Wintertrip Äkäslompolo

The program starts to run to its end. But before everyone started to head back home, we had a final trip to lapland. This time out, we had to plan the majority of the trip by ourselves. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but we were excited to have one final trip all together.

Hiking

Monday and thuesday were hiking days! They were a bit different then our previous trip to Pallas national park. We didn’t needed tents for this trip, we had a nice little accommodation in Hannakuru. This made hiking so much lichter and therefore easier. Also doing the entire walk off road made the whole experience so much more special and intense.

On top of that you had the cold, the cold made sure that we really had an unique experience. Due to the cold the lakes were frozen and we could walk over them. It was even so cold that our drinking bottles froze while we were walking, but we didn’t really mind about that. It was nice to have a cold drink from time to time.

Overall it was an experience that we will refer to as magic from this point on.

Humak Nurmijarvi Erasmus 2018 Kai

Fat biking

After our hike it was time to go fat biking on Wednesday. After a short explanation of the bikes and gear, we divided us in 3 groups according to experience level. In the morning we started up with a tour around the town and some nice riding on the frozen lake. After that we picked up the pace and started to go off road and even doing a nice downhill part. After lunch some others joined our group and led by Kai we again found some nice tracks. We followed a single trail next to the lake and found a challenging hill to climb. It was a tough one, but the fun part is that when you go up you always have to go down again. Go pro mounted on my chest we rode down that hill. After that we took some nice trails and headed back to town.

On Thursday we had an independent day, and some of us chose to go fat biking again. We started of easy again, and took a similar route of the afternoon with Kai. We followed the single trail and back to the big hill. This time we filmed the downhill from 3 different points of view. After that we took more shots with Ruben’s drone on the lake and met up with others who were ice skating. After lunch more people got on the saddle again. Roel and Chris went to look for some more challenging sections and found this nice hill to climb. Although once we started we realised that there was no ending to this hill. Bucking through it we reached the top and turned around to descend. We found it so nice we decided to go do it again. But climbing again we cursed ourselves for it. After going down again we did it one more time before we started to go down on the other side of the mountain. The track we thought to take turned out to be a cross-country trail so there was no real path. Still we went for it and bumping over rocks and swamps we found our way back to town with a nice day burned in our memory forever.

 

Humak Nurmijarvi Erasmus 2018 photo by Chris Bindels

Ice skating

On Thursday we had our independand day. A lot of people wanted to Ice skate on the Akaslompolo lake. We rented ice skates at a rental shop and for a lot of the students it was a suprise that we also got poles with them. The students from Belgium and the Nederlands were used to ice figure skate, but now we had ice skates attached to our boots.

We went all together on the lake and the first 15 minutes it was a challange to move on the ice. After a couple of trails and errors everyone managed to ice skate. Ice skating with poles was something that everyone needed to get use to it, but it was a verry fun experience

Final evening

Part Paulien

 

Ruben, Chris, Noor, Paulien