4. Summer 2015 – Crossing the Circle, and some

We end up driving along the Baltic for a day or so but we don’t see it except on a detour.  This northernmost part is the Gulf of Bothnia, a sea which freezes for about five months every year.  Now we head NW away from the sea towards the Arctic Circle, Kiruna and the Norwegian border.  The Arctic Circle on the road where we cross it has a café, a sign and a line of white painted boulders stretching away for fifty yards or so.  Not too tacky but of course the circle moves over time just as the magnetic pole does and the marked ‘Arctic Circle’ is about a kilometre south of the current actual arctic circle.   It’s a bit like the old stopped watch which is right twice a day but the café and sign won’t be in the right place until the year 22,000.  I can hardly wait.

Just a few miles further on at Jokkmokk, we stop at a very rural and unpretentious campsite where we choose not to have electricity and therefore get a spot right on the edge of a lovely lake.  We have a couple of sunny days and it seems idyllic.  I did ask the owner (a Dutchman who has moved here) when the lake froze for the winter.  He said October and that it melts in May but that in summer the water reaches 20 degrees and is “fine for swimming”.  When we’ve looked at walking and snowmobile trail maps, the snowmobile routes often go straight across a lake and of course that’s because all the lakes up here are frozen in winter.   This is the spot where H made some scones and we had an Arctic Circle cream tea in the sun overlooking the water.

I know the mechanics of why we get midnight sun at these latitudes in the summer but experiencing it is somewhat bizarre and slightly disorientating.  Wake up at half past midnight and it’s light.  Of course it is light 24 hours a day, that’s what the midnight sun is all about but it is also just as likely to be midnight cloud or midnight rain.  We expect it to be light but the reality of it is strange.  Do the locals keep to the same waking hours all year or do they stay up much later ?  Any nocturnal animals must change their behaviour, so owls and others are around in the light but I wonder if they stick to what we consider as night time and although this is a short growing season, the plants have 24 hours of light available for photosynthesis and growth so I guess anyone with a lawn curses the long days.

As we were driving within a handful of miles from the Ice-Hotel where we spent a few days when H retired, we decided to call in and have a look but at this time of year it’s more like the Puddle-Hotel.  Just a few sorry looking scraps of ice wall left in what seemed to be a remarkably small space.  Rather like a building marked out on the floor which looks too small and then when it’s built you can’t really believe that it is the same space.  The lake/river alongside was deep blue with people on paddleboards in it.  The last time we saw it the big mechanical cutters were sawing out six feet thick pieces of ice for the following winter ice-hotel building work and cars were just driving on the lake as a short cut across the mile or so to the other side.

This is near a big mining town, that’s big mining not particularly big town, which is having to be rebuilt because it’s sinking due to the extent of the tunnelling under the town.  It’s iron ore they’re after and WW11 neutral Sweden made shed loads of money selling iron to both sides.  The plan here now is to relocate individual houses and other buildings rather than just building a new town.  It is nondescript now and when it’s moved I daresay it will be level and nondescript.

So we come to that border crossing.  No big customs post but we were waved down and asked to wait a moment.  Our booze had been ‘tidied up’.  “Got any animals”, he asked.  “No”.  “OK welcome to Norway” and off we went.  So far we’ve only had to show our passports once and that was at Dover, not for customs but to be waved through at the ferry ticket office.  To begin with Norway looks very similar to Sweden, it’s raining.

 

A little north of Narvik in Norway is the farthest we’re going to go, to a place called Andenes at the north end of the Vesteralen Islands.  This puts us on a latitude of about 69.6 degrees, which is further north than some of the Canadian mainland and not far short of the north coast of Alaska.  If we were at this latitude in the southern hemisphere we’d be on the Antarctic Icecap so it really does show what that warmish water flowing across the Atlantic does for the climate of the western European coastlines.  Now, guess how far the northernmost point of Norway, North Cape is from Narvik – answer at the bottom of the page. 

The Lofotens is the group of Norwegian islands that is famous for scenic beauty but the Vesteralen islands are stunningly rugged and beautiful.  In places I have to say this place is infested with motorhomes, many German and Dutch, a few from Belgium and France and only one other Britiish so far.   Yes we’re part of the infestation but I suppose we’re all bringing tourism money into the area.  This is a glaciated landscape but not one which has been rounded and smoothed, quite the opposite, much of the landscape has the appearance of giant Toblerones scattered about the place, many with a snowy peak.  There are many small settlements which are spread out, perhaps 20 or 30 yards between some houses and sometimes more so that a small village may stretch a mile or so but probably without having more than a couple of hundred houses, mostly looking very New England.  The vegetation in gardens and countryside that isn’t boggy looks as if it could be in any temperate area but we just can’t imagine what it must be like up here in the winter.  I’m writing this within a few days of mid-summer and the air temperature has varied between 9C and 15C.  In the wind and/or if the sun isn’t out it feels a lot colder of course.  It’s a bit like a sunny winter day in England most of the time.  To us there are some great town names here.  Some of our English ones, Ryme Intrinseca, Mudford Sock and Wyke Champflower for instance from Dorset and Somerset are rather poetic and mellifluous.  Here in stark Norway there are stark names too, Bo, Sto, Å

and in a couple weeks near Bergen we can go to Hell – it’s near Bergen.

There are still good birds being seen for those of you who are bothered about birds.  White-tailed Sea-Eagles are a regular sighting.  These have a bigger wingspan than a Golden Eagle and are the biggest eagles in Europe and the fourth in the world.   We were up a mountain a couple of days back and were able to look down a couple of hundred feet and watch one gliding about below us while we heard a Cuckoo calling from somewhere on the hillside.  We’ve seen Common Gulls, which are not at all common in England, huge numbers of Puffin, some Gannets, Black Guillemots and so on but no sign yet unfortunately of any Norwegian Blues, dead or alive.

A boat trip has been booked for tonight.  A combined whale watching, bird watching and midnight sun trip from 10.00pm to 2.00am in a rib out on the Arctic Sea.  As I’m not a boat person all I can say is that a rib is a rubber boat about 25 feet or so long with a powerful engine and bouncy rubber seats which are sat astride like a horse saddle.  Being small and quick it can get closer to whales than some of you might think is prudent but hey, what could possibly go wrong!  We’re to wear buoyancy suits and I expect it to be nippy.  Birds will be seen but whales may not come out to play and it might be cloudy and midnight sun isn’t at midnight.  Like everywhere else Norway is on summer-time/daylight saving so true midnight is at 1.00am.  Why they don’t have octuple daylight saving in the winter and stop all that dark-all-day stuff I can’t imagine.

* Narvik to North Cape – one way, about 750 miles.