Too hot!…

A gastronomic and cultural week during which we tried one of the most popular Scandinavian customs and took an “urban” break to enjoy an opera festival…

We spent a nice weekend on the shore of our lake near Suomussalmi. We were actually far enough away to be quiet, but close enough to the city (5 km) to walk there and even have a pizza on Saturday lunchtime. Cities in the north or central Finland are not really photogenic. In many ways, they look like these American cities lost in the middle of nowhere, where people go everywhere by car, park right in front of where they need to go and get back straight to the countryside (where most people live) as soon as they are done. On a Saturday lunchtime, Suomussalmi was deserted and apart from the supermarket, we only found two pizzerias open. But don’t think of an Italian-style pizzeria. In fact, a restaurant here is more like a school canteen or a company self-service. It looks more like a cafeteria than a restaurant, although, let’s be honest, the pizza and burger we had were very good! We would have preferred to try the local cuisine, but… the restaurant was closed… 😒

Weekend in the sun… (21/07/2024)

After that rest day, we headed out that morning 160km further south (although we had to make a long detour to find a place to empty and refill Marvin’s water tanks). We were close to the village of Khumo, but a bit further west, on the edge of Hidenportti National Park. And in the process, we changed provinces once again, moving from Kainuu to North Karelia. It’s not that our journeys are longer or that we’re trying to get to Helsinki faster, but… apart from Lapland, which takes up about half the country, Finnish provinces tend to get smaller as we get closer to the south of the country…

Once again, we settled in a large forest, but between two lakes this time, one on each side… And the little miracle of these last 72 hours is that, for an unknown reason for the moment, we had a whole weekend without a single mosquito! Both in Suomossalmi and here we were able to take long walks in the forest, eat outdoors and watch the sunset in peace, without having to spray ourselves with Autan or fight all the creatures on Earth. Needless to say, we revived! 😜 The only drawback is that here, instead, we have a kind of biting flies (they are not horseflies but something smaller with black and white dots on their wings). Fortunately there are not many of them… We probably can’t have everything either… And on the other hand, in both forests we were literally surrounded by blueberries. Maybe we will try to make a pie… 😉

Local habits (23/07/2024)

Today was a bit like a scene from the movie “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray. We woke up that morning in absolute silence, in our beautiful forest between two small lakes… The next morning we also woke up in a forest, between two small lakes and, without a doubt, in absolute silence… 😁

The only thing that was a little different was the forest, which had more birch trees than the one the day before, but apart from that, the ground there was also covered with blueberries, just like the day before… You might think that it must be boring to drive for miles and miles to always get to yet another lake surrounded by a forest, but in reality, it is not at all. Each place is different and, although some are more spectacular than others, the sunsets or the reflections of the trees and clouds in the water of the lakes at the end of the day… it never gets boring… 🤓.

That day, to fit in a bit, we decided to try one of the Scandinavians’ (and therefore Finns’) favourite activities: collecting all kinds of things in the forest. Apparently it’s a regional addiction and whenever they can, Scandinavians go for walks in the forest and collect mushrooms, blueberries, blackberries or anything else that grows there and is edible…

We thought that mushrooms were perhaps a bit risky (it would be a shame to end up like Christopher McCandless…). So we focused on blueberries, after checking on the internet that there was no possible confusion with something deadly… 😜

It turns out that in addition to “real” blueberries, there are also “wetlands berries” here, which look similar enough to be confused, although both species are edible, the latter being less sweet than the former, but without any risk…

So we have our little harvest, and now all we have to do is find dough, cream and sugar to turn it all into a Finnish-style blueberry pie!…

We also developed a technique to pick blueberries without getting eaten by biting flies (sorry, I searched but I can’t find the name of these flies…): one person picks while the other fans with the lid of the tupperware or with a handkerchief… It worked very well until, when we were almost done, we accidentally stepped on a swarm of wasps and then the fan system stopped being effective. We ran away and got out with just two stings… Nature is ungrateful in Finland… 🤓.

