Day 7: Kiruna to Strömsund

Click here to enlarge this panorama or see an ultra high-resolution version.

I sense a pattern developing for this trip: If by noon I haven't managed to find a suitable candidate for a panorama, I get a little desperate. Such was the case today on my drive down from Kiruna back to the relatively tropical parts of Sweden. Sweden, I now realize, is almost wholly comprised of pine forests and lakes arranged in esthetically pleasing juxtapositions, with access roads. Somebody should make a coffee table book. Stockholm is the big exception, not the norm, and it took my 12-hour drive southward today to really "drive" that home.

But landscapes tend not to be photogenic while pelted with rain, no matter how beautiful — much like looking at the Mona Lisa on a black-and-white television. So by noon, as I found myself in the splendidly named Jokkmokk, I decided that if I couldn't capture beauty, I'd go for realism and take a panorama of Jokkmokk's center. I'm sure Jokkmokk looks great with a coat of snow, and you'll really want to visit it during its famous Christmas market, but just today it was hardly inspiring. And the panorama, being faithful, was hardly inspiring.

So I kept on driving, hunting an elusive patch of blue far off on the horizon that may have been in my imagination. And then, as I was driving into the small town of Strömsund shortly before sunset, the clouds finally parted.

Now it was a race against time to find a good spot before darkness. I ended up on Ön island, which is ironic as the name means "the island" in Swedish. (So if you want to say "Ön island" in Swedish, you'd say "Ön Ön".) Much of the lakeside was privately owned by farmers, but I eventually managed to get access to to the water.

And that's where I took today's panorama, just a few hours ago at 9.14pm. Sure, it looks like any old sunset, but for me it represents triumph over adversity.