Utsjoki
We had a little difficulty finding our log cabin in the middle of nowhere as that's exactly where it was. We found Utsjoki easily enough but managed to drive past our cabin in the dark. Utsjoki is a very small ullage and our cabin is about 10kms outside. We went about 12 KMS too far before we realised. It's a fair bit off the road and looks as if a film set designer had created the perfect log cabin in the wilderness. A river runs near the cabin and the other bank is Norway. Beside our cabin is a huge log cabin sauna that could easily take 8 people. There is also a large circular cook house for a barbecue. The snow outside is quite deep about 500mm on the drive. All we can hear is silence. Perfect. We will explore tomorrow when it is light. We ended the day with a heart stoping moment. Gill and I went out to explore our surroundings in the dark. We discovered we have a clear sky so there is a slim chance is aurora later. We came back to discover we had locked ourselves out of the cabin. When I said we are in the middle of nowhere I wasn't joking. The nearest house is probably a KM away. We had left a lasagne cooking in the oven. I had left my phone in the cabin . There was an emergency key box by the door but the number was in an E mail on my phone. The car keys were in the cabin . The temperature is minus 8 so lots of scenarios flashed through my mind! The emergency box had a number lock and we decided to try the four digits of the house number. You can imagine our relief as the box opened. I think we will have a quiet night by the fire!
We woke up to new snow on the ground. There was about 9 cms of snow on the car. The shower is in the sauna cabin which is about 20 metres across the snow beside the main cabin. As we are in Finland I thought I better conform to local custom and walked over naked in my show boots. To be honest it wasn't as cold as I imagined. It went to minus 9 last night but this morning is a balmy minus 3. The quiet here is palpable. The snow is dry and powdery and when you stand outside you can hear the tiny flakes falling on the material of your jacket. It's that quiet. We look out over a snowy landscape that dips down to a river which forms the border between Finland and Norway. There are steps going down to the river but they are invisible under the snow with only the handrail sticking above the smooth whiteness. There are boardwalks around the house and I managed to step off one and went into the snow to half way up my calf. There has been constant light snow all day and I decided it would be a good idea to drive the couple of hundred metres to the main road to compact the snow to make it easier to drive when we leave. I got to the road and made the fatal mistake of reversing back down the drive. I managed to hit the soft snow on the side of the drive and my back wheel sunk in to half way up the tyre. My efforts to free the car resulted in getting further into trouble and by the time I finished the snow was up to the wheel arch. It took nearly an hour with a shovel to extricate myself from this self inflicted mess. I'm taking the rest of the day off. It's 2.15 pm and it's totally dark now. Very cloudy so not much chance of seeing the Aurora. However we will have a look later. Time for a hot cup of tea.
About 10 CMS of snow fell last night so everywhere is blanketed. The car was covered so we had to clear that. As we were standing at the top of the drive the owner of the cabin drove up and we had a conversation about the snow. Serious topic of conversation here! Gill discovered that this region of Finland has a population density of one person per four square kilometres. I'm glad I didn't know that when we locked ourselves out of the house. It might have been a long walk for help. I realised that living in isolation here makes for a somewhat thin blog! Our days are silent and we read and relax and eat. Listening to silence is our new favourite activity. We have been reading up all about Finland. Specifically we were curious to know why alcohol is so eye wateringly expensive here. So far we haven't found an explanation. The excise duty, which we thought might be to blame, isn't that high. There is a tax on fizzy sugary drinks which makes them about twice as expensive as New Zealand. Overall Finland has prices that are 70% above the EU average for food and beverages and one of the banks here attributes it to lack of competition. A mid range meal in a restaurant for two people has an average price of 60 euro. While that is expensive by NZ standards the cost of utilities for an 80 sq metre apartment would be 98 euro which covers electricity, heating or coling, water and refuse collection. The surprise for me was finding out that Finland produces a quarter of its electricity by nuclear generation. Personally I'm a huge fan of nuclear power over carbon based generation. It's a no brainer given global warming. Yes I know ..Chernobyl. so ask me about that particular disaster when our planet is consumed by raging fires and tsunamis and flooding which will make billions homeless or, in other words, the end of civilisation as we know it.
