Lapping up Lapland

All aboard the Arctic Circle Express

I have been to the top of the world! Where the reindeer roam, the people speak little, even by Scandinavian standards, and there is not a lot to do, even by Scandinavian standards. But there are husky dogs, snow mobiles, a town on the move, an ice hotel and most importantly, Aurora Borealis that burn green across the night sky. Well sort of.

But first I had to get there and Swedish Lapland is a long way from anywhere. Do you know that if you turned Sweden around 90 degrees form its most southern point, the north of the country would reach Rome! So Lapland is a long way north.

Of course the insane quirks of the modern oil guzzling world meant that it was moderately cheaper to fly to Lapland from Stockholm. But the lure of a train trip on the superbly named Arctic Circle Express, a work life balance that affords some luxury of time and a girlfriend who helps encourage me to consider environmental implications, meant I took the 18-hour train trip.

Fortunately, I had been advised to bring some food with me, as indeed the food available from the train dining car was limited and awful. I was also lucky to be sharing my six-berth compartment with just two other travellers, a mid-60-year-old maths teacher from a town south of Stockholm and his daughter and their skis.

I have found for some time now that chatting to your fellow passengers on trains or planes can be nice. But also a pain. I didn’t expect this to be a problem in taciturn Sweden, but after half an hour of awkward glances and smiles, the teacher turned out to be quite chatty, in a mild mannered way. His 20 something daughter said nothing for 18 hours.

They were regular Lapland visitors and train travellers and this time they were going on a skiing excursion which would involve a week of skiing from one rustic wooden hut to another, starting from the train. Hardcore. The teacher was also an avid concert goer and had seen the Beatles play Sweden. It also turned out that he was quite a Morrissey and Echo and the Bunnymen fan. Odd.

Now the trouble with talking to fellow passengers is how to stop talking when you are bored with skiing and northern English indie band conversation and you want to get stuck in to the reading material that you brought. So after about three hours, I simply did as Swedes would do and picked up my book and began reading. I felt a bit bad, especially as we never really spoke again for the rest of the journey and he seemed very nice. And I also felt a bit hypocritical, as I criticise swedes (just a little bit) for being non-communicative, and here was one blowing away all my stereotypes. But I got over it.

I had hoped the train journey would afford me the chance to see the scenery of northern Sweden. But because we left Stockholm’s Central Station at 6pm, the first 14 hours of the trip were in total darkness. It was apparently bedtime around 10pm, indicated by my fellow passengers yawning and looking at me a lot. And so the seats were pulled down into beds and I climbed up to my very high upper berth, which required strait-jacket like rubber cords on the side to stop me falling out of bed.

I slept surprisingly well and woke around 8am, just half an hour south of the Arctic Circle, to be greeted with a white bright landscape of empty expanses. There were some trees, but less than you normally see from a Swedish train, and some small mountains in the distance, but not a lot else.

Four more hours of this and I arrived at Bjorkliden, my destination, a hamlet centered on a small ski resort near the Norwegian border and some 100kms northwest of the only significant town here-abouts, Kiruna. Bizarrely, a minivan from the hotel met the train but only took our bags, leaving me and the other four guests to trudge up the snow covered road to the very functional looking rectangular hotel where I met my friend Ryan who had flown in from England.

The hamlet is a service place for the ski-resort. Just 30 people live there year round, with some 200 staff swelling the population over the winter season. This was home for the next three days and apart from the winter sports activities there was clearly nothing else here.

The views were impressive, with the hotel overlooking the hamlet below and a giant frozen lake beyond ringed by smooth curved small mountains. It was all white. But not too dissimilar to the scenery much further south around Åre. And while there really was nothing else for miles around, the tourist complex that was the hotel, with chalets, car parks, vans and a kind of scruffy service like atmosphere (that I feel is generally the case in ski-resorts) diluted a sense of wilderness.

The hotel was also oddly packed with mostly English middle-aged tourists and a staff that consisted of young 20-something dudes and dudettes from all over the world who clearly travelled with the seasons from one adventure-like location to another. This evoked a school-trip holiday-camp kind of atmosphere, and also meant few of the staff (or guides on activities) carried much authority, confidence or general ability to convey their specific areas of knowledge (husky dogs, northern lights) to us.

The booking process had also been a total shambles of inefficiency. The room was, for 150 pounds a night, basic, cold and had a wet-room style bathroom which meant every time you went to the toilet your socks got wet! The window view was also terrible. But this was due to it being blocked by snow, so maybe not the hotel’s fault.