Local cuisine… (23/07/2024)

The big advantage of northern Finland (probably the indigenous influence that makes authorities build nice roads for the Sámi to keep them quiet…) is that the roads were in perfect condition. No need to say that this is not the case in the south!… Many of the roads we take, even though they are official roads, are actually dirt tracks so hard packed that the speed is limited to 80 km/h. The problem is that the further south we go, the more we try to go on those tracks because they are infinitely better than the “asphalted” roads, which don’t seem to have been renewed since the last Russian invasion!… Today’s journey only included about 30% of the track and consequently, it was a bit bumpy!…

We are close to the town of Joensuu, capital of the province of North Karelia. We are also in the northern part of the Finnish “Lake District”, that region in the south-east of the country that has so many lakes that there is more land under than above water!… The landscape is starting to change and we see more and more fields and farms, surrounded by forests and lakes, of course, but they are no longer these immense forest landscapes that we were seeing until now…

After a 100% “life in the woods” evening, with a campfire to keep away the few mosquitoes and keep us warm (last night it was only 19ºC! 😜) while enjoying the absolute calm of the forest and the completely smooth surface of the lake, we went out that following morning in search of a supermarket to find the ingredients for our blueberry pie…

The trickiest thing to find was the dough… Apparently, around here, pie dough is made by hand, without anyone’s help! There are no Herta-style ready-made doughs or equivalent. Finally, after some searching, we found what looked the closest: a frozen “block” of dough, to flatten and roll out yourself. Well, so be it… if that’s the local custom… Plus, the package clearly said that this was the dough for making the best blueberry pie, so…

Once settled on the shore of our lake for that day, we began to flatten and stretch the dough, prepare the cream, cook the blueberries a bit in sugar and put it all in the oven. We just needed to wait for the pie to take on that delicious brown colour…

The result looks pretty good… And all we have to do is to wait for the pie to cool down before we can enjoy it!… 😋

Surrounded by water… (24/07/2024)

First of all, and without wanting to make anyone jealous, the Finnish blueberry pie was (is) delicious! Just the right amount of cream, blueberries, sugar and everything you need for the best blueberry pie, just like the packaging of the dough said!… 😋

We also know now that our famous “biting flies” are actually horseflies (thanks Laurence! 😉). In fact, there are over 160 species of horseflies in Europe alone, and obviously quite a few of them in Finland (and around us, apparently…). Fortunately, the sunset that evening was, once again, spectacular. It helps to forget about horseflies and other bugs (mental note: Thermacell seems to work pretty well on mosquitoes, but not so much on other insects)…

Our goal for the day was to take a short detour to visit the Orinoro Gorge in the province of South Savonia, a narrow gorge with vertical walls, carved by glaciers during the last Ice Age. Well, let’s put it into perspective right away, it’s not quite the Grand Canyon, but in a country as flat as Finland, a gorge up to 20 m high, lost in the middle of the forest, at least has the merit of existing…

The advantage of the Orinoro Gorge is that it is cool. And on these days when the heat quickly becomes stifling, this is much appreciated! The gorge is not very big (about 200 m long), but a spring flows in the middle and helps keep the temperatures cooler. According to the explanatory panel, it is also common to find snow there until the end of June… A small path made of wooden planks allows you to cross the gorge from one end to the other keeping your feet dry and, above all, avoiding crushing the tiny frogs that live there (and who have the bad idea of ​​being the same colour as the brownish moss that also grows at the bottom of the gorge…). And since the Finnish forests no longer hold any secrets for us, instead of reaching the gorge via the official access, we took the alternative path, from “the top” of the gorge, through the forest. A nice trail that gets lost a little in some sections, and that the moose must also appreciate because there were traces of their passage everywhere…

And since we were in South Savo, we came to settle at the mouth of the Haponlahti canal that connects… nothing, actually, since it only splits one piece of land into two, but this piece of land is surrounded by the same lake… 🤔

We are on the shore of Lake Saimaa, the largest lake in Finland with its 4,279 km². We are right in the Lake District and therefore surrounded by a lot of water! Where we are, right next to the canal, you could almost believe you were on a boat! 😜

To get here, we even had to take a ferry!… Suddenly, just like that, coming out of a bend, the road ends and continues on the other side of an arm of the lake, and a ferry pulled by a cable goes back and forth to transport cars and pedestrians from one side to the other…

