This evening a hedgehog sniffed around in my garden. It ignored the water bowl, probably looking for food. I put on my big telephoto lens to take a portrait but the hedgehog had other plans. It approached so fast, that it soon was too near for taking pictures. And it came nearer and nearer until it almost bumped into my leg. It sniffed a bit, considered me as completely uninteresting and continued its way through the grass of my backyard.
Thanks, Astrid for the Photo.
Yesterday I used my new car to drive to Vittjåkk, a small skiing area near Arvidsjaur, two hours away from home. Annika and I were there in wintertime and made a showshoe tour up the hills. I lived in Munich for six years and do not call these hills real mountains, but at least they reach above the treeline.
I parked again at the same parking lot and ascended the first hill that seems to be nameless. The sky was free of clouds, it was quite warm and I was completely alone.
Soon I was on top of the first hill. I wasn’t alone anymore. Some horseflies tried to make friends with me or at least with my blood. I descended the first hill and went up the Vittjåkk.
From the top I had a wide view over large forests, lakes and a higher mountain range.
Beside of taking pictures I didn’t rest because the horseflies really loved me. So I continued downhill again and was a bit flabbergasted that the whole hike took hardly more than 90 minutes. The hut village was completely abandoned, only a snowmobile showed that this place is only used in wintertime. And other signs showed that too …
One: construction sites. Almost all major roads are under constant repair each summer. It takes a lot of time to travel. Sometimes you have to wait for a traffic light becoming green or a follow-me car. Sometimes you follow an expencive camper whose driver doesn’t dare to drive more than 20 km/h on the gravelly sections. And this may go on for miles. Swedish miles! (A Swedish mile is 10 km.)
Two: lupins. Many roadsides are overgrown with lupins. They are beautiful, but they are invasive and threaten biodiversity. The Swedish Transport Agency has started to fight theses flowers.
Three: reindeers. Most reindeers are in the mountains but there are always reindeers left in the inland. Keep attention when driving! When you see one reindeer you can be quite sure that others are around, too.
Four: bilingual town signs. On many place in Northern Sweden you are in two countries at the same time. Sweden, the official nation and Sápmi, the region traditionally inhabited by the Sami people. Therefore many places have (at least) two names, a Swedish and a Sami one.
I drove a lot yesterday: 535 km in total. But as a result I know the new Subaru Outback much better and got used both to the automatic gearbox as the electronic systems. I’m very satisfied with the car that is much more comfortable than the old one. The only drawback, it might be the white colour: The horseflies just love the car. When I return to the car it is mostly surrounded by some dozens of this pests and they will even try to follow when I set off. (They manage round 25 km/h.)
Still summer weather – blue sky, temperatures not too hot and the last rain seems to be away like ages. Flowers are blooming, the Baltic Sea is blue and the cows are left on the green pastures for the first time of the year.
Today I had two visitors in my backyard. They apparently enjoyed the high growing grass on my lawn (most neighbours already cut it). It was two hedgehogs.
The smaller one seemed to be cautious. He stayed mostly on one place and ducked into the grass. The bigger one however walked zig-zag through the grass, visited all three willow bushes and sniffed curiously around. I sat in my backyard and followed him with the tele lens of my camera.
Thanks for the visit, hedgehogs and welcome back.
This article is part of the series “2018-05: Gotland”.
It’s Thursday, our 4th full day on Gotland. Today we want to hire a car, meet Ingrid again and explore Fårö, an island northeast from Gotland.
We return our e-bikes, that we used the last two days and walk to Mickes biluthyrning, where we rent a VW Passat from 1995. Annika drives. We fill up the car and drive to Lärbro, where we meet Ingrid. She has been living on Gotland for a year and will guide us around.
In Fårösund we drive on the free ferry; the ferry crossing takes only 8 minutes. Then we are on Fårö.
First stop: Fårö kyrka. Beside this church used to be a tourist information, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not a big problem, since Ingrid knows all these places she wants to show us.
The next stop however is a request of Annika and me: a real bakery! With a few exceptions, there are no bakeries in Northern Sweden and we enjoy visiting this one. We buy bread and cake and take a break to eat the latter.
We drive through the landscapes of Fårö, which are as varied as Gotland’s landscapes. Sometimes you think, you are in Spain or Greece, sometimes you believe being in Northern Germany and (only) sometimes in Sweden. Now I understand the Swedish people better, who say that Gotland is not Sweden.
