You’ve probably heard in the news at some point last summer that a couple from New Zealand wanted to name their newborn son 4Real, but the registrar of births, deaths and marriages rejected the suggestion. Couple’s explanation of the name was not so much surprising as it was dull: it was supposedly their first verbal reaction when they found out that she was pregnant. Not a safe way to choose a name, I believe. I don’t even want to think what my kid’s name would have been if my first verbal reaction would be turned into a name.

Anyway, I chuckled after reading the snippet in the papers and thought the newborn can be thankful for the effective administration in his country and should already begin thinking about changing his parents. But as it turned out the story had a twisted epilogue. About two months later the same New Zealand family made the news again, only that this time around there was no mention of administrative objections. The couple decided to name their son Superman even though they still insist on calling him 4Real. Is it just me, or are some people just dumb as a brick.

One of peculiarities which characterize my learning of a foreign language from scratch as an adult is that I still (and very often, too) read, hear and understand words too literally. Of course, most occurrences are not interesting, but those that are turn out to be great fun and my linguistic Eureka! moments. But judging by reactions of those in my immediate vicinity when I reveal such an instance and burst into guffaw, I’d say that hardly anyone but me finds it funny. So I’ve by trying to keep these chuckles to myself as much as I can. It didn’t take a rocket scientist inside my cranium to figure out that the way I look at this language that is still new to me, would hardly ever occur to a native speaker.

You too might think that what you’re about to read is complete crap, just as my Finnish friends probably do when they treat my bellows with blank stares. But please bear with me.

In Finnish appetite is foodwant (ruokahalua), an airplane a flyingmachine (lentokone), a refrigerator an icecabinet (jääkaappi), a peanut a groundnut (maapähkinä), an explorer a findhiker (löytöretkeilija), a postmortem either a tracegame or an aftergame (jälkipeli), depending on how you look at it, I guess, a dessert an afterfood (jälkiruoka), future generation afterknee (jälkipolvi), attendance audiencequantity (yleisömäärä). I could probably list pages of similar examples, but you get my point; Finnish is incredibly descriptive. And when we use the language we don’t think about it; if we did, we would fail at using it. Since I cannot really use it just yet, I have plenty of time to think about it when others are chatting away.

So what exactly does this diversion have to do with infantile parents miserably failing at naming their son (twice to be precise)? Many parents obviously don’t really think much about the meaning of the name they are about to give. On various occasions I have bumped into a few really memorable Finnish names I’d like to share with you.

If you’re shopping for your kid’s name, please do your kid and yourself a favor and don’t name him Urpo. As a noun, urpo in Finnish stands for and idiot. Not only that I can’t imagine myself running after my own child around the playground shouting “Idiot, idiot, come here!” but it’s even worse to think how parents make life easier for bullies who don’t even have to make up a name for their kid; it’s right there. And just as I thought that Idiot must be one of the worst names, I came across Vomit.

Actually, I’d have a hard time deciding which one is worse, but Finns obviously don’t just have a knack for names, but gender equality too. So they have both male and female version of names, which in everyday parlance stand for puke: Yrjö and Pirjo.

Since Yrjö also stands for George, I’ve been wondering at which point did puke (or George) get into the midst of it. I could come up with two plausible explanations. It is either that Yrjö was originally a name of a widely popular pagan god, a proto-Finnish Bakkhos (who else could bear a name with such meaning), whose name the Church took over during the Christianization to make the whole Christian ordeal more popular among pagan locals. However, they somehow foundered at understanding what it really means until it was already too late and all their publications were already in print. Although I’d rather bet my luck on the agile, crafty and sharp-witted local pagan population who deliberately named the Christian saint as an inside joke to gibe at newcomers who forced them onto church benches.

The latter could even be seen as a precedent for one of the many modern-time Finnish mockings of Swedish. Håkan is a very common Swedish name, which unsurprisingly ensured its ease of entry into the Finnish slang. However, during one of the assimilation stages the meaning was slightly shifted. On the streets of Finnish towns Håkan is an insult not very different from English faggot.

I’m sure that in every language there are cruel name combinations, which must be especially difficult when you’re a kid. This may sound a trifle odd, but when I was in high school in the US my calculus teacher’s name was Dick Large. He was probably the best math teacher I have ever had, but also one with the name combination that makes you think if his parents wanted to make fun out of their own kid. I can still remember debating on more than one occasion with a devout Christian friend who, on account that it is a “dirty word”, refused to say out loud Dick’s name. But Dick Large is his name, I insisted. It did not help. We ended up calling him Mr. Large.

