To reach the Træna Festival, you have to take a couple of flights, cross the Arctic Circle, and hunker down on a ferry for five hours. LOUISE EASTgoes anyway
ABOUT FIVE years ago, at roughly the same time I realised I did not have to finish reading books I didn’t like, I finally acknowledged that I really, really don’t love music festivals. The problem is not the trenchfoot or the Portaloos, it’s the endless decisions. Hot chips or a hot dog? Mosh pit or my dignity? I tend to lose things at festivals: my friends, my shoes, my reputation as a laid-back, free-wheelin’ kinda gal.
So it was a tad perverse of me to sign up for a musical festival so epically hard to get to: it’s as though someone took the security fence at Glasto’ and turned it up to 11. To reach Norway’s Træna Festival, I have to take a couple of flights, cross the Arctic Circle, and hunker down on a ferry for five hours. At the other end of this day and a half of travel, lies a line-up of 26 acts, only two of which I know, and beer priced at €7.50 a throw.
If Træna were any other music festival, this would add up to a very bad idea indeed but as it stands, the festival is really an excuse for an exhilarating, three-day bungee jump into an Arctic world of midnight sun, islands, cliffs, sea eagles, bee orchids, whale burgers, caves the size of a cathedrals, churches the size of a cocktail cabinet, and everywhere, egg-yolk yellow pennants proudly announcing “Træna: Sea People!”
An archipelago of more than 1,000 islands and skerries carved neatly in two by the Arctic Circle, Træna lies 1,000km north of Oslo. People have inhabited the islands for more than 9,000 years, and with seas rich in cod, pollack and halibut, odds are good that fishing has always been the numero uno day job.
That still holds true for the 350-odd year-round inhabitants of Husøy, the largest of Træna’s four populated islands, all except for three days in July when the fishing factory is scrubbed up and turned into guest bedrooms, curtains are tacked over the church windows to transform it into a gig venue, and Træna gets ready to rock.
Red-and-white ferries from Bodø on the mainland unload a rag-bag cargo of festival-goers, tents, costumes, deck chairs and double basses onto the harbour wall, where a fleet of small boys with wheelbarrows queue up to offer an impromptu taxi service. En route to the camp site, a springy hill-side speckled with vetch, clover and tiny delicate orchids, has home-made signs offering fresh coffee, waffles, popcorn and liquorice.
With an on-site bar offering air-dried fish and a fellow selling turns in a giant inflatable beach ball, there’s more than a touch of the Craggy Island fair to Træna. Yet there’s nothing remotely parochial about the scenery. Hulking great molars of rock rear out of a jade-coloured sea. Sea eagles bank and circle while the fat sun does a slow-motion bounce far out to sea. A million miniature Mount Fujis puncture the horizon and a great slew of ice, the Svartisen glacier, glitters like spilt sugar.
As if acknowledging that competition is pointless, the music at Træna plays support to the landscape. Over the years, international acts including Spiritualised, Damien Rice, and Richard Hawley have played the festival (this year’s nominated hipsters were British Sea Power and Erland Øye of Kings of Convenience) but for the most part, the line-up is packed with home- grown Scandinavian acts.
A cave on the neighbouring island, Sanna, is the venue for Saturday’s headline concert, a coming together of a beautiful local choir and Moddi, a troop of impossibly good-looking pixies in Nordic knitwear. There must be more than a thousand people scattered across the rocks and grass below, but such is the scale of the Kirkehelleren or “cathedral cave”, they look no greater than a spill of thumb tacks.
From here, Sanna’s only road winds past a clutch of butter-yellow clapboard houses and leads straight into a cliff face, James Bond-style. For 700 steep black metres, a tunnel climbs through solid rock, finally reaching daylight just below a mysterious golfball-shaped radar station eavesdropping on the sea below. During the festival, flickering candles are wedged into cracks in the tunnel, and each fresh bend offers some new oddity – a tent stuffed with meringues, a mosaic of Love Heart sweets.
The island’s tiny wooden church is the location of another festival highlight – a screening of Robert J Flaherty’s 1934 film, Man of Aran, with an eerily beautiful soundtrack performed by British Sea Power. It’s a moving affair. Although sequins of sun speckle the sea outside, a carved wooden boat high in the eaves draws a taut line bet-ween the fragility of life in the old fishing communities of Ireland’s Atlantic coast and those here in the Arctic.
The main festival site comes into its own as the sun slithers down the side of Sanna’s crag. At ground level, it’s peopled by whale-burger vendors, girls toting jugs of free coffee, a Red Cross man sitting benignly behind a large dish of Elastoplasts, and lots of happy campers. High on each of the peaks and crags circling the stage, people dance to Icelandic reggae, their shadows stretched like gum to the main-stage far below.
Across town in the Vulkana (polarsafari.com), it’s time to fire up the sauna in one of the world’s most unlikely hammams. A whaling trawler until 2004, the curved wooden belly of the boat now houses a steam room and seawater plunge pool. There’s a hot-tub on deck, a wood-fired sauna with picture windows at sea level and, if the cobwebs still lurk after all that, a diving board offers a quick introduction to the ice-melt sea, seven metres below.
En route to the Vulkana, a beat-up red van pulls up and a man running short on teeth offers me a lift to wherever I’d like to go.
“You like Træna?” he asks.
“Oh, I do,” I say. “I really do.”
“You like festivals?”
I consider. My breath stinks of air-dried fish, I am pining for darkness as though it were a stiff drink and I have just spent €12 on a Bloody Mary, but the beauty of Træna has changed my stance on festivals.
“I do,” I say.
“So tell me.” He whacks a hand on the dashboard. “People say we have the best festival in the whole world here on Træna.”
He turns and his eyes are wide.
“The whole world! Is that true?”
“It is,” I say. “It’s definitely true.”
visitnorway.com
Rock around the clock . . .
The festival always runs in the second weekend of July: next year it is from July 7th-9th. A three-day ticket for next year’s festival costs about €130; camping is €6 each a night. There is a small supermarket, post office and an ATM on Husøy, but as food is expensive it’s a good idea to bring supplies.
The midnight sun is visible on Træna for six weeks from the end of May. Pack an eye mask for sleeping, high-factor sun cream, and a warm jacket for the evenings. On the festival site, exchange cash for “bonger” tokens to buy cans of the local brew, wine and dried fish.
- trena.net
Go there
Norwegian airlines (norwegian.com) flies from Dublin to Oslo-Gardermoen. Norwegian and Widerøe (wideroe.no) fly from Oslo-Gardermoen to Bodø, the departure point for the Træna ferry (trena.net)