Sightseeing in Kiruna - Snowmobile tour - Dogsledge tour - Flights and prices

Wednesday : We had booked a guide, Henrik Taube, for 2 days. He comes to pick us up at the youth hostel and we all try to fit in his van: 1 on the front seat with the guide, 8 on the passengers seats and 3 in the trunk. We stop by a petrol station to fill in some jerrycans - that the unfortunate people in the trunk will have to share the space with for the end of the ride - for the snowmobiles, and we drive toward the tour's departure point. We put on warm clothes, we remove snow from the snowmobiles and we load the trailers with food and wood (3 logs per person; remember that, it is important for the rest of the story). Let's go!

We ride the snowmobiles for 2 hours before arriving to the sami camp. We stop by the dogs to feed them and then, we start the final approach: the camp is on the other side of a river and we only have a raft. We load it with all the equipment, everybody (12 people) jumps in it and we are ready to go. Of course, the raft is not motorized so some of us must row a few minutes to cross the river!

Back to the ground, we still have to unload the raft (the food and the wood) and carry everything to the camp which is located a hundred meters from the shore (first change: 3 logs per person now mean several kilos). On the camp, there are 8 buildings: one traditional lappish hut which will be our place for the night, the house of the camp manager, Arne, which also contains the kitchen and the dining-room, a small elevated storage building for the food (that animals cannot reach), a storage building for the equipment, a 4 beds cabin, a sauna, an indoor barbecue and a cabin made of 5 planks (4 walls + the roof) covering a hole in the ground (for those who do not understand, this is the w-c).

We put our bags in the hut and go out immediatly to start cutting the logs into small pieces while it is still daylight (second change: several kilos of wood mean hundreds of blows). Short lunch break around 15:00 (pasta and raindeer cooked with spices) and we keep chopping (but we are finally happy to do that since we know it will be used for the sauna and for keeping us warm overnight!). We also go to the river with a sledge and fill in some 75 liters jerrycans with water (don't worry, we do not use the same that we used for the snowmobiles gasoline). We have dinner around 19:00 in the indoor barbecue building and we turn on the sauna.

Around 21:00, sauna. We enjoy the heat, we drink beers and we go out to roll in the snow. We spend most of the evening chatting with Arne (while some of us are building an igloo): he tells us stories about the life up in the north, he drinks a beer, he tells us stories about the life on the camp, about the people he meets, he drinks a beer, ...
We take a walk to the pontoon waiting for an aurora to light up the sky but it does not come. We enjoy the landscape and its calmness anyway.

Exhausted, we finally go to bed. We have to take care of the fire in turns but nobody does! In the morning, it is dead...

Sightseeing in Kiruna - Snowmobile tour - Dogsledge tour - Flights and prices