Swedish Parker!

I absolutely had to show my parents around my favourite part of Sweden – Abisko.

(Swedish Lapland! photo album on flickr)

Lying in the middle of Swedish Lapland, it’s apparently both Sweden’s driest and sunniest place. Going by the amazing weather we had I’m not surprised (that being said, it did get down to -25 at one point, and rarely back up above -10… I think the sun forgets how to emit warmth by the time it gets to this far northern part of the world).

Pictures really don’t do this incredible place justice. But I’ll try anyway.

After leaving Kiruna we drove to Abisko with a slight detour through Norway, which is only half an hour down the road:

Then we grabbed packs (containing reindeer skins and tiny, tiny little fishing rods…) to go ice fishing!

If you bury your head under a skin you can see right down the hole as the fish lunch on your bait. Didn’t end up catching anything (the ones we did hook were too big to pull out of the holes in the ice…), but a pretty cool experience (no pun intended lol).

Spent a day snowboarding and skiing just down the road at Björkliden:

I hadn’t snowboarded in two and a half years, and Dad hadn’t skied in over 20, but we managed to pick it all back up pretty quickly. The weather was so good that it took me all day to notice we were the only ones on the mountain not wearing ski masks..

Saw more Northern Lights, snowboarded off-piste down Noulja (the deceptively tough mountain that I only managed to get halfway up the last time I was in Abisko – fortunately the chairlift is now running..), explored the frozen world of Lake Torneträsk, ate cloudberries, thought I was suffering mild frostbite as I tried to walk across Torneträsk facing into 70k/hr wind, spent 38 more hours on the Stockholm to Narvik train, took at least 50 photos of the sun shining like a star (see above & below), and drank far, far too much wine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under Abisko, Norway, Sweden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.