So learning that Finns also have a male name which means dick was nowhere near as entertaining as idiot and vomit were. Just like Dick, substantive version of a proper name Jorma means a male genital organ. Coupling this knowledge with the Finnish custom of giving one or even two middle names to their offspring, I already felt compassion for kids whose parents for some reason lack enough common sense and name their kids Urpo Yrjö Jorma (idiot vomit dick), or Jorma Yrjö Urpo (dick vomit idiot). I don’t know which one is worse, but these kids must go through nervous breakdowns in school.

But wait, this is not all. It must be quite rare, but you probably wouldn’t consider yourself lucky if your name was Anu Saukko. An innocent looking name turns vicious the moment you pronounce it. When spoken out loud Anu Saukko inevitably melts into anusaukko, which coincidentally sounds exactly the same as anus aukko, or ass hole. Just imagine how long it takes to get used to introducing yourself as Asshole. Imagine shaking your blind date’s hand and saying out loud “Asshole, pleased to meet you.” Or at a job interview. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it must be to land a job as an Asshole. But then again, if you’re a Dick Vomit Idiot, what a relief must it be to find out that there’s an Asshole in the same class. You probably don’t ever want to leave that school.

In conclusion I’ll return to where I begun. Just like New Zealand Finland too has an administrative unit governing population naming. Not long ago Finland got slapped on the fingers for violating the European Convention on Human Rights for refusing to accept a couple’s wish to name their son Axl. I don’t know about wise men sitting on the naming commission, but given an option I’d much rather be called Axl then Urpo Jorma Yrjö, Raivo (Rage), or Anu Saukko, for that matter.

Mladen

I’ve survived another night in the wild, and much more eventful than the previous one too. It was already dark outside around eleven o’clock and I have retreated into the tent leaving mosquitoes and rain outside to read a book under a flashlight. About half an hour passed when someone or something begun scratching tirelessly on the side of the tent. Scratching went on for about a minute and then stopped just to continue several moments later. The itchy-scratchy visit lasted altogether some 10 minutes during which I pretended blithely to be completely immersed and consumed by the book, too busy to even care who or what that might be. But inside of me adrenaline was produced in gushes and my heart was racing. That’s the end of it, I thought, what a miserable way to go. Whether a curious bear or an uninvited trigger happy hillbilly taking a break from shooting his gun, whatever it was it would have to either knock on the door or rip open the tent for me to come out.

Even though bears are shy animals and at least in Finland, as far as I know, the last time a bear killed a human being was so long ago no one even remembers. But for all I know, this peace treaty could be broken over my cadaver. And I already imagined the headlines selling the yellow press the next day: “Stupid camper sets a tent just outside a bear den”, or something similarly scandalous and stupid.

I thought if I ever get out of this alive, I won’t be able to get any shut-eye for the rest of the trip. Just how wrong I was. Next thing I remember was waking up startled only the next morning, trying to figure out where I was. I circled the tent looking for clues or traces of my nightly visitor but found none. I now proudly belonged to mountain men, afraid of no one and nothing. Even though it is a statistical fact (if that’s not an oxymoron) that in Finland it is much more likely to get killed by your ex than a bear. There you have it.

Feeling content, I could concentrate on other more important things such as gathering breakfast. This is probably a single most rewarding thing when being out and about in the wild, getting your own food right from nature’s bosom. And there was plenty all around me. Freshly picked bilberries and just ripened lingonberries went straight into my porridge bowl. It was fantastic and I clung to the moment for as long as I could. Which wasn’t all that long as now besides restless mosquitoes I had deer fly attacking me too.

Deer fly were a complete novelty to me when I arrived to Finland a couple of years ago. Never before in my life have I seen an insect so clumsy as a deer fly. Upon my first encounter with the Lipoptena cervi I begun to think this must be either a very young species, or it managed to trick the ways of survival of the fittest by being incredibly cunning at something. I vividly remember wondering through the forest a couple of years ago and only after returning home I’ve noticed tens of these tiny slimy-like flies firmly attached to my scalp, clinging so hard that it took a lot of time, profanities and patience before I got read of little critters.