Finland has a very enlightened policy towards social and economic policy: "In national income policy agreements, the government and the employees' and employers' organizations attempt to reach a common understanding of the best choices for the national economy in terms of economic growth and real wages. The basic conundrum is simple: employees want higher salaries, employers want no wage hikes. The government wants to maintain international competitiveness and a high employment rate, while simultaneously ensuring sufficient tax revenues and keeping inflation in check." It's not rocket science is it? You'd thank most countries would see it the same way. Pre school education is free from 8 months and municipalities pay mothers to stay home for up to three years. Schools don't give homework and teachers are well paid and respected. Competition for places at University to study education are fiercely competitive. Oh and you have to have a master's degree to become a teacher. It makes you wonder how some countries like the USA get it so wrong. They are so keen to increase their already obscenely large arsenal of weapons and give tax breaks to wealthy corporations and individuals that there is no money left for education, health care or infrastructure. I'm always perplexed by people who bemoan Trump and believe all will be well once he leaves office. Don't they understand that trump IS America? They elected him president for goodness sake. It's called the will of the people and he represents it. He's the logical conclusion of a progress towards moronic ignorance, exceptionalism and prejudice that has grown in America since the end of the second world war. We were temporarily blinded to this march to the cliff by the stunning success of Silicon Valley. We were fooled into thinking that the US was actually a clever country. If you seriously think Trump is the problem then watch The Senate defecate all over the constitution they claim to uphold when they refuse to impeach. Believe me, Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Lik so many empires before it, America has been hollowed out by avarice, xenophobia and stupidity.
Today is our last day in our log cabin that we have made home. I'm usually quite a restless person when I travel but I am going to be very sorry to leave this magical spot. We have done nothing in the last two days except enjoy total silence and solitude. Occasionally we walk outside and crunch the snow under our boots. We read and talk and relax. There are so few times in life when we have palpable silence around us and total isolation. Our biggest excitement was last night when the snow plough turned up to clear our drive. It was a massive tractor with two metre tyres. A huge scoop on the front could probably have lifted a car. At the back was another scoop that threw the snow into the air to the side. I had to move our car from the top of the drive to let him in. Unfortunately it was stuck and I was gratified to see that even the snow plough driver couldn't manage to extricate it. We got a shovel and did some digging and he pushed the car while I slithered out the entrance. We now have a smooth snowy drive which is a bit icy in places but at least we can get out. Wears moving to another cabin up the road so we have a bit more silence to enjoy!
We moved to our new cottage which is just up the road from our previous place. It has a tiny balcony and a little upstairs sitting room. The roads are good to drive on even though they are covered in snow. The temperature has plummeted today to -12 and you can feel the icy chill on your face. Once settled we decided to drive into Utsjoki to get provisions as we only bought enough food for two days in Ivalo. We hadn't bargained for the fact that today is a national holiday, Independence Day. Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917 and, like Ireland, immediately had a civil war. There is one shop in the town but it was closed for the holiday. I'm not sure you can call it a town as it comprises two petrol stations, a pub/restaurant, a shop and a hotel. As we hadn't eaten lunch we decided to go into the pub restaurant. There were two old men at a table and the proprieter. They couldn't have looked more surprised if ET had walked through the door and offered free drinks all round. There was total silence as they stared at us. We must have looked somewhat extra-terrestrial as our glasses had totally steamed up from coming in from the intense cold. Once they picked their jaws up from the floor they ignored us totally. We bought a cup of coffee and a cardamon bun which was delicious. The bun was the only food in offer even though a sign outside promised a buffet from 11 am to 4 pm. The buffet stand in the corner was emoty. Gill then managed to engage the waitress in conversation and we discovered we had hit a national holiday. She also told Gill that Pizza would be available from 3pm. Quite why it was not available at 1.00 pm, lunch time, was not clear but there didn't seem to be any hope that pizzas might be on sale any earlier. Gill optimistically ventured that we might try and get a take out Pizza but it was obvious that the kitchen was shuttered and nothing was going to happen till mid afternoon. We decided to go back to the cabin and have crisp bread, salmon slices, 2 squares of chocolate and banana for tea. That's all the food we have. Let's hope the shop is open tomorrow. We had planned for Arctic temperatures but not for starvation!
We were told to expect snow last night but there was only a light dusting on the car. Apparently the heavy snow we have seen over the past few days is unusual. Just our luck, as the cloudy skies mean no aurora sightings. The interesting thing about travel is that you go with the expectation of seeing one thing and end up seeing another. I think that this idea could be better expressed by saying that we often have experiences when we travel which are very different from those we were expecting.
