Lapland

[Olof_imp]

@Cormanus: yes the scenery is truly stunning, also up close we were amazed by the freshness and beauty. Drinking the water straight from the streams is not only fine but also very tasty. At the same time it's an unforgiving harsh environment, especially in winter - the hardships that early settlers had to endure are unbelievable.

@Goldoxie: absolutely, ADV riding should be top here in terms of wildlife. However, there are not really that many roads around. These two phone screenshots, from the Swedish Transport Administration site, perhaps illustrate this. The top image portrays the Saxnäs area, Lapland, and the bottom image portrays the Helsingborg area, Skåne (where we live), with same scale - 1:750000 which roughly translates to 100 km horizontally across the images (I have no idea why the images end up with different sizes in the post but in reality these are the same so just mentally enlarge the Skåne image, sorry for that). Red lines are tarmac roads and blue lines are gravel roads. There simply aren't any roads up north. The difference corresponds pretty well with the population density - in Lapland less than one person per square kilometer, compared to 107 in Skåne (which happens to equal the average population density for Europe).




@Stitchill: Thermacell looks interesting. I admit that the mosquitoes bothered us more than we had expected and after a few days with constant application of chemicals on your skin - which goes straight into your blood - we were quite happy to leave that behind us. So, we'll look into this. Thanks!