Iguana on my Journal

Februrary 2020

2020-08-20T18:34:59Z

Surprise Tromsø! There were reindeer to be raced, Emily's birthday to be celebrated, and annual leave carry-over to be used up, and that meant an unexpected third trip to the arctic before Emily was due to finish her year's contract out there. In addition to those flights, I also had Flight, a multi-sensory experience in a shipping container in Nottingham. On the 29 Feb I spend an evening with Samathy, Lex, and one of Samathy's friends at the board game café, which I think was the last time I met up with any friends or family.

Tromsø 3: Weekend 1 (Reindeer racing)

I spent two weekends in Tromsø and it was great to arrive again having previously thought I might not see the place again. On the first weekend I made the most of not having seen Tromsø town itself, as we visited a festival being held on and around the high street. On Saturday we we there to buy tickets for Sunday's reindeer racing, but there was a lassooing competition being held too which was fun to watch.

Step one rung back each successful throw; first person to the back wins.

We did a bit of shopping, including getting me a nice mustard yellow blanket to take home, then returned the next day for the reindeer racing. The snow along the high street was actually artificially generated this year because the normal layer of snow and ice had melted early, and we watched the reindeer being led up to the start line of the 200-metre-or-so run.

I nearly got licked. They were quite playful!

The races themselves happened very quickly. We were near the start line and the reindeer were so fast! A couple of races ended with one or both of the ... jockeys? ... falling over, at which point the reindeer just continued trotting along without them.

After the races we walked across the tall long bridge from Trsomø to the mainland to see the Arctic Cathedral in some spare time before going to the cinema to watch a nature documentary-film Emily wanted to see featuring a young reindeer. It was a cute film and I followed it well enough without being able to understand any of the Norwegian narrator!

In the evening we walked up Nattmålstinden; no aurora tonight.

Tromsø 3: the week (Trehørningen, reindeer, Åsfjellet, birthday cake)

On Monday we went into the shopping centre outside town for bubble tea. I tried on a few bits of clothing, and bought a dress! (In fact, I think Emily may have bought it for me.)

ACTION SHOT

On Tuesday we climbed Trehørningen and it was very moody

On the way back down we saw a lone reindeer walking along parallel to us. We sat down and watched it for a while. I just absolutely love coming across wild animals in nature.

On Wednesday it was Åsfjellet. It even snowed a bit, and we got a double rainbow!

RIGHT ACROSS THE FJORD

The snow in Tromsø was also at near-record highs.

In the evening Emily made me a cake, having heard that my parents hadn't made me a birthday cake when I stayed with them for Christmas and my birthday. It was very tasty! Tim also arrived in the evening, I think, in time for Emily's birthday the next day.

Tromsø 3: Emily's arctic sea swim birthday

For Emily's birthday we drove to Sommarøy, which I'd last visited in summer, to take a short swim in the sea.

We climbed the nearby hill to get nice and warm, then I changed into my brand new swimwear before Emily drove us across the bridge and parked at the spot.

The tide was fully in to make it easier to dunk ourselves in without a long, shallow slope into the water. The water itself was icy (there was literally ice over inlets with calm water) and I did shriek quite loudly as I submerged myself (keeping my head above water).

I took about ten strokes, then got out as fast as I could, stripped off, and dried myself as fast as I could. Fortunately there wasn't much passing traffic, though we did get a honk of appreciation from one car passing by!

When we got back, we celebrated by making Emily's birthday cake, a chocolate and chocolate mousse afair.

I don't have any record of what we did on Friday 14th, which probably means the weather was too bad to go out. We did play some rounds of Ticket to Ride throughout the holiday though, so I suspect that featured.

Tromsø 3: Weekend 2 (Aurorae at Nattmåls, and an escape room)

On Saturday we went to Nattmåls in questionable weather in the hope of a gap in the clouds and some aurora. The clouds did clear, and we saw some faint ones while we were on the hill, but otherwise it appeared to be a bust. I remember being quite cold and shivery having ended up with wet trousers from walking through deep snow, but just as we were taking off our snowshoes at the car to go home, the sky awakened and we spent a good half-hour enjoying the aurorae and forgetting that my tripod was right inside the car we were trying to balance our cameras on, oops!

