Camping in the Swedish Archipelago

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It’s mid-July and the summer solstice has just passed its apex, though judging by yet another stifling night in London, this hasn’t appeared to quell the temperatures much. The feeble desk fan in the corner does little to alleviate the situation aside from sort of push the air around the room, like how leaves stir half-heartedly in an alleyway.

This time last year I was in a tent on an island in the Swedish Archipelago, hands behind my head cradling the heavy warmth of a beer and bratwurst supper. Nights there are cool and damp, and a light breeze skips off the surrounding lakes and slips through the trees, ushering the smell of earth and fruit into the campsite. I was there with my best friend, and we’d taken the ferry from Stockholm earlier that week, a little unsure of where exactly we were going and what it would be like.

The white boat putters through the lake system like a kind of water bus, and you are free to hop off wherever you like, though a lot of the islands are privately owned and don’t have campsites. We disembarked at Grinda, one of the larger islands in the network along with maybe 8 or 9 other people, and about 10 were waiting to get on. If like us, you prefer to sleep somewhere free from the scuttling charms of a wood ant colony, scouting for the perfect spot can require a certain amount of patience, though there were plenty of yawning, open spaces to choose from.

Grinda has a restaurant, bar and grocery store all located near a tiny quay where a few of the Swedish elite park their yachts. Unfortunately, the grocery store didn’t sell camping gas for our stove so, when evening came we would take to scrabbling over the enormous boulders along the coast looking for patches of Reindeer Lichen; something we discovered had hidden talents as a veracious natural fire-lighter. We cooked and ate our supper on the cliffs as the sun set, before heading down to the bar for a session with our fellow campers. In the morning, at about 6 a man on a quad bike hurtles round the campsites collecting your 3 Euros (a night’s fee) and provides an effective, if inadvertent wake-up call. The boat arrives daily at 11 in the morning and 4 in the evening to take you back to Stockholm, or to another island waiting to be explored.

Tomorrow I will wake up in the unruffled fug of a London summer and though the night won’t have cost me a penny, and I won’t have to traipse through forest to find a water pump to brush my teeth, if I were offered the opportunity to bunk down with a family of wood ants in Sweden tomorrow night, I’d take it with relish.

4 / 5 Review by contributing editor Alex Allen

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