Kallasjärvi, a small village by the Kalix river, very scenic.
It just doesn’t seem right to me – what do you think?
I don’t really recognise it. Wasn’t there a mountain to the left back there, and a hot geyser? Where have they gone? And where’s the flippin’ party? It should be packed by now, it’s the April bean feast, it’s always packed. But there’s no-one else here! Where are the volcanic eruptions, did the volcanoes just disappear? And that horse over there – doesn’t seem right somehow. Too big, wouldn’t you say?
Maybe, maybe we got our directions a bit wrong? I mean, it was a strong westerly when we came over and we might have just been chatting and allowed ourselves to veer a bit off track. It’s possible, isn’t it?
In which case, where the hell are we? If it isn’t Iceland…. It must be, er, Norway. Or Sweden. Or worse still, Siberia. No, can’t be Siberia, not cold enough.
Seems there’s stuff to eat, but there’s a lot of ice in the way to get to it. Now that’s not right, is it? Ice in Iceland, in April? Nah, not where we usually meet up.
The three of them look disconsolately at the frozen river. There’s a patch of water though, much inhabited by whooper swans, who are a bit territorial. They waddle up the hill to snuffle around titbits in the snow. This trip is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare.
We see them from the track, three Greenland white-fronted geese. They have probably over-wintered in southern Ireland, or south west Scotland, and now was their time to head back north, stopping over in Iceland on the way.
We’d been walking on the river when we’d had one of those ‘Tales of the River Bank’ experiences. A man skied past below us where we were sitting on a log, and we watched him take his skis off and disappear onto the track. Five minutes later he returned, but this time walking determinedly, in the same direction he originally came from. He disappeared round the bend. Then after ten minutes or so he returned, with a woman, and this time he’s skiing again, but the woman is walking.
We get talking and the explanation is that she found the skiing too slippery so he took the skis back for her so she could return walking with more ease. We are talking about birds, as there are a lot of small feeding birds nearby. She tells us enthusiastically that there are some rare birds here, from Greenland. They’re causing quite a stir in the village where they seem to have paused for a break to reset their navigation system.
When we went looking for them they were not where they were supposed to be. Another wild goose chase, we thought. But we spotted them eventually, a little further away. They did look a bit puzzled. They also looked rather ordinary to me, but anything out of its normal place can be exotic.
I don’t know what Sweden could do to make them feel more welcome. They’d clearly rather be in Iceland.