The Haponlahti Canal was built in the 1960s to replace the nearby and narrower Oravi Canal, thus making it easier for slightly larger ships to pass through. Lake Saimaa is apparently very popular in summer for all kinds of water sports, but it is also used for river (or lake) transport of wood and other goods, which explains the canal, which avoids having to go around the entire strip of land we are on…

The anecdote of the day is that, upon arriving at the ferry, we met a Catalan from Vilafranca del Penedès who immediately came to talk to us, to ask us where we came from and where we were going, etc. etc. He (and his family) spend every summer here in a “cabin” near the ferry, and he spent a few years in Finland when he was young… It was fun to chat in Catalan in the middle of Finland. Catalan is a more international language than we think! 😜

Change of plans… (25/07/2024)

Initially, the idea was to make a stop in Savonlinna, visit the town and its medieval castle (St. Olaf’s Castle or Olavinlinna in Finnish), run a few errands and head a little further south, near another part of the great Saimaa Lake.

Yeah, but it turns out that Savonlinna is a very cute little town, that St. Olaf’s Castle is quite nice and that the walk along the lake, with its lawns and shaded terraces, had a bigger attractive effect than expected (we probably stayed too long in the woods, far from cities… 😉). Also, it turns out that we are in the middle of the 2024 season of the Savonlinna Opera Festival (internationally famous, it seems) and today was the last performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. We really had no other option but to stay in town to spend the evening at the opera, in the company of Wolfgang Amadeus, at St. Olaf’s Castle…

So we settled down by the lake, on the outskirts of the city, in a place that was a little less sexy than usual but which allowed us to walk to the opera, that evening at 7 pm…

Also, with the sunset we had the night before, even though for once we slept near a train track, it wasn’t a drama (especially since there aren’t really any bullet trains that pass through there, and at most two per day)… 😉 I promise, I swear, there is no filter on any of our pictures… Those were the true colours of the sky that night…

We also took advantage of the afternoon of the previous day to change Marvin’s water filters (FYI, it’s normal for the one on the left to be black, it’s a carbon filter and it’s always like that, but the one on the right was originally white 🤢), after which we worked a bit from our “office” for the day, with our feet in the water and a stunning view over the lake… We have to admit that some work environments are more stressful than others!… 😜.

Hotter and hotter… (26/07/2024)

Back in the forest after our little city break and our opera yesterday. I must admit that I had never seen so many people at an opera and, above all, not even at the Liceu in Barcelona or at the Geneva opera house, people were so well dressed! Apparently, in Savonlinna there is still that tradition, long gone in our lands, of dressing up to go out and, in particular, to go to the opera…

The Savonlinna festival takes place inside St. Olaf’s Castle (which allowed us to visit it…). A large tent is set up in the main courtyard of the castle, and the stone walls and stairs are used as stage decorations.

The only problem is that it is unusually hot around here, these days (the locals say so… it is usually never this hot in summer in Finland). The thermometer is around 30ºC during the day and the temperature never drops below 21ºC or 22ºC at night. Add to that the humidity of the lake and the air is so heavy that it is impossible to do any activity under the sun after 11am. And even if we get something close to a night again (a little more darkness for 2 or 3 hours), it is not enough to cool down the air…

In short, a tent filled with 2.000 people crammed in, with no ventilation (because if there were any it would be impossible to darken the room), in the sun for more than 16 or 18 hours a day, is not the best idea to spend a pleasant and refreshing evening listening to Don Giovanni… Fortunately, for the second act, those who were next to us went to sit at the end of the row and we were able to leave a little more space between those of us who remained. Although it was hot, the air circulated a little more…

This morning, after a few last photos of St. Olaf’s Castle from our parking lot near the railway line, which at least offered a nice view of the castle (for a little anecdote, the currents are so strong around the castle – which is built on an islet – that it is the only part of the lake that doesn’t freeze in winter…), we went a little further south. Curiously, in this mostly flooded region, the path logically follows the few strips of land that emerge from the water and, consequently, we have the false impression that we see less lakes (or water) around here than when we were in Lapland…

We are in the final stretch of our Finnish route. We have about 250 km left to Helsinki, the capital, from where a ferry will take us to Estonia. In the meantime, we are going to make a last stop on the shore of Lake Saimaa before finishing crossing it (we still have more than half of it to go) and getting closer to Helsinki…

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On the shore of Lake Saimaa, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.