The main thing I will remember about Karasjok will almost certainly be the cold. Until today we had been experiencing temperatures in the balmy range of 0 to -5 degrees. Thanks to the gulf stream, much of northern Norway has a comparatively mild climate for somewhere sitting inside the Arctic Circle. Once one moves inland as far as Karasjok, the capital of the Sami people in Norway the situation changes somewhat. According to the car dashboard, temperatures today bottomed out at -26 °C. Aleks has experienced this kind of cold before, I have not. At these temperatures the moisture in your nostrils and on any facial hair freezes within minutes. (The low temperature shouldn’t really surprise us, as Karasjok has recorded the coldest official temperature ever in Norway: −51.4 °C on 1 January 1886.) Toes seem to turn into blocks of ice which can only be thawed with long blasts of the car heater – difficult to achieve when you need the fans to prevent ice forming on the insides of the windscreen and car windows. And noses! Let’s not forget about how quickly the tip of the nose becomes painfully, prickly cold. Auch!
Karasjok houses the government of the Sami people in Norway in a pretty building inspired by traditional Sami tents. On weekdays at 13:00 there are guided tours of the building, however as it was a Sunday, we were left to admire it from the outside. As well as viewing the parliament building we went to Sámpi Park. The buildings were closed, but we had a walk through the outdoor part seeing different Sami dwellings and structures, including Bealjegoahti (winter hut), Guolleburvi (a hut in a side of a hill filled with snow and ice during winter, which remained cold during summer – a predecessor to a fridge), storage huts on skis to enable transport, summer tents, reindeer enclosures (minus the reindeer) and more. I’m glad we came as I found the place really interesting. I imagine it’s even better in the summer, when it’s populated and when the snow is melted.
With the temperature less than friendly, and most things being closed on a Sunday, we soon retreated from Karsjok, but decided first to take a trip to a country we had never visited before. The drive to the Finnish border took only 20 minutes, however according to our rental agreement we weren’t actually able to drive out of the country. We therefore parked up just before the bridge which crossed the frozen river separating the two countries and proceeded on foot to the other side. Apart from being able to officially tick another country off the list of those we’ve set foot in, we were also able to visit the small convenience store on the other side of the border. Not much of a sightseeing experience, but it did allow me to stock up with a large supply of Salmiaki (salted liquorice, which I love and Aleks does not).
We returned to Norway and our car and headed back towards Alta, pausing in Kautokeino where we admired the timber church and lamented the fact that we had just missed the opening hours of the Sami museum there.
Side note: There’s a café restaurant a short way from Kautekino called Pit Stop. It has free wifi and every table has access to an electricity plug, so it’s a good place to take a break and charge your devices. We also realised today that the Rema 1000 shops not only offer free wifi, but also free coffee to its shoppers. 🙂
Daleks Abroad 