Although Jen's plane wasn't until mid-afternoon on Wednesday 13 April, it was hard to do too much beforehand as there was a lot of repacking and reorganisation required. I picked up the car at about 1pm with the idea of driving Jen to the airport and then working it out from there.
To make life more interesting, I've decided to go the manual gearbox route (actually, trying to get an automatic wasn't that easy). As such, my every instinct for driving is now totally invalid or wrong. I'm driving on the wrong side of the road, obeying give way rules which are the opposite of back home, in a manual, with the gearstick on the wrong side of the car and the indicator where the window wipers should be!! So it goes without saying that I've stalled the car multiple times, seldom indicate (but clean my windows a lot) and have no idea of whether or not I'm supposed to give way...
After leaving Jen at about 3pm, I plugged in a random city into the sat nav and sheepishly obeyed it's every whim. I reached the city of Pori (about 300km from Helsinki) at about 9pm after lunch and a spot of shopping. The first hotel I went to was totally overpriced. They suggested a motel down the road which was a bit cheaper and called them for me on my behalf.
Ever the slave to the internet I was much more interested in borrowing the hotel's wifi than making my way to the accommodation and desperately sought cheaper accommodation on my own. But, eventually defeated I made my way to the motel only to find that it had closed (obviously they had become tired of waiting for me and shut up shop). By a stroke of luck, there was some nearby wifi without password protection (thank god for people who don't put a password on their wifi). My calls (via skype) to the motel went unanswered and an impending sense of doom started to roll over. Here I was, at 11pm on my first night without a place to stay, during the off season, with the only available accommodation options shutting down!
One last call of desperation to a hostel, some 40 km in the wrong direction was answered - and they had availability. Lucky. The 40km drive was scary as hell. The roads aren't as brightly painted as NZ roads, the sat nav was continuously beeping with warnings of speed cameras on the side of the road (sidebar - I can't quite comprehend just how many speed cameras there are on the side of the road. I must have passed over two or three hundred so far) it was pitch black outside and the lights from oncoming vehicles made driving all the more stressful. After arriving at about midnight I vowed not to repeat that process and to ensure I reached accommodation before night fall from that point forward. However, the hostel itself was great. In what is becoming a theme for this journey, I was the only guest and had a double room and the run of the facilities to myself. The hostel was more of a farmhouse and in summer you could pick berries or mushrooms or go hiking in the nearby areas. It would be great to return one day and I could highly recommend it to anyone (www.anttilantila.fi)
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| Seen everywhere, these woodsheds are very pretty |
The second day was much better. I covered over 600 km before ending up outside a town called Oulu on the Western Finnish coast by the Baltic Sea. The driving is great. The landscape is once again very flat (compared to NZ at least) and the roads are straight and long. The driving is easy with enough variation to maintain interest and concentration. The roadside mostly comprises of birch and pine trees, with agricultural land in between. The land is still mostly covered in snow, but enough has melted for a full suite of greens, browns and whites around every corner. Barns, homes and a series of small woodsheds (?) reflecting in melted pockets of water make for a picturesque journey. Although the day started off foggy, it quickly lifted to reveal a stunning day with blue sky and mild temperatures. I had been hoping to see the sea on my journey up the coast, but the road was too far inland to make this possible but for only a few occasions. However, there were a few spectacular bridge crossings.
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| Some woodsheds are in worse condition than others |
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| Bridge crossing, and I assume country houses in the background? |
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| The Baltic Sea - an ideal place to stop for lunch |
On the previous night when I had been stealing wifi, I reserved accommodation for a hostel near Oulu in an area called Virpiniemi, which turned out to be a sort of sports institution. A large gymnasium was across the road from the hostel and a cross country ski area was adjacent to the hostel (including a ski jump).
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| Waterfalls weren't that common on the trip |
Although cross-country skiing would have been great, there was nowhere to hire skis, so I jumped in the car to head North to Lapland's capital city, Rovaniemi and my end point - a hostel about 70km North of Rovaniemi and about 65km North of the Arctic circle.
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| You see plenty of warning signs about Reindeer, but I had to travel off-road on a small detour to spot these (literally 3 or 4 metres off the road) |
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| The reindeer were almost tame and didn't seem too afraid of the cars |
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| The arctic circle and Santa's Home |
Once again, I find myself as the only guest at the hostel I am staying at. However the location is stunning and I can even go ice-swimming tonight if I feel like it!
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| No jumping - it will upset the other ice-swimmers.. |
About 700km to North Cape, but fortunately an early night tonight...
To make life more interesting, I've decided to go the manual gearbox route (actually, trying to get an automatic wasn't that easy). As such, my every instinct for driving is now totally invalid or wrong. I'm driving on the wrong side of the road, obeying give way rules which are the opposite of back home, in a manual, with the gearstick on the wrong side of the car and the indicator where the window wipers should be!! So it goes without saying that I've stalled the car multiple times, seldom indicate (but clean my windows a lot) and have no idea of whether or not I'm supposed to give way...
One last call of desperation to a hostel, some 40 km in the wrong direction was answered - and they had availability. Lucky. The 40km drive was scary as hell. The roads aren't as brightly painted as NZ roads, the sat nav was continuously beeping with warnings of speed cameras on the side of the road (sidebar - I can't quite comprehend just how many speed cameras there are on the side of the road. I must have passed over two or three hundred so far) it was pitch black outside and the lights from oncoming vehicles made driving all the more stressful. After arriving at about midnight I vowed not to repeat that process and to ensure I reached accommodation before night fall from that point forward. However, the hostel itself was great. In what is becoming a theme for this journey, I was the only guest and had a double room and the run of the facilities to myself. The hostel was more of a farmhouse and in summer you could pick berries or mushrooms or go hiking in the nearby areas. It would be great to return one day and I could highly recommend it to anyone (www.anttilantila.fi)
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