The interesting thing is that they really aren’t slimy at all, but have an elastic and glassy body that gives impression of sliminess. Deer fly bodies are so elastic that it is actually quite difficult to even squeeze them between a thumb and a forefinger. And boy, do they know how to irritate. But once I learned that their ending up on humans is really just a big mistake, I started treating them with compassion. Just think about this, L. cervi mistake humans for either deer, elk or any other bovine animal. Not that I’d wanted to be mistaken for a deer by anyone or anything, it’s just that they hardly ever bite humans, drink human blood and deposit their eggs under our skin as they like to do so much on their true host animals. Now that’s what I call devotion, it won’t touch it if it ain’t on its diet and reproduction list. Quite some creatures, I must say. We became instant friends.

After picking all the unlucky deer fly off me (I didn’t want to carry them too far away from their families, after all) and explaining how sorry I was that they will have to try their luck somewhere else, I flung them off just to see their ever clumsy flying.

I was on my way to cycle around lake Pielinen today. Lake Pielinen is the fifth largest lake in Finland (check it out here, it’s that dark splotch in the middle). It covers the area of 868 km², so there’s really no way to pretend you’re cycling around it by accident. It took me much of the three days to complete the task. The circumference of 200 kilometers might sound daunting, but there were aplenty boring villages, tiny hamlets and other amusing sites on the way that kept me entertained like a good album on a long driving trip can.

Just a few hours into the ride I saw a perfect bathing spot right off the road. It was invincible. I simply had to wash away all that dust and sweat from the previous two days somewhere and this place was as good as it gets. I pulled off, took the towel and soap and went for a dip. The whole experience ended up more like a quick shower than a nice bath as water was excruciatingly cold and as far as I could recall even avanto was more akin to steamy bath than this was. Sure enough, after I emerged from the lake I stank no more, but it took me hours to rise my body temperature from 13 back to my preference of 36,5°C.

By looking at the map there are countless town names scattered around the perimeter of lake Pielinen, but when you’re actually out there, half would not elicit even a though of naming, let alone placing that name on a 1:200 000 map. But there they were in all their glory marked on the map, being no more than a handful of abandoned train stations and half-deserted houses on both sides of the road. But there was something special about this place after all.

Never before in my life have I seen so many bus stops as I have during these several hundred kilometers. Most of the time I was cycling on back-country roads, but there they were, faithful like a dog, hundreds and hundreds of them. In Finland for every ten trees by the road one bus stop is erected, or so it seems. Not that many buses drove by during my whole trip, but even just a bus stop sign conveyed a certain amount of feeling that I was closer to civilization than I would have wanted to be. I am sure that they have built such an extensive public transportation network just to convince the locals to stay put in such remote places. Just who would have otherwise wanted to live some place called Talviniemi without being assured that all it takes for them to leave is by hopping on the next bus.

As I cycled along the eastern shore of lake Pielinen between Lieksa and Nurmes, two incredibly dull towns, I thought this is it, I am tired of all these hills. But just as I fell into simplemindedness of propelling the bike up and down all those hills, I spotted an unusual sign by the road. It was Mätäsvaara abandoned molybdenum mine. A narrow boarded path led off the road down a narrow slit in the rocky hill. I propped my bike on the wooden hut by the entrance into that really narrow and steep gorge, left the helmet on my head, took my camera and flashlight, and set off to explore the mine.

Already after few paces into the slit the place became eerily silent and dark. But I wasn’t even entering the mine at all. After reaching the end of the slit a truly impressive rock pit with a pitch black pond in the middle opened up in front of me. Mätävaara’s molybdenum mine was one of the largest in Finland in 1930s and 1940s when it was in its heyday. They’ve dug it several hundreds of meters deep and its tunnels covered some 11 kilometers altogether. I was lucky enough to meet a local visiting the mine at the same time. A strongly built older gentleman explained that as they were digging deeper and deeper, they miners taking everything that wasn’t molybdenum a few kilometers away from the site where piles of debris grew into several hills. But everything that is left of Mätävaara’s mine today is this pond hiding kilometers of dormant dark water-filled tunnels beneath its placid surface.

They say that the pit has peculiar acoustic qualities, so today it is used as a summer outdoor stage for concerts. It would be amazing to hear a concert here, I thought, but I didn’t want to waste much precious time as in meantime I had made my mind that tonight would be the last night I’d sleep out of doors. I was only 170 km or so away from Kuopio. If I wanted to check out another cool thing on the road I would have to prolong the trip for two more days, which would endanger my engagements for the upcoming weekend, namely another fine summer party. The plan immediately sunk in and I was determined to get as close as possible to the town of Nurmes on the northern tip of lake Pielinen, spend another night in the wild and cycle home the following day.

