14th August 2004. Saturday.

After having been at home in Nyköping, Sweden for three days after my photographic mission down at the Stockhausen Courses in Kuerten outside Cologne, Germany, I boarded a train on the Saturday of 14th August 2004, which left for Stockholm at 09.55 AM. I arrived in Stockholm at 11.00 AM and had hours to spend, since the train north, operated by Connex, was to leave only at 3 PM. I stashed my backpack in a locker at the station and drifted around Stockholm.
I was mighty tired of photographing after the Stockhausen job, so to feel free and also get a little lighter a burden, I left camera equipment at home – for the first time on a Lapland hike.

Well ahead of departure with the Connex train I picked up my backpack and bought some food for the trip.

To begin with I had the compartment all to myself, but people crawled aboard at later stops as the train proceeded north past Uppsala, Gävle and so on. They were young people, and most of them were heading for Padjelanta, which meant getting off at Gällivare the next morning.
One of the young ones seated in my compartment was 19 year old Tina Maria Wolf-Heimer. She recommended me a book, which in German was called Weit Weg und glücklich, but which was written by a Canadian called Steve Zikman, and the original title is The Power of Travel. In turn I recommend her books by Bruce Chatwin, which had been recommended me by the German lady Michaela Bach on my mountain hike in 2000…

I and Tina talked long and intense, for example about Michael Moore. To be that young she was quite knowledgeable in many things. She was going to visit a friend who worked for a while in a Saami village. In the beginning of September she and her friend were heading for a mountain hike in Norway.
Tina curled up like a kitten on the coach beside me and slept.

At nightfall we folded out our beds. For once I had my place at the bottom, because I had booked the trip so late. Otherwise I always try to get the upper bed.

15th August 2004. Sunday.

At about 10 AM we arrived at Abisko mountain station. I talked some with three guys from southern Sweden who did their first Lapland hike. They were to sleep in tents, and were somewhat poorly equipped, it seemed to me. They, however, executed their hike with no big problems. We bumped into each other almost each day thereafter, along the trail.

It rained a little in Abisko, but I took off with my, to begin with, 19 kilos on my back. A slight pain in my right knee worried me some. Later that day I developed a pain in my right hip, but these pains ceased as the day passed.

It was a routine hike to Abiskojaure. I looked after my feet carefully on this first day, not to develop any blisters, wise from former hikes… I plastered a piece of compeed on a toe that I started to feel too much. I also changed my socks. This was just routine caution, really, to make everything smooth and comfortable.

At this time, arriving at the Abiskojaure hut, I had no way of knowing that my life thereafter would take a completely new turn, for some good and for much bad – but I probably shouldn’t complain, for what we have to go through and experience we have to go through and experience; that is my firm belief – and nothing is for nothing; it’s not just written in the sand, it’s karma, we get these karmic lessons.

Early in the afternoon I stepped in through one of the doors of the hut, and noticed that I was in the same part of the house where I stayed last time, in 2001. Furthermore, I went into the same dormitory as last time, all through the room down to the window facing south, and found the same bed as last time free, so I flung my stuff onto it. I noticed some stuff on the upper bed.

A little later, after I’d been to see the newly arrived hut host (they had just switched, and the former host had just left) and paid my stay, I found a girl with golden locks sitting on the upper bed. I asked her if she though the bed below her was free, and she said it seemed unoccupied. She spoke Swedish, but with an accent. I asked if she came from the States, but she replied that she was English.

We talked some about under what circumstances we hiked, and we both walked alone and had the same route plans. Zoë – which was the girl’s name – wondered if I liked walking by myself, but I said I preferred walking with someone. Here Zoë misunderstood me a little, because she thought I was asking her if she would walk with me, while I thought that she came up with that idea!

We changed over to English pretty soon.

Zoë went outside somewhere, and I went through the grove out to the little stretch of sandy beach that can be found on the southern tip of Abiskojaure Lake. I went there to wash up. As I came there, Zoë was already there, with her little analogue camera. As it turned out, she’d even been there bathing already.

A good part of the evening Zoë sat out in the kitchen/assembly room, reading and sipping tea. During the whole hike she kept reading a thick volume with its story located to New York. Later, when she lay in bed, she used a headlamp to read. I also had my headlamp with me, reading Kalevala.

I had applied plenty of Tiger Balm on my hip, so there was a pleasant fragrance in the hut. Zoë also put on Tiger Balm, especially on her lower legs.

Zoë explained that she originated in England, but that she had worked a couple of years as an arborist in Stockholm, taking care of trees in parks and other urban environments. She also told me that most people with this profession in Stockholm were from Britain. Zoë said that she sprained her ankle just one week before this hike, and that she could feel it. She’d done it while sports climbing in Stockholm.

