On our way to northern Karelia we stopped in Joensuu in the hope to find a laundry service. We obviously arrived late on a sunday and everything was closing. We were still able to buy some food which would be quite useful the next time we camped. We then headed to the Ruuna national park. After getting maps and some info about the park at the ranger's office we set camp on a little island in the middle of the main river's rapids. We were all by ourselves for 2 days in this gorgeous area of nature.
As usual we had all the comfort of the Finnish national parks, including the camp fire pit that you can see on this picture. We hiked all around the marches in the park, most of the time on board walks.
We harvested plenty of blueberries for our dinner:).
To complete our loop, we had to cross the river, the ranger had told us that it was simple, just row to the other side, tow the other boat back and cross again. Easy, ahah!.
Well, the boats were wrenched pretty high up the shore on rocks so just getting them afloat was quite an effort, then even if the picture doesn't seem to show it, there was current, the water was low so you had to dodge underwater rocks, and rowing straight in these conditions when you've never rowed proved to be an interesting challenge !!! It was fun but it probably took us a good half an hour the time we had to do it fully (the other time we happened to come when a couple was crossing from the other side so we didn't have to do the towing). Anyway I still remember telling Michelle how I wouldn't expect these boats to stay in place in France, I would totally expect some people to have fun with them and go down the river with it and leave a few miles down there. Maybe I'm just badmouthing, but still I was impressed at the quantity of gear that was left in the parks for free use and was nicely maintained by the visitors.
We came back to our camp and started cooking on the fire. This time we were more ready and we departed from just fire grilled moose toasts:
Moose tartiflette, yes ! It felt so great ! We also enjoyed the great views from our camp, which honestly was the prettiest place we've stayed at the entire trip.
The next day we enjoyed going through the park in a whitewater raft with a group. We got quite splashed and it was some good fun. We left the park for Kuhmo, the capital of Finnish Karelia where we finally found a laundry service. While waiting for our clothes to get washed (couldn't find a place to do it ourselves) we visited the museums of the town. It was a very nice dive into finnish culture, between the fantastic tales of
Kalevala and the troubled history of Finland throughout the
Winter War and WWII (they are one of the few countries that switched sides) and finally some ethnological museum. It was a quiet little boring town that was mostly empty as Finnish school had restarted and most tourists were gone.
We had yet another nice sunset on a lake (it's kind of the Finnish specialty).
We left the place with clean clothes and decided that instead of spending more time in the Baltic countries we would just go to Lapland from there. One long day of drive through small straight Finnish roads -with reindeer and moose crossing signs all over- later, we set camp next to a park in Jyrkankoski about 50km NE from Kuusamo, again right by the Russian border. Unfortunately the weather got worse and we hiked along the little bear trail the next day under a layer of clouds. We hiked around a string of rapids in a very green forest alternating with marches. It was almost greener than Oregon :). The floor was covered with lingonberries, blueberries and crowberries, so much that had you wanted to sit, you would have needed to eat your seating spot clean before doing so or get dirty. We encountered a reindeer that was happily selecting only lingonberries to eat and doing the same with mushrooms: eating only the freshest ones.
We took advantage of that day to harvest lots of mushrooms then buy a book in Finnish in the hope to identify which of our "cepes" were edible and hopefully good. The identification process wasn't that successful and the ones we ate weren't that tasty and kind of shuffled my stomach. What a disapppointment :(. One key sentence of a Finnish we asked for advice on the mushrooms was: "we don't eat mushrooms: reindeer eat mushrooms, we eat reindeer". Well I'll do better next time. After a nice and relaxing sauna in the evening and a good night of sleep we headed to Rovaniemi, first stopping by Santa Klaus town. Yes if you writ a letter to Santa Klaus Finland and stamp it correctly, it goes there, right on the polar circle.
We also took a picture with the real Santa Klaus, as some of you might have noticed in your mailboxes :). After buying a set of presents we visited the Arcticum museum in Rovaniemi. We learnt everithing we could on the arctic climate, and the populations of the arctic, but our favourite part of the museum was about the history of alcohol and the
temperance movement in Finland. They had their prohibition era, and it lasted much longer than in other countries, they were still needing special cards to buy booze in the 70s with weird rules like you had to wear a tie to enter bars and were not serving alcohol without food.
The next day we drove back to Helsinki and then back to Jyvaskyla where I had forgotten my bag with camera and passport... That was 1100km of driving on small roads in a day... The next day we took the boat to Talinn, Estonia and would be back to Finland for only half a day before departing to Israel.
The last day we spent some more time in Helsinki, visiting the modern art museum which pleasantly surprised us (usually our approach to these museums is tainted of irony).
