“ It’ s miles from anywhere and is desperately hard to get to but Balestrand – and the Kviknes Hotel in particular – is just magnificent”
TRAVEL
Visit Oslo and the Nobel Peace Center should be essential viewing for anyone with a sense of history. Although Alfred Nobel was Swedish and settled four of his prizes in his home country, he decided that the prize for peace – initially one of the least controversial of his awards but how times have changed! – should be hosted in neighbouring Norway.
Staff at the centre are unsure why he made such a division but are delighted he did. If you want to see and understand how much our world has changed over the past 100 or so years, there can be fewer better places to start. The building itself, opened in 2005, is relatively modest – there are a few rooms spread over two floors – but the impact it has on the visitor will last for many a year.
“ It’ s miles from anywhere and is desperately hard to get to but Balestrand – and the Kviknes Hotel in particular – is just magnificent”
Walking around this inspiring building, with pictures of the likes of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu hanging on the wall, was indeed one of many highlights of a five-day jaunt across the southern tip of this Nordic country. But before we go back to the beginning, let me give you some ammunition for the weekly pub quiz. Who is the only person to have turned down the Nobel Prize for Peace? It was in 1973 when the prize was jointly awarded to Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese politician, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for their work negotiating a ceasefire in the Vietnam war. Tho said that, at that time, there was no ceasefire so he refused the award.( That should be worth a point or two at your local …) R
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