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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Cycling, Environment, Finland, Leisure, Travelogue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.