Ancestors

Around 60 years ago, a man was out ploughing his field in Alta when he found a large rock with an ornate carving of a human female on it. Over the course of the next few years people discovered a massive amount of local rock art dating from between 7000 and 2000 years ago. Much of it is concentrated in a place called Hjemmeluft, right at the edge of the Fjord, where the creators congregated for thousands of years. There's a museum there, where you can walk out along a raised wooden causeway and see for yourself.

As ever, you can click on these images to enlarge them.

Up until quite recently the carvings were painted red to make them more visible. Now this is considered bad form, so any newly found carvings are being left untouched and there is a project underway to remove the paint on the others. Without the paint they look like this:

Many of the images depict animals, people and boats. Although some seem a little cryptic, it's amazing how easy it is to recognise many of the motifs. These people could communicate a lot of information with only a few lines.

My favourite was this image of a man catching a fish (below).  It has been suggested that the bear and the fish are meeting in another world, to which the water is the gateway.

When you think about how long this style of art was practiced in comparison to the later more "realistic" European style of painting and drawing, the latter seems like a tiny anomaly. Especially when you consider the return to abstraction in the 20th Century. That people were meeting up here in the same small area of the arctic and practicing this tradition right through from the late Neolithic period to the start of the Christian calender is mind-blowing.

Even weirder is that I drew those same stick-men when I was a child. You probably did too.

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!