I’m on the plane leaving rainy Copenhagen for my last two days with old friends Paul and Silvia in London, for whom I was best man four years ago at a gorgeous wedding in Treviso, near Venice. While I remember it, I just want to give myself a round of applause for correctly predicting in my blog at the beginning of Wimbledon that dear old Andy Murray would go all the way to the semi-finals of the championships and get booted out by a superior player like Nadal. Don’t want to be smug but that’s exactly what happened yesterday.
It’s been an interesting and fruitful three days in Denmark and I’m slimmer and stronger-legged for my time there, which is saying something as much of the rest of my trip to Europe has been about piling on the kilos. Just as well that all my plans to review restaurants fell through – I arrived on Tuesday night and was just starting dinner near the hotel when I opened my welcome pack to see that I was meant to be dining at one of Copenhagen’s best restaurants at exactly the same time. Oops. I think the Media Officer, the aforementioned H, got the hump with me because we were supposed to meet and try another top restaurant the following evening but he cancelled. So sorry Helen, I won’t be filing that story on the three best alternatives to Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. You’d be disgusted if you knew what kind of backpacker fodder I wolfed down instead.
With the disappearance of media helper H I was left to my own devices and honestly I did pretty well for a grown adult male. The first thing I did was join a free bike tour of Copenhagen which came courtesy of the hired velocipede at my hotel.
What a great start to the visit this was. Blazing sunshine on Wednesday morning and a young, enthusiastic guide (Steen, who I mistakenly thought was called Sting after the yoga buff) to show about eight of us his city. We took in all the major sights including the Little Mermaid, the hippy city Christiana and various other landmarks like Round Tower in the old town and the Opera House. Bikes are everywhere in Copenhagen and most streets have dedicated cycle lanes, raised a little from the road and on both sides. What I loved most was seeing the special Christiana bikes which have an inbuilt trolley at the front, many of which I witnessed carrying small kids. It truly is a biking city, like Amsterdam (only a little more polite).
Old H had done well with the fantastic city centre hotel he booked for me, the Axel Guldmedsen. Really groovy Balinese décor, sensual basement spa, top-notch organic breakfasts and very helpful staff. One of the front desk crew, Kim, even leant me his own bike helmet when I told him I had to protect my crown jewels (that’s my brain in case you’re wondering). Others were very chatty and full of advice. The only minuses here were the fact that the outdoor courtyard was also an outdoor smoking area which meant non-puffers couldn’t sit out there in comfort and the fact that when they were minding my heavy suitcase the staff managed to destroy one of its wheels, rendering it unusable. They weren’t offering to replace it either or even contribute to doing so.
The smoking thing I discovered later is pretty widespread in Denmark. Apparently, ten years ago, as much as 80% of the population smoked and while that has reduced to 25% in a very short time, far too many young people are polluting their lungs. It just seemed anathema to me that a place that has an organic café and organic wellness spa should be promoting smoking in its only outdoor area and in fact the staff seemed to be the ones taking most advantage of it, puffing away at every opportunity out there. The Danes reckon it’s all about their freedom but as with every argument about human rights – the freedom to smoke restricts another person’s rights to breathe fresh air.
Ok, enough griping. My two day cycle up to Helsingor was just delicious. Equipped with a slightly more sprightly seven gear bike, I sped out of town via the series of lakes I’d visited on my first day and then took a cycle lane (National Route 9) that heads north alongside a major road. It wasn’t long before the route hit the seaside and the posh (mostly glass-fronted) mansions and marinas started appearing. Then there were the beaches like Bellevue at the edge of the Oresund, between Denmark and neighbouring Sweden. After cutting in land and skirting a royal deer park, the leafy track followed the railway line before rejoining the coast at Rungsted, where I stopped for lunch and a longish visit to the childhood home and grave of Karen Blixen, reincarnated by Meryl Streep, with a questionable Danish/English accent in the film Out Of Africa.
Blixen, one of Denmark’s foremost authors, was the second writer on this European trip to fire my imagination, the first being Tommy Hardy of Dawset. And her home, where she lived on either side of a seventeen year stint in Kenya, resounds with her character. Most poignant was her grave in the woods behind the house. The poor woman weighed just 35 kilos at her death, after starving because of treatment with arsenic and heavy metals for suspected syphilis earlier in her life.
From Rungsted I continued on at pace to Helsingor. This town’s a real mish-mash of historic buildings, extensive harbour works and multiple booze shops servicing the Swedes, who come over en masse on the fifteen minute long ferry ride from Helsinborg across the water. Most famously the town is home to Elsinore, Hamlet’s castle, and big fuck-off place with green turrets and domes, parapets and cannons aimed at Sweden.
Many of Hamlet’s lines are engraved in my mind following my final year exams at school and so I wandered around the old castle muttering quotes like:
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, things rank and gross possess it merely…”
“Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter…”
“Who would fardels bare to …sweat under a weary life”
Happy bloke Hamlet.
I was staying at a strange sort of casino hotel called the Marienlyst. The rooms were lovely, overlooking the sea and with most mod-cons and yet it was nearly deserted, probably because it’s largely an ugly 70s style construct. Still, the staff were sweet as …and I took full advantage of the indoor pool and sauna and just stopped myself from making an ass of myself on the waterslide.
The next morning I was shown around a bit by council official Ole Christiensen, a contact given to me by the BBC Nordic correspondent Julian, based nearby. Good of him to give me a tour and to cycle with me to Hamlet’s grave behind the Marienlyst Castle.
Not satisfied with Hamlet’s grave and castle, I determined to bike inland next to the Royal Palace at Fredensborg, in the hope of adding the Crown Prince, his Tasmanian wife Mary and their four kids (twins added recently) to my royal collection. But no luck unfortunately, just some very well organised and easy-on-the-eye gardens. Worth the twenty kilometre detour for sure.
I won’t go into the three times I got lost trying to find the coast again. Suffice to say that when in need, locals were incredibly helpful and all spoke perfect English. I stopped for lunch and a rest for my very sore arse by the beach. As I bit into my ham and cheese roll, a silver haired lady emerged from the sea in front of me. Without a stitch on.
“Hello,” I said slightly awkwardly.
“Hey, hey,” she beamed back. “Wilkommen” she smiled again.
So my first visit to Denmark has been a mixed bag but mostly great. It was only this morning when I left the hotel at 5.30am and walked the gauntlet of pimps, druggies, drunks and a host of sodden African prostitutes that I saw the other side of Copenhagen. One poor soul was squatting between two cars answering the call of nature and then a pissed bloke was pissing even more openly straight into the street. Still I guess it’s a free country isn’t it?
Once again as I tour this world of ours I am left saddened and angered by the huge divisions of wealth that exist out there. It shouldn’t be this way – life should not be all champagne, yachts and glass fronted mansions for some and smoke addled, intensely vulnerable and desperate for others.
Home in two days to another country with its own big divisions in wealth but boy am I looking forward to hugging my two daughters and holding onto them for as long as they’ll let me. There’s still Papua New Guinea to come next week but these last four weeks have been thrilling, funny, eye-opening and instructive. I feel lucky to have experienced it all and even luckier to be able to do it for work.
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