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Through Hell and back again Dateline: Monday 6.9.1999 19:15 Location: Train 387, Trondheim (Norway) -> Bräcke (S)
Oh no! I just went through Hell and, sinner that I am, I didn't even notice, much less take a picture. Now I feel like such a Dombås... and speaking of Dombås, the clerk there informed me that the system was screwed åp and she couldn't reserve a Swedish couchette for me; several hours later a grumpy clerk in Trondheim told me that she couldn't book me one either because the train was full. Full!?! In September, when all the trains I've seen (including this one) have had an average of 0.5 passangers per carriage? Unfortunately, as I have no Swedish currency (unless I manage to locate an ATM during the 15-minute stay at Östersund), I can't just buy one from the conductor -- so odds are I'll try sleeping in a standard SJ compartment, carefully designed to make this as difficult as possible (raised tables embedded between seats, another table's legs blocking the space on the floor, etc.)
But yes, Pizzakjelleren did still have its 59 kr pizza buffet, with two laid-back black guys whipping up greasy but good American-style pizza and conversing in a bizarre language that, I realized with a start, was just bizarrely accented English. Yowza! So 5 kr for a postcard left me with zilch, I can't even buy stamps here.
After a lengthy announcement in Swedish covering everything from the dining car to the on-board cellphone and in-train movies (!), the heliumed-up and in fact downright Japanese-sounding voice of the announcer piped up in English:
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Swedish Railways! Further information is available from the conductor. Have a pleasant journey!
Gee. That was useful.
So I spent most of those 6 hours talking with my compartmentmate Camilla, a chemical engineer who'd come from Lund to Storlien (at the Swedish-Norwegian border) for a week of hiking. Evidently it had otherwise been a great experience with good weather and all that, but she didn't like the fact that all the mountain huts she stayed at had not only electricity but such totally unnecessary luxuries as running water and even showers as well!
- There has to be a little pain, you know. But no mosquitos. I hate mosquitos, that's why I hike in September!
My train was delayed but so was its connection, so I got on the night train to the north without any problems. But, as I'd expected, I had no chance to get Swedish cash so I couldn't even try for a couchette. [Ed. I only remembered later that Finnish conductors accept credit cards, so I could probably have paid my way with Visa in Sweden as well.] After several hours of floundering in one of the upper pits of Hell, trying to sleep on a 3-person bench still half a meter too short and with hard metallic bars between the seats to boot, I started looking hungrily at the 30-cm gap between the bottom of the seat and the floor. I laid out my sleeping pad, wiggled in and -- the luxury! -- stretched out my legs! And so I managed to retain my sanity and sleep most of the way.
Friske Gällivare -- Gällivare's official sloganDateline: Tuesday 7.9.1999 9:23 Location: In front of Gällivare YH, Gällivare
I crossed the Arctic Circle (which was actually marked with a big sign and a white arc of painted rocks) around 8 in the morning and arrived in Gällivare soon thereafter. I trudged over the footbridge across the tracks to the hostel only to find the door locked and a "Be right back!" sign at the reception -- which, for all I know, may have been there since the hostel owner sank into a bog hole on a morning jog back in 1989. I'll give him/her/it a few more mins and then go back to find an ATM, some breakfast and a pair of gloves -- my hands are freezing!
Dateline: Tuesday 7.9.1999 13:50 Location: The slopes of Mt. Dundret, Gällivare
Needless to say, the hostel keeper did not show up, so I proceeded to hit the town and run through the checklist, quite successfully at that (I even scored a pair of gloves for 15 kr, less than the cost of a can of pasta sauce). The free Hembydgsmuseum above the tourist office is a killer, especially the exhibit on "youth in the 50s/60s/70s/80s" -- Ola Håkansson and the Accordion Drive? It's just too much!
