Finland and Sweden - February 2018

Before heading straight back to the US from England, I decided to make a quick trip to Scandinavia in an attempt to see the Aurora Borealis in Northern Sweden. I didn't want to just fly to the north of Sweden for the Aurora so I decided to fly to Helsinki and then make my way north in Finland and then head to Kiruna in Sweden where I hopefully would see the lights before going down to Stockholm where I could get a cheap direct flight back to Oakland, California.

I put together my itinerary that included two flights, two overnight train trips, two bus trips and an Aurora Tour all occuring within a 4 day period. I was going to fly to Helsinki, catch an overnight train north to Kemi, catch a bus to the Swedish border at Haparanda, transfer to a bus to Kiruna, see the Aurora and then catch a train to Stockholm and my flight to the US. There was very little room for delays in the schedule so I was a bit apprehensive as to whether it would work as planned.

Helsinki Central Station

The first leg was fine - an uneventful flight from Gatwick to Helsinki where I arrived in the early afternoon. I then took the train from the airport into the main station in Helsinki to spend the afternoon and evening exploring before my late night train north. Helsinki station itself is quite a wonderful building, designed by Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero Saarinen who later designed the Gateway Arch in St Louis among other things) it has some nice touches both inside and outside. There is a skating rink outside the station and everyone is having a great time gliding around on the ice. The thermometer on one of the buildings says it is -5 C. That is pretty cold.

Helsinki Street, not too cold for accordion playing.

I wander off in what looks like the most interesting direction. I don’t have a guide so I can’t really tell where I am going or what I might see. One or two nice buildings and some big old department store. A government building looking very stern and official. A few statues of folks that I do not know. A modern concert hall with interesting sculpture outside causes me to look in. I find out there is a free concert that night. That provides me with something to do as it would be too cold to keep walking around.

Unknown Statue, Helsinki

Retracing my steps a little I find a nice old church and then a design museum with an exhibition on California design. I didn’t go in but I wonder what they had in their exhibit. I find a nice looking Konditorei and get a bite to eat and a chance to warm up.

I then make my way to the concert hall for the concert. It is a flamenco concert. There are a lot of people and I only just get in, and I have to sit on the floor. It was surprisingly good. The musical support of piano, cello, flute and percussion were quite jazzy. The dancing ladies were good too and the main singer herself was terrific. A short concert but a good one that opened my eyes to flamenco more than they had been before.

The night train north from Helsinki

It was now really cold so I go to a coffee shop to keep warm until my train arrives. At 11:30 I board the train. I have a compartment to myself and it is really quite comfortable. There is even WiFi onboard.

Kemi

I get a reasonable nights sleep and I awake to a beautiful blue sky as we travel through a winter wonderland with lots of fir trees and lots of snow. We arrive in Kemi, my stop, about 9:50. Just enough time for me to walk up through town to the bus station and catch the 10:05 bus to Haparanda/Tornio. Like I said not much room for error.

Haparanda, Sweden

It is a short 40 minute ride to Haparanda/Tornio. There is not much sign of the border here - one minute you are in Finland (Tornio) and the next in Sweden (Haparanda) with no real physical sign of any transition that I saw (other than the one hour time change as you cross). This is the border that Lenin crossed over to Finland in 1917 on his way to stir up the Bolsheviks and start the Russian Revolution. Imagine if he were not allowed to cross. Not everyone wanted him to. The world might be a different place if that had not happened. Now in modern times Haparanda is famous for housing the most northerly IKEA store.

The most northerly IKEA, Haparanda, Sweden

I have time for a quick 30 minute walk around Haparanda and then I am on the bus again; this time for Kiruna. It is a 6 hr ride through the snow covered landscape. At first we headed north just west of the Torne River through the town of Pajala and up to Karesuvanto before dropping down towards Kiruna. 

En Route to Kiruna

The bus stops frequently along the way and we change drivers every couple of hours. Time passes quickly and just after sunset we arrive in Kiruna. I am staying at a hostel at a conference center and I walk the 15 or 20 minutes to my lodging. There’s a larger hotel next door with a restaurant and I have a lovely meal of reindeer steak, Very tender but a rich meat - with lingonberries too - just like the meatballs in IKEA.

I return to get kitted up for my late night Aurora Tour. It is going to be cold out there so I put on multiple layers of thermals, my down jacket and my boots. As expected right on 9:00 I am picked up by Stefan the owner/operator of the tour company. He is an expat German who has had a lot of experience in the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic well as here in Sweden. There are a group of 4 Aussies in the van from Brisbane and Western Victoria - all nice folk.

