Hello everyone! I arrived home from my trip to Swedish Lapland early this morning. Overall the trip went very well. It was a nice break and I am happy to be back in Oslo. I decided for my blog that I would write an overview post of the trip and then compose one separate post for each day. At this point I have all my pictures up on facebook from the trip so feel free to check them out whenever, and I will be sure to add pictures to the posts about the specific days.
The one thing that struck me most about the trip was how beautiful everything was. The scenery up there is absolutely stunning. Nothing compares. It's very frustrating actually trying to take pictures because you just can't capture something like that. On the way home I was perfectly content for about three hours just staring out the window. Most of the drive was made along winding, snow-covered roads. Everywhere you looked there were pine trees as far as the eye could see. It was mostly hilly terrain, with some flat areas of course and some gorgeous mountainous areas, as well. On the way home I saw the most vibrant sunset I have ever seen, and it seemed to last for such a long time. Even after it was gone there was a greenish patch where the sun used to be set against the deep blue backdrop of the night sky. Simply incredible. That's all I can say.
The trip there and back was somewhere around 18 hours. Each way we left around 3 in the afternoon, so a good chunk of the travel time was spent sleeping. Neither trip seemed awfully long, just not very comfortable. Our tour guide rode up with us. She was from Latvia, and her name was "Sanna" (not sure about spelling). She was very enthusiastic and peppy, which was good except sometimes I felt like she was talking to us like we were children. Overall she did a good job, though. Our bus drivers were Swedish and they both had good senses of humor.
The first town we stayed in was Kiruna, known for the largest iron ore mine in the world. I took a tour of the mine, though not everyone did. The interesting thing about Kiruna is that the town has to be moved in the next few decades because the mining has caused a crack to form that is slowly getting closer to the town itself. Abisko, the next town was smaller and set on a very large lake where I've heard is a great place to see Northern Lights (we didn't see any on our trip). Finally we ended up in Jokk Mokk, another fairly small town where we stayed at a camping center.
The highlights of the trip: Kiruna mine tour, meeting a Sami man and his son who spoke with us and allowed us to feed their reindeer, a BBQ in a Sami tent, a traditional wood-heated sauna followed by running outside in the snow, the Ice Hotel, and the Sami Heritage museum tour.
We were also supposed to take a day trip to Narvik which is a town in Norway that played a role in WWII (basically the reason the Germans invaded Norway). However, the trip to Narvik was iffy from the get go because they often close the roads because of weather. While the roads were not closed, we ended up turning around and going back to Abisko because the weather we would be driving into was much worse than what we were experiencing. That day was not a complete bust though. Sarah and I took a very nice walk and later we had time to spend in the Sauna.
Overall it was a very nice trip. I would have liked a little less downtime and some more exciting activities. Not seeing the Northern Lights was a disappointment. Each night we went out it was quite foggy and the moon was bright, not to mention the activity of the lights was labeled as "quiet," a 1 on a scale of 9. So we did not have the right conditions to see them.
One surprise was how nice the weather was when we were there. I was expecting it to be very cold when we were there and there were only a couple days that got past -10. There were even some days that got up to 0! We also didn't experience a ton of precipitation. Overall, besides being cloudy when we wanted to see the northern lights, the weather was very agreeable.
This ended up being quite a bit longer than I had originally imagined. I hope you will look forward to my next posts outlining each day in Lapland :)
The one thing that struck me most about the trip was how beautiful everything was. The scenery up there is absolutely stunning. Nothing compares. It's very frustrating actually trying to take pictures because you just can't capture something like that. On the way home I was perfectly content for about three hours just staring out the window. Most of the drive was made along winding, snow-covered roads. Everywhere you looked there were pine trees as far as the eye could see. It was mostly hilly terrain, with some flat areas of course and some gorgeous mountainous areas, as well. On the way home I saw the most vibrant sunset I have ever seen, and it seemed to last for such a long time. Even after it was gone there was a greenish patch where the sun used to be set against the deep blue backdrop of the night sky. Simply incredible. That's all I can say.
The trip there and back was somewhere around 18 hours. Each way we left around 3 in the afternoon, so a good chunk of the travel time was spent sleeping. Neither trip seemed awfully long, just not very comfortable. Our tour guide rode up with us. She was from Latvia, and her name was "Sanna" (not sure about spelling). She was very enthusiastic and peppy, which was good except sometimes I felt like she was talking to us like we were children. Overall she did a good job, though. Our bus drivers were Swedish and they both had good senses of humor.
The first town we stayed in was Kiruna, known for the largest iron ore mine in the world. I took a tour of the mine, though not everyone did. The interesting thing about Kiruna is that the town has to be moved in the next few decades because the mining has caused a crack to form that is slowly getting closer to the town itself. Abisko, the next town was smaller and set on a very large lake where I've heard is a great place to see Northern Lights (we didn't see any on our trip). Finally we ended up in Jokk Mokk, another fairly small town where we stayed at a camping center.
The highlights of the trip: Kiruna mine tour, meeting a Sami man and his son who spoke with us and allowed us to feed their reindeer, a BBQ in a Sami tent, a traditional wood-heated sauna followed by running outside in the snow, the Ice Hotel, and the Sami Heritage museum tour.
We were also supposed to take a day trip to Narvik which is a town in Norway that played a role in WWII (basically the reason the Germans invaded Norway). However, the trip to Narvik was iffy from the get go because they often close the roads because of weather. While the roads were not closed, we ended up turning around and going back to Abisko because the weather we would be driving into was much worse than what we were experiencing. That day was not a complete bust though. Sarah and I took a very nice walk and later we had time to spend in the Sauna.
Overall it was a very nice trip. I would have liked a little less downtime and some more exciting activities. Not seeing the Northern Lights was a disappointment. Each night we went out it was quite foggy and the moon was bright, not to mention the activity of the lights was labeled as "quiet," a 1 on a scale of 9. So we did not have the right conditions to see them.
One surprise was how nice the weather was when we were there. I was expecting it to be very cold when we were there and there were only a couple days that got past -10. There were even some days that got up to 0! We also didn't experience a ton of precipitation. Overall, besides being cloudy when we wanted to see the northern lights, the weather was very agreeable.
This ended up being quite a bit longer than I had originally imagined. I hope you will look forward to my next posts outlining each day in Lapland :)
Being a traveller, I noticed through my journey that lapland trips are one of the most extravagant, exclusive and enjoyable journey where we could observe several romantic and sensational destinations to spend plenty of duration with out loved ones.
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