The View from Ross's House

Its hard living in Narvik, you either live on the mountainside with a view down the fiord and suffer from sunsets (when the some actually comes up or goes down). Or you live on the hill looking back at the mountain, and further right to the snowy ridges known as the sleeping queen. Ross's new house has the latter...

Norwegian Woods

Writing now, late at night, from the luxurious home of Ross Wakelin an old friend from NZ now resident in Narvik, Norway. We swam into Norway a few days ago through a mountain tarn (I will for the time spare you the shots of my big white butt glistening in the Arctic Sun).

Matt, La, Penny and I had a fantastic tramp from Abisko in Sweden to Narvik over five days of amazing calm and clear weather. It was the height of Autumn and red and gold forests and fields surrounded us whereever we went, apart from when we ventured up into the land of granite slabs.

The first day was heightened by an encounter with some Sami people. Following a trail of reindeer fat up a rugged ATV track we encountered a man and his son at their secluded cabin...

"does this track continue up the hill"?

"No, you come the wrong way, this track goes to heaven!"

"Well, that sounds about right then"

After some brief and entertaining conversation they got rid of us and went back to whatever on earth they were up to with that reindeer fat, reassured hopefully that we were nearly as crazy as they were. We camped that night on top of a barren hill near a Sami encampment and reindeer corral, empty now for the coming winter. We glimpsed for the first time Storsteinfjellet (the big stone mountain)and the fluffy little flowers that floated on the marshes like cotton wool.

Day 2 we had some serious walking to do to wander through the Swedish tundra to the hills of Norway. We then had our border swim (photos again spared), climbed a snowslope then stalked our first herd of reindeer. We killed an hour or so doing this then had to descend through the heinous sub-alpine belt which consisted almost entirely of blueberries, or other types of berrys. We arrived at our campsite not wet and muddy but with stained fingers and faces from delightful engorgement.

Storsteinfjellet was now at our mercy, and we ascended up its grantite ridges and gentle snow slopes before being pole axed by its chossy summit ridge. The descent past the foot of its glacier was lovely however and we camped in a freaky barrow downs landscape that provided us with pleasant views and mossy beds.

Time had come to get cranking and Day 4 we just walked all day through a few little mountain passes alongside some silted glacial lakes and amongst some more bemused reindeer.

Then we had to get the hell out of there because the aioli in a tube was running out (although we still had plenty of tomato paste) and we wanted to finally see the sea, which was beautiful. Regrettably Norwegians dont pick up groups of four hitchhiking so the 15 or so km from the road end to Ross and Hildas house, despite been alongside a beautiful fiord was testing. We could however always look back and get some satisfaction from how far we had come.

Ross and Hilda have been awesome hosts, providing us great digs, food and conversation. This morning Hilda showed us around the Narvik musueum while this afternoon Ross took us to the top of a massive great big mountain above town. Ill try and write more on this soon. Sweet take care out there!

Dr Derek facing Deportation

I was stirred from my relaxed mood this morning by a tragically farce news story on www.stuff.co.nz sent to us by Pennys Mum Doff recently http://www.stuff.co.nz/4692494a11.html. My aggravation has been only partially addressed by the follow up this evening here

This is the same Dr Derek that Penny and I worked with for a month just recently on the islands of Pulau Pulau Batu off Sumatras west coast.

It appears Derek is in trouble for his rescue of an injured Australian surfer. The link to the details of this rescue and its aftermath is here Check out particularly the update dated 15\06\08.

Derek has his faults, his medicine is not applied or focussed in the rational western fashion. He clings to patients he decides he can make a real difference for rather than following a more utilitarian approach. An example recently has been his devotion to Leone a six month old baby with a cleft palate and TB who would surely have died had it not been for his personal care for a month, a task he undertook gladly although it probably left him less able to undertake other work. My theory is that it is these personal conections or "saving of lives" as Derek would put it that have sustained him through 20 years of working in environments which border on the ridiculous and would leave lesser people screaming with frustration. It is no surprise at all that Derek undertook the flight to rescue the Australian surfer and I am sure he would do it again even if he had the Indonesian airforce on his tail

To put this in context, Tello is the centre of an island group containing around 30,000 people. It has a private $2 million NGO funded hospital with 35 fulltime staff which no-one can afford to use. It has a community health centre with five fulltime staff who do absolutely nothing and it has Dr Derek, his translator Given and a rag tag bunch of volunteers primarily from NZ who run 2 clinics a day treating about 100 people a time.

A public service job in Indonesia once bought (as that is how they are acquired, including sometimes with qualifications) is a licence to do no work. Incompetence and corruption is endemic. While one bureaucracy is trying to kick Derek out of the country, another trys to extort money for the return of his helicopter. Its like 50% of the people in the country sit around all day trying to figure out ways to get money for doing nothing. Im glad in NZ there are far fewer of us.

Derek acts with a humanistic, romantic view of the world to make positive change, Im glad someone in Indonesian society has recognised that with his award, I hope the less far sighted bureaucracy get off his back.

Aaron and Saras Wedding

I'm writing now from a backpackers hostel deep inside the Arctic circle. We flew into Kiruna today swerving between the sparse fluffy grey clouds that failed to obscure the beautiful chain of mountain peaks including Swedens highest, Kebnekaise. Kiruna is a mining town and this is immediately clear as the giant piles of tailings dominate the eastern aspect. The iron ore is mined from 500 metres underground and taken by giant trains across the mountains to the Norwegian Port of Narvik. A direction we are heading off into tomorrow morning. Although our plan is to get off the train halfway at the mountain resort of Abisko and spend 5 days hiking through the birch, tundra and fiords to Narvik.

