(THE LOCAL) The Storskog border station — just two hours drive from the Arctic City of Murmansk in Russia’s far north — is Norway’s only legal border crossing with Russia.
According to border agreements, it is illegal either to cross the border on foot or to give someone without papers a lift, a problem Syrian refugees have sidestepped by using bicycles.
“It is not news to us that tourists cross the border on bicycles, but recently we’ve also started to see some asylum seekers coming by bicycle,” Gøran Stenseth, one of the border officials, told the local Sør-Varanger Avis newspaper.