As such, this was the only good shot I got, but the ribbons were really shimmering, and passing over us at a casual speed, and it was wonderful.

On my final full day in Tromsø we did the final escape room at the northernmost escape room in the world. My write-up on Without A Padlock is here, and at the time of writing (August 2020 because I am terrible at keeping up) it's the most recent escape room I've done because waves hands all of this.

I flew home the next day, into Luton airport for the first time, which wasn't as bad as I had feared! I did end up waiting a long time at the railway station, because I'd massively overestimated how long it would take to get out the airport when booking my ticket, but ther was a cafe selling hot chocolate, so it worked out.

Darkfield's Flight

In a shipping container at Lakeside Arts in Nottingham, I attended Flight, a replica of the interior of a plane made by ... entertainment company? art group?.. Darkfield. I went into this fairly blind; it sounded interesting and who wouldn't want to spend 30 minutes inside a shipping container that makes noises at you? Not me, Samathy or Lex, who came along, that's for sure.

It was a little abstract inside but the general gist was that (spoilers for the rest of the paragraph) you took your seat, put on noise-cancelling headphones that played the audio, and then the plane "takes off" more-or-less as normal. Things get a bit weird, and various things go wrong that seem like they would lead to a crash. A voice whispers in your ear about the universe splitting in two every time someone makes a choice, and you leave the plane feeling like you were the lucky version of you that survived all the events. Schrodinger's Cat was mentioned.

I have Opinions about the use of the latter in pseudoscientific environments because the artist ususally misinterprets it, and this did indeed happen here. That aside, the experience was interesting, a little bewildering, and somewhat underwhelming.

Afterwards we went to see Sonic the Hedgehog at the cinema, which was interesting, a little bewildering, and somewhat underwhelming.

comments

December 2019

2020-07-26T20:52:44Z

In December I had Sean and Lexie stay over at mine for Samathy's birthday weekend; her partner Lex had arranged for us to surprise her by turning up on her doorstep on the day. It was great to see everyone! We played some board games (including the Star Trek VHS game) and went out for dinner in the evening. The next weekend, I flew out to Tromsø for my second visit.

Tromsø 2: Polar Night

I'd seen the summer solstice in my previous visit; this time I was there for the winter solstice, during polar night when the sun never rises.

The difference was stark; vivid green hills and blue skies replaced with snow absolutely everywhere (even covering the roads) and lit up with sodium lights. This was the view from Varden at midday on the 18th:

Saturday - Nattmålsfjellet

I arrived on the 14th, though I snoozed through most of the day because I hadn't quite put together when I booked the flights that I would need to be at the airport at 0400, which even makes getting to check-in from one of Gatwick's hotels a challenge! In the evening we went for a walk up to Nattmålsfjellet. With the chance to see the Northern Lights this trip, I wanted to make sure I was out and about around the time they would peak, though we didn't see any this evening. According to Emily I was drunk with tiredness too, so perhaps just as well!

Nattmåls in the dark

Sunday - Åsfjellet

The next day, we went out for a longer walk to the top of Åsfjellet

Comparing this with my summer photos is bizarre

Angel action shot!

One of my favourite shots of the holiday

Nearly sunrise, but never quite getting there.

I got a little unnerved on the way back down; our tracks were covered by snow, and what was an easy bit of navigation in the light was a lot more tricky as the light quickly waned. But we found our snow angels, and followed some arctic hare tracks back down the hill. When I was happy I knew where I was, I cheered up quite a bit and did some grippy skiing in my snow shoes.

The Week

I was working remotely during the week, since although it's dark enough for aurorae most of the day, the physics of the auroral oval mean that unless there's a huge solar storm (and we're currently at the nadir of the sun's 11-year cycle, so that's unlikely) the best time to see the lights is a couple of hours either side of around 2200. It was cloudy almost every day during the week, anyway!

I did have time during my lunch break to walk up to Varden and back, and stand by the radar dish at the top, looking down at Tromsø.

The clouds cleared on Thursday night and so we went to Nattmåls again. We got a tiny amount of activity, which I was just about picking up in greyscale, but Emily says she saw green (and she has better night colour vision than me). My camera picked it up too.