Later at night there were several loud bangs in the partition between the bed places. I thought that Zoë accidentally hit the wall while turning around, and she’d thought it was I, but it turned out it was somebody else on the other side of the wooden partition.

16th August 2004. Monday.

I awoke early, around 5:30 AM, and got up. A middle-aged thin man had already started his breakfast in the kitchen. His name was Ulf. He had announced the night before that he was off to an early start, because he wanted to make it to an early boat ride along the last part of the lake to the Alesjaure huts.
Zoë also got up when she noticed that I woke, since we were supposed to walk together. I cocked my breakfast oatmeal, and Zoë also made some kind of oatmeal. I had coffee and she drank tea.
Ulf left about twenty minutes or half an hour before Zoë and I started. Zoë was ready ahead of me and sat waiting outside the hut.

We set off across the hanging bridge, into stony terrain, at first in dense mountain birch brush. It was a strife as usual to get up the incline, especially after the bridge across the jokk. I was sweating profusely. Sometimes we halted to spay back down towards the Abiskojaure hut, which was hard to make out down in the birch country.

We came up around Kartinvare and marched on over the rocks. We had the same tempo, so walking together worked fine. The weather, having started rainy, was stabilized, and the low temperature was pleasant to walk in. I had some extra heartbeats now and then, but decided that if I was going to go, I might as well do it mountain hiking, and it ceased soon after.

We caught up with Ulf, whose whole name is Ulf Sparre. He works as a coordinator for SAS in Stockholm. He was sitting on top of a large rock, eating sandwiches and sipping coffee, airing his feet. Zoë and I took a break a bit further up the trail, by a rock by the reindeer fence between two different Saami territories. I changed my clothes on the upper part of my body since I’d been sweating so hard, after which I munched a chocolate bar and drank water. Ulf caught up with us, passed and set off in haste across the land. He was calculating that he would hit the boat landing just in time for departure if he kept his speed up. He promised to try and hold the boat for us too.

I think it was during this day that Zoë told me that she was going to Tibet later in the year, and then to New Zealand to work there as an arborist.

We stopped at a small jokk to fill our water flasks, and after having walked some distance Zoë discovered that she’d forgotten her camera. I sat down with her backpack to wait while she strode back to find her camera, which she did, and we continued our hike.

As we approached the boat landing we started to meet a few groups of people who walked the opposire direction. They had all come with the boat from Alesjaure. Ulf was waiting by the boat with the Saami guy Roland, who ran the boat traffic. In the boat out on the lake he explained many things to us about the reindeer trade.

When we got to Alesjaure we paid Roland, and commenced climbing up the st eep incline to the huts. A lady up there – the departing hut host – immediately said she recognized me from my earlier mountain stories that she’d read on the Internet! The other, new host, knew Ulf, and told him that he was expected, even though Ulf himself had no idea that he was!

Zoë and I went to pay for our room in hut number 2 at Alesjaure. We had a fourbed room all to ourselves that evening and night.

Zoë asked me if I was going to the sauna, and I thought that’d be nice. I paid the 50 crowns, and at 6 PM, an hour after it opened, we went down to the sauna, half way down towards the big jokk which runs from a glacier down to the lake.
In the changing room we undressed, and suddenly I found myself in a room with a stark naked and extremely beautiful Zoë! There were more people inside the sauna itself; mostly ladies. It really was fun, and everybody was in a jolly mood.

A relatively large STF-group – hikers with leaders from STF, the Swedish Tourist Society, also attended. They were perhaps 14 people, mostly ladies, some really fun!

Zoë and I went down to the jokk together, ducking at the cold water from the glacier, eventually getting in the stream, but because we were so heated up from the sauna, it didn’t feel that bad. Zoë splashed jokk water on me and I returned the favor…

Zoë was just 26 years old, about to turn 27 (3rd September), and perhaps that is a border line case for an older man like myself (double her age), but those thoughts rose in my mind pretty soon. Already on our first day of joint hiking I felt very attracted to this woman.

Later that night in our room – the only time on the hike that we did have our privacy – after both she and I had turned off out headlamps after reading, I was on the verge of asking her to come down and sleep with me, but I refrained… A few days later, out on the trail, I told her about my thoughts in the Alesjaure hut, and she said she felt “flattered”, but that she was in Lapland mostly to walk.

She had already earlier on our hike quoted Dalai lama, and I wasn’t sure if those quotes contained some kind of code for me: ” Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other” and ”Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon”

I slept bad that night, twisting and turning and yearning, many times almost asking Zoë to come down to my bed. She always chose to sleep in the upper bed, while I preferred the bottom one.