This is the slow life – the ultimate luxury for people in a world so fast-paced few have time for themselves. This ultimate indulgence, with a modern setting, can be enjoyed in Scandinavia, a region where quality of life is of utmost importance to a people with one of the highest literacy rates and per capita incomes in the world.
In this region, people have time to stop and smell the flowers and to take long walks in the woods where chestnuts litter leaf-strewn paths. Here you can savor every bite of delectable fresh Danish butter slathered on freshly baked nutty organic bread. Danes call it "hygge" – a word that invokes intimacy, coziness and quality time with friends and loved ones.
Life may be slow in Scandinavia, but efficiency is not sacrificed. Scandinavian officials are proud to tell visitors that everything works in their region – the mass transportation, the state-of-the-art telecommunications networks, the public utilities that bring basic services such as electricity even to the most forbidding areas in the north.
The region made up of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden is marked by dramatic contrasts, featuring verdant valleys with year-round temperate climate to perpetually snow-capped mountain ranges and glaciers.
Scandinavia is just starting to make an aggressive push to promote the region as an Asian traveler’s destination. The marketing push is so new Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), a company identified with business travelers and the high-end market, still doesn’t have direct flights from Manila.
Instead SAS relies on its Star Alliance with Lufthansa, which picks up passengers in Manila for transfer to SAS flights in Bangkok, Thailand for the trip to Europe. SAS does have an office in Manila, and country manager Nila Layug is optimistic about increasing traffic between the Philippines and SAS destinations Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
If you leave Manila at night, the 15-hour flight, with a two-hour stopover in Bangkok, will see you arriving early morning in Copenhagen, the Danish capital. The clean spring air – a luxury for residents of polluted Asian cities – is bracing, and you may have enough energy to kick off your sightseeing in Billund.
Companies sponsor trips to the park for their employees and families. The activities include team-building exercises that involve the use of – what else? – Lego blocks to depict stories by Hans Christian Andersen.
From Billund you can immerse yourself in the life of Andersen. Danes suggest riding a bicycle to explore the Andersen Route, which cuts across Denmark. Make sure you stop at Odense, the writer’s hometown. You can take a side trip to the fishing village of Faaborg, where you have to stay or enjoy at least one meal at the Falsled Kro, famed for its delectable organic French fusion cuisine and impeccable hotel service.
The enchanting Falsled Kro, with its organic kitchen garden and its famous chef, 58-year-old Jean-Louis Lieffroy, specializes in the Scandinavian fusion kitchen. Jean-Louis is French but met a Norwegian woman and was hooked. Now his son Patrick, 29, is learning the secrets of his kitchen and preparing to take charge of the successful family enterprise.
From the glass-enclosed dining area you can see a part of the garden. Beyond that is a fjord, those bodies of water dotting the Scandinavian land mass. There are no passages between fjords; you enter the fjord and return to the sea through the same route. The deepest part in the middle of a fjord can be equivalent to the height of the tallest peak nearby. The temperature should be freezing, but the Gulf stream warms the water year-round so the fjords do not freeze even in winter.
Think of an old bathtub with its gently sloping bottom, accumulating warm water in the summer and the Gulf stream in winter, keeping the temperature at a steady 5 degrees Celsius. From the air the fjords look like a tree with many branches. Each branch has a name, and the biggest in Northern Europe is called the Sognefjord.
From the fjord you can take the Flam railway from the fertile Flamsdalen valley up the mountains to the Myrdal station, 856.6 meters above sea level. The 20-kilometer-long railway line cuts through steep mountainsides and runs on narrow ledges, providing some of the most spectacular views in Northern Europe. If you’re lucky (or with an overactive imagination!), you may have a wild, erotic encounter with Huldra the wood nymph as she frolics in the waterfall at Kjosfossen, one of the brief stopovers during the train ride.
Little of Norway is arable – perhaps the reason Vikings set off beyond the fjords and seas to become marauders in Europe. Norwegians emphasize that the Vikings, aside from being accomplished shipbuilders and raiders, were also farmers, merchants and everything else required of early settlers, and that the Vikings had a code of conduct for daily life.
The old Norway can still be seen in the city of Bergen, described by its residents as "the most beautiful city in the world" and their nation’s secret capital. In an expensive enclave aptly called Paradise sits the King’s castle, home to the Norwegian royals whenever they are in Bergen. The birthplace of Gerhard Henrik Armeur Hansen, the physician who first identified leprosy in 1874, the city also features "Witch Hill" – a spot where witches were once burned.
Apart from Viking lore, adults and children alike will be entranced by stories of Norway’s other famous export, the troll. The mythical mountain creatures are supposed to lurk behind trees that locals believe come alive at night. The trees line the road from the Solstrand Hotel & Bad, one of the loveliest in the region, to the home of famed classical composer Edvard Grieg.
Solstrand is owned and operated by Borrea Schau-Larsen, a woman who is marketing not just a hotel but a concept of management to the world. Larsen employs over 120, all of them women. Under the Solstrand Program that is taught in the University of Norway, corporate hierarchical structures are done away with.
Soren Leerskov, regional director for Asia of the STB, wants travel packages that educate at the same time that they entertain and allow visitors to enjoy the slow life in Scandinavia.
Tours in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, for example, include highly informative stories about the city’s system of government, its history and a look at the prestigious prizes named after the nation’s famous son, Alfred Nobel, the man who developed dynamite. Because Nobel also lived in Oslo, the Peace Prize is given in the Norwegian capital. All the other prizes, however, are handed out during a fancy dinner each December at the Stockholm City Hall.
You emerge from a tour of Scandinavia with your batteries fully recharged, your lungs cleared of pollution, and vowing to return as soon as you can.