We were up a bit earlier today and we are starting to master our cold weather outfits so we are speeding up when getting ready!
We had a taxi booked for 9.40 to take us to our first proper excursion of our Lapland adventure - husky sledging with Rami’s huskies. We drove back along the road that we had come in by on the airport bus but this time in the light.
We knew by the barking that we were getting close. We met Anita who is a freelance husky pack owner with 61 dogs (all Siberian huskies apart from 4 Alaskan) who brings her dogs to Rami’s place when he has a lot of visitors. We had 7 dogs in our team, all Siberian huskies. As we waited - I was in the sledge first with a rug and reindeer skins and Colin driving - the dogs were going wild and then once we started moving they were all silent.
The dogs knew their way but were really excited and that seemed to encourage their digestion... as they were literally pooping as we went along and it was all flying back towards our sledge... (I made sure my buff was firmly over my face!). They also kept trying to eat the snow which I thought meant that they were thirsty but Anita explained that they were actually really hot as -5 is actually quite warm for a husky apparently!
After 8kms we stopped and Anita tied up the dogs and then she somehow made a fire from birch wood on the ice using a small axe to cut kindling - she wasn’t a woman to be messed with. Then we cooked Finnish sausages on the fire... well as I was photographing the huskies Colin was charcoaling the sausages! Anita boiled some bilberry juice in black kettles on the fire and ginger biscuits appeared from nowhere. It was really nice to sit in a circle with other ‘sledgers’ from Italy, toasting each other in Finnish, Italian and English.
Then back to the sledges and this time in was my turn to stand on the back and control the dogs. It was quite tricky at first simply staying on the back rails of the sledge and using the brake to stop the sledge and help the dogs on a downward slope.
It was silent when the dogs were running and all we could hear was the swish of the sledge runners on the snow.
We arrived back and the dogs started barking again but were fed straight away with exactly the same sized block of minced meat. I managed to get some more photos and Anita told me a lot about her dogs. Finally it was time to go and we called a taxi and headed back to the hotel.
We were both pretty tired but managed to get ourselves up and going to catch the 3.40pm ski bus back up to the ski village with our green sledge which we then proceeded to whizz downtime children slope, falling off a few times but the snow was very soft. An excellent day rounded off by a meal in a local restaurant - ‘Orso’ where I did NOT have bear or capercaillie! Still no Northern Lights though.
Here's some more images of the huskies from today...
https://www.facebook.com/pg/EmmaDurnfordPhotography/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1749999868386020