Next stop Fårö Fyr, the lighthouse of Fårö, located at the easternmost point of Fårö. There’s a beautiful rock coast, but we do not stay very long, there’s a lot to see.
Next stop Skärsändan, a beautiful sandy beach that is several kilometres long. Annika and I take a bath (the water is quite shallow) and then Ingrid, Annika and I walk barefooted along the beach.
After a longer promenade we continue our Fårö exploration trip. On the way to Langhammars Raukar we make a stopover. Here we find many things typical for Gotland and Fårö: grey sheep, windmills, thatched houses, braided fences and dry stone walls.
Next stop is Langhammars Raukar, one of the famous spots with rauks – steep limestone formations formed by the waves of the sea. On of them reminds me on the stone statues of the Easter Island.
We continue to another fascinating spot, three kilometres away: Helgumannen, an old abandoned fishing village. This group of tiny wooden houses located on a rocky beach that seems to be endless looks really remote and I ask myself what kind of live the inhabitants had.
The last stop on Fårö for today: Gamle Hamn, another spot well-known for raukar. The last photo shows the “coffee pot”. Personally it reminds me more of Buckbeak, the hippogriff in Harry Potter.
I has become late, we are hungry and a bit tired. Ingrid drives the way back to the ferry and soon we are on Gotland again. Here we take the first restaurant and get something to eat, before we drive back to Lärbro and say goodbye to Ingrid.
Tusen takk, Ingrid for a wonderful day!
When Annika and I arrive in Visby it’s so late that the sun sets and the ice cream shop is already closed.
This article is part of the series “2018-03: Varanger peninsula”.
Some unpublished photos from my winter journey. I want to show them as long it is still wintry here.
While the grown-up huskies are doing their job the puppies have to wait in the trailer. I guess it is very boring for them. There are curious and seek contact.
While Chris, Annika, Ørjan and I are enjoying the gorgeous breakfast in the hotel Thon an asian tourist is waiting outside. She seems to be well protected against the elements but why has the fur to be pink …?
On the way to Kiberg Annika and I make a stopover in Ekkerøy where we enjoy a beach walk. Here we meet H. who invites us to visit her. We will make that true some days later. I take a photo of Annika’s and H.’s footwear. Tradition, meet modern world.
Cape East Arctic Adventure, our stay lies directly at the beach. I could spend weeks with only watching the tides and the changing weather.
There’s hardly any commercial fishing left in the small former fisher villages and the large drying racks for drying cod remain empty. Some people however still dry cod for personal usage.
A view through the window of Cape East Arctic Adventure. Today we will continue our journey.
We hardly have the time to explore Berlevåg, we only buy food. Two images of Berlevåg anyway. Just for the records …
This snowstorm shaken rocky shore appears more arctic than many other places of this journey.
A woman has found a wind protected place and watches the Norwegian winter landscape.
On our long car trip back from Ørnes to Skelleftehamn we pass Saltstraumen, a small strait with one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. We are too early to see the strongest maelstroms and I’m too eager to continue home. It’s still 500 km to drive.
Now I finally can erase my “later” folder on the computer.
I woke up from a bad dream tonight and stood up to get something to drink. I peeked though the kitchen window, it was snowing. On the snow wall in front of the neighbours front yard I could see a large snowball. It was moving. What?! I looked again and saw a mountain hare sitting on top of the snow wall. I spotted even two other pairs of white ears behind the snow wall.
Luckily I still had the big telephoto lens on my camera, so I adjusted the ISO value to 256000 (!) and tried to make some photos of the hare. The best one:
It’s not raining on the photo, it’s snowing, but even with this extreme ISO value I had to expose ⅛ second.
Then I got my tripod to get better images but the mountain hare seemed to spot me through the window and all hares run away in a flash. But only to hide on the street behind the snow wall in my front yard. (We still have at least 85 cm of snow in Skelleftehamn.) Some minutes later I spotted two of the hares in the street again but only for seconds before they ran away once more, this time for good.
This hare is a mountain hare. In Sweden this species is called Skogshare (“forest hare”) while in Germany its name is Schneehase (“snow hare”).
Now I’ll continue to sleep …
This article is part of the series “2018-02: Ski tour near Kvikkjokk”.
Day 7 of the winter journey 2018
I’m really glad, that my friend Jonas and I managed to realise a ski tour this year. It’s our 3rd ski tour together, but the last one was five years ago. A long time. Actually we had planned for eleven days, but due to severe snow falls between Gävle and Sundsvall two weeks ago the whole train traffic was cancelled and Jonas arrived more than two days later than planned.
