Älg 2008 took place from 4th till 12th of Feb. A long Älg 2008 DVD with crazy footage has been compiled and issued to participants. If you are interested in a copy to get the flavour and motivate yourself to go North, please mail us ! With addition of a few days and a few 1000 km-s, depending of where participants came from, before and after to get to Kupio and get back home from Rovaniemi, we drove some 4500km. With only 7 people (France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherland, UK) we had a low volume but high spirited group on this venture. It was a real good, heavy duty trip. Maarten arranged excellent accomodation to compensate for the daytime deep freeze driving. Älg 2008 took us through extreme Lapland all the way up to Kirkenes at the Bartentzsea, some 100 km from Murmansk. As the absolute highlight we got an excellent view of the Aurora Borealis (and of course the Hullu Porro bar in Levi)!!
ALG 2008
Our material only had some some minor issues with bikes (starting problems, batteries fading, ignition, clutch, flat tire, real wheel bearing... ie the usual stuff..) Our utter admiration on this trip however goes out to Manny. He fell of his DrBig and in pain continued the rest of the trip (a few 1000 km over ice), with what later turned out to be a broken shoulder... true die-hards are still amongst us....
The Alg Rally route was as per below:
04/02 - Kuopio - 400 km from Helsinki - nice house
05/02 - Kuusamo - 450 km - very nice big log cabin
06/02 - Kuusamo - day to relax, snowmobile tour, smoke sauna and traditional dinner. (see below)
07/02 - Levi/Sirkka - 375 km - very nice log house
08/02 - Levi/Sirkka - day to relax, make a tour or else. Live band in local "crazy reindeer" hotel
09/02 - Kaamanen - 260 km - nice log cabins by the river
10/02 - Kaamanen - 400 km return optional trip to Kirkenes (or else depending on weather)
11/02 - Saariselka - 110 km - log cabins with own in-house brewery
12/02 - Rovaniemi - 273 km - check out the town and Santa Claus...