One week road trip through Finland
After two days in Helsinki we set off north.
Day 1 - Helsinki to Finnish Lakeland
Look at a map of Finland and you'll see a huge area of blue in the south east of the country where there is more lake than land. This is Finland's Lakeland, known as 'land of a thousand lakes'.
There are hundreds of islands linked by roads on land bridges. These often are tree lined so driving on the roads, it's not always obvious you are on a land bridge with lake either side.
We found a stunning place to spend the night near Puumala, an area used for launching boats near a view point. We enjoyed swimming in the lake and watching the sunset.
Day 2 - Puumala to Karsamaki
We headed north to Kuopio, back to miles of straight road, with conifers on either side. I'd heard about the Kuopio tower where you could get a 360 panoramic view of the region. It really was an incredible surprise to see so much water.
We continued to drive north on the road to Oulu. Noticing a very reasonable price for parking for the night and good facilities offered, we decided to stay at a campsite in a small town called Karsamaki. This town was definitely not on a tourist trail, but we had a blast there and started to appreciate the welcoming and friendly nature of many Finnish people. We used google to find a local bar with the hope that they would be showing the Norway vs England World Cup match. It turned out that this was the only bar in the town and it was the type of bar for which it was unusual to have new visitors. Yet we were accepted with curiosity and congeniality. The bar owner was happy to put the game on the TV which started at midnight Finnish time - it was going to be a late night. We soon had a crowd of locals join us, yet for the main part they did not usually watch or follow football at all; ice hockey and Finnish Baseball are the main spectator sports. We met some really nice folk and had a lot of laughs. When we came out of the bar at about half two it was bright sunlight - if it had gone dark, we had missed it. We were now in the region of perpetual daytime.
Day 3 - Karsamaki to north of Kemi (road to Lapland)
We left Karsamaki the next day with a recommendation to drive over a recently opened bridge to Hailuoto island near Oulu. It was really something to see - at 8 km long it's now Finland's longest bridge. It's kind of a causeway, linking two small bridges on each end.
We drove across, but didn't have any plans for doing anything on the island, so we turned around and drove back.
We then continued our journey north. We found a place to stay in a small carpark near a dam on a river north of Kemi.
Day 4 Kemi to north of Rovaniemi
On the edge of the arctic circle, Rovaniemi is the home of Santa and is a popular Lapland winter resort. Without the magic of Christmas lights and snow, it just appears as tatty concrete buildings and tacky gift shops. I wanted to visit Santa and take a picture at the lit up arctic circle line - but Garry was not going for this, so we made it further up the road to Sodankyla.
This was really a low point of the trip. We were behind on sleep due to the absence of night time, everywhere we tried to stop, within seconds we were surrounded and bitten by flies and mosquitos, and the driving (straight roads through conifers) was incredibly dull.
We were fortunate to find and excellent cafe with log cabins to rent (Cottages and Camping Peurasuvanto) , where the owners (a Finnish lady and a guy originally from Dumfries and Galloway) provided us with a place a park. This included electricity, use of showers and washing machine and as a bonus use of the traditional wood burning sauna and the opportunity to sample their wonderful freshly baked cinnamon buns and carrot cake. Things were looking up. We had also found some hacks to make things more comfortable in van, wearing eye masks, using the fan to blow the mosquitos away or hoovering them up with the car hoover. The next day we headed to the next cafe up the road, which was also a fish shop and bought some of their smoked salmon.
Day 5 - Tankavaara to Ivalo
We'd read about the next town up the road being a centre for gold panning, with the world gold panning championships coming up the next weekend. We thought we would see what they had to offer in terms of a gold panning experience - but we weren't impressed when we saw a pond of stagnant water and thousands of mosquitos. So we quickly left and moved on. We were pretty fed up again.
Also we were nearly out of fuel and had noticed that diesel prices had suddenly jumped to around 2.20 euros per litre. Accepting that we didn't have a choice, we drove into the next garage to find that they had sold out of fuel completely. So it was on to the next town with just a few litres in the tank. Fortunately we made it.
We decided to just drive a short distance and recuperate at a high spec. campsite near Ivalo. This campsite was really comfortable - excellent facilities and an amazing restaurant where we decided to treat ourselves to a meal. The food was all homemade including the icecream which came in a large array of original flavours. I had fish caught from a local lake and Garry had reindeer pizza. The price was quite reasonable for the quality of the food.
In the afternoon we had gone for a short cycle into town and the real highlight of the day was close encounters with reindeer (you'll note though, it didn't put Garry off his dinner choice). They were nonchalantly walking along the roads, hanging out in the roundabout and walking across the supermarket carpark. We were later told that the reindeer had taken to coming into town in the Summer to get away from the flies.
Day 6 - Ivalo to Inari and on to Kautokeino (Norway)
We headed further north to Inari, where there is an award-winning museum (Siida) which tells the story of the Sami people and how their culture and traditions are adapted to the to the Arctic Environment.
We went for a wonderful short bike ride here, a trail of around 6km up through the forest and across a narrow suspension bridge above some river rapids. There was lots of flowers and fungi to see and we passed huts which were available for anyone to make a fire and cook food.
A lot of travelers we had met were going to, or coming from Nord Kapp, the most northernly point of mainland Europe, but in the end we decided against driving another 5 hours north, with the potential that the weather would be such that there was nothing to see, and started heading west to spend more time in Tromsø and Senja island. This meant going into Norway for a day, before returning to Finland the next day.
We stayed at a campsite called Duottar Camping, where we were able to have a lovely sauna overlooking a lake and then spend the evening chatting with other campers around a fire in a communal hut. We met a young man of just 17 years of age who was walking from Nord Kapp to the south of Italy (his incredible journey was going to take about a year).
Day 7 - back into Finland and to Kilpisjavi Hiking Centre
As we approached Kilpisjavi we entered a mountainous region, the first we had come across on our week journey through Finland. The hiking centre has a campsite and great facilities which reminded me of an outdoor centre. We were greeted by a herd of reindeer who appeared to be permanent residents of the campsite.
The next day we hiked to the Three-country Cairn - the place where the borders of Finland, Norway and Sweden meet. We took a (very pricy) boat to the head of the lake to cut the journey in one direction but then walked back around 20 km. Ignoring the prevalence of bitey insects and the disappointing yellow concrete block that was the cairn, it was a really interesting hill walk, crossing lots of different habitats, including wetlands, birch wood and moorland, and providing views over lake and mountain, passing a breathtaking waterfall and several hundred reindeer.
