Lapp up the light
Want to catch the Midnight Sun? Head to Swedish Lapland says Clare Jenkins who boards a train to explore the region.
Guninger Wallström is showing us around the tiny, tidy Swedish town of Arjeplog. It’s 10am and she’s only had a few hours sleep – she was gardening until 1.30am, awake again at 5am. “We’re like bears,” she says. “In the winter we like to sleep a lot. But in the summer, we are filled with energy.”
It’s hardly surprising. Here in
Swedish Lapland, the winters are long, the summers short. By September, the inhabitants have eight months of darkness ahead of them and temperatures can fall to minus 30. So when the days begin to lengthen, it’s like letting pit ponies loose in the meadows.
“We go fishing in the streams after work – we have top-notch streams,” says Guninger. “We go hiking, and we go mountain chasing, walking over ten mountain tops. Then we go back into work.”
Today, Guninger’s work includes showing us Arjeplog’s main sights: the pretty salmon-pink church, the lake (Sweden’s deepest), and the Silver Museum, with the largest collection of Sami (Swedish Lapp) silver in the world – over 700 items of jewellery, collars, belts, cups, dating back to medieval times.
The museum is a lovely place, with a recreated mid-19th century living-room (complete with faded wall stencils and a hanging wooden baby seat), bedrooms with cosy, hand-painted box beds and rag rugs, a schoolroom with child-size reindeer skin boots hung from the ceiling.
My husband and I were last in Sweden a couple of years ago, to see the Northern Lights. We’re now back to see the midnight sun. And we do see it – along with a full moon one night at 3am.
We’re travelling on the Inlandsbanan
– a community-owned, privately run inland railway. In the summer season it runs tours through central Sweden and Swedish Lapland to beyond the Arctic Circle.
The line – more than 800 miles long is seen as one of Scandinavia’s great rail journeys. It’s certainly one of the most tree-lined. Luckily, fellow passenger Stella Peterson can tell us the difference between birch, larch, pine and aspen.
Stella is a retired landscape architect from Todmorden. She and her friend Sue Stafford, from Lancaster, are spending two weeks touring Sweden, Norway and the Lofoten Islands by public transport. Couldn’t they just have flown?
“Yes, but this is slow travel,” says Stella, as we gaze out at isolated timber houses, fields of wild flowers and cotton-grass, lakes, and mountains.
The pair are heading for Gällivare, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A total journey of nearly 18 hours. An onboard ‘host’ takes passengers’ orders for station stop restaurants and rings ahead, so the roast reindeer, moose burger or salmon fillet is waiting when the train arrives.
For the next few hours, we talk trees, Todmorden, intemperate climates and trackside flowers – “That’s purple vetch,”