Since hearing some aspirationally pro-campers swear by camping in Temagami, it has become a bucket-list camping destination for us. From naïvely attempting Crown land camping in 2021 (failing miserably and swearing never to go to Crown land again), to portaging through Algonquin’s Tim River in 2022, to backpacking through Killarney’s La Cloche Silhouette trail 2023, we finally felt prepared to tackle Temagami… we would be coming full circle from our newbie Crown land days!
And so we arrive at the our final hurrah before we go back to Canada and real life (aka unemployment) begins.
In late June, my trip began with a 1 day layover in Iceland. Back then, the sun did not set.
Early September, our trip ended with a 3 day layover in Iceland. At that point, the nights were just long enough for potential aurora sightings. This leg of my trip is the focus of this post.
Iceland–a significant place in its own right–will also forever be personally significant to me for bookending this season of my life. I would like to think my second time here was different from the first, that I left that side of the Atlantic a changed person… I mean, that’s the kind of outcome and introspection that makes good blog material. But in reality, I think this layover was different from the first not because I’ve changed/grown/crossed-thresholds/seen things, but moreso because I am coming under different circumstances; I envy people who can be so sure otherwise.
My parents wanted to piggy back on my whole post-conference kerfuffle and met us in Olso after the WWOOFing leg of our trip.
If it were up to my parents, they would have signed up for a Chinese Bus Tour to sight-see some bus-accessible, ultra-touristy “Natural Wonders”. If it were up to me, well, you know what I’d be up to. The thing is, my parents travel exclusively by Chinese Bus Tourism. Meanwhile, I would throw myself into a fjord if I had to go on one more Chinese Bus Tour in my life (even if they were taking me to the parts of Scandinavia with “Natural Wonders”).
The only way we can reconcile this conundrum is for me to plan the trip and for them to follow along as if I were their amateur Chinese Bus Tour Guide.
It’s been almost a year since I went to the conference in Munich that started all this and I’m getting self-conscious and kind of ashamed that I am still writing about a 2 month experience over a > 6 month time span … almost 12 months later ….
To put this post in perspective, this (probably the last) part of a series of posts about WWOOFing in Norway so far:
This post will be a compilation of micro-stories that fell through the cracks.
A memory I have that will always bring me a smile was the moment we met our Tønsberg WWOOF host.
We were still reminiscing our time at the Gjøvik farm, when we stepped off the train from Oslo to Tønsberg into an epic downpour. In our entire time in Norway, we would never seen it rain as hard as it did this day. Without phones to call (both our phones were broken by now) or WiFi to use my laptop, we were left at the train station waiting, trusting that our host would pick us up. Obviously, we didn’t know what the host would look like, but we were hoping our Asian-ness will be enough of an eyesore to catch his attention.
Several minutes later, we see a tall (even for Norwegian standards!) man roll up on a bike in front of us …
A little photo diary of what some WWOOFers did on their days off.
In Norway (at least the part we were in), if you are registered as a farm, you are audited from time to time for compliance to their rules (which mainly have conventional monoculture farms in mind) otherwise you lose your “farm” status and its associated privileges. One of the requirements is to keep a mowed field of a certain size. Besides, it’ll make future earthwork projects much easier to follow through with.
In theory, goats are great at eating these small fast-growing trees on fields. However, there are prerequisites to goats. This includes (a) fencing the field and (b) cleaning/making room in the barn for the goats (which, if you remember how much garbage was in the shed, is not a simple feat).
In the meantime, WWOOFers make ideal surrogate goats. That is, we needed to (c) manually keep the trees from growing too big while we are waiting on (a) and (b) to happen. Spoiler Alert: We never made it to (a), maybe a day an a half was dedicated to (b), but the majority of our labour was spent on (c). In fact, this entire post is about (c).
If you thought being in Norway would give me the space to have deep thoughts etc., you would have overestimated me. If you caught me zoning out, 9 times out of 10, I would be thinking about berries. The 10th time, I’d be thinking about ice cream.
So I’m not sure why the bears in Canada didn’t get the memo, but there are tons of wild berries in Scandinavia. Basically, free food everywhere. Yet foraging is a special kind of free food. For one, its free food without mark-ups for being package-free, local, AND fair-trade. It’s free food without anyone trying to sell my anything (ie. samples at Costco). It’s free food without someone trying to bribe me to do something (ie. to be social at a lunch hosted by church). And, not to mention, it would actually go to waste if it weren’t in my belly. This is free food I don’t have to feel guilty about. In fact, I can make a moral case for eating berries.
Our first expansion project in Gjøvik was to help expand the Food Forest.
The idea of the Food Forest (or Forest Garden) is to look to a naturally occurring forest as inspiration for how vegetation should be organized in a garden. Notice all the diversity and connections that exist in a forest: multiple levels of shrubbery, thick hummus that keeps water in the soil, animal life, perennials that grow deep roots in a forest.
Our permaculture peeps see the connections and positive feedback loops between all the aforementioned components and are inspired to replicate this system using edible plants. By intentionally planting layers of mutually beneficial, edible and non-invasive perennials, they hope to improve soil quality and create a resilient food system that requires less manual inputs over time. “Harvesting” would be more akin to “foraging” in a forest of food like this!
Before I do a deep dive into specific incidents, stories, and my thoughts thereof… I convinced myself that I should do a general overview to give more context to the stuff that is (in my honest opinion) more fun to write later.
There are three core elements to WWOOFing:
I will say a couple words about each of these.