The so far highly random weather (impenetrable fog and sunny skies at 5-min intervals) finally took a decisive turn for the
worsebetter, so after finding out that reception should open at 5 PM, I decided to tackle Mt. Dundret (821 m). The complete opposite of Mt. Nesaksla and a typical feature of Lapland (dundr is the Sámi word for mountain, which has mutated into tunturi in Finnish), Dundret is a veeeeery gentle but big hill, so much so that I had to walk 7 km just to climb 100 meters! I wasn't in the mood to even walk a marathon, so once I hit the ski track I turned and ambled along, as opposed to up, the slope. With the sun out it was perfectly comfortable in just a T-shirt if on the move or at least sheltered from the chilly wind. Still, this place looks less "Arctic" than I'd expected, it's all just swamp and regular Finnish-style forest... far from real tundra. Ah well, I don't have the time to got further up north, or the clothes for that matter...
Entrails are Nutritious -- informative comment at ÁjtteDateline: Wednesday 8.9.1999 11:42 Location: Ájtte museum, Jokkmokk, Sápmi
I finally realized that I was in the North when I took the bus from Gällivare to Jokkmokk. The road cut its way straight through the forest-bog (fjäll), with huge swathes of forest cut down on both sides and the road raised almost a meter above ground. Why? So the masses of snow that fall in the winter can be pushed aside, and so the runoff from the melting snow won't flood the roads. Aside from a humongous hydroelectric power plant at Porjus, there was absolutely nothing but fjäll in the 93 km between Gällivare and Jokkmokk.
The museum itself, devoted to the indigenous Sámi people who once lived throughout Norden but were pushed up to Lapland by the invaders who now form the great bulk (over 99%) of Norden's population, both exceeded and fell short of my expectations. Exceeded, since it was new, airy and for most part well done and well explained (in an extensive English booklet that translated most, if not quite all, on-site descriptions). And the restaurant had lunch sets with salad bar, drink (even beer!) and dessert included for just 55 kr.
But the museum also fell short, because something was missing. The museum chronicled the Sámi way of life extensively: what they wore, what they ate (remember kids, Entrails are Nutritious), what they did... but note the past tense: it's all ancient history now, as the descriptions themselves mourned. All of this served little to give a picture of the Sámi as people: what did(/do?) they believe in? A few folk tales were mentioned, as if by accident, but even the special exhibit on shamans' drums just had lots of drums suspended in midair, fluff about "the shamans used drums to enter a trance", and the statement "They are silent now." Imagine an exhibit on techno parties that consists of a dusty synthesizer suspended in midair and a faded Cyberdog shirt -- would that give you any idea of What It's All About?
Dateline: Wednesday 8.9.1999 15:47 Location: Train 981, Gällivare -> Luleå
My plan was to visit Jokkmokk, then take the 3-o'clock train from Gällivare to Boden, catch the bus via Haparanda to Kemi and continue with the night train to Helsinki -- a calculated gamble, as this train is supposed to arrive at 15:05 and the bus leaves at 15:15, only a ten-minute window. Unfortunately, it seems safe to say that I've lost my gamble, as we left Gällivare already 15 minutes late with no built-in leeway. Plan B was to take the next bus (which was way too late for train connections) and stay the night in the border town of Haparanda, but there turns out to be a Plan C as well: this train continues straight to Luleå and so, it seems, do the buses. Maybe I can still catch the bus from Luleå? We'll see...
Uh-oh -- on closer examination it turns out that Plan B's late bus runs only on holidays, so it's Plan C or nothing now. Go go järnväget go!
And it went. In Luleå I ran into Philip, a Swiss traffic engineer who was coming from Narvik (at the other end of the track), had run into the same delays as me and was heading for Helsinki to meet his Finnish girlfriend. There was another bus running from Luleå to Kemi that would get us there in time, so we breathed a sigh of relief and hopped on board.It was Philip's first visit to Finland, and I have to say that arriving in Kemi will not give you the best possible first impression of the country. A town devoted almost solely to heavy industry, the traffic seemed to consist primarily of dented Ladas and the air was heavy with the sickeningly sweet stink of boiled wood pulp from all the paper factories in the vicinity. The Kemi train station is a small old building, shunted off into the boondocks and surrounded by appetizing concrete block apartments -- just add a few donkeys and the scene could have been straight out of Romania. (Except that most Westerners find Romanian considerably easier to understand.)
The train arrived, we both arranged sleeper beds with the conductor (there are no couchettes in Finland, but the sleepers cost just 60 mk ($10)) and headed to the bar to celebrate our last night on the road with a dry sandwich and a wet beer.
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