Hotel Ivalo

... effortlessly. An attempt to copy his movements reveals how much effort is required, and I go back to my shuffling steps. We head out along an easy route to the nearby village of Laanilä (about 4km away according to the map), the location of the nearest café. The route is lined with streetlights and takes us past a husky farm. The dogs bay and howl at the visitors arriving at the farm to take part in husky sled trips, and we ...

... discouraged, they don't appear to like people strolling (or skiing) across their frontier. Russia is very close to Saariselkä, the border lies about 30km as the crow flies to the west, across the Uhro Kekkonen National Park. Checking the BBC weather forecasts before we left, looking at Murmansk was better for predicting conditions in Saariselkä that looking at Helsinki. We're closer to the Arctic Ocean than to the Baltic.

... green. the wall behind them is decorated with an array of traditional Finnish items, from an ice hockey stick and an ice-fishing auger to a traditional hand-saw for felling trees. Further down the bar is a tray of Sami hunting knives in reindeer hide sheathes for sale. I hope that this place doesn't turn out to be like 'Roadhouse' with Patrick Swayze, where the drinkers expect a good fight at the end of the night.

No amount of snow that we've had in the UK could prepare us for the conditions on arrival in Finnish Lapland in early February. Apart from a brief break in the cloud cover as we flew over Oslo, we'd seen nothing of the conditions on the ground since leaving a moderately snowy Gatwick at 4pm UK time. Over the past two days I'd been listening to new reports and traffic updates telling of school snow days, poor road ...

Despite the storm our train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi was delayed only for an hour. That was a plesant surprise actually, because some trains were delayed for many hours. Aino joined us in Tampere. She had been waiting for the train there for more than two hours, but she almost lost it... She was helping two traveller girls, whose flight to London was cancelled.... Well, she did catch the train and our journey began. We slept well in the train ...

... constantly emerging through intra-actions, and limits to understanding not only due to a lack of human capacity or data but actually inherent to the world itself, the absolute truth indeterminable. What follows is that I don't think I, or anyone, should ever come from a position of believing that the are definitely right and others definitely wrong, about anything. Always mindful of the indeterminacy of the world, I ...

I have entered the land of the midnight sun! which, I've discovered, means I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping. Luckily, I have been able to relax in sauna. I just got back from the sauna at our hotel, which is right beside the Inari river - so we had a couple of dips in between sauna ...

Today we decided that we would drive a loop that would take us to Inari in the north of Finland (69° north) and then back slightly south before heading back to the base camp in Levi for the night. There are only a few countries that are in the same latitude region as this part of Finland: Northern Alaska, a fair bit of Canada, Greenland, Northern Norway, a tiny bit of Sweden and quite a bit of northern Russia. What this means is that it is a ...

During my last day in Inari, almost everyone I met was asking me if I had seen the bears, and upon some questioning, told me there were supposed to be some aggressive brown bears (because they had cubs) in the outskirts of the town. A good time to leave, I don't really want to see an aggressive bear (actually I do, as long as it does not see me). So, as I had missed my plane and was short on money, I decided to try my hand at ...

... cold wind silently announces that the summer is over and the trees one by one start to agree, so that there can be plants of the same species side by side and each bear a different hue, as they change from green to yellow, to orange, to red, to brown. Makes you feel like you need nothing else but to be there. I was so right in coming to Finland. I am ready to leave to Helsinki now (had to give up Savonlinna), but how will I get there? Read in the next section. :)