Dave's Travel Journals
24 Hours
Kalmar, Sweden: May 21, 2001
By Dave Fox
If you deprive yourself of sleep for too long, you begin to hallucinate. I am expecting the fluorescent iguanas to fly overhead any minute now.
Here's a recap of my last 24 hours:
11 p.m. Saturday night: Board night train from Oslo, Norway, to Malmö, Sweden.
Midnight: I finish chatting with other travelers in the aisle and go into my sleeping compartment. One of the people inside is one of the foulest smelling humans I've ever encountered. I climb into my bunk and fall asleep.
1 a.m.: I am awakened by a new passenger clambering into the bunk above me. I spend the next hour gagging on the odor of the man across from me.
2 a.m.: I fall asleep.
3 a.m.: I wake up again. Night trains and jetlag are a stupid combination.
4 a.m.: I begin to doze.
5 a.m.: A conductor wakes me up. He has come into the compartment to tell someone else she has arrived at her station.
6 a.m.: I begin to doze.
6:15: The conductor wakes everyone up to tell us we are arriving 20 minutes early in Malmö.
7 a.m.: I am on my next train across the water to Copenhagen, Denmark. I dodge junkies in Copenhagen Central Station as I eat breakfast. My final destination is a farm in rural Denmark where I will meet a tour in progress for the next four days to tag along and do research. It's the family farm of Jane, another tour guide. Her group is supposed to arrive at 1. I don't want to arrive too early and get in her parents' way. I have several hours to kill.
9 a.m.: I can't deal with the Copenhagen train station any more and I'm too tired to take a walk. I hop an earlier train than planned to Holbaek, a nondescript little town where I will catch my bus to the farm. Right now, I would rather be bored in a nondescript little town than be bored dodging junkies in Copenhagen.
[I started typing this in bed last night. At this point I fell asleep....]
10 a.m.: Arrive in Holbaek. My head bobs like a marionette's head as I half-sleep.
11 a.m.: Catch the bus to Bråde. The driver insists on telling me in extensive detail about his travels in northern Norway in a dialect of Danish I find completely indecypherable. At first I try to understand. It's too exhausting. Then I try pretending to understand, but he can tell I am faking and repeats things until I halfway get them. I try talking a lot myself, figuring if I can keep speaking Norwegian, I won't have to try to understand his Danish. Everything I say sparks new topics for him to talk about. He is planning a trip to New York. He wants to see the Indian reservations. He has a large teepee in his front yard. He sleeps and meditates in it. His wife uses it for Tupperware parties.
Noon: I arrive at Jane's farm. The group is not there yet. Andreas, Jane's 5-year-old nephew, remembers me and insists I go outside and play "capture," a game in which he runs through the farm, and I gasp painfully as I chase him. Andreas has the reddest hair I've ever seen. It seems to be a barometer of his energy level. He tears through horse stables, ducking under fences and shrieking gleefully with every doorway he slams before I can catch him. A 5-year-old, in a matter of minutes, has reduced me to a level of exhaustion I did not know was possible.
1:30: Finally the group arrives. Lunch is pickled herring, a Scandinavian specialty eaten on rye bread. I hate pickled herring. Given my current state, drinking alcohol is the dumbest thing I can do, but Jane's father is pouring shot after shot of akvavit for everyone... and it is the only way I can successfully wash the herring down.
5 p.m.: Full of herring and akvavit, we hit the road. I snooze fitfully on the bus to Sweden. We are behind schedule.
11 p.m.: We arrive in Kalmar in a thick rain. I try to write but my brain is no longer functioning.
Six hours of uninterrupted sleep later, I am finally over my jetlag.
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