The staff’s attitude was best exemplified by a trip to the underground huge bar area where an awful guitar player sang predictable covers and the atmosphere was like a school disco. The barman looked disdainful when we ordered fruit juices on our arrival, then he just wandered off without charging us. When we beckoned to his colleague asking how much we owed, she just sort of waved her arms and mumbled don’t worry about it.

Still, I guess it was a case of captured clientele as there wasn’t anywhere else to go.  The place was kind of like Fawlty Towers meets The Shining. Fortunately though the restaurant was more sophisticated and provided decent Nordic food of reindeer, elk and the like.

Anyway, we were here to see the northern lights and partake in the winter sports activities, the first of which was dog sledding, at night.

I have done dog sledding before and find it a bit pointless. Yes the Husky dogs look great, and it is nice to feel like you are in a Narnian like fantasy world as you sit on a wooden sled and traverse iced lakes and snow covered forests. But it feels a bit like you are just being taking around in a circle for an hour or two with no real purpose, which is of course exactly what you are doing.

This excursion though was made more exciting by the fact that the sled we were on, with two others plus the driver, tipped over within seconds of us starting, adding a certain element of danger for the remainder of the ride. The constant yelping and barking from the dogs was also quite an incredible sound, especially when they got excited before we set out. The smells coming from the dogs and Ryan’s farts as I sat behind them were also a rather potent force of nature.

We did this excursion at night to combine it with seeing the northern lights, which we did not see, and as it was night, saw absolutely nothing.

But back up at the hotel, the sky was about to become the limit, though not quite how I expected.

…….to be continued

Planes v Trains v Automobiles

I’m back. In Sweden, having just spent nearly three weeks in the UK for Christmas and New Year.

And with a new year comes a new way of traveling from England to Sweden. I have tried planes and earlier this year we drove from London to Stockholm, so on this occasion it was time to take the train.

Now those of you who know us well will know that Elin always takes the train between our two countries. Her commitment to cutting down on plane travel due to its environmental impact, means that for several years now she has taken a 24 hour (ish) lasting series of trains instead of the 6-7 hour door to door journey that it takes to get from London to Stockholm by plane.

While I wholeheartedly agree with her that aeroplane travel is the single most damaging thing we as individuals do to the environment, I am not as prepared to put my money where my mouth like she is.

And just in case there are any doubters out there, the statistics, while varied, seem irrefutable to me, not to mention the common sense of the fact that spewing tons of aviation fuel into the atmosphere can’t be good.

Indeed most stats I have seen, including this one in the New York Times, say that one return transatlantic flight equals about half the average American households’ electricity use over a whole year or an entire year’s car driving.

Of course Americans are far more carbon consuming than Brits, but even an average driver in the UK commuting 20 miles a day will produce around 1.4 tonnes of CO2, according to the Good Energy website, with one return transatlantic flight producing around 2.5 tonnes.

As I said, the stats vary, but they all conclude that flying is way more damaging than any other form of transport.

So along with the fact that I am fed up giving ryanair money, this week I got environmentally active and took the train (s) with Elin from England to Sweden.

We began on Monday with a lift from my Dad from Chelmsford in Essex to Ebbsfleet in Kent to pick up the Eurostar to Brussels.

It takes just two hours to get to Brussels by Eurostar and I always love arriving there by train. The tracks bring you right into the center of the city on huge wide viaducts which are level with the upper stories of old narrow town houses oozing with personality.

The building’s locations right next to the train tracks, falling on top of each other, and the graffiti that is everywhere make me feel like I am arriving in a real gritty, edgy, dense urban environment. The way a city should be.

No time alas for a waffle or a Belgian beer though as our train to the east Belgium was leaving straight away.

We have friends who live in the Ardennes forest which makes a perfect first night stop to break the journey home.

Belgium is such a ridiculously small country it only takes about 2-3 hours to get from one side to the other. And so after an hour we alighted at Liege for a small detour to Stavelot and our friend’s house.

Next evening it was back to Liege with its fantastically modern station of ribbed white concrete open on the sides, making a perfect frame for the city skyline beyond.

It is incredibly just an hour from Liege to the mighty old arches of Cologne station in Germany where we had two hours to gawp at the colossal Cologne cathedral right outside the station, wonder at the bizarre giant Christmas nativity model in the station which depicts scenes from a war-torn Cologne in the 1940s and eat a curry wurst and fries. What else!

