The World’s Most Boring City
If you’ve ever gone backpacking, you’ll know that your accommodation gives a pretty good idea of the place you’ll be staying. Clean, well-equipped hostels with very few other guests are usually found in cities that are, well, neat, pleasant and devoid of tourists. Larger, livelier cities have a host of hostels in the heart of town, but don’t be surprised to find to come back at 3am and find your bed has been let to another visitor, who still wants to party. Then of course, there are hostels that, like the towns they occupy, are just weird. The youth hostel in Haparanda, Sweden is definitely one of those.
Haparanda is a town in Northern Sweden, within the boundary of Lapland, an ideological nation that straddles the upper quarter of Scandinavia. It sits so close to the Finnish border that the town across the boundary, Tornio, merged with it to form a unique ’Eurocity’- one city across 2 nations. It sounded like an interesting diversion, particularly as many guide books mentioned that the different licensing laws forced Finnish revellers to cross the bridge into Sweden every night, creating an unpredictable, ’border town'feel to the place.
We arrived at 6 o’clock on a Saturday night, and didn’t see another person until we arrived at the hostel half an hour later. A sign in the window said NO VACANCIES. Thank God we booked in advance, I thought. We knocked and waited. And waited. Eventually somebody appeared, clucking and sighing from behind the door. “Sorry we’re late”I said with an embarrassed grimace. The reply was immediate. “Sorry! Sorry!”said with a heavy dollop of sarcasm. He sighed and trudged off down the hallway, pushing our bedroom door open on the way. The only other time we saw him was to hand our keys in and receive another volley of barely suppressed disdain.
The room itself was not that bad, I mean no reed diffusers in the loo, but I have definately slept in worse. Worryingly it had four separate beds. Would we have to share, we asked tentatively. He just shook his head and walked off. It later transpired that we were the only people in the entire hostel. The window in the room looked out over a pleasant garden area, with a stream in the distance. There was one problem - it was covered by heavy iron shutters that couldn’t be removed. Why on earth would they do this, we wondered. It was obvious really - in summer, in Haparanda, it never gets dark.
Wandering through the deserted streets of Haparanda and its sister city, Tornio, felt so similar to trudging around the silent hostel that they started to feel virtually indistinguishable; the fact that it was cold, cloudy and light for the entire 48 hours we were there didn’t help. It felt like the day after a dreadful apocalypse, the only survivors being a drunk old man who kept pointing at his leg and shouting, and a supermarket assistant even ruder than the hostel owner. The main square was full of rubble. The town’s hideous giant black church was shut on Sunday morning. The traffic crossings made a hellish noise that cut through the silence like a nuclear fallout alarm. We tried to escape into Tornio, a very, very slightly better place, to go to the cinema. It was shut.
There were some bright spots in this bizarre town where there is almost absolutely nothing to do; we found a pub and played pool until our bus out arrived, and also watched a car full of goths drive in a circle for a few hours. Other than that, the town, like the hostel, was almost otherworldly. It certainly felt like a border town - a last outpost on the edge of nothingness. On our final night, at some time between 8pm and 3am, we heard a voice through a megaphone through the shuttered window, and ventured outside.
The voice was being responded to in turn by different people, who also beeped their car horns at random intervals. What the hell was going on? A right-wing rally? A cult meeting? The only other fellow traveller we encountered told us the sorry truth. “Car bingo. That’s what people do for fun around here.”Of course. There’s so little to do that people drive into a field to play giant bingo without getting out of their cars. Haparanda remains the single strangest place I have ever been - a deserted, timeless nightmare of a place off even the most lightly beaten track. From the first moment, I should have known. A hostel that has a No Vacancies sign permanently in its window can’t be expecting too many visitors.
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