Hello Norway!

“Where is Ben?” I asked as I realised that only six out of seven students were at Helsinki train station to board the train to Kautokeino, Norway.

Our time in Helsinki had come to an end. We had returned from our two-week travel break across Europe and now had to take a 10-hour train trip plus a three hour bus ride to reach the remote Norwegian village of Kautokeino.

We had known this day would come; the final six weeks of our course would involve studying environmental journalism at Sami University College. We didn’t know what it was going to be like living in a town above the Arctic Circle where there were more reindeers than people. For a start, we had to worry about getting there.

All of us had dragged our suitcases onto the train before we realised Ben was missing. A text message flashed up on Georgie’s phone - from the man himself:

“The train leaves at 9.40, right?”, she read out loud. 

“No, Ben – it leaves at 9.20!” She texted back furiously.

Well, there was no way we could wait for him and we kept trying to figure out how to squeeze our entire luggage into the tiny sleeper-train cabins (and believe me, they are tiny). We knew the train was about to leave in a few minutes and still no sight of Ben. I started to wonder what would actually happen if he didn’t get on the train - getting to Kolari in Northern Finland was one thing but then, there was 120km from there to Kautokeino with no public transport at this time of year…

“Ben!” Someone called out and there he was. Huffing and puffing, with his gear strapped onto his back – just a mere thirty seconds until the train is due to depart. I laughed, “You have the luck of a devil, my friend.”  Then, we proceeded on the long trip up to Kautokeino, grabbing a reindeer sandwich at Kolari and then a three hour mini-bus ride (which costs over 500 euros between us, yep – looks like Norway lives up to its reputation as an expensive country to live in) until we finally arrived at Kautokeino. I think we were just amazed that we managed to get somewhere so remote relatively hassle free. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as dark as I expected – in fact, it was really bright outside – but there was still a decent amount of snow in town. We spotted one pub, two supermarkets, a petrol station and a bunch of houses – yep, this was definitely going to be small town life.

Living in Kautokeino

Day 1 in the Big Brother house. Well... it feels like the Big Brother house.

The Big Brother House

For the last six weeks, I’ve been living under the same roof with six Australians and one French national. Here, we share a kitchen, laundry, bathroom and kindergarten. Yes – we are sharing a kindergarten because we are living in a kindergarten.

There’s even a playground outside and when we walk out, a few Sami three-year olds call out "Ei-o!" to us. Every morning, one of our housemates, Emma, is woken to the sound of hundreds of tiny little feet running across the corridors downstairs.

Apparently, there weren’t enough houses to accommodate us in groups of twos or threes this year but there was an empty floor above the local kindergarten which does resemble a house once you get there; complete with a long hallway, a common room and kitchen. However, there are also drawings and paintings clearly done by toddlers stuck into the drawing board on the walls.

So, we tried to settle into Kautokeino life, which was unsurprisingly very… quiet. At first, there were no classes so we spent some time chilling in our new home. Sometimes, it's quite relaxing; waking up and deciding to watch a movie or read a book because you had nothing else to do. It was like being on holiday. There’s no one to answer to and no to-do lists. However, you do get to spend a lot of time on the internet! Then, when you realise that it’s only 1pm but feels like three, you start to feel bored because you’ve got nothing else to do. Then, frustration settles in because you just want some kind of work and there’s no such thing as going out since it costs $13 for a beer, not to mention that you can only buy alcohol from the bottle shop on Wednesday and only before 3pm.

Finally, our classes started and we were all looking forward to have something to do besides play the twentieth round of Kemps or checking our emails... again. But then another thing happens – after a few weeks, you get into a perpetual state of laziness.

Classes and assignments have started, so there’s more productive things to do but you just don’t do them. You think I would have been way ahead with my assignments or something, but you get into the habit of spending your days sleeping in till noon and watching stuff on Youtube. You get sick of it, it’s boring – but I wasn’t doing anything about it.

Then, one night, we got a knock at the door. I was sitting in the lounge chatting to my housemates, when Georgie told us, in these exact words, “There’s an Asian lady outside and she wants to come in.”

…. What?!

This must have been one of the most bizarre experiences of my life, there was what appeared to be a little Asian woman with a suitcase, standing outside our door at 11.30pm on a Monday night. Holy shit, it was like Big Brother – we were getting ‘intruders’ showing up to our door at 11:30pm. 

