LAPPING IT UP
0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Nov 8, 2009 | by ADAM LEE-POTTER
Try catching reindeer and riding on a sledge pulled by huskies when you take a trip to magical Lapland…
COLD and bleak, the Arctic Circle isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But as an antidote to sitting on a beach with a paperback and a pina colada, it is a breath of fresh, minus 38oC air.
The hotel accommodation is basic (a pine bunk, a shower and a telly) while the food is school dinnerish, meat and veg boiled to grey.
Local fare in the one-bar hamlet which passes for a town around here isn’t much better, running to the Arctic combo – three slices of seal, three slices of whale and a raw potato – or reindeer burgers. At pounds 5 for a glass of beer, you can’t even afford to drown your sorrows.
caledonia pizza Worse, you look rather foolish and fat in your essential holiday wear, an all-in-one bodysuit. But then even Kate Moss would look a champion pie-eater in one of these, galumphing along in snow boots like a drunken sailor.
Certainly, this is not the place for a first-date adventure.
But let’s face it, you don’t come to Northern Lapland for glamour or romance. With a population of just 500 and, seemingly, just two surnames – Poulsen and Povlsen – Karesuando is the Arctic Circle’s Wild West.
You come, instead, for the wondrous sights, the peace and beauty of the wilderness and hopefully a glimpse of the fabled Northern Lights. It is hard to understand the impossibly high suicide rates that rival neighbouring Norway. If you run out of things to do here you’re really not trying.
Ice fishing, sledging, roaring around in two-stroke skidoos, rolling about in the snow after a brutally hot sauna, just taking in the hush and the beauty. You could have fun here 365 days of the year.
Perched, as we are, between Norway and Sweden, you can even walk to the latter in 20 minutes. The food’s no better, but it sounds posh: “Just off to Sweden for lunch.”
It’s also bewitchingly perfect for children: loads of snow, reindeer and herders seemingly everywhere and, of course, Father Christmas on your doorstep. Three days is scarcely enough to scrape the surface.
After landing at Tromso Airport in Norway, a three-hour flight, we head north in a steamed-up minibus. Our driver stops two hours later at a truck stop – “because these are the last loos that aren’t frozen” – where we are assaulted by the cold. It has plunged 18oC, to minus 2oC. It’s like a punch to the lungs.
Two bruising hours later, and now in total darkness, we arrive at the isolated Davvi Arctic Lodge, a vast timber chalet in the middle of, well, nothing. A wolf howls ominously in the distance.
But there’s no time to brood on being eaten alive. We’re soon suited and booted and romping about in the snow before sitting down to a plate of gloopy chick-e n and boiled carrots, washed down with limitless Ribena. Delicious. You certainly sleep well out here. And in the morning we set out with renewed vigour for a snowshoe trek. It soon becomes clear why tennis racquets strapped to your feet is a good idea. You look daft, but without them you look dafter still, up to your waist in snow.
Either way, it’s punishing. This is no gentle tramp. I’m soon puffing like Vanessa Feltz in a sauna. In two hours, we cover barely a mile.
Then it’s off to reindeer camp where it quickly becomes apparent that lassooing is just as difficult as I’d imagined… impossible.
TV explorer Bruce Parry may have made piloting a reindeer sled look pitifully easy but in reality it’s like wrestling wild animals. Which is exactly what you are doing. As our impenetrable guide, a big bear of a man with calluses on his hands bigger than my fists, tells us with a logic that is impossible to fault: “These aren’t horses. You can never tame a reindeer.”
One tip if you ever want to round up a herd of reindeer is forget the lasso and go for a wee outside instead. Reindeer adore the salt in human urine and come running as if you were sprinkling the snow with Pedigree Chum.
But as soon as I’ve discovered the reindeers’ filthy secret we’re off to drive some huskies.
Labradors they ain’t. They are all wild eyes and killer fangs. The handler senses our unease and laughs: “Don’t worry, they won’t eat you. As long as you do what I tell you.”
Two hours later we are done – and it is clear the huskies have taken me for a walk, rather than the other way around.
My fingers are numb from clinging to the reins for dear life, my arms feel as though they’ve been torn from their sockets and my feet are frozen
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