Saturday - Rismålhøgda

On Saturday Tim joined us and, despite having the same time flight as me, he wasn't dead on his feet, so we walked up Rismålhøgda. I did a lot of zoomies down the hill. It was fun and slightly unnerved Emily.

In the evening we had traditional home-made rømmegrøt, which is rice pudding with cinnamon.

I bought some pudding rice when I got home, intending to make some, then totally forgot. As it happens I had homemade rice pudding (with nutmeg though) the evening I wrote this, wondering what the heck I'd bought pudding rice for in the past. (The rømmegrøt was nicer.)

Sunday - Trehørningen

After a walk up to Varden in the morning, we played three escape rooms after lunch! Arctic Escape holds the title for the world's northernmost escape rooms, so we couldn't pass them up. And they were all really good too! I've reviewed them on my escape room blog here.

By coincidence I finished off the winter visit with the same hike as when I visited in the summer, to the top of Trehørningen and back. This was a tougher climb than expected towards the top, as the snow had been refrozen to quite a hard slippery surface. Coming back down was worse but I don't remember anyone slipping too badly.

I flew back the next day and, expecting this to be my last trip to Tromø, at least for the foreseeable future, felt a profound sense of sadness as the plane took off. Once again the Arctic has been very special for me.

Rest of December

I actually travelled back to my parents rather than home from Tromsø, spending the night in a Gatwick hotel before the train journey, arriving in Budleigh mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve, and I stayed there until the day after my birthday. For my birthday my parents organised a trip to a birds of prey experience where I got to hold a number of big birds. I also got a reference book I asked for, for organising a vegetable plot.

comments

Midnight Sun 2019: Part 2

2019-11-13T20:45:08Z

For a four-day weekend at the end of my trip to Norway, we left the country several times, in part thanks to running around Treriksrøysa several times, but also for a trip to Abisko and Kiruna in Sweden.

(← Part 1)

Friday - Treriksrøysa

Treriksrøysa/Treriksröset/Kolmen valtakunnan rajapyykki is the Three-Country Cairn at the tripoint of Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the 12 kilometer walk from parking in Finland is really beautiful. We saw lots of reindeer roaming around, especially on the way back, and running around the concrete cairn, which is surrounded by a board walk on a lake, was good fun too.

As the sun got lower (I nearly wrote "as the sun was setting" but that does not happen) we got some beautiful nacreous clouds with pastel colours around the edges that my camera couldn't really do justice to:

Saturday - Rismålhøgda (Ringvassøya) and Trehørningen (Kvaløya)

I wrote in my previous entry that I thought Kvaløya was the northernmost point I went to, but the walk we did on Ringvassøya beats it by a couple of hundred metres, having it looked it up.

We drove through a tunnel from Kvaløya to Ringvassøya and took a steep walk up a shrubby hillside to the top where there was a small lake between some peaks. We had fantastic views of the fjords.

Back through the eerie tunnel (and yes, I did remember to reset the setting afterwards this time!)

South to one of the western arms of Kvaløya to climb Trehørningen, which started off with some beautiful rainbows but turned into quite a wet walk in the end, with the peak blasting us with wet winds coming straight from out at sea. It was a bracing final walk in Norway!

Sunday - Abisko

We had decided to take an overnight trip to Kiruna in northern Sweden, since Emily wanted to do the Midnattsol trail there, and I had unfinished business with the Kiruna Mine Tour, having narrowly missed being promoted from the reserve list when I last visited. (It worked out; instead I saw a stunning nacreous cloud which are apparently quite rare.

It's a long drive to Kiruna from Tromsø, with a route skimming past Narvik and then running parallel to the LKAB railway line for most of the rest of the way. What I hadn't expected was how beautiful the mountain road that ran from Narvik to the Norway/Sweden border would be.

Apparently mountain lodges are very common on the Norway side around here, and it's not difficult to see why.

Soon we were driving alongside the lake Torneträsk, which we had seen (partly) frozen over from the top of the Abisko tourist cable car a few years before, and we saw the familiar Lapporten valley straight ahead of us.

