Sweden : Into the Wild

Our time in Stockholm wasn't quite what we had hoped for but it wasn't this beautiful city's fault. The 3 days or so that we thought we would spend exploring each corner of the city quickly turned into a logistical operation to organise what we were really here for, hiking the Kungsleden in the Arctic circle.

First of all, we spent a whole day swirling around Central Station trying to find the cheapest possible way of travelling to and from the furthest possible point in a very longiline and famously expensive country. We explored bus and train options, as well as various rail passes versus standard tickets and so on. It took a while but, with the help and patience of the rail ticket counter staff, we managed to leave the station with all the train tickets for our whole time in Sweden and onto Copenhagen.

Once that was sorted out, we went on a wild goose chase trying to retrieve some packages we had foolishly got our mothers to send over as poste restante. Those packages contained things we would need for the hike like thermals and hiking boots. It should have all gone fine except that the address we had found was the site of where the general post office used to be but is now a government building. According to the beefhead security guy, our address might have worked 20 years ago. To make matters worse, Sweden doesn't really have post office anymore. They only have little counters here and there accross the city. Finally, we had only one tracking number which made the other package, well, untrackable. There was basically no hope for that one. The other one, the trackable one, we managed to run after blindly listening to the instructions of the post office hotline in real time. We would call and they would say where the package was last seen and we would run there only to be told it wasn't there yet or anymore or ever. Finally, we were told that they were being sent back to the sender. We would have to do with what we had with us. The only thing we bought was a pair of wet-weather pants for me and thank god we did!

With the small amount of free time we managed to scavenge out of this boring mission, we ran around a few must-see sites, only the free ones that is and although it felt messy and chaotic, we were still able to see that although we thought we were back in Europe when we reached Russia, Scandi countries are in a league of their own. I think that in Sweden, we basically reached the peak of civilisation (We decided to skip Norway as that would take our budget to new heights). In our daggy backpacker attire, all we could do was lurk around in the shadow of these tall and handsome people and watch them drink cold beers in garden cafes, eat scrumptious salads and awesome sandwiches, ride their funky bicycles looking like they live in the pages of the sartorialist (for those unfamiliar with it, the "Sartorialist" website is a fashion bible) and look happy doing it. Then, we would retreat to our campground on the outskirts of the city which, to be fair, had a few perks. We had access to a lovely little beach on a lake AND we were only a few stops away from the largest IKEA in the world...

In the evening of our third day, we boarded the weekly train which runs from Malmo, in the very south of Sweden) to Abisko TuristStation, in the very north. That was our destination. The trip took around 18 hours and thanks to the train being fairly empty, the only passengers being hikers, we were able to get 2 seats each and get a little bit of sleep. We crossed the Arctic circle line around mid-day and reached Abisko around 3pm. Once there, faced with never-ending daylight, litteraly, we decided to make hay while the sun shines, and walked the first 4 km of the Kungsleden hike before setting up camp for our first night in the wild. 4km down, 96 to go...