June 4: Fjærland Bøkboyn
We woke up sore from sleeping in the car
and decided to drive to Fjærland, where almost a whole town’s worth of
buildings had been abandoned, and then turned into second-hand bookstores. Stopping by the climate change center on the
way (and refusing the pay the exorbitant fee to get in) and making several
stops to marvel at the beautiful Fjærlandfjord.
When we arrived at the rainy Booktown
(Bøkboyn), it still looked very much abandoned, and not much like the lively
pictures illustrated in the Sognefjord brochure. We drove to the end of the street, all the
way to the pier and entered the first bookshop.
The books reached from the floor to the ceiling and scattered the floor
and sat on display shelves and in boxes and buckets. There were booked behind the counter, on the
counter and in stacks underneath it.
Piles of newspapers sat on the windowsills and littered the floor.
Most of the buildings along the main street
were like this; before there were roads leading to Fjærland, the traffic came
in via the fjord itself, and necessitated waiting rooms. Now the only ferries that come into the town
are tourist ferries, and the buildings began to fall into disrepair. Like the ferry waiting rooms we encountered
in Orkney, a pile of books began to accumulate, left for people waiting to pass
the time.
Over time, this pile of books filled the
waiting room. Gradually, the people of
Fjærland turned the abandoned buildings into little bookstores to suit all
tastes. The first bookstore we entered
was fiction (including fiction in English). Upstairs were textbooks and periodicals. The
second was non-fiction, with an emphasis on war history and stacks of
newspapers from the 1940’s. The third
was travel and geography. The fourth was
predominantly hobby books, with lots of books on nature, hunting, some
cooking. Stashed into some rooms in the
back were some extra crime and memoirs that mustn’t’ve fit anyway else.
The fifth was attached to a café and held a
similar mishmash of books as the fourth store, but had an emphasis on healthy
cookbooks and health and beauty. They
also had a big section on humour. Inside
the sixth bookshop there was a small tourist office, headed by a friendly
blonde woman. There were mostly
children’s and teen fiction here, but also lots of books on art (there was even
a small art gallery in here) and technical books.
There were literally thousands of books in
Bøkboyn, but I limited myself to only purchasing two; a book of Hans Christian
Andersen tales printed in his hometown in the 1960’s, and a book I presumed was
of Norwegian folktales, but – upon closer inspection – was an illustrated New
Testament. “Same things,” says Nick.
Just north of Bøkboyn you can see another
arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier, the huge glacier we had climbed on
yesterday. While we weren’t game to go
awandering without a guide, we drove up to the icy spectacle and took some
pictures.
By this time it was nearing the afternoon
and we were due to return the car. We
had to hastily repack the bags, give the keys back and then wait for the bus
that would take us back to Sogndal center.
We climbed back up the mountain to our campsite from the other night,
and pitched the tent early. It was only
five and we had hours of full sunlight left, so we lay back on the grass and
ate our way through a kilo of cherries before crawling into the tent and
falling asleep.
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