Lapland Experience I

I do not really know how to start telling what has been one of the best trip in my life ( I am 23 years old right now), but I think I am going to start like the most of the stories, from the beginning.

On the 23rd of February Jorge and I left Linköping heading to Stockholm, from where we took the bus which would bring us to Lapland. We arrived to Sheraton hotel, where the bus was waiting for us. Until Uppsala the bus was not completely full but at the end there were not empty seats. Our bus was composed of 16 different nationalities (people from many different places did not want to loose the chance to get this kind of travel).

We had the hard task of covering around 1200 km in order to arrive to Kiruna which was the first stop of our travel. As you can imagine is not very pleasant to spend almost 1 day travelling by bus, but we tried to do it as well as we could (sleeping, listening to music, meeting new people, etc). We made a stop for dinner (which was included on the price) and around 8 a.m we arrived to Kiruna.

Kiruna is a city located at the very north of Sweden. It has around 20.000 inhabitants and nowadays is the second largest municipality in the world regarding its extension. Just to get an idea it has around 6000 lakes...

The city of Kiruna is famous because of its iron mine. I did not before going there that it was so famous and I did not either the amount of money that they are earning with that, it is crazy. In around 5 years the whole city is going to be moved out, due to the iron mine work. They are excavating and because of this huge crater (right now the mine has a deepth of around 1200 meters) people and buldings are going to be moved out and they are going to re-build a new Kiruna.

Before this introduction paragraph I would like to show you some pictures about the church of Kiruna, which got the mention of the most beautiful building in Sweden ( I do not really know how Swedes are voting...) and the mine, which are the most important places in Kiruna.

By the way, Kiruna's mine is using a train with many wagons in order to carry the iron from Kiruna to Narvik (a Norwegian city). This is because in winter, Swedes cannot export its iron from Sweden, because the most of the entrances to the harbour are frozen, so they send the iron to Narvik (whose sea is not so cold during winter) and from there, the iron is sent around the world.

After the iron mine tour we went to one of the best parts of our travel, "dog sledging" and "snow mobile". The only bad thing of this was that as we had been in the iron mine before, we had to take this tour at 5, which means that the sun was already set and we could not see the beautiful landscapes that we were passing through. Anyway, we cannot get everything in this life.

The "combi tour" took 3 hours. We started with the dogs and after that, in the middle of our way, we made an stop inside a tent to get warmer and from this point, we started with the snow mobile.

We were lucky in the sense that the guy who was coming with us as dog sledging's leader were very friendly. He explained to us many things about dogs, its behaviour, why he was here, etc. I really enjoyd both, dogs and snow mobiles, but from my point of view, I prefer snow mobile, which was faster (I really like the speed). I do not have many good pictures due to we took them during the night, and it is even worse with some videos that I tried to record in order to share these amazing experiences with all of you, but let's give it a try.

After these pictures and this video (I was not drunk) we came back to the hostel, where our particular dinner's problem started. We arrived there around 9.45 p.m and they were closing the kitchen at 10 p.m. We tried to cook pasta in this time, the cookers were not really good, we were very tired and at the end, I finished with one very small bowl, full of cold pasta, and a tuna's tin where I was mixing pasta, tuna and cream (to get them even colder). It was just the beginning of our poor and miserable dinners.

Once we were full (irony), we went to a bar where we meet up with the rest of the group. We had a great time even though we had some problems with some drunk guys, but a hero appeard to saved all us. I want to thank a german girl the explanation that she gave in a video about the story of this night, it will appear in the next part of the "Lapland Experience".

(Max, have a look to the german video, I think you will be proud of it.)

C u all in the next post, hugs and kisses ;)