There's No Hamn in Taking a Bike Ride

On a Saturday afternoon recently, I decided to go on a bit of an exploratory journey of Ronneby. After all, I'm here for six months, and it would be a bit embarrassing if I didn't get to see everything that the town had to offer. So, I thought there would be no harm in popping down to see the port and beach area. The Swedish word for harbour is hamn. This relates to the Swedish translation of Copenhagen as Köpenhamn, meaning merchant's harbour. You can see the similarity between köp and the English shop, since a 'k' before an 'ö' is said more like a 'ch'. For those interested, Copenhagen in Danish is København, and in Italian it is Copenaghen.

Anyway, I took my map of Ronneby which only just showed the harbour area on it, got on my bike and headed off. It's only a few kilometres south of the flat, so it didn't take me all that long to reach it. I do remember riding past a lot of farms with horses on them though, and for that reason the air was rather smelly. The following two photos show almost all there is to see of the beach, which is located out the back of a caravan park type area. So you can tell we're not talking anything like Cottesloe proportions here. Nonetheless, the people seemed to be enjoying the Summer weather.


Having gone basically as far south as possible, I turned eastwards. Along this road there was quite a lot of industrial buildings. This was quite a shock to me, as all I had ever seen of Ronneby was this quaint little village, mainly filled with trees. Right near the mouth of the Ronnebyån, I came to the hamn. Here are two pictures I took. One is of a boat docked at the harbour, and the other is of the LARGE pile of wood on the other side of the river. This was the 'filled with trees' part of Ronneby.

It wa getting towards dinnertime, so I decided to head home. I rode northwards along by the river. After a bit, I came across one of the famous signs with a diagonal red line through them, to be interpreted as 'you are now leaving...' and this was one for Ronneby Hamn.

Along the way up towards the water park and BTH, I rode past the golf course - I hadn't even known that Ronneby had one. Sorry this is not a very interesting photo, but it was about the best I could get from the footpath.