Svanhovd sits in the Pasvik valley in Sør-Varanger, a little under an hour’s drive south of Kirkenes and a few hundred metres from the Russian border. I was there for three days in August. Svanhovd as a place is magic, calm, introspective and resonant. Amongst all impressions, what I remember distinctly too is not the border, and not the pine forest that runs unbroken to the horizon in whichever direction you care to look. It is a yellow post-it with my name on it, written by the head of kitchen, stuck to a bowl of boiled eggs in a fridge.
The office is the visitor centre
NIBIO Svanhovd is a research station, and its office building is also the visitor centre for Øvre Pasvik National Park. Before arriving, I had the impression that it was two institutions in different locations within the same wildlife park. It was not. When I arrived, I met in sight with one long red timber building where the researchers’ offices, the meeting rooms, the guest rooms and the public exhibition all open off the same corridor, and where the person behind the reception desk is as likely to be answering a question about a bear to visitors to Svanhovd, as about a sampling permit. Do you want to know more about the native to the Pacific Ocean Pink Salmon species that is currently abundant in Northern Norway? Your tour guide is likely the same lead research scientist of the field in Svanhovd. Last I heard, they were measuring different spawning points of the same river of the Pink Salmon, trying to figure out why it is that the same river bed would have different hatching conditions that allowed eggs to hatch almost six months apart. That insight piqued my interest no end as to localized water and environmental conditions.
