When I speak with friends who don’t leave close by, one of the most common questions they ask is whether it is still light or dark over here. And considering that the amount of daylight has a tremendous impact on life and culture in Finland, this is always a relevant question. The light period during the summer gives everyone an extra boost of energy, while the dark winters bring extra weight, drowsiness and moodiness. People talk about it like they do about the weather.

The difference in the amount of light and darkness between summers and winters is quite extreme at this latitude. And the swings between day and night during the course of a year are almost too swift and difficult to comprehend.

Recently I have stumbled upon Gaisma, a web service visualizing the relation between light and darkness for thousands of places on Earth. The graphs Gaisma generates provide absolutely astonishing information, but are at the same time incredibly easy to understand. The first graph shows the relation between sunshine and darkness for Espoo, Finland, the second for Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the third for Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Amazing stuff.

Mladen

Just spotted this traffic sign mashup in Otaniemi, a self-proclaimed Nordic technology hub, but locally better known for its high density of geeky student population. Is that a sign of onslaught on consumerism? Or is it of consumerism? Hard to tell, but I sincerely hope dedicated shopping cart roads are not someone’s true vision or everything this technology hub can contribute to the world.

Mladen

If you’d want to know about the weather conditions in any part of the world, you’d find that information easily yourself, I know. So believe me, the last thing I’d like to bore you with are weather reports. But due to unbearable weather conditions one is definitely due.

It’s January and even though they tell me the average temperature in Helsinki should be low enough to turn off the freezer and move its contents to the balcony, it’s so warm that it won’t do to cool the sauna beer. Actually I don’t even care so much for the temperature itself. What hurts is that pathetic amount of white stuff on the ground only meteorologists could call snow cover.

In many respects this is the first winter I have decided to actively embrace the harsh weather of the north, but it turned its back on me. For the first time I’ve changed the summer tires for a pair of these beasts with 240 studs. Then I got myself some seriously practical literature on building wintertime shelters (How to Build an Igloo And Other Snow Shelters). Just in case. But what nailed the last nail into the coffin of my winter plans is skiing. It rained cats and dogs for a whole week after I got a pair of skis. When former miss Finland Ninni Laaksonen enunciated her understanding of the climate change by admitting that she has only seen the headlines bearing these words and that for all she knows it means that it’ll bring us longer and warmer summers, she was painfully right: last year’s summer did stretch all the way into January.

Even ice fishermen who with their Jesus-like craftiness usually somehow manage to walk onto the middle of lakes and sit there the whole day, when for the rest of us there is no ice whatsoever, are not only disappointed with this year’s winter, but warm weather might decimate their ranks this season. Yet what truly speaks of the unbearable conditions is that the guys who thawed their freezers to make the only cross-country skiing track in Finland, and managed to keep it open for the whopping 36 hours, were charging a formidable 8€ for a half kilometer loop. How many visitors they got remained unknown, but I bet it wasn’t crowded.

The only thing that makes this godforsaken snow-free place feel like winter are the measly amounts of sunshine. If I were to ask you how many hours of sun you think the residents of Helsinki could have seen in the whole month of December (assuming that that’s all they wanted to do), what would you say? 80 hours? 60? 40? Wrong! Twenty! Yes, twenty hours spread over 31 days. Most likely I have overslept all that sunshine as I can’t really remember seeing any at all.

But life is getting brighter after all. There’s absurdly more snow in Dubai than there is in the whole of Finland right now, but yesterday was the first time I left the office while it was still light outside–and I leave work at 4.

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.