The reindeer races took place last week. Unfortunately it was a rainy day, the temperatures were above zero – it makes a horrible mess of the snow. Luckily there was enough snow in Tromsø’s main street for the races to take place (I actually think they cheated and got snow from elsewhere!)

The races were really impressive, I had never seen anything like it! Very fast… Here are some photos I took. In the last one you can see that there was also a race for children!

Here’s an experiment, see if I can show a video of the races!

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The races are organized by Sami people, I love their colorful clothes!

By the end of the races we were all cold so we went for some soup/coffee inside a Sami tent, sitting on reindeer skins around the fire… very cosy! As you can see in the photo below those tents are made of wood and reindeer skinds, with a big hole in the top to let the smoke out.

It kept raining on Monday and Tuesday, and then finally temperatures dropped below zero again and we had fresh snow. A lot better than the mess you get when the snow melts and it rains on top of that! Unfortunately today that happened again… blegh. We’ve been trying to find a second hand car this week, no luck so far. Would be great to have one and explore the area aroundTromsø a bit more!