This is officially Europe's best cycle path

Times

2 days ago

Many, many years ago, when I was just starting out along the travel writing path, I secured a berth on MS Juno, which murmurs along Sweden's Gota Canal between Gothenburg and Stockholm. This luxurious period piece has the reputation of being the Orient Express of sweetwater cruising, with a big emphasis on gastronomy, and I remember spending a lot of time at the dining table tucking into the likes of reindeer and Arctic char.
I remember, too, being bewitched by the world beyond the portholes. Sweden's pastoral backyard was a storybook landscape of gossamer morning mists, of wildflowered meadows, of little Pippi Longstocking summerhouses, where apple-cheeked blondes sang to their babies while their dungareed menfolk tried to keep a handbrake on spring.
At the locks, dusky red-painted wooden cafés served coffee and homemade cinnamon buns, children draped each other in daisy chains and families readied their kayaks for adventure. It was all rather charming and wholesome.
At the time, I remember gazing at this unravelling landscape rather wistfully, wishing that I could freeze-frame the boat trip for a day or so and get off, to get to grips with the waterside in a less passive, more hands-on kind of way.
Well, fast forward a couple of decades or three and I am back again on the Gota Canal, this time doing exactly that, and with my own apple-cheeked other half. Moreover, it's not just personal wish-fulfilment, because the canal's towpath has recently been declared the European Cycle Route of the Year at Fiets en Wandelbeurs, an annual Dutch cycling and hiking fair.
The whole Gota route stitches together several big lakes. We had a plan to cycle over three days from its start at Sjotorp on the eastern edge of Lake Vanern to Karlsborg on the western side of Lake Vattern, roughly midway. We would be covering an average of 20 miles a day on sturdy hybrid bikes provided by our guesthouse for the first two nights, an elegant former vicarage called Prastgarden in the canalside town of Toreboda.
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The canal is one of a tradition of nation-crossing waterways, like the Kiel Canal in Germany and the Canal du Midi in France, and when it was completed in 1832 it immediately had strategic significance in getting valuable freight and military hardware from one side of the country to the other without having to pass under anyone else's guns.
These days, however, it is entirely given over to recreation, and is a considerable source of national pride, not least because digging out its 120 miles was a huge endeavour, involving 58,000 soldiers and an awful lot of wheelbarrows. The crew included a tough band of Scots brought over by our very own Thomas Telford, creator of the Scotland-crossing Caledonian Canal, whose expertise was engaged by the canal's driving force, the Swedish naval officer Count Baltzar von Platen. All of this can be gleaned from multilingual signposts along the canal's bank, and in historic buildings dotted along its length.
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We had our first fika — coffee and a cinnamon bun — in an antique wooden warehouse by the harbourside in Sjotorp, where the canal proper begins on the eastern shore of Lake Vanern, and where the good folk from Prastgarden had deposited us with our bikes. There's a canal museum upstairs, but the downstairs Café Baltzar feels like a museum piece too, sitting under chandeliers at a lace-covered table overlooked by a portrait of the count himself (gotakanal.se).
Fortified by the count's buns, we set off on the towpath, enveloped by birdsong, and ticking off the ells. When the canal was built, the ell was a common unit of measurement, and not just for cloth. Numbered stones are placed along the canal every 1,000 ells, which equates to about 600 metres — an ideal distance to convince cyclists that they are going 'ell for leather.
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The canal winds through a mix of woodlands and wheat fields, celebrated at regular intervals by salvos of lupins in blues, purples and pinks. There are freshly painted roll-across bridges and lock systems, usually with a cluster of onlookers gathering to exchange greetings with boats passing through. Here too are the little wooden houses with summerhouses I remembered, although no more men in dungarees: instead robomowers graze slowly across the lawns, looking like fat rabbits, but that's about the only concession to the passing of time.
After about 16 miles of canalside cycling we got back to Toreboda, welcomed into the town by a long gallery of paintings along the water's edge, backed by a succession of designer bungalows whose gardens were open to the towpath.
When I mentioned to the Prastgarden's co-owner Yvonne Branfelt how unfenced-off everything seemed, she said people didn't need to lock their doors in Toreboda. Apart from when word went round that one particular well-known bad apple was out of prison.
Next day we were back on the towpath for a couple of hours before the canal debouched into a smaller intermediary lake, Viken. Here the cycle route veers away into farmland, forest and fields of wheat, tracking the lake's outline from a distance along a network of gravel roads.
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Secreted among the woodlands were holiday cabins, some elaborate, some primitive, but every one a private paradise. One had a little self-serve kiosk selling mostly knitted goods, which answered my unspoken question: what do people do here in the winter?
That day was a tougher 40 miles, and my apple-cheeked companion was getting a bit Granny Smith by the time we reached Forsvik, where the canal does a short sprint between lakes Viken and Vattern.
Here the drop between the two — and the resulting waterpower — has been instrumental to the success of a long line of industries, starting back in the 1400s with a sawmill and flour mill, and moving on more recently to smithy and iron foundry, all on the same patch of lakeside. They needed a lot of manpower, those industries, and today the Vandrarhem worker's apartments, where we stayed that night, have been transformed into tourist accommodation, in a timewarp of old coal ranges and period furniture. Walking out from here among the ghosts of old factories felt like a walk through Sweden's social history.
From Forsvik it was a relatively short ten-mile ride on our final day to Karlsborg, a settlement originally created as Sweden's reserve capital, inland and up the canal, in case coastal Stockholm came under attack. There we were planning a visit to its castle, before setting off back to Gothenburg for our flight home.
That short morning's cycle was different again from the previous day, being mainly through a pine forest completely carpeted in bilberries. The low sun shone stroboscopically through the trees, silhouetting deer that stood motionless as we passed, but bolted when we stopped to take a picture.
At Karlsborg, it seemed a bit premature to bring the trip to an end with plenty of canal remaining, but it was a natural break, with more ungainly shaped lakes to be circumvented ahead before the waterway proper began again.
All in all it was a very wholesome three days, along a carefully curated route, in a fresh climate that was neither too hot nor too cold. My only disappointment was that we didn't meet my old friend Juno somewhere along the way; she was plying her trade two days ahead of us.
So I look forward to draping her with daisy chains when we eventually return to the Gota, having saved the eastern half of the cycle route for another time.Andrew Eames was a guest of West Sweden (westsweden.com) and Visit Sweden (visitsweden.com). The Prastgarden guesthouse has two nights' half-board from £484pp, including bike hire (prastgarden.nu). Fly to Gothenburg then take the train to Toreboda and Karlsborg (sj.se)