Day 10: Karlstad to Fjällbacka

Click here to enlarge this panorama or see an ultra high-resolution version.

This is the view of Fjällbacka during yesterday's (Sunday's) sunset, from the the top of a diving platform on a small island that forms one edge of the harbor. It had been cloudy most of the day, but out over the North Sea there was clear sky, so it was only a matter of setting up the camera and waiting for the sun to dip under the cloud cover before it set. For a five-minute period, the village was ablaze in red. For those of you tempted to jump in, the water was 17 degrees Celsius.

Fjällbacka lies amid an archipelago of islands that stretches north of Göteborg, and friends had told me it is as worthwhile a visit as Stockholm's archipelago. They were right. It is beautiful here. Fjällbacka is also where Ingrid Bergman spent her holidays — the main square is now named after her — and if it's good enough for her then it is certainly good enough for me:-)

I got here via small roads, for a change. During the afternoon, I visited the bronze-age rock carvings at Tanum — yet another World Heritage site — and spent an interesting hour wandering the hilly countryside looking for what really are very pretty stylized figures chipped into sloping rock faces around 1000-500 BC:

There is a great museum there too, though in they are not helping their cause when they explicitly compare Tanum in their literature as an achievement equal in stature with the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids of Giza. Er, no. What Tanum's rock carvings show is how our northern European ancestors were —pardon the pun — still scratching the surface when it comes to the civilizational sweepstakes some 1,500 years after the pyramids had been built.