Kiruna & Stockholm Trip 20-24 Feb Part 3

Day 2 - Northern Light Tour

After spending a night at Mushers Lodge, the 9 of us set off early in the morning for our Northern Light Tour, hoping to be lucky enough to see aurora in Kiruna. Basically, aurora is a display of natural coloured light in the night sky and the frequency of seeing aurora is especially high from the period December to April, especially in the polar zone.

We went on this 2 day 1 night package in which we travelled in the wilderness to our campsite by snowmobile and dog sled. We then spent the rest of our time there chopping firewood for fire for our Lappish hut (our accomodation), reindeer meat lunch, BBQ dinner, slacking around and playing in the snow, waiting for aurora to come out at night, etc .. Well, to cut a long story short .. here are the pictures =)

Our guide - Henrik Taube giving us an introduction to the tour

Preparing the dog sleds for the journey to our campsite. The dogs are lined up in a particular order and hooked to a chain before they are attached to the dog sleds.

With the snowmobile

Jialiang - the first driver for the snowmobile for the day, and Xiaoli behind him.

The rest of us sitting on the trailer attached behind the snowmobile. We all got to take turns to drive the snowmobile as there were numerous stops along the way for us to change drivers. All of us were relatively good drivers and the journey was rather smooth, except a minor glitch along the way when Brandon 'holland-ed' (meaning lost his way) at a junction, according to Brandon, his vehicle commander Joey gave him the wrong directions .. haha. As a result, we stopped over and waited for Taube to backtrack to find us (everywhere looked the same in the wilderness, and it was amazing how Taube managed to know his way so well without maps or compasses).

Travelling in convoy movement. The dog sleds in front and the snowmobile at the back.

Changeover to dog sleds after half the journey.. 3 of us to one dog sled. The dog sleds were so much better than the snowmobile and the dogs can run really fast! Really cool to ride on the dog sleds!

Me (the driver for the dog sled), Joel and Brandon (the passengers)

With the dog at the end point

A photo at our destination - with the wilderness behind us =)

After we reached the end point, we had to trek on the frozen river to our campsite

Our Campsite

Reindeer

The place where we stay in - Lappish Hut (which can accomodate up to 10 people comfortably)

The interior - triple decker bed


Junhao posing at the fireplace - we have to chop our own wood to last us through the cold night.

It was damn tough trying to chop the firewood into the correct sizes because the axes and saws were not very sharp. We actually sweated while doing it and it took us about 2 hours to finish chopping the required amount of firewood.

The woodcutters' pose =)


After a gruelling 2 hours of woodcutting, we had our first meal of the tour: Lunch - which was a simple meal of macaroni and reindeer meat (tasted a bit like bacon).

After lunch, we played in the snow and slided down some slopes on these plastic seaters.

And went for a walk on the frozen river .. and 'tau pok' Jialiang because there was nothing else to do in the wilderness! Haha

Followed by BBQ dinner (chicken and macaroni)

After dinner - bread making session with all the other foreigners who also went on the Northern Light Tour.

And after that, we just sat around and waited for the Northern Lights to come out. However, it was really unfortunate because it was a cloudy night and as a result, we saw nothing! =(

So in the end we went to sleep because our guide told us that we won't be able to see anything that night and we decided that there was no point waiting. Well although we didn't get to see aurora, at least we had a great day on the dog sleds, snowmobile, wood chopping, reindeer meat .. all these were something very new to all of us so at least we didn't feel that bad.

Day 3 - To be continued ...