We head south from Kiruna towards Nikkaluotka. Stefan claims it is much less traveled down there as opposed to the busy roads around Abisko to the north where most people go and he is right, after we get out of town, we do not see another vehicle all evening. For a good ways we don’t see any aurora activity either and then after an hour or so we see a faint glow. We stop and observe and as we do it becomes more well formed - faint wisps of bluish greenish white cloud like forms. A little further on it seems to be getting stronger and we stop again to take photos. It is a great surprise to me to see how the camera behaves - accumulating all that light for a 12+ second exposure, the resulting picture shows a very bright and colorful image. All those long exposure photos are all overly vivid and bright.

Aurora Borealis near Nikkaluotka

It is colder out of town and it becomes very difficult to operate the delicate controls of my little camera. I fumbled around in the cold and dark until my fingers were quite painful. I should have practiced more and memorized some of the settings. What seems to work best is an 800 ISO, f2.8, for 10 or 12 seconds with a manual focus on infinity and a 2 second shutter delay. Too many little adjustments to make with cold fingers.

We drive on in the middle of the icy road often with our lights out (apparently he has had many tickets for driving without lights). The lights out really help with keeping your eyes adjusted to the dark and for spotting the changes in the aurora - which are quite frequent. Sometimes it is almost non-existent and then sometimes it blossoms into ribbons and curtains of bluish green light across the northern sky.

We continue on until we reach Nikkaluotka some 75 km from Kiruna stopping every now and again to observe and photograph until we are too cold to bear it any more. Stefan reckons it is -38 Deg C. My feet start to feel the cold and I realize how dangerous it would be to be stuck out there with a breakdown or whatever. You wouldn’t last too long in that kind of cold. Strangely when I was in Alaska I didn’t seem to worry about such conditions but now in my maturity it is a different matter.

We turn around and make the return trip, again stopping every now and again to observe the lights. We take some coffee and biscuits but the coffee doesn’t stay warm long enough. We only saw one moose walking in the trees next to the road - he watched us, we watched him. We get back to Kiruna about 2:00 am after a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding trip. Well worth the 2100 kroner. 

Church in Kiruna

Next morning I am a little late getting moving but I have breakfast at the hostel and then leave my bags there while I walk around town. There is not a lot to see in Kiruna, a nice wooden church, a local government building, a Saami culture museum and that’s about it. Still with all the snow it is a pleasant enough town to walk in. I walk out to the railway station where I am supposed to catch the train in the evening. It isn’t much of a station - unmanned, just a little waiting room and a lot of tracks. The modern electrified line takes a lot of traffic from the iron ore mine over to the coast in Norway but apparently passenger traffic is not that frequent.

Back in town I sign up for the iron ore mine tour. The mine in Kiruna is the largest underground iron ore mine in the world and a tour is high on the list of things to do. I am waitlisted but they managed to squeeze me on the bus. It was a full size bus full of people and we drove off to the mine and then actually drove into the mine. There is a highway down into the mine and for several kilometers we drove down to the 500 m level. At this level there are old workings and a visitor area where we were given the spiel about the company, its history, the mine and the high grade magnetite that they produce. It was most interesting - it started in the early 20th century, it grew to the largest underground iron ore mine. They are now mining down towards the 1500m level and every night around 1:00 am they detonate the days drilling and apparently you can feel these detonations in Kiruna.

The LKAB Mine in Kiruna

Unfortunately they have removed so much material that the ground in Kiruna is collapsing and they have plans to move half the town of Kiruna to another more stable area in the next few years. A thoroughly interesting tour.

Hard Hats for everyone, LKAB Mine

I went back to pick up the bags and then out to the station. At the station there are quite a few buses and quite a few people. It is announced that our train is on time but then it never arrives and after 45 mins or so the train disappears from the station’s display. As I learned later the train was cancelled and one of the buses was supposed to take everyone to Bodum to catch another train. All the Swedes got texts about the change and no announcement was made in English in the waiting room. There was just myself and a Chinese couple from Hong Kong left waiting around in the unmanned station. What a disaster. We are both in the same boat with flights out of Stockholm the next day. Fortunately we have internet so we book tickets on the early morning SAS flight (expensive) book a hotel in town and call for a taxi back to town.

Not a very satisfactory end to the day and we are all furious with the train company. Still KK Pang and his wife, Cheri, both teachers from Honk Kong become fast friends.

KK and Cheri, en route to Stockholm from Kiruna

After a short stay in the hotel, we have a 4:30 taxi to the airport for the early flight to Stockholm. Everything else goes smoothly. In retrospect, if I had known about the bus to Bodum then I would have taken it, but the likely outcome would have been that it would take a long time and I would have been late arriving in Stockholm for my flight to the US. That would have been more of a disaster so it turned out well in the end.

There are more photographs here.