Ånäset - Luleå

We slept wonderfully in the cosy cabin in the forest. Over a cup of coffee we enjoyed the view of the forest and had breakfast. The cabin stands on Lufta campsite in Ånäset, where we had arrived in the rain the day before. Ånäset is a small village in the municipality of Robertsfors in Västerbotten County, surrounded by farmland.

We would have loved to stay here longer too, but we had a long stretch ahead of us today, because we wanted to drive all the way to Luleå. That is a good 150 km as the crow flies and around 200 by road. We took turns driving. After a fuel stop we continued to the Norrbottens Järnvägsmuseum, an old railway museum in the middle of a forest. There are several halls with trains to look at there, and a few long, decommissioned trains standing in the forest. Access to these trains is free.

The museum lies in Karlsvik, about 6 km from the centre of Luleå, and belongs to the non-profit association Malmbanans Vänner, which also runs it. Museum and association together own around 140 vehicles. The museum mainly preserves and displays objects connected with the Malmbanan, the Iron Ore Line from Luleå via Boden to the ore mines near Kiruna and on to the Norwegian border, where the Ofotbanen continues to Narvik. We stayed the night in Kiruna two days later, and in September 2022 we travelled by train from Narvik to Boden, on the Malmbanan from the border onwards.

Karlsvik used to be an industrial village, first with a steam sawmill and from 1905 with an ironworks that turned iron ore into pig iron and was wound down between 1929 and 1932. A railway was built from Gammelstad to Karlsvik for the ironworks, bringing ore from Gällivare. It has been rebuilt and is now part of the museum, and heritage trains run on it in summer.

We liked the old, rusty trains a lot and they made a perfect photo subject. A rust-red locomotive stood with its freight cars on a track in the pine forest, and chains hung from one of the wagons. On top of that it was very sunny and warm and we were the only ones visiting the trains.

After that we drove on to our next accommodation, Hotel Naran in the centre of Luleå. The room was simply but nicely furnished. We stowed our luggage and walked along Luleå’s sunny and warm beach promenade. We passed a cathedral, woods and a beach and had a view of the sea the whole time. The sea here is the Bothnian Bay, the northern part of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Lule älv flows into it at Luleå. The water off the city is brackish, neither salt nor fresh.

The cathedral is Luleå domkyrka, a Neo-Gothic building of red brick with a tower just over 60 m high. The great town fire of 1887 had destroyed the old Gustafs kyrka, and afterwards the centre was laid out anew on a rectangular grid of wide streets. The new church was consecrated in 1893 and became a cathedral in 1904, when the Diocese of Luleå was created.

Hungry after the walk, we picked up Indian takeaway and ate it in the comfort of our hotel room. Later we drove to a viewpoint a little above the city, because the chance of northern lights was especially high that night thanks to the clear sky.