Alta: Finnmarksløpet

Finnmarksløpet is the world's northernmost sled dog race and it ran for the first time in the year I was born. There are two routes, both starting and ending in Alta, the longer of which goes across to Kirkenes, a town which lies north of Finland and just west of Russia. People come from all over to take part in the race, and this year we were in Alta to see it start too.

We booked a suite in the Park Hotel, a place so nice we decided to stay an extra night, and it turned out that our hotel room had its own roof-terrace overlooking the main street. On Friday night and Saturday morning people brought in and laid extra snow, cordoned off the street and made a track for the dogs with a big inflatable starting gate. Just around breakfast time the race officially opened and a warm-up man came out and did a set of weird and unfunny, somewhat adult oriented jokes to the child-heavy waiting audience.

At around 11 the sledges and dog teams made their way out from the nearby car park, crossed a road and lined up along the track. One thing was clear: while the atmosphere was pretty good on all sides, nobody was quite so excited as the dogs were. These dogs really wanted to start their running. I was surprised at how normal they seemed. Some of the dogs looked like you might expect a husky to look, but many others looked more like a dog I would expect to meet in a local recreation ground than in the pages of Call of the Wild.

For much of the afternoon the competitors took off one by one. I can't claim we saw them all, but we watched a fair few. The longer race went on for around a week and was won this year by Inger Marie Haaland. This made her the second woman to win. You can see a couple of pretty amazing images from one of the chekpoints on Jan Georg Svane's Flickr.

Alta: Borealis

Alta town centre looks a bit like the buildings have been dropped in by air-lift. Around it the residential areas are hidden amongst trees or over small hills, leaving in view only box shaped shopping centres and car parks which give the impression of a kind of sci-fi wild west in the northern wastelands. In the main square between all these blocks of glass and concrete, Laila Kolostyak had built an ice garden. There were strangely shaped snow-penguins with glowing eyes, a dragon which children could climb inside, an igloo and a massive ornate stage made of snow and ice.

After night fell, local children and teenagers put on an abstract movement piece, the story of which was (and I have since read a suggestion that this interpretation is completely wrong, but trust me dear reader, this is how it was...) a tale of a young warrior from the orient who travelled around the northern areas of the globe, collecting elements of the northern lights in a magic cake tin and braving dangers, such as wolves and belly dancers. At the end the warrior opened the cake tin and released the aurora borealis, at which point the rest of the cast came back on stage for their bow, creating a complex tableau in the process, and at the same time people at the back of the crowd let go of a large number of coloured helium balloons with glow sticks hanging from them which floated up into the sky. I told myself not to worry about the plastic, we're in the middle of nowhere up here, it's a drop in the ocean.

The whole thing was a great example of what can be achieved when amateurs and professionals get together to produce something for the community. My personal highlights of the performance were a large bird puppet, the symbolism of which I couldn't fully grasp, but which looked great on the two occasions it circled the action, and the music which accompanied the final section of the performance. This was a kind of Sami joik (a form of traditional singing not too far from yodeling) with a seriously banging beat and bass line underneath it. I would love to know what this piece of music was, so if you know, please get in touch!

E6 to Finnmark

Last weekend we drove to Alta, the largest town in Finnmark, which is the only Norwegian principality further north than the one we live in.

The first part of the journey took us over Kvænangen mountain. Marthe drives that way to work sometimes but I had never been up there before. It was a sunny day and once the road leveled out towards the top we stopped the car and I ran out into fields of snow. In no time I was almost knee-deep. There is no sound up there at all. There is wind all around, but somehow it seems noiseless.

Further on we found a small road which turns off towards Øksfjordjøkulen. That's a glacier which calves directly into the sea and which we saw on the map before we moved here. Until recently it was too dark to make the trip. We ran out of road and parked beside what appeared to be a fish factory closed for the day, then we walked along the side of a fjord until we came to a tiny collection of houses, some boarded up toilets and a sign telling tourists that they were a four hour walk from Øksfjordjøkulen. We climbed up to a natural observation point. The glacier was imbedded in the mountain on the other side of the fjord, a translucent blue under a cover of snow. You can see it in the picture below, up in the background to the right of the yellow house, though the light it holds is a little lost in a photograph.

And so we retraced our steps and drove on into Finnmark, but it was a busy weekend, so I'll follow this post up with two more soon.