The night train to Copenhagen left Cologne at 10.30pm having started its journey in Amsterdam some three hours earlier.  This meant that our cabin, made up of six bunk beds, was already full of young twenty something Dutch people including two women on the bottom bunks who were on their way to study teaching for six months in Malmo, southern Sweden, for six months, and a guy on the top bunk who studies in Denmark.

The girls were extremely chatty, so I wonder how they will get on in Sweden where they have never been before and told me that they partly want to go there to improve their English. But they did stop talking around midnight.

The guy unfortunately continued making noises through the entire night. He farted regularly and snored a real wet phlegmy loud snore constantly. This along with the juddery movement of the train whose driver was rather sharp on the breaks, and our snoring friend’s need to turn the light on during his regular trips to the toilet meant we got very little sleep. The snoring Dutchman had it seemed drunk a bottle or two of wine before we got on, as the rattling bottles where his bags had been suggested after he got off one stop before Copenhagen.

I wonder why so many people take the train. I asked the Dutch teaching students and they said that it was easier to take the train because they had so many bags, along with alcohol and a knife, which would be harder to take on a plane.

Funnily enough at about 8am a Danish customs officer came into our cabin with a dog. On hearing the women were from Holland, he asked “have you smoked cannabis in Holland before getting on the train?” Does anyone say yes to that question? The Dutch girls said no, but giggled a lot.

It took 12 hours to get from Cologne to Copenhagen, which I spent pretty much horizontal and unable to see out the window.

We had an hour between trains in Copenhagen to pop into an extremely Scandinavian cafe of pinewood and bulbous light bulbs where a coffee cost £4 and a sandwich ten quid. Ah nearly home then. I had a Danish pastry. What else. And it was delicious.

And so the final leg of the journey from Copenhagen to Stockholm, a mere five hours, which started by crossing the mighty Oresund Bridge, which didn’t seem to have any murders going on on it, although a fishing boat did seem to be sailing remarkably close (for those who have no idea what I am talking about check out the latest season of Scandi crime drama The Bridge, currently on BBC4).

The train crosses the bridge on the lower level, with car lanes above, so from the train you see very little of the bridge itself and the five hours across southern Sweden consisted of the now almost comforting familiar sight of red houses, lakes and trees. Have I ever mentioned how many trees there are in Sweden? It is incredible!

And so home. Was it worth it? Well I arrived home knackered. But it was an adventure. And it would certainly make a good holiday if we stopped for longer in the towns we passed through. Train travel is undoubtedly far more romantic and fun than plane travel. And of course there is the small matter of the environment.

Now don’t get me wrong, I will be flying again. But the more and especially shorter journeys we do by train instead of plane can only be a good thing.

Now many will probably be saying but how much did it cost? Well it wasn’t bad actually. The entire journey from England to Sweden including the Eurostar cost me around £150. The Copenhagen to Stockholm leg was an amazingly cheap £19. Only five quid more than a single for the half hour Chelmsford to London fare!

Now this is still more than a ryanair ticket would have cost me, but with transfers to and from the airports I reckon it is about a third more maybe to go by train than plane.

It is of course insane that it costs more to do this journey by plane than train, but perhaps the more we travel by train the cheaper it will become? It should be easier too soon with direct trains from London to Cologne and elsewhere being imminently planned.

And air flight is not always plane sailing either (boom boom). The last two times I have flown from Stockholm, well the ryanair Stockholm airport some 100km south of the city, I have got to the airport to find I couldn’t actually fly!

In September the flight was cancelled as I was queuing to get on the plane, due to fog, requiring me to rapidly rebook a flight the next day on my smart phone and cadge a lift back to Stockholm with some English guy who lives here and I got talking to in the queue.

And then just before Christmas while Elin was making her way to London by train and I was complacently marveling at how much quicker it is to fly, with much self-satisfaction, I realised, while queuing to check my bag in at the airport, that I had left my passport at home! What an idiot, I know!

This meant frantically and futilely searching through my bags, rebooking a flight for the next morning, waiting an hour and a half for a bus back to Stockholm, getting about 4 hours sleep, before getting a bus back to the airport at 4am the next morning.

I had not taken the train with Elin as I thought it was too expensive. I ended up spending more than the train would have cost (having now purchased two plane tickets) and arriving in England just four hours before Elin, pissed off and knackered. That, was probably karma.