Sabbatical, Finland 2

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).

Sabbatical - Finland 1

Looking back at the whole sabbatical, the time we spent in Finland definitely left us some of the greatest memories. It was the beginning of the vacation and the time we spent in the wilderness was definitely a welcomed break from the daily routine.
As said in the previous post we started in Helsinki, the city ambiance was quite laid back and nice, but we were not overly impressed by what it had to offer. What impressed us though was the size of the ferries linking the city to Talinn.


We spent the next day on the island of Suomenlinna, a fortress guarding the entrance to the port of Helsinki. The fortress contains a small city, mostly occupied by old military blocks, defenses and a dry dock that was built by connecting 2 small islands. It's a nice place to have a relaxing walk looking at older architecture.


We originally had planned to stay for most of the vacations in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) but we decided that it would be stupid to pass in Finland without seeing a bit of the Lakes area. On the way to the lakes we made a stop in the very cute little town of Porvoo.



We arrived in the lake district's through the capital: Savonlinna (Newcastle in Swedish) also known for its medieval castle that was guarding the border of the kingdom with Russia then.


The next morning we headed to the Linansaari national park with the intent to rent a canoe to explore the wilderness. They were out of canoes but convinced us easily that what we wanted was a 2-sitter kayak in which we could easily put all our camping gear and go for a multi-day expedition in the park. They provided us with a map with the list of islands where there was a camp spot. We originally wanted to go for 2 days only - we were kind of short on food and water for longer - but we decided we would go for 3 and would stop on the main island where there was a well to refill water and a cafe where hopefully we could munch. So yeah we left for 3 days with supplies for half of that, but it would have taken us half a day to get back to a supermarket and come back to the lake.

We headed "straight" towards the island where we intended to camp the first night which was about 10 miles away. Yes "straight" because it's actually pretty hard to actually go straight on a lake in a kayak, not get lost between the multitude of look-alike islands. Honestly, without the map + compass we would have had quite a tough time. We decided to stop on the first island that had a camp spot just to check how it looked like as it was our first experience with the Finnish national parks. We were blown away by the accommodations we found there. You could only set 3-4 tents maximum on that island but you had a small woden shed with pre-cut wood, an axe, a saw, dry toilets with a reserve a toilet paper, a fire pit with a grill, a kettle and a pan for cooking.

This comforted us quite a bit as we were a bit nervous heading out deep in the wilderness, far from everything with nothing else than what we had in our kayak. We made it to our camp where we were joined by a French guide with his 2 daughters. That evening, he was teaching them to fish and I proceeded to scale, gut and cook their fish on the fire. We were gratified by a wonderful sunset, and played cards (tarot) with them until midnight and it was probably the night we went to bed the latest of the entire trip :).

The next morning we hiked around the island for a few hours in order to refill our water supply and get some food. Despite the rationing we were already very low on supplies and we were getting quite hungry. It was with great pleasure that we made it to the little cafe on the other side of the island. We ordered pretty much one of each of their snacks including one with freshly smoked fish from the lake (she fired up the smoker at 9 am just for us). It tasted amazing ! We then went and tried to buy supply but were quite disappointed as they seem to only offer candy and chips. Almost only as I spotted on the top shelf a tin can with no sticker that had just "Moose" written on it with a sharpie. That moose can ended up being one of our favorites culinary memories of Finland (with the locks - smoked salmon - which was absolutely amazing, the best we ever ate, ever ever). So we bought that can of moose, convinced her to sell us some of the bread she had to make sandwiches and we were now ready to continue, not hungry anymore and quite happy.

We headed to another island, about 10 miles from the first one again and this time we were all alone at the camp even though a sailboat had anchored on the other side of our tiny island and a wild party seemed to be going on there. That night we bathed for a second day in the lake, had fire toasted moose sandwiches and slept like babies as paddling for hours is quite something on the upper body. The next day we headed back to the park entrance and decided we would try another national park instead of going to Estonia as it was really fun. That day was quite windy and we discovered how much easier it was to paddle on a flat lake instead of fighting with waves.
We drove north to Karelia, right at the border with Russia and I'll tell you more about it soon. In the mean time you can look at all the Finnish photo album here.

Sabbatical

I've been in the company for long enough to be elligible for a sabbatical vacation, that's an additional 8 weeks on top of the usual vacations. M successfully took unpaid vacation to come with me and we've been going around for over two weeks. You won't see any pictures for now and for a while but I'm going to try to keep our itinerary up to date here.
We flew to Helsinki, through Chicago and Frankfurt, it took us about 28 hours door to door. It was long enough that we pretty much didn't get any jetlag. We walked all around town enjoyed the quietness and slow living style and after 2 days we were departing for Porvoo, a cute little town a bit east of Helsinki. We spent the best part of the day windowshopping there, and enjoying the views on the old houses across the river. That was our first night of camping. That was pretty much it for classical tourism in Finland, we were going to spend most of the rest of the trip in the nature.
After camping in Savonlinna, the capital of the lake district, we headed ton Linansari, one of the large parks covering the lakes. There we rent a 2 sit kayak for 3 days, packed the camping gear into the kayak and headed for 3 days of island to island paddling and camping in the wilderness. That was also our first encounter with the Finnish national park accomodations. We were amazed at their quality. Sprinkeled all over their national parks are free campgrounds where you can find a dry toilet, a fire pit with gear to cook (including kettle and pan), dry wood, an axe to split it and usually amazing views. We were so enchanted by the trip around the lakes that we decided to go for another park instead of heading early for the baltic countries.
We drove to the northern part of Karelia, to the park of Ruuna, where we settled on an island in the middle of the river. That was probably the most scenic camp spot I've ever been at. We did short hikes in the park, gathered berries, did some rafting in the river's rapids and on the third day we headed farther north towards Lapland. We stopped one day for laundry in the lovely town of Kuhmo, the cultural capital of Karelia, where we visited a few local culture and history museum and learnt all about the Kalevala, the Finnish Epic stories and legends. From there we departed for the Oulanka national park to hike the little bear's trail. By then the weather had started to be quite cold, the Finnish were back at school and most places where empty.
Unfortunately the sun left us and we didn't get a sunny hike in Lapland. The hike was very pretty, we had a close encounter with a reindeer and a not so close one with a moose. We harvested mushrooms for the evening dinner, which we followed by one hour in the sauna, which helped gratly for the coming cold night.
We then drove to Rovaniemi, crossed the arctic circle, and did some shopping in "Santa's official home town". At least his post office is there, and we took advantage of it ;). We finished the day by a long visit to the arctic museum which gave us a lot of insight in the arctic ecosystem and the arctic populations cultures.
Next day was drive fest, we drove all the way down to helsinki in 10h30 to realize that I had forgotten my camera bag and passport at our last spot 250km north, where M courageously drove us back.
Yesterday we took the ferry to Talinn, and had quite a shock when we arrived at the camping. No more beautifull nature, cute little clean log toilets etc... Talinn's camping is a parking lot with a few smelly showers in a hangar nearby. That totally looked soviet style... Anyways, it rained all night and we decided a Hotel bed was in order.

See you