I don’t know if it was just me or was the last day objectively by far the most dull. Hills, hills and more hills. Some smart aleck came up with speculation that origins of word Suomi are to be found in suo, a Finnish word for a swamp. During this last day of cycling it wasn’t difficult to solve the riddle of Suomi. Suo was complemented with mäki, a Finnish word for hill. There are countless swamps in Finland, but there are just as many hills, if not more. It was almost hypnotic, especially when going downhill, and delirious whenever it was time to climb that next hill. I was getting tired of this not just because I would cycle 150 km on the last day, the exhaustion was mental too.

During those four days I’ve cycled some 500 km. It was fantastic. I’d do it in an eye-blink again, I’d just pick a different tour this time.

Mladen

This is the fourth and the last part of the Koli cycling trip series. Here you can find the first, second and third parts.

I slept like a log even though last night before I fell asleep I had vivid images appearing in front of my eyes of a bear limping around my silvery tent thinking what the hell is this and then without any further notice just tearing it up and helping himself to some warm meat. Now it was obvious that these ominous thoughts of mine were nowhere near as ominous as I’d wanted to believe they were. I was actually even disappointed to find that bag full of food I had hanged on a nearby tree before heading into the tent last night appeared to be untouched. And my disappointment grew still as I found that it was not bears who had helped themselves to my squished bananas and a couple of hard-boiled eggs, but it was throngs of slimy yellow slugs that were nipping at my edibles. I’d much rather see a bear munching on that banana.

Soon enough I completely forgot about all these really just minor details, because almost instantly after crawling out of the tent I had a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing around me each tirelessly trying to get a sip of my blood. I repeated the hand wriggling workout of the previous evening, this time as I was trying to pack the tent. It all happened very quickly and I was on my bike as soon as I flicked off the last of mollusks from the food I believed I still wanted to consume that day.

Cycling from Kajoo seemed to go with ease I couldn’t recollect feeling the day before. But sooner than I had wanted I was reminded that landscape had not flattened overnight as sure enough I was again climbing one hideous hill after another. Nevertheless, the first 30 kilometers to the small town of Juuka on the shore of lake Pielinen were incredible fun. Which did amuse me at least a bit, as I had expected not to be able to move at all after covering quite a considerable distance yesterday. In fact, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning. It is much more likely that it was the thought of breakfast in Juuka that made my brain produce unthinkable amounts of endorphins out of nowhere.

Although I’d expected Juuka to be an old cozy small Finnish countryside town with its much written about old wooden buildings forming the town’s core, it was almost all but. Sure the wooden buildings were there, but these were incomparably outnumbered by modern concrete boxes, swallowing what was left of the Puu Juuka (or wooden Juuka) I had read about. At some point or another I had realized that practically any Finnish town older than 50 years could boast about having a wooden heart. In reality this image of almost romantic warm wooden structures was rather bleak and it seemed that it served much more the purpose of touristic propaganda than it actually reflected what was actually there. In the end the most important attractions in Juuka on a Saturday morning ended up being running water and a store where I could replenish my supplies of apples and porridge.

Knowing that I had laboriously pushed the pedals the day before, I was not only determined but sure that today would be the day when I would reach Koli. On the map it is situated only about 20 kilometers to the south of Juuka, but since I opted for the scenic route of back-country logging gravel roads I somehow ended up cycling almost twice that distance. On more than one occasion I though I was even moving backwards, that’s how slow I was going up and down all those hills. Here for the first time I faced hills so steep that they looked dangerous, only to find a similarly perilous drop after climbing for several tens of meters. And this game of going up and down seemed to be never-ending. After several hours I finally emerged on a bit wider gravel road where a sign instructed that everyone turning right will reach Koli, but to my surprise only after following the road for 9 kilometers. How could this be possible? I murmured a rather loud expletive to myself, obliged the sign and turned right.

All along the way multitude narrow driveways leading off from the main gravel road to houses concealed in the forest accompanied me with incredible regularity. Of course, it was only rows of red mailboxes standing by the main road that revealed their owners’ property at the end of each driveway. What stunned me was how mailbox decoration had quite suddenly changed from occasional kitschy boys stretching an accordion to what was now incredibly consistant decorating of mailboxes with differently sized statuettes depicting wolves and bears. I wondered for a moment or two just what could be the reason for this shift. Was it just that Karelians had a different closer to nature preference than people in the Savo region did? Or was I finally entering the mountain men country? It was difficult to tell as forest on both sides of the road was eerily quiet and seemed so lifeless all along the way anyway. But night was still hours away and these uneasy thoughts were soon replaced by more immediate threat of yet another long stretch of uphill road leading to Koli itself.