We decided to stop at Abisko to use the loo and see what the area was like in summer. It turned out to be absolutely stunning! We ended up staying longer than we intended, just wandering around the nature walks, looking out over the river, and hiking the tiniest amount of Kungsleden.

Monday - Kiruna

Eventually we drove on to Kiruna, which was a surreal experience because, as promised, some of the town had been relocated in the meantime! Of particular note was the old town hall was part-way demolished, with its steampunky clock tower relocated to the new, frankly, worse, building across town. The church was still around, as was LKAB's Gullriset accomodation, which we were staying in.

Kiruna has a midnight sun walk which Emily had been wanting to do, so we set off on that in the late evening on Sunday. From the top of the hill we could see the satellite dish of the European Space Agency's Kiruna station, and the sun got noticeably lower in the sky than in Tromsø.

The route was somewhat heavily interrupted by the construction works of the re-routed E10 motorway, which was being built as an overpass across the trail, and severely disrupted the second half of the walk back from the hilltop. We got quite lost, especially since Google Maps and even Openstreetmap were having trouble keeping up with all the changes here!

We got back to Gullriset at around 2am on Monday. Gullriset is close enough to the mines to hear the nightly drill blasting, though we didn't hear any when we stayed in the same lodgings in 2017. However, exhausted as I was and falling asleep with my earplugs in (which don't block much bass anyway), I did indeed feel a rumble, and managed to remember it as I fell asleep. (Emily was still up and heard it too. The next day we were both a little nervous to mention it in case the other hadn't.) Pretty exciting to hear the ground being blasted out from nearly underneath you!

The next day we were booked on the LKAB mine tour, and just about made it after struggling to find parking because, you know, Kiruna's being dug up, and the advertised parking was very not available. We got the coach down into the mines, and had a (very) short walk in the dark while seeing some huge machinery. It was a good enough tour, though a little heavy on the PR from the mining company. At the end we got to help ourselves to some iron pellets and a magnetic core section, which made it all worth it!

So with Kiruna finally "done", we got back in the car and started the drive back to Tromsø. We stopped a few times to let one of the extremely long LKAB trains full of iron pellets pass, then drove back past them, as the speed limit was a little faster than the train tended to go, playing Flight of the Valkyries.

And, gosh, aside from a few strolls along some mountain trails on the way back to the border, that was my last full day in the arctic. Emily drove me back to Tromsø airport the next day and I was back in the UK by evening of the 2 July, already looking forward to going back!

comments

Midnight Sun 2019: Part 1

2019-10-30T21:26:01Z

I spent a week and a half in June within the arctic circle, staying with Emily on the island of Tromsø, Norway. I saw the sun at midnight, and climbed many beautiful hills.

Tromsøya

Tromsøya is the principal island of Tromsø, with a bridge and tunnel connecting it to Norway's mainland. Emily's place, like most of the areas on the island, is part-way up a hill, giving it fantastic views of the fjords and mountains behind it, with the occasional ship passing under the long high bridge.

Thursday - Sørtinden (Kvaløya)

I arrived at Tromsø airport at nearly ten in the evening, not that you would be able to tell from the sun, given that almost everywhere above the arctic circle was enjoying midnight sun this week - I had arrived the day before the summer solstice.

We went for a short hike so I could see the sun at midnight, picking Sørtinden on the island of Kvaløya. There was still snow on the ground from the last snowfall earlier in the year, and there was beautiful golden light everywhere.

It was a very worthwhile hike as it turned out, as the clouds came in the next day and rather stuck around, so the remaining nights were all grey, which was probably a good thing for my sleep patterns!

Friday - a beach on Kvaløya

I was working remotely during the day, so after Emily got back from work we drove over to Kvaløya again to pick some flowers for midsummer's day.

I saw some reindeer in a field today, some of the only wildlife that happened to be around. There are often moose around as well, but I wasn't lucky enough for that – though I'd seen wild moose during my last trip to the arctic when I visited Kiruna in Sweden.

I didn't make a note of which beach we ended up stopping in, but it's likely the northernmost point I've been to (Svalbard is now On The List) and it had some pretty flowers growing alongside it.

