Alli's Blog

When we were in the UK, I noticed this phenomonen. It looks like mud, has boot prints etc in it, but it has been quite cold overnight, and the mud has frozen. When you walk on it you think its going to be slippery, but instead it is solid and makes a noise like walking on chocolate crackles. Very odd.

Now I understand what sauna's are all about. I have only ever experienced them in Australia, where it seemed kind of pointless to sit in a big hot room when you can just go outside and stand in a big hot outside. We met up with Naomi and Mike at Hotel Kakslauttanen and discovered the joy of saunas. When its minus 25 outside and your snot is frozen, sometimes to your scarf, you jump in the sauna (about 60 - 70 degrees) and ahhhhhhh. The Finnish tradition is to get nice and hot, then run outside and roll in the snow. I have photos and a short video of Na and Mike and Rusty doing this. Aside from a lot of swearing they described it as "refreshing".

Northern Finland is really cold at this time of year. When I say cold I mean minus 25 degrees C. For us Aussies that is a temperature we cant begin to imagine. Its a dry cold, so your skin gets all the moisture leached out of it in seconds. If you put face cream on less than half an hour before you go out, it freezes on your face, due to the water content in most face creams.

The husky safari was good fun. Rusty and I each had 4 husky dogs (Alaskan Huskies -there is no such thing as Finnish Huskies) under our control. They pull the sled and you hang on for dear life trying not to hit trees with the sled. The method of steering is via voice command, but only one dog out of our combined eight understood such commands. Now, this is useful if you have that one dog as the leader of your team, but if not, steering is quite tricky. At one point I leapt off my sled sideways because the dogs were going towards one side of a tree and the sled towards the other. I was going to be going headlong INTO the tree, so bailed out.

For lunch on the way out to the hut, Henri started a fire and made a fish stew / soup from scratch. It was actually REALLY good. I hate fish, but we were cold and tired and starving by the time we stopped for lunch, so it was fantastic when we got to eat. A cup of tea finished lunch and we were back on the road / lake.

We made it to the "wilderness" hut after about 6 hours on the back of the sled. Most of the day was spent sledding across the frozen Lake Inari. The hut was simple, but after starting a fire we warmed up, and then our guide took us down to the lake to fetch water. We had to scoop it up from a hole in the frozen lake, then take it up to the water heater (fire-powered) so we could wash and have hot water for dishes. There was no running water, but we did ok. The only icky bit was the "Arctic toilet". It was a composting toilet (which is fine) but it was outside in another hut, so if you needed to go, you had to put on your ten layers of clothes and boots and trek out there. Brrrrrr. You really had to need to go quite badly to brave the cold. Luckily the seat was made of cork, so in relation to everything else it felt warm when you sat down!

Then came dinner. Our guide, Henri, cooked us some moose and elk meat, with potatos and pickles. It tasted like a cross between kangaroo and beef. A fairly typical finnish lake meal. I guess if you are vegetarian you would have eaten a lot of bread, as thats about all there was that wasn't meat or fish of some kind. The hut had gas for cooking, so the food wasn't too bad. We were really hungry, as all that cold and sledding is tiring.