“Well – do we let her in?” someone asked (can’t remember who) with a laugh. Of course we did – turned out this was our new housemate who was here for a week doing a Sami language course. No one actually bothered to tell us this or bother to tell her that you needed a code to get into the building (or what that code was). Lucky we weren’t asleep, otherwise it would have been an uncomfortable sleep outside in the Arctic Circle for our new Mongolian housemate, Marina.

I’ve probably made this sound as though the most exciting experience I had in six weeks was having a stranger show up to my house, but that’s not true. There were some truly amazing moments scattered over the course of the time I spent there getting to know the Sami people and their way of life. One of them was reindeer herding.

Reindeer Herding – the Sami way of life

The Sami people are nomadic people; they travel from coast to coast across the arctic circle, often herding a few thousand reindeers. We were living in one of the largest reindeer herding areas in Norway and got to spend some time reindeer herding with a Sami family. I didn’t know what to expect but I was pretty excited to have something to break up the monotony of the experience so far. And, oh did it break up the monotony! We started by getting on some snowmobiles – a sure sign that this was going to be good. Snow mobiles are the perfect form of travel in the arctic. For one, they’re fast but really comfortable to ride on and two, speeding across a frozen river between mountains with 2000 reindeers in front of you is pretty amazing. We also managed to borrow some of the family’s ski pants, ski boots and socks so we never went cold throughout the whole trip.

Once we herded the reindeer, we set up for lunch in a genuine teepee which was completed with a camp fire in the middle where the smoke escape through the hole at the top. We sat on reindeer rugs and had a real Sami lunch which consisted mainly of meat, bread and chocolate. That meat used here is, of course, reindeer meat and if you like lamb, you’ll like reindeer. It’s good smoked, boiled, and even raw – but I wouldn’t recommend the tongue; it’s a bit fatty. The reindeer herder, Ingra, brought out a variety of Sami bread, sausages for the fire and reindeer meat. She even brought yoghurts and fruits for the vegetarians (a concept that the Sami people struggle to understand, since they spend parts of their lives eating only meat when they are herding in the middle of the arctic winter). Then, there was another helping of coffee, tea, biscuits and chocolate. And we were encouraged to eat as much as we liked, which we did. It was a nice way to eat.

Then it was back on the snow mobiles to head back to town. It’s hard to describe the amazing natural scenery – I felt I was in a national geographic shot, I could just see someone filming or taking shots of this endless landscape of snow, ice and mountains all under a clear blue sky with a shining sun. It’s hard to describe how amazing it is, so I’ll put one of the photos we took, which I think almost captures it.

We returned home after a pretty amazing day, with a head full of very unique memories. But it wasn’t the only traditional Sami experience we had or the last time that we went reindeer herding.

The second time we went herding with the Sami family, it was time to put the reindeers into the fence. The Sami had built a huge fence to herd the reindeer into. We helped by dragging thick wooden poles over a metre long through waist-deep snow, and then it was time to watch the reindeer being herded. Thousands of reindeer were herded into the fence. We jumped in and watched them run round and round. You find that reindeer are quite timid animals, particularly when they’re semi-domesticated; they purposefully avoid you. It was time to separate the calves from their mothers, and I’m proud to say that I’ve wrangled a reindeer in my lifetime, which is no easy feat - especially when they keep kicking their hooves in protest. But I finally managed to drag it through the dirt (albeit with the help of a Sami reindeer herder) to a secluded area of the pen. Ingra (the matriarch of the Sami family) said we were “very good help”, but I don’t think I’ll be a signing up for reindeer herding anytime soon… an Arts degree is so much easier!

Six weeks came to a close surprisingly quickly and I have a some very special memories of a land where the sun is still shining at 11pm, reindeer is as common as chicken and people follow reindeer for most of their lives. I’m not sure if I’ll miss the place, but it was definitely an experience.

Next stop – Europe

Now my exchange is truly over - results have come in, course work is done and it’s time to start the month-long trip around Europe that I had planned from the start. For the next month I’ll be living out of my suitcase and bumping along the Mediterranean – providing that damn ash cloud doesn’t get in my way….