Saturday - Nattmålsfjellet (Kvaløya)

Kvaløya again (it's a big island!) and this time to Nattmålsfjellet, a peak with a short walk up from a road that gets closed during winter.

It was a slightly damp day but the view from the top was still pretty nice!

There were also some pretty flowers and everywhere was pretty lush for the height of summer.

Sunday - Sommarøy and Hillesøya

I like the name "Hillesøya", literally "hill island". It's a hill… on an island. It's not the tallest peak around, but it was a heck of a climb, even with the thick rope that extended down most of the southern side. On the way down we took the more leisurely northern route, which had stunning views of the emerald sea below.

Hillesøya is on the far side of neighbouring island Sommarøy, which the area is usually referred to by. On the way we climbed Ørnfløya which gave a great view of Sommarøy and Hillesøya.

In the distance, rising from the water, is the jagged mountain island Håja, which inspired the design of the Arctic Cathedral in Tromsø.

On the drive back it was very still, and I got this rather lovely photo of a set of houses on the fjord:

Monday - Brosmetinden (Kvaløya)

For some reason I don't have any photos of today; I imagine I probably forgot my camera or something equally silly. Brosmetinden was a reasonably straightforward hike from a small carpark at the end of a narrow track, across a flat bit of what would probably be incredibly marshy land in spring, and up the side of a hill that turned into something of a ridge. Plenty of photo opportunities for people daft enough to sit onthe edge – we only saw one person doing this! (Then again, we only saw one group, making the daft rate pretty high.)

Tuesday - Fløya (Fastlandet)

On Tuesday after work we drove to the mainland, in part via one of the several tunnels running under Tromsøya's hilltops, including one containing two roundabouts, which was quite a novelty for me!

On Tromsø mainland (fastlandet) is Sherpatrappa, a stone staircase up the side of Fløya, laid by Nepalese workers to prevent erosion of the popular route. There is also a cable car up the side, but Sherpatrappa goes through some lovely wooded areas and then out above the tree line almost immediately into snow and great views.

Getting to the peak was also pretty snowy in places, but at this point the snow was pretty well compressed so it wasn't too arduous, especially compared to the steep climb up the steps!

We took a different, more gentle route down, which went alongside some beautiful brooks and through more lush woodland.

No hike on Wedsnesday, just a nice evening in, with some oven pizza if I recall correctly!

Thursday - Åsfjellet (Fastlandet)

Another hike on the mainland, this time to Åsfjellet, on what I think was the most beautiful walk of the trip.

Some idiot had been trying to take photos from a moving car in a tunnel and had turned the ISO of the camera up to 12800 (that's twelve thousand eight hundred) and forgotten to reset it afterwards, so, well done me. We'll call it an inadvertant instagram filter!

(Part 2 →)

comments

Kiruna 2017: Part 2

2017-09-03T11:56:09Z

I spent ten days straddling January and February in one of Europe's most remote areas in northern Sweden, partly to attend Umeå University's Arctic Science course, which is a fantastic 6-week course with a 4-day in-situ component in the town of Kiruna. For the other six days I took the opportunity to have a short holiday!

Staying in a condemned building

The course provided us with subsidised accomodation, which was great. It was within the next-up area to be demolished as part of the town move, so while this hotel was still in normal shape, it was quite exciting.

I don't have a photo of the place but here is some shop-bought prinsesstårta instead.

The first night we were there we had an amazing Aurora display above the hotel (thanks to Emily for waking me up!) where I saw red and green shimmering bands across the sky.

Abisko

While most of the course was in the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) campus in Kiruna and was the usual university lecture fare, on one day we took a trip out to Abisko where there was often less cloud than in Kiruna, in order to hopefully get some aurora sightings in the evening.

The first thing we did was use the ski lift to the Tourist Station up one of the nearby mountains. This was fun and we got to see sunset along with great views of the nearby lake Torneträsk, which had not frozen over this winter for the first time our course coordinator Carol had ever seen (global warming is skewed towards the poles).

When we got back down the mountain it was properly dark and we were lucky; a green aurora arrived during our quite lengthy walk to a lecture.