This morning we awoke in the Stockholm Archipelago, in a great little flat camp spot on a sheltered island with woods of wood on the rounded hill behind it. We spent a couple of nights in the archipelago with some sea kayaking in between. Myriads of low, rocky, rounded islands, the occasional swan and summer house complex of house, jetty, and sauna. Some of my favourite spots had arched wooden bridges linking the small channels between islands, more for picturesque value I suspect than any utilitarian purpose. We were an armada of six double kayaks; Matt and La, Gordon and Lance, Jackie and Aaron, Russel and Viv, Chris and Em, as well as Penny and myself. Great times!!

But to get to the big story, Aaron and Sara are now married! The big day went smoothly despite a bit of rain and the beautiful couple, looked well, I'll let you decide when I manage to chuck some photos up.

The best man managed to not lose the ring, crack a few jokes and toast the brides maid, and avoid mentioning ex boyfriends and girlfriends. So he's stoked to survive without stuffing anything up too bad.Here he is pictured with the cutest one year old in the world

And Stockholm...

It was with some relief that we found the wonderful Sara Wallen there to meet us on the stroke of midnight at Stockholms Arlanda airport. A night spent in a corner of the airport was an inferior option to a night spent on Saras parents lawn.

I hadn't experienced suburban Sweden before, low slung wooden houses, a maze of fences and walls and miniature parks, enclosed in a bunch by fingers of forest. We woke early and enjoyed the family breakfast, crispbread, caramel cheese, cheesy spreads and cucumber as well as the more usual museli and yoghurt. Dairy products are ridiculously cheap here, subsidised I think, great that the masses can afford to eat cheese, a sad reflection on the state of affairs in NZ.

We stayed last night in a really nice hostel in Central Stockholm. Our room was actually on a boat, the AF Chapman.

We have met up with Prince family and friends over for the wedding, Viv, Russel, Matt and La, Jackie, Gordon and Lance. Rumour has it the fabulous Chris Forne and Emily Wall will also soon join us.

I'm sitting in a mall now in central Stockholm, waiting for Penny to find some mascara. We spent the morning wandering over to the suit place, to meet Aaron, be prepared for some pretty hot photos from the wedding.

Photos from Helsinki

Caught some rest at the luxurious pad of Helsinki's most famous orienteering snakebreeder and unofficial world record speed record holder for naked roller blading.

Penny reports from Tello

Finally, some memories from the Doctor. We are currently in the luxurious pad of our newly domesticated Australian friend BJ, the snake breeder from Tasmania.

Currently in Helsinki, staying at a friends place and half way through our mission to get from Indonesia to Sweden for a friends wedding, which Jamie is bestman at. Left Tello a week ago, since then had a 24 hour bus ride across Sumatra ( I never want to smell another cigarette again), a few days in Bukittingi, where our friend Kate was persuaded into acting in a tourist promotion video, and hired scooters for my birthday and scooted around Lake Maninjau, a steep sided volcanic lake surrounded by fish farms and paddy fields.

For the last month we have been living on Tello Island, off the west coast of sumatra, working with Derek Allen, a kiwi doctor there. Several other kiwi volunteers there arrived at the same time as us, providing a physio, nurse midwife, another doctor (Nick), several other helpers. Too much to write about all of it but here are some snippets...

*Day one, relaxing drinking a beer, I am called to see my first patient, an old lady who has been lying on the concrete floor of her hut for months since she broke her hip. Her family are worried that she has a foot infection. Sweet, I think to myself, I know how to handle infections, thats what we have antibiotics for. Unfortunately I realise as I walk into the house that the smell of rotten meat is coming from her, and her foot is gangrenous and full of maggots! Good way to be broken in to the job...

*Day 3: we are thrown in the deep end, Derek has to leave for a week to sort out some paperwork, and our translator decides to go off to sell mungbeans for a couple of hours (I can't quite justify buying the 10 kilos of mungbeans from him just so we can have our translator back, but chip in and buy one). Nick and I attempt in our 2nd rate indonesian to run the clinic. Tello is an island of 5000 people with medical care which is made up of a hospital ( kindly built by an NGO after the tsunami but too expensive for anyone to go to so it sits empty all day and night with a couple of useless doctors and nurses sitting there too), a government funded primary health centre ( the doctor doesn't like tello though so lives somewhere else, and the nurses turn up to work for 2 hours a day, do nothing and then go home). While we were there we took over the rooms of the health clinic in the morning while the local nurses looked on in vague amusement. We saw up to 50 patients each morning with diseases like TB and malaria, both rife on the island but very treatable. In saying that, the most common patient were the ones with 'pain everywhere' who I diagnosed as having paracetamol deficiency and treated accordingly. Each afternoon we visited the villages around the island, running clinics in peoples houses, crowded with the curious and the sick.

Worth mentioning is the slightly unusual sewerage system. I don't know how I thought it worked, but on an early morning run along the beach past the villages, I came across about 10 people doing their business on the beach. This isn't really what shocked me the most, I was well aware that a lot of people use the beach as their toilet, but what was surprising was that next to each person there was a fat pig, who just gobbled up their pooh! I retched the first time I saw it, but realised that it is actually quite simple and efficient (at least that is what I told myself...)

Team Tello goes to Beluta. There had been talk of visiting this outlying island for a couple of days but no-one knew when the boat would go. With a couple of hours notice, we ran around, grabbed some medicines and hopped on the boat. We landed safely at the island after a 2 hour boat trip ( arriving safely not to be taken for granted in Indonesia), and started a clinic at someones house who Derek knows. There was almost a mutiny when we discovered that the only food sold on the island was rice and noodles, but this high carb, low fibre diet was appreciated for obvious reasons when we were shown the toilets, a ditch on the other side of the kitchen door with a handy pooh-eating pig snorting excitedly by it! Suddenly Tello seemed quite civilised after all...