Our four hour days of daylight in Finland have given us ample time to read, reflect and chat. I'm not quite sure how I managed to end up reading a Stanford University article on Phenomenology but that's the sort of thing enforced idleness leads to. When I was a student I struggled to understand the basic precepts of this branch of philosophy and had to give up. I simply hadn't a clue what they were on about. It seemed like a load of pretentious shite but I had the good sense to keep these views to myself and gave a passable imitation in tutorials of someone who was mildly intrigued by the seemingly incomprehensible texts of Merleau- Ponty. If I was good at one thing, it was disguising that I was totally out of my depth. I would advocate this as a skill which should be taught in all schools as it is a vital life skill and comes in very useful to those seeking preferment in their field of employment.
The article on Phenomenology got me thinking about how we experience travel. When we were in the Old Square in Prague there was a group of three young women busily engaged in that most modern of travel activities, Instagramming. The camera person had been co-opted to help with wardrobe and was holding a small coat up to shield the model who had stripped to her bra in the 2 degree chill to don yet another costume which the third member of the team was fishing from a backpack. In the airport at Helsinki there was a Japanese young woman who was being filmed acting out pulling a fur hat from her hand luggage and donning it and then walking towards a shop. She reviewed her friends cell phone footage and was obviously not satisfied. The hat was pushed back in the bag and was redonned and the walk to the shop re commenced. I'm afraid the devil in me got the better of my normally reticent self and I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and filmed the girl with the cell phone filming the girl with the hat. We walked in a little crocodile towards the shop and I noticed that not a single person thought it was the least odd that a woman in a fur hat should be followed by two people filming her as she did the most common thing you do in an airport, namely walking down a corridor.
These two separate event made me reflect on what exactly I had witnessed. Both sets of instagrammers/YouTubers were obviously going to post material related to travel. But it was not about their experience of travel. It was about obliterating the concept of travel behind their posing, preening, egocentric tunnel vision of themselves. They would be made more significant by their surroundings. Prague Old Square would be the borrowed beaitiful backdrop for an impressive wardrobe and a mundane airport corridor would underline the exotic luxury of a fur hat. The underlying concept behind travel instagrammers is ME ME ME. That made me examine my motivation for wanting to see the Aurora Borealis. Were my motives that different than the instagrammers? I am a photographer and could it not be that I was less interested in the Aurora than the reactions of viewers to my photographs of the phenomenon? Was this about me as a photographer and not really about the sighting itself? The true test would be if I could leave my camera in the table and just enjoyed the Aurora. The act of raising the camera changes the experience and my intent. When we experience phenomenon we have to objectively examine the peripheral issues and, specifically, our intent. I did not find the Aurora so I will never know if I would have been able to just enjoy the ephemerality of the moment rather than seek to record it so that I might appear clever to others. What I did find was totally unexpected. On the last night of our stay in the log cabin I went outside to stand in the falling snow. I stood in complete and utter silence. It was of a density we rarely experience. I allowed my eyes to adjust to the darkness and I could see a river bed below me filled with snow which rose on the other side to a forest of bare trees. There was a watery moon behind cloud, low on the horizon. As I stood there immobile,I realised that I could hear the tiny flakes of snow hitting the fabric of my jacket. I listened as they fell and the entire universe disappeared. All that mattered to me was that faint sound that I had never, in my life, heard before. I could concentrate my entire being on that sound and, in that moment, I knew this was a better experience than seeing the Aurora Borealis.
We fly back to Helsinki today and then on to Prague. We will spend the night there and then get a train to Munich for our flight home to NZ. We drove the 170kms to the airport on roads covered in snow and during the first hour didn't encounter a single vehicle other than two snow ploughs. To Gillian's delight we met two reindeer ambling along the side of the road. We have seen a few as we drove along but this time we slowed down to take a picture. Being isolated in a silent landscape for five days has been a magical experience and we are finding it strange and disquieting being among people again. We savour the snow as we walk over the tarmac at the airport and hear it crunching under our feet. It will be quite a while till we hear that sound again. When we landed in Lapland on Monday last, I had strong misgivings about having chosen it as a destination. Put bluntly, we were going to a featureless, cold, snowy landscape with no real tourist infrastructure. There would be no excursions to see Reindeer farms or rides on dog sleds. We were about 500 km north of the Arctic Circle and there was nothing to do except enjoy the four hours of dim twilight before darkness descended for another twenty hours. Now that we are leaving we are both sad but that is as it should be. We have been given an opportunity to experience silence. Just as I wrote those last words Gill pointed to a headline in the Finnair magazine: "True luxury is connecting with nature and feeling that your senses work again." Couldn't have said it better myself!