The Ice Hotel

The next day we had a day trip to Jukkasjärvi, the town in which ICEHOTEL is situated, for a tour of the facilities. (It was educational because we watched a promo vid of how they made it beforehand!)

The hotel is rebuilt every year, except for a new section which is being kept in basically a large cool box, and there are two tiers of room, the "basic" design where all the rooms are roughly the same, and the top tier, where a different artist has designed and sculpted each room. During the day the rooms are open to tourists. I'm not sure how they decide who gets which room, because the rooms vary wildly in taste.

Check out this merman's abs; he sure is.

And who doesn't want to be stared at unblinkingly by the damned while they sleep?

My favourite was in the cool box section, which had a bit more in the way of lighting effects; here's one that looked a bit like the 2006 TARDIS:

Feeding reindeer

With a bit of free time, we visited the Sami museum, which was very interesting and worth remembering that Europe too had (has) an indiginous people that were treated badly by newcomers. We paid for some lichen to feed the reindeer there, which was definitely worth doing. They were adorable.

We made an igloo!

The day the course finished we whisked ourselves off to Kiruna Husky's igloo-building experience, which was fantastic. The guides gave us the instructions we needed and then left us to it, so we really felt we'd done the whole thing ourselves.

To build an igloo you will need:

* Snow
* Shovels
* Plenty of sticks

The idea is to build a dome wide enough for yourself to sleep in. The snow you dig up is quite light and fluffy, so periodically you have to have a good ol' stamp on the top of the dome to flatten it, then continue.

When compacted, the snow undergoes a structural change, making it very strong. Before it gets too strong, you must drive several sticks about 30cm into the dome, which is how you know how thick the walls are when you are digging it out later.

Our guide provided us with thermoses of hot drink, firewood, and, later, bedding, and helped us hollow out the dome as it get getting quite late by the time it was complete.

A couple of good jumps on top of the quinzee confirmed the snow had set, and we were ready to sleep!

The view from inside was quite pretty in the morning.

I got claustrophic during the night and ended up sleeping in the equipment room, but Emily slept pretty well. ("It was nice and warm!")

Finally, in the morning, it made a good slide.

The quinzee would stay there, along with previous people's homemade hotel rooms, until the snow melts in the summer.

I passed!

A few months later, this letter from Umea University arrived in the post.

I passed with distinction!

comments

Kiruna 2017: Part 1

2017-07-16T21:54:40Z

Sleeping in planes

Emily had volunteered as a teaching assistant since she had done the course in the past and so we flew out together via Stockholm, staying in the airport's Jumbo Hotel, a converted 747. Each room was numbered 7xx, had bunk beds, and used a section of overhead luggage storage in place of a cupboard.

It was comfy and surprisingly quiet!

We arrived in Kiruna the next morning on a somewhat more modest aircraft. Kiruna airport is tiny, and everything except the main runway was covered in snow, even with the temperatures considerably above average (ie, above zero) for the first few days we arrived.

Kiruna

Kiruna itself is famous for being the town that is relocating itself due to it being undermined by the nearby iron ore works. While it's not a case of moving all the houses on the back of lorries -- instead, old houses are being compulsory-bought and demolished with new homes being built on the far side of the town -- it does mean that some landmarks are disappearing, amongst them the striking town hall and Kiruna Church.

The town itself is large, though the centre of town is really just a cluster of shops around a square near the town hall and bus depot. We stayed in a beautiful B&B called 68 Degrees, whose hosts were friendly and helpful, and really spoiled us for breakfast.

In one of the town's parks was a snow sculpturing competition, with entrants from various countries. Unfortunately we never found out who won but we got to vote at least!

Nacreous Clouds

Our first trip was a snow-shoeing outing to attempt to see the aurora (wait for it) but we only saw the faintest of faint glows that evening. However, the next day we were wondering through the park when we spotted the most stunning clouds. They were coloured in pastel rainbows and morphed slowly between streamlined shapes; first a fish, then bird, then a whale.

These were nacreous clouds, particularly high (stratospheric) clouds that only occur at high latitudes. Our B&B hosts told us they were the best ones they'd seen in the ten years they'd lived in Kiruna and were much rarer than the aurora.