The threat, however, turned out to be completely groundless. Koli, after all, is nothing more than a teeny-weeny hill reaching a pathetic 347 meters above sea level. By no means could it even be compared to mountain tops I have scaled while cycling as a teenager in Slovenia when only climbing two kilometers above the sea level on a continuously ascending twenty-something kilometer long road was considered a climb worth a mention. Cycling in Finland is a completely different affair and all I could aspire for was a meager couple hundred meters high hill and climbing it wouldn’t bring any bragging rights whatsoever. But as its granite gneiss top stands almost untouched even by the ice age erosion and glacier movements at least a hundred meters above all the other hills, which were rubbed down by movement of glaciers, you actually do get a feeling of standing on the top of the world. On a clear day the view stretches as far as 80 kilometers in all directions. It is absolutely amazing. I perched myself on the exposed bedrock and enjoyed the sight for nearly an hour.

Geologically speaking I was resting my derrière on one of the oldest bedrocks in Europe dating as far back as three billion years. Just imagine, I was sitting on the very same rock that was around when our protozoan ancestors crawled around. As I was thinking these prosaic thoughts, it also couldn’t escape my mind that Finns had built a hotel right on top of the very same hill on that very same rock. Although I cannot really say how happy I was that this was Finland, because if it were in the US, I’d be staring at a shopping mall. Even though I would build no more than a log hut, if anything at all, I was in a way also grateful that the discreet two-story hotel did not even reach treetops of surrounding pine and birch trees. And Koli rising an unimaginable 200 or so meters above the lake Pielinen, it would be a shame to forgo the chance of rezing the forest on the side of the hill for the skiing slope. So come winter and you can watch people standing on splinters of wood sliding down one of the oldest hills in Europe. Quite nifty.

But along with the title of the national landscape come also throngs of mindless tourists. No it was not a bus-load of shouting Italians who would ruin the whole experience. It was really just a peculiar individual that proved visiting Koli does grant bragging rights after all. As I was walking towards my bike, an out-of-breath man approached me and asked where Koli was. “Well, sir, if you’d had at least three neurons inside that cranium of yours you’d know that you’re standing right on top of it.” “But no, really, where is it?” “Why are you asking if you don’t believe me?” I couldn’t even imagine I was having this conversation. And then he nails it saying “Oh, alright then, I have to hurry up as I have a cab to catch to go back to Joensuu,” a town some 80 kilometers to the south of Koli. I couldn’t have been more happy continuing my trip on the endless gravel road knowing that chances of meeting similar specimens would be very thin.

It was late afternoon and since camping within the boundaries of the national park is not allowed, I decided to put in another 30 kilometers along the Pielinen’s western shore before the end of the day.

Along the way I have stopped to visit the Devil’s Church cave, which with its 33 meters also happens to be the longest one in Finland. Considering cave’s rather ominous name and ghostly silence in the woods surrounding it, a steep descent towards the cave entrance at dusk gave me chills. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but was determined to examine the cave nonetheless. I strapped the flashlight on my head and entered the cave squatted and in a duck-like motion. Devil’s Church (or Pirunkirkko) is an entirely different type of cave than any of the caves I’ve seen before. It is really just a half meter wide and some three meters high crack in the granite gneiss bedrock in the shape of letter Z. The information board diligently informed visitors that the cave is probably as old as the hill itself, but due to the hard bedrock it retained its incredibly minimalist and almost straight lines. Even though having headlamp might have made me feel more comfortable, it was absolutely unnecessary as daylight shone through various cracks and I didn’t even feel like being in a cave at all.

Slovenia being a country of caves where about 100 caves are discovered each year on top of 8.800 already registered ones, I have learned to associate caves with stalagmites, stalactites, water dripping everywhere, silence, darkness and claustrophobia. All of which, except for silence, were missing in the Devil’s Church. There was really nothing devilish about it, except maybe the myths of it’s shamanic past.

After I left the cave I wasn’t far from the national park boundary anymore, but decided to continue cycling until eight o’clock that evening. I’ve found an incomparably more agreeable camping spot than the last night’s was. I pitched the tent in a thin spruce forest listening to some gun nut continuously firing his gun and was trying hard to ignore the disturbing sound. It reminded me that I was closer to civilization than I had wanted to be and yet again realized that if there was anything to be afraid of out in the wild it wouldn’t be stumbling upon a bear, but a demented gun nut.

Mladen

This is the third part of the Koli cycling trip series. Here you can find the first, second and fourth parts.