea really.
We got to Gothenburg and decided that it would be a nice place to see a little of as we had heard it was quite a cool city. We drove to a camping ground (Scot navigated perfectly) that is very near to the tram, but for the first time since being in Europe we were told they were full. Wow, we have never had to try an alternate ground, so we went to another one which was like a huge dirt carpark and it was a long way to the tram – up a huge hill. So we went to another holding stand that is only for Motorhomes and was owned by the original camp we visited. It has power and security driving by occasionally but nothing else. This was fine for us as we could walk 10 minutes to the tram going into Gothenburg. We got in for free as even though I asked how to get a ticket from the driver, my card didn’t work – or I was doing something wrong. Very embarrassing actually in front of the entire carriage watching me not able to figure it out. Anyway we got off in pouring rain (which had been off and on all day) and found the tourist centre to get a map and work out what we wanted to go and see in the short time we had. We wandered around, under a newly bought umbrella as ours is somewhere in Malilla or in someone else’s van 🙂 It was quite a busy and cute city and we were a little disappointed we couldn’t do it justice, but time is of the essence and we saw as much as we could. They have an amazing sailing ship out on the port which we went to have a look at, but it is a permanent feature there as a hotel/restaurant. I could imagine it in its sailing days would have been incredibly spectacular with its sails up. Gothenburg has many cafes and pubs unlike a few of the other places we have seen and reckon it would be a neat place to party. It is a university town though, so this may be why. We sat out one huge downpour in a café having coffee, hot chocolate and muffins and used the wifi since we have none at the campsite, but the rain wasn’t stopping any time soon by the look of it.
It was going to be too much of a hassle to keep looking around in the rain so we decided just to head back to the van and relax. We didn’t really go with our wet weather gear on, but should have guessed it was the thing to do after rain every day, so we didn’t really want to get saturated trying to see anything more.
