The Kattegattleden Route
Kattegattleden (The Kattegat Trail) is Sweden’s 1st national cycle route, covering 390 km of Western Sweden. It starts in Helsingborg, and ends in Gothenburg. It is possible to do the route in the opposite direction, but this is the more popular direction of travel. Many riders begin in Copenhagen, taking the ferry from Helsingør to Helsingborg to begin the official route. It involves a lot of coastal scenery (along the Kattegat), but has more inland stretches, and more hills, than you may expect from a largely coastal route. The route is officially divided into 8 stages, though the first stage is very short (22km) and can be easily combined with the second stage. Some cyclists complete the route in 4 days, but if you want time to experience the sights and towns off the bike, I would recommend a more leisurely pace.
Planning and Preparation
Whilst I still consider myself an above average runner, in spite of the fact that my PR’s would seem to all be behind me, I am quite comfortable about being a below-average cyclist. I primarily see cycling as a way of easily getting from point A to point B, and as a nice way to explore the surrounding areas with a larger radius than is possible through running. I have a 19-year old hybrid bike and, laden with double pannier bags for bike touring, average a very pedestrian 18km per hour. Asides from hill climbs, all of my cycling is no more strenuous than walking. Thankfully my cycling companion for the trip has a similar philosophy, and a bike even less suited for speed (or hills, as I discovered on our previous cycling trip together a few years ago). My training therefore focused on getting in some longer rides (40 to 80km) a couple of times a week, rather than attempting to increase speed.
The bike tour itself
Day 1: Stages 1 and 2: Helsingborg to Höganäs to Ängelholm
Day 1 involved a very early start, and an inauspicious beginning. I had booked a place on the 08:50am FlixBus to Helsingborg, back in April, complete with a front row seat to enjoy the scenery. They emailed me on Thursday afternoon (which I didn’t receive until around 10pm that night due to an event directly after work) telling me that the bus was cancelled and that they had rebooked me on the 03:35am bus instead, and with no booked seat. I was not impressed. It took around 30 minutes talking to an AI chatbot before they confirmed there would be a seat for me on the bus. I would have cancelled and taken the train if that was a possibility, but the track works between Kungsbacka and Falkenberg mean that it is not possible to take a bike with you, so I had no other option.
This meant I had around 3 hours sleep, waking at 2:00am to ensure I left and got to the bus station in plenty of time. I had already packed, charged and fitted my bike lights, and checked my tyre pressure the evening before. The bike ride to Åkareplatsen is only around 5 ½ km, and is mostly downhill. There is a section at Svingeln transport hub where the bike lane gets a bit confusing though and, due to lack of sleep and poor night vision, I ended up cycling into the tram tracks. I promptly crashed, ending up with a massive bruise on my right hip, smaller ones elsewhere on the legs and arms, and two small scrapes on my face. Thankfully nothing in my bag was damaged, no trams were in imminent danger of running me over, and my bike seemed unscathed. I checked that I was not concussed, by recalling my name and date of birth, wheeled the bike over to the cycle path, and continued on.
My travel companion had very kindly offered to come to Helsingborg for around 07:30am rather than the 11:30am we had originally planned. I didn’t manage to get any sleep on the bus, and it was raining heavily when she arrived on the ferry. She had brought breakfast (Danish rolls and pastries, and apples) and by the time we left around 09:00am the rain was easing off a little.
Stage 1 begins outside the train station, and after a few photos we were on our way. The first few kilometres take you through Helsingborg, then there is a mix of coastal path and slightly inland route. There is a slight hill around 3 or 4km into the route, but it isn’t overly steep, then it gently undulates. The route mostly follows the edge of the peninsula, and we reached Höganäs after around an hour and 40 minutes of cycling. It seemed like a pleasant small coastal village, but very windy, so we continued on. There was one public toilet en route which we found before lunch, and I took advantage of that. We stopped to eat lunch on a bench outside of a large building in a hamlet called Hässlebo, somewhere on the northern edge of the peninsula, finishing our Danish rolls, and a couple of eggs that my companion had prepared that morning. (She ended up being responsible for most of our lunches on the trip, because we were rarely somewhere convenient with amenities when we got hungry, and she would take eggs and apples from the breakfast buffets in anticipation of this. I was very glad of this foresight.) Whilst we were eating lunch in Hässlebo, a couple of locals came to talk to us, and were interested in our travels, and happy that we were using the bench, which another guy who lived there had built himself. I mentioned that I hadn’t put on sunscreen, and my companion asked if I planned to. I thought she was joking, as it was so overcast, cool, and had been a bit drizzly. After 20 minutes or so, we set off, thinking we were halfway to our destination.
Somehow, we either missed a sign, or turned the wrong way, or a sign was missing. We reached a T-junction with no sign, and headed left, but I was concerned by the lack of signage. I became aware that we had definitely gone awry when I realised that the sea was on the wrong side. When you’re following a route from south to north, along the west coast, the sea should always be on your left. Here, though, it was on our right. The peninsula we were on is nowhere near narrow enough for that to happen. Looking back at the Strava map, if we had turned right at that junction everything would have been fine. As it was, we ended up adding around 9km onto our trip before we got back on track. The route goes alongside a fairly busy road for a while, and there were some more undulations on the way to Ängelholm. Realising my companion was tiring, and was still wearing a heavy backpack (in which she had brought breakfast and lunch) I offered to take that for the final kilometres. She still seemed to be slowing down though, even on the downhills, and I found a café (with toilet facilities) whilst waiting on her at one point. At another point, near Ängelholm, I saw and waved at a cyclist coming around the corner wearing a similar-coloured jacket to her. It was not her, but a young German guy. We had a quick chat where I tried the explain in Swedish that I had thought he was someone else, but, also, did he know the way to where we were going. He switched to English and I realised he was German. He was on a two week tour and was planning to cycle all the way back to Germany (presumably making use of a ferry at some point). He headed off before my companion arrived.
We reached Riverside Apartments around 4pm, were met by the friendly owner, got our bikes stored securely, and checked out our large and comfortable apartment in the annex, before cleaning up and heading out to explore Ängelholm. It turned out that I had actually managed to get a bit sunburnt, even through all that thick cloud and intermittent rain. The owner joked that he knew a Scottish woman (the wife of a former colleague) who had got sunburnt on a similarly cloudy day, spent outdoors but under the shade of a large sun parasol. I regretted my decision to leave my P20 Pro at home based on the weather forecast, and resolved to reapply my Nivea factor 30 sunscreen every 3 hours from now on.