On Wednesday, 7 February we left Solberget and took my car to Jokkmokk, where we bought food for nine days. Anything from muesli (with powdered milk), tea and chocolate to pasta with pesto, salami, potato mash and much more. Have a look:
After taking a lunch we continued to Kvikkjokk. The weather was sunny and the temperatures sank below -20 °C. In Kvikkjokk we packed our pulkas, transport sledges you carry behind, locked the car, put on the skies and started our tour. First along a road, then on a snow mobile track. We didn’t come long when we met a local with a snow shovel who asked for our plans. He looked at our heavy loaded pulkas and mentioned that we would have a hard time in pathless terrain. He said, that it was 100 cm of snow in Kvikkjokk and 150 in the mountains.
I reparked my car – another tip of the local – and we started our tour again. With his permission we used his private snowmobile track that led us to the river where it joined a larger snowmobile track. It already had been starting to get dark and our plan was to find a place for our tent quite soon. We weren’t alone on the river – two moose (mother and calf) stood on the river some hundred metres away. We waited until they left and continued. The river slopes were quite steep and after we had decided to leave the river we had to put off our skis and drag the heavy pulkas up through hip deep snow. Exhausting! At least we found a nice little clearing in the forest for our first night in the tent.
As usual we started to tramp down the snow with our skis to make it stable enough to bear the weight of tent and ourselves after some time. This snow however was so loose that it seemed impossible to us to erect the tent on top of it. Therefore we digged down half a meter (making round 6 cubic meters of snow to dig) and erected the tent in the hole. The temperature had continued to fall, now down to -25 °C. Finally the tent was “ready for occupation” and we were eager to eat something warm.
After Chinese noodles with some asian ready-made sauce we left the tent and watched the amazing clear starry night. The milky way gleamed over half the sky and Sirius had just started to rise on the eastern horizon. What a wonderful first night!
… and a cold one. When we started to sleep the temperature had fallen to -30 °C. Jonas and I have huge down sleeping bags and we had it warm and cozy anyway. I just had problems to sleep because I don’t like sleeping on my back and always have trouble to fall into sleep the first two, three nights when tenting.
Next morning: Clear blue sky, some feathery clouds that just started to colour purple. Jonas’ thermometer at the pulka showed -34 °C. It was completely calm and we decided to cook outside. Cooking in the morning mainly means boiling water for tea and for making milk for the muesli. I was glad about my warm mukluk boots, down pants and my puffy down parka. And finally the sun rose over horizon and trees.
Today we would continue westward to the mountain lodge Njunjes and probably sleep there.
Photo #1 and #6 in this blog article are made by Jonas Balbasus.
Day 4 of the winter journey 2018
This morning was cold, clear and crisp with temperatures round -25 °C. The snow glittered and the sun slowly started to illuminate the snow covered trees. Today Annika would travel back to Umeå and our main plan for that day was to not have any plans at all.
Dirk, the owner of Solberget asked me however if I could have a short photo session to make pictures of his reindeer sledges in action – one of the attraction of the wilderness retreat. And I gladly accepted. Here’s a first selection of the photos i made.
When I later took Annika to the nearest train station Nattavaara the temperature dropped to temperatures round -30 °C. Good to know, that the small station in Nattavaara has a small heated waiting room where you can wait for the train.
Her train was several hours late (I’ll come back to that topic later …) but thanks to internet and mobile app we already were informed about that delay and hadn’t wait too long until the train arrived in Nattavaara.
Annika will be away for two weeks until we’ll meet again and start our main winter journey. Meanwhile I’ll do a ski tour with Jonas, a good friend from Germany who should already have arrived the day before. Which he didn’t. Well, the train delays – I promised you to come back to that topic.
Due to a snowstorm in Gävleborgs län all trains to Northern Sweden had been cancelled. Jonas had been stuck in Stockholm. He couldn’t take the train the next day neither since it was fully booked. Therefore he was forced to wait another day and then take the night train with a scheduled arrival on Monday, 7:38. This train however was stuck in Vännäs for many hours due to technical problems. Instead of arriving on Saturday, 12:40 as originally planned he arrived on Monday, 17:00. That’s more than 52 hours delay!
But finally he arrived and tomorrow we can plan our ski tour which we’ll probably start on the day after tomorrow, 7 February.
