the following photos show the winterish lappland in its full beauty. the first two photos show part of the näverniemi lomakylä.
essentially all photos have been taken on the second and the eighth of january.

how is lappland in winter? how is polar night? something i had to find out, and so i was here for almost two weeks, staying in ivalo, a village in northern lappland which is now somewhat familiar to me.
the first three days i was staying at näverniemi lomakylä, and the rest of the time at guesthouse husky. two wonderful places!
i was somewhat lucky and unlucky. lucky in the sense that usually, it is much colder here, around -15 to -25 degrees; i mostly had -5 to -15. not that -25 scares me, having lived for two years in calgary. but doing a nice walk at -15 is just much nicer than at -25… :-) i was unlucky in the sense that most of the time, it was overcast. only very few days lacked the dense cloud cover which is painting the snowscape in grey. still, a beautiful grey! the first set of photos i want to present you is from the overcast daytime, and mostly looks like black and white, or blue and white. the truth is somewhere inbetween, as the light here is quite bluish.
i also did a husky tour on one of the greyish days, as you can see below.

(you can get the large version by clicking here directly.)

finally.

this is not the first night it snows – yesterday, flakes fell down as well. but this time, the snow is staying. not for long, i’m afraid, but at least for a little while. time to go outside and enjoy it, which i just did. not yet enough to play in it (that probably has to wait until the end of the year anyway), but great enough for some hopefully nice photos. enjoy!

here’s my project 52 shot for the tenth week. the topic was

fernweh.

this topic could be so easy if archive photos would be allowed. like in the last year, i visited many stunning places which i’d love to see again right now:

the photos were taken near vikajärvi, haines junction, keno and mayo, and yellowknife (from left to right, top to bottom). the message of these photos is plain and simple: i’d like to be far, far more north! somewhere near the arctic circle, or even north of it.

unfortunately, i couldn’t make it north. instead, i went south, and up by train, to recover a photography combining two aspects of northern travel: snow and railways.

technical details: 1/1000s, f/8, 32mm, iso 200.

(this photo is in fact older than the topic. originally i wanted to near to that place again, to take more photos, also for use for project 52. unfortunately, i was too busy and too sick to do this.)

yesterday, i spent over 15 hours on various trains in switzerland. i started at 6 am at the main station in zürich and proceeded to zermatt via visp. in zermatt, i explored the city a bit in the 45 minutes i had, and got back to the train station to get on the glacier express, departing 10 am, which eventually led me to st. moritz. the glacier express is one of the famous panoramic train lines in switzerland, similar to the golden pass panoramics tour i did a couple of years ago, leading through the alps, peaking in oberalbpass at 2033 meters above sea level. the weather was mostly beautiful, except a lot of fog around chur. i had the three course meal on the train, it was really good. (there are also vegetarian choices.) finally, in disentis, there was a fasnacht parade going on.

i took some photos on the trip. unfortunately, one cannot open the windows of the glacier express, whence there are always some more or less ugly reflections lurking around. here are some of the better shots:

if you want to take a lot of photos, better take a usual train, since on these routes they often have windows which can be opened. i might do that somewhen soon, at least for the part from andermatt to disentis.

besides the inability to open the windows, the trip is great! if you have a chance, do it. it’s probably also very interesting during summer, and also during winter when there’s more snow than this year…

yesterday, i again used my ga to explore a bit of switzerland (and italy). i decided to use an offer by the sbb to drive up the cimetta, a mountain next to locarno at the lago maggiore. the weather report for most of switzerland wasn’t very good yesterday, except for the ticino, whence i ended up there. at ground level it was rather foggy, but when climbing up the mountain by cable car i eventually got out of the sea of fog. around the cardada station, the final destination of said cable car, wasn’t too much snow, but still enough left to take a lot of snow photos! later i took the chair lift up to the top and had lunch there, as well as took out my laptop (which i carried with me all the time… i really need to get a netbook!) and worked a bit. that was a funny moment, sitting over 1600 meters over sea level, surrounded by snow, while programming. i guess i have to do that more often :-)

later, i took the cable car back down to locarno and explored the city a bit. here are some impressions, including the madonna del sasso and the castello visconteo:

finally, i took the train to domodossola, operated by fart (ferrovie autolinee regionali ticinesi). the train ride is really beautiful. unfortunately, i had to shoot all photos through the window, which resulted in not so great ones… anyway, there are a few i really like:

i didn’t stay in domodossola, due to being tired and its getting dark outside, so i hopped onto the next train to brig, going through the simplon tunnel (about whose construction i read a novel called simplon some years ago). eventually, 14 hours after my departure, i arrived back in zürich.