Friday, June 29, 2018

Lapland

I have only once been in a place where the cold was dangerous: Lapland, in January. The road surfaces were 6" of packed grey ice; daylight lasted four hours; at one point the temperature at midday plunged below -30C.

We were there for a week, for a wedding in an ice chapel. On the other days we did what tourists do - take a sledge ride behind reindeer, try out snowshoes, venture out at night to search for the aurora. One event was ice fishing, where we used an augur to screw a hole through a metre of ice to fish for char and trout. When we pulled a fish from the hole it froze instantly with a sharp crackling.

Our early ancestors should never have left Africa.

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