Kiruna - Abisko

This morning starts at 6:30 am with the generous breakfast buffet at our hotel in Kiruna. Afterwards we make sandwiches for lunch and pack our backpacks: today we are hiking. In Abisko National Park, to be precise, our northernmost destination here in Sweden. We have enough food and water with us, our cameras and drone are charged, the car is fully fuelled with petrol and electricity, in short: we are ready to go!

It is an hour’s drive, or about 100 km, to Abisko. On the way it seems to get colder and colder, and we pass many frozen lakes. We also pass a few scattered reindeer at the roadside.

We first head towards “Stranden”, which takes us to the “beach”, made up of the frozen lake and snow instead of sand. Then we walk two of the shorter hikes. One leads us to a raging, roaring waterfall, the other brings us closer to the life of the indigenous people of Scandinavia, called the Sami. The melted snow flows straight into a lake that is still largely frozen. By the waterfall there are still some frozen spots.

We also explore the start of the legendary Kungsleden trail (The King Of All Trails), which is 440 km long if you walk all of it. At the moment the trail consists of many muddy and snow-covered stretches. We are almost the only hikers and only very rarely meet other people.

Above all, though, we enjoy the many individual frozen lakes, shimmering light blue from the ice. Both on the way there and on the way back we keep stopping at lakes to marvel at them. Here and there we even see fishermen on the ice drilling holes to fish through. These ice fishermen are equipped with high rubber boots and long poles, which they use to test where the ice can be walked on. We also see skiers on the ice and walkers strolling across it with their dogs. We take lots of photos and Nicolas flies his drone over the ice-covered lakes.

Besides the reindeer we also saw an eagle and a ptarmigan today. The wild animals are mostly very shy and quickly disappear if you stop next to them with the car to photograph them.

On the way back we drive to the ICA Kvantum in Kiruna to get dinner. However, it has hardly any takeaway food, so we decide to make a detour to Burger King to get halloumi salad bowls, onion rings and sweet potato fries. Back at the hotel we phone friends and family and edit photos. Today there are particularly many photos and choosing is very hard, since they are all so beautiful with the icy lakes.