Moose on horseback

We went out on Icelandic ponies as part of a elk-spotting group, which ended up a little underwhelming since, although there were elk around, we ended up in a horsey queue to see them, and at one point the ponies freaked out and ran off with us!

After we got back we went out on our own on foot and retraced our steps to where some moose had crossed the track in front of the front of the pony queue. The tracks were quite clear -- the snow was knee deep -- and we lucked out: first we saw a depression in the snow where the animals had taken a short nap, and after that we came across two of them very nearby.

Wilderness Camp

The next day we went to the excellent Taube Activity site to stay for the night. The site itself is a small collection of wood huts, including the traditional Sami huts for sleeping in. We were lucky enough to be one of only three couples on the camp; a class load of schoolchildren arrived the day we left. The idea behind the activity centre is that people staying chop their own firewood (from a log store) and fetch their own drinking water from the ice-covered river Torne the site sits on the banks of. On top of that, dinner and breakfast is provided as well as free use of any of the activity equipment there, including snow shoes, cross-country ski eqipment, toboggans, ice fishing tackle, and so on.

We drove there from somewhere near Kiruna on snowmobiles, getting a decent time behind the handlebars each, through snow-covered scenery. When we arrived Emily and I took a walk along the river banks, in an upstream area that had faster flow and so wasn't completely frozen over.

After that, the guides showed us how to drill into the ice for water. This involved using a hand drill to make four circular holes, then joining up the holes using a tool that looked like a saw attached to a harpoon.

One of the reasons we'd gone to this place was because Emily wanted to have a wild swim in frozen water, and the guides were very accommodating of this. We (and the other visitors who crazily volunteered) spent a not-insignificant time widening the watering hole into what would become known as Emily's ice bath. We were cutting into virgin ice that was about half a metre thick, and the chunks that got pulled out were crystal clear. They also made an excellent ad-hoc sculpture.

The Ice Bath

With the watering hole now just about big enough to fit a ladder and room for a couple of swim strokes, Emily and I (somehow the only volunteers for actually having a dunk despite everyone pitching in with creating the bath) were shown how to set up the sauna hut. The idea is to get the sauna so hot that you can't bear to be in there any longer. We had the thermometer on the wall reading 50C or so, so we didn't do a bad job.

While we were upping our core body temperature in our swimwear the organisers were setting up the bath, bringing out the ladder, some rope we would tie around our waists before getting in, and, unbeknownst to us, an amazing log fire and blankets for the ground when we got out (heat is lost fastest through the snow).

It was now after dark and we walked the 100m briskly from the sauna to the middle of the river in just our swimwear and boots. The air was considerably below zero outside but having emerged from stifling heat, it merely felt soothingly cool. When we reached the swimming hole we were a little awestruck at how cozy and welcoming it looked thanks to the fire and rugs.

Emily got in first, lowering herself from the edge of the ice, took a few strokes, and climbed back out using the ladder, looking exceptionally happy. After transferring the rope from her to me, it was my turn.

The water was about -1C and yet wasn't quite as big a shock as I had expected. I also took a couple of short strokes and then climbed out. My hand stuck a little to the ladder as I got out; I lost a bit of skin from my palm (I also have a scar on my left index finger from the sauna...) but emerged happy. Only after getting out did the air seem frigid!

Emily took another turn; I don't remember whether I did but I suspect not. The parts of my hair that got wet froze solid. We slipped our boots back on and raced back to the sauna to warm up before getting dressed and walking back down to admire the scene.

By the next morning the bath had frozen over.

The aurora

Nobody at the activity camp had yet seen the aurora on their respective holidays, so in the evening we agreed we would take turns at watching out for it. I think it was the German fellow, Arved, who called everyone out. We were being treated to a clear sky and a fairly active green aurora moving overhead towards us.

We went back down to the lake to get a better view. My camera picked out a small amount of red banding in this shot, showing that the aurora had got stronger.

Both these shots, for reference, were 30 seconds long. Emily and I were sharing a tripod which was well worth the extra weight in our luggage!

The next day we drove ourselves back on snowmobiles (not before enjoying a couple of rides on the toboggans) and Taube dropped us off at our accommodation for the Arctic Science course. More on that later....

comments