Kirsten and Bo kindly left work early to meet us at the airport, and drove us home to their home in the northern suburb of Holte.
Holte is a very green area, and within a short distance from their home they have about six different forest areas.
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| Bo and Kirsten's home. Constantly heated, with living areas upstairs, and sleeping down. |
A trip to the supermarket with them was interesting- familiar brands like Ribena,werthers original and carmex cold sore cream were available. Berries were very freely available. Bananas are sold by the number of bananas, rather than by weight.
We had wonderful steak with creamy sauce for dinner, followed by a Danish summer dessert of koldscal. This is a lemony sweetened buttermilk with small crunchy sweet biscuits in it. Quite delicious.
The sun set at close to 10 pm and rose again at about 4 am. This is confusing for the body as I am trying to tell myself that it is not time to get up yet, but the sun is up!
We spent the morning doing nothing much. While Kirsten worked , we monopolised Bo's time with questions, did a bit of planning ahead regarding our future days,I tried to figure out why my blog was auto translating to Danish, and fix the errors, and then we shared lunch with Bo.
Then we took off into the forest with maps in hand to investigate this spot that I have dreamed of visiting for so many years. It is now 9 years since Kirsten first visited Australia and I heard about her local forest and orienteering club, and almost since that first conversation I have wanted to see it for myself. It was hard to believe the we were finally here.
If you look closely at the map you can see the purple M toward the lower part of the olive green area-this is Kirsten and Bo's home. You can see how close the forest is.
In this forest are approximately 40 permanent orienteering controls which also have reflective tape. This means that they can be easily used for training purposes in both daylight and dark. In winter the club still trains every week -but in the dark.
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| Erica in the Sollerod forest at last |
Bo provided us with a map showing all the permanent controls, which meant that we could go and actually find some controls. The photos above show the brown posts which are the controls. We used our northern hemisphere compasses for the first time, and started to understand the northern hemisphere maps with brown ditches, walls for fences, marshy low points, and very different vegetation. I feel very pleased that I packed my gaiters, as there were many berry plants in the forest with their vicious prickles. There were also ripe raspberries which we could snack on!
This was one of the forest tracks which we followed.
The forest was just as beautiful as I had always imagined. The Beech trees allow for dappled sunlight to filter through, the many tracks are a constant challenge , and the contours are constantly changing. This may be one of the flattest countries in the world, but you would not know it from this sample. Overall it was just breathtakingly beautiful and I have to keep stopping myself from crying with the joy of finally being here, and being overwhelmed by the whole experience.
Kirsten and Bo are such wonderful hosts. With their already ultra busy lives they still have found a lot of time to spend with us and to answer all our crazy Aussie questions. They have also been very reassuring regarding the upcoming races in Sweden , and have some good Swedish maps from previous experience there to help us to get our heads around the terrain. We are very much looking forward to the days ahead with them, both here, and then later in Sweden.
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| Dappled sunlight filtering through the trees. |
This terrain is so very different from that of Rock Oyster where we would have been competing today if we were at home, but the stars are the same, and so are the control descriptions. We are thinking of you with your slippery oyster fossils and parallel creeks. We hope that you enjoy your overnight camping there.
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