2015-02-08 Luleå
Little shopping street, looks like GBG but smaller. Ice beaver with slide, tiny park. Crazy pizza restaurant. Walk on frozen harbour, ice skaters, dogs, ships. Big sleep, reality shows. No restaurant open, not even exotic or big boy. Cup a noodle in coop.
2015-02-09 Luleå/Gällivare
Pavement in front of our window is fenced off and workers shovel snow from the roof. Complaining about warm weather, hotel man recommends Gällivare. Walk to train station and sit in hot train. Reach hostel, very nice. Walk around town. Have halloumiburger, then walk through the dark to the ski slope to see some northern lights. Treacherous snow, sometimes thigh deep! Local kids in big cars doing drifting stuff. No northern lights, but we play with our head lamps and long exposure. Walk back around 11 pm.
2015-02-10 Kiruna
Rent cross country skis in space station camping lodge. Ask if we can keep them for longer (very enthusiastic). Don’t find right track, too much downhill. Reach a frozen lake and cross it. Find right track finally. Have to walk up the hill in the end, very hot!! Stop to eat a couple of scoops of snow, walk further. Decide to give back the skis :( back to hostel, cook ramen and eat semla, then mine tour. Bus goes underground, deep down, 700m, but scary. Guide says in case of fire we’d go further down. Tour very interesting, but propaganda. Lots of big machines, interesting information. 10 trains every day to Narvik. Quiet evening. We get best pizza in town (though later we find several flyers claiming the same thing), which is a bit disappointing. Watch a bit of dota. Set alarm to wake up for detonation shaking, we even place a glass of water to observe it Jurassic park style. But too confused when alarm rings and fall asleep again.
2015-02-11 Kiruna
Wake up to text from SJ saying train from Abisko to Narvik will be cancelled. More true is that train from Kiruna to Abisko is cancelled. Pack our stuff, walk to train station, eat half a semla, cancel Abisko hostel, go back to Kiruna hostel. We can have the room one more night. Have a nice brunch, then go for a walk. Find snow sculptures and ice slide. Bum hurts a bit but we slide several times to get a good shot. Go to nice cafe to have a tea.
Go home, eat pasta, play Netrunner, sleep badly. No shaking in the night, only aurora alarm from Swiss guy.
2015-02-12 Kiruna/Abisko
Phone Abisko Hostel if room is still free, take train. Platform is covered in a metre of snow, we’re the first ones to get off since the big snowfall. Walk to hostel, check in, walk down to lake. Very windy! Make silly snow videos, go shopping in godisfabriken and very well stocked coop. Eat tomato soup, have a nap and shower, then walk to only bar/restaurant in town to have a (terrible) veggie burger and watch Luleå play Skellefteå in ice hockey. We leave in the middle because the aurora forecast looks a bit promising. Fetch camera stuff and headlamps, walk behind hostel to dark spot. Star photos and suddenly spot a glimpse of aurora. We’re to cold, walk back, read in bed and watch something. Very good sleep, despite the wind howling outside.
2015-02-13 Abisko/Narvik/Tromsø
Sunshine and calm outside. Breakfast and then check out. Walk down to lake again, clouds over in a matter of minutes and back to blue. Weather changes here extremely rapidly. Lapporten is beautiful. Snow is like a valley of thick fog with some mountains sticking out. It’s very peaceful down there until the wind picks up again. Walk back to hostel, are promised to get our money back from the night before, hunt down food bag and take train to Narvik.
Wait in Björkliden (?) for almost an hour for some iron train, train conductor says we’ll probably not catch the bus to Narvik. Though whole journey is quite nice. The amount of snow is astonishing. Not much along the way except some houses and an abandoned ski lift. In Narvik the bus arrives but avalanche on the way. Maybe we’ll have to sleep in some tiny Norwegian village on the way. View from the bus is stunning.
We drive along fjords on snowy roads, mountain cliffs straight up from the road. Can’t really enjoy it though because my mind plays endless clips of how we could have various terrible accidents that all lead to a cruel end in icy fjord water. Norwegian houses are lovely, though energy intensive;/each one has at least 4 bright lamps on the outside of the house. Looks incredibly cosy, especially when everything is covered in thick snow. 5 quiet hours later we reach Tromsø. Looks very pretty. Cute houses. Heated pavements - the first stony ground I’ve seen in a week. Hostel is maritime themed and the view from the room is amazing; directly at the fjord with a view to the mountain where the cable car goes up. Ramen -again - and then bed.
2015-02-14 Tromsø
Shower situation could be better. Only one bathroom for 4 2-bed-rooms, so lots of waiting. Walk to the next supermarket and buy breakfast. Norway seems to be a much less vegetarian friendly place than Sweden. Weather looks partly promising: above us is a big patch of bright blue, though to the north is a wall of white low hanging clouds and to the south the fjord is blocked off by dark blue clouds. We walk to the town centre and visit the Perspektiv museum. Very nice photo gallery and free! Current exhibitions show the daily life of a Norwegian priest who travels from remote island to remote island, religion in Norway and old photographs of Tromsø. After that Polar museum. It’s nice but needs more English translations. Also, seal hunting in more detail than I would’ve ever wanted to know. Part about the discovery of Svalbard, Amundsen and Nansen is very interesting. Amundsen is a massive national hero, at least 4 massive statues of him (or his head) in the town centre. He left from Tromsø on a rescue party and never returned.
After the polar museum and a Börek, we take the cable car up the mountain for a nice view over Tromsø. Cable car is slightly terrifying, but it only takes 4 minutes to go up. Weather has completely changed by the time we arrive on the top. We take some photos of the breathtaking view down before the clouds close in. Walk around a bit, then decide to have hot chocolate and ice cream in the café. Then down, back to hostel, it’s dark already. Later we try to find a table in a restaurant on Valentines day evening. Surprisingly, we get one at an Indian place. After that Ølhallen, the oldest pub in Tromsø. They sell beer in the different sizes and have an astonishing selection. We drink several little ones: 0.17L for 45 NOK. I’m dreaming of the cheap beer in Sweden.
2015-02-15 Tromsø/GBG
Not much time before we need to go to the airport. Quick breakfast and then bus to the airport. It disappears into an innocent looking tunnel, which turns out to be a crazy underground road system with intersections and different directions and even an underground roundabout (undergroundabout?). 10 minutes drive to small airport. The pizza hut there has elk pizza. Flight is quiet and view is gorgeous; white fjords and mountains. Duncan sleeps. Oslo is disappointing after a week of whiteness. Dirty and everything under construction. Pizza makes us happier, walk along main boulevard to palace, sit on cold bench in empty park. Train ride back is nice, Duncan is happy about dogs in the carriage. Gothenburg is already asleep when we come back. Such a nice journey.