First full day in Sweden

It's only 1pm, but since I've been awake (after a fashion) since 02:30, and at home it's around 10pm, I feel sleepy. I can't sleep until 21:00 at the earliest though, or I'm not going to adjust to the new timezone.

So I've retreated to my hotel room, after a morning out. I woke at 2:30am, as I mentioned, after going to sleep at around 19:00. I perhaps should have stayed up a bit later, but didn't want to push myself to the point of exhaustion. I was still tired after waking though, so dozed in and out of sleep until 04:00, at which point I rolled out of bed, unable to get any more sleep. It was still pitch black outside, but the town was lit up quite brightly.

By breakfast time, 06:00, I was quite hungry, and though I was one of the first people there I probably ate half the available food. Made up for my caffeine-withdrawal headache too, with a couple of decent coffees.

I checked email and chatted after breakfast until 9am, at which point I headed out to the shops. The one I was after is called "Expert", and is the source for anything technological in town apparently. As of this morning, I had 10 minutes of recording time left on my DVD camcorder, and needed new discs for it. And a memory stick so I can take photos with it. The store wasn't going to open until 10am though, so I went for a drive out of town.

Very quickly I was on a deserted country road, with minutes between seeing any other cars. I stopped frequently in the little parking spaces along the road to get videos of the countryside... the woods, the swamps, the hills and the clouds. The roads here all seem to have been build up along channels cut out of the ground, so there are ditches on either side, everywhere. The roads outside of town are all very well kept, though inside town they're working on all of the major intersections simultaneously, and have left the road as gravel and mud!

I think the ditches are twofold. One is that it gives an uphill path for animals bolting, slowing them down from running in front of traffic. The other, and main, reason is the water. As I've said, there's water everywhere here, sitting in pools as well as falling from the sky. This way the water doesn't sit too deeply on the roads, or run over it. There's pipes under the road at intervals so water can pass under it without building up to the road level and running over it in sheets. Works well for consistent rain falls, though I expect problems if they get torrential downpours.

I didn't have a map, or any idea where I was going... I'd just chosen a road at random. I saw a hill off to one side and decided to climb it, so kept an eye out for roads leading towards it. I didn't see any, and afer about half an hour without much scenery change, I turn around and drove back.

On the way back I stopped by an open field... it seemed strange for there to be open fields in the middle of the woods, but I'd seen several. A closer inspection explained why... it wasn't an open field, it was a swamp with surface water hidden by grasses. There goes my plan to go tromping through the field... I'd be up to my knees in mud and stuck within a metre.

I hopped in the car and drove back.

On the way back I saw the first animal I've seen... a squirrel hopped its way over the road. It was longer and skinnier than the American squirrels I saw in Texas, but still cute.

Most of the way back to Gallivare, I saw a sign saying "i", which I took to be the symbol for "information", as in, touristy stuff. Turned out to be closed up, but there was a road leading up behind it, and a notice board mentioning a national park, if my understanding of the Swedish was correct. Score! I jumped into my trusty 4wd and took off up the road, towards my hill!

A one lane road wound its way up the hillside, with thickenings every 100 metres or so, so people can pull over and allow others to pass. I passed a couple of stopped vehicles on the way up, until one point where I was in a saddle between two hills, and a track went off the road. I pulled over, put my gloves and jacket on, and went to the track.

It was a series of wooden planks leading from the roadside over a small stream and up over the swampy ground. I stuck to the planks, the ground was essentially mud and a wrongly placed foot would sink straight in. The planks were slippery, as it was raining, and I could see the clouds overhead, obscuring the top of the hill. After about 50 metres the planks stopped, and I was on terra firma again, stepping from rock to rock as I made my way up the hill.

The ground was covered with low-lying heather, which was covered in berries. It must be the season for it or something. The path was marked with 2 metre high posts driven into the ground. I followed it until I was near the top of the hill... the path continued down the other side and up another hill. It was cold and wet, and I wanted to get to the top of my hill, rather than follow the trail, so I made diverted from the path and headed to the outcrop of rocks that crowned the hill.

The ground was covered in heather, as I've mentioned, but up close I saw all sorts of strange growths. Mushrooms grew unprotected, so the climate must be damp constantly up there, or at least lately, rather than it just having been raining these past two days. There was also something that looked like free-standing lichen.. it had the same colour and shape as lichen, but stood by itself instead of growing on rocks. I don't know what it is... and closer inspection turned up several other alien growths. The rocks were chunks of basalt, I think the entire hillsides are big blocks of basalt. It'll be interesting to see the geology of the Aitik mine when I get there.

After using the last remaining minutes on my camcorder to record the view (clouds obscured seeing far unfortunately), I headed back down, hopped in the car then drove back into town. And drove, and drove...

I was lost.

I had no idea how to get back onto a road I recognised. It was fun! I drove around, into factory grounds, down residential streets, over roadworks... eventually though I spotted a shop I thought I'd seen yesterday, when searching for the supermarket. Sure enough, I was soon back into the parts of Gallivare I knew. Awww. I found the "Expert" shop, but soon discovered that although the shopping complex it is in opened at 10am, Expert does not open on Sundays. So I'll have to find some way to get there during work hours to get some discs, as they're only open until 6pm. Fortunately Aitik isn't far from my hotel, 15 minutes I'm told, so I may be able to drop back here during lunch tomorrow.

I got some lunch from a fast food store called "Sybilla"... it tasted exactly the same as Wendys. Grabbed some tourist information from the tourist centre across the road from the hotel, and retired to my hotel room. Now it's 2:44pm, and with everything shut and the rain coming down I may have a nap... so tired, the jet lag is hitting me.