Finland.
Helsinki, Lahti, streets
Arriving at Helsinki airport, we filed a claim with Lufthansa as
a hard shell suitcase had a splintered corner. We were surprised
that so many Finns arrived from Munich with skis, more on that
later.
We picked up our car and started on our way towards Koli;
driving with a top speed of 100 km/h and often being limited to 80
km/h or even 60 km/h is... unusual...
Finnish police/authorities seem to be obsessed with enforcing
those speed limits as there are a
lot of speed cameras
along the way.
Finnish people seem to be similarly obsessed with slot machines;
there is an incredible amount of them at gas stations and a
constant stream of people playing them. From an outsider's
perspective, it's weird that a country as strict about one form of
addiction, alcohol, and working against it vigorously, by means of
taxes, would allow another form of addiction, gambling, run as
freely and this allow so many slot machines.
Speaking of taxes on alcohol: a single 0.33 l bottle of beer is
more expensive in a Finnish supermarket than 0.5 l of beer in a
German restaurant. Which also explains why supermarkets tend to
have a rather large section with relatively cheap alcohol free
beer.
Anyway, coming back to streets: Highway intersections don't have
continuous on/off ramps from which you change from one highway to
another; you drive off of the highway, stop at a traffic light, and
then continue onto the other highway. Weird system, but given the
amount of traffic we witnessed, it's probably Good Enough (tm).
Stopping for a short time in Lohti simply because it's
apparently famous for winter sports competitions, we arrived at
Future Freetime in Koli national park after about five to six
gruelling hours of net driving through somewhat bad weather and
behind slow drivers.
Koli
Hiking up to Ukko-Koli and its sister peaks proved to be rather
exhausting as we kept on breaking through the snow cover to our
knees and sometimes even our hips. Once we were up there, we
realized that even though you couldn't see it in between the trees,
there was fog all over the plains so we couldn't see anything.
Still, it was a nice hike even if somewhat short.
Note to self: Even when a trail is marked locally, if
OpenStreetMap does not know about it... don't walk along it.
Especially not when the going's rough already. And if there's a
sign suggesting you wear snow shoes... wear snow shoes.
Returning to Koli Hotel and the museum next to it, we walked
over to the ski slope. The highest peak within Koli,Ukko-Koli, is
347 meters high, the local ski slope starts a good way below that.
This would explain why a lot of Finns came back from Munich with
their skis...
Afterwards, we rented a snow mobile, without guide or
supervision, and drove from Loma-Koli over lake Pielien towards
Purnuniemi and in a large circle down towards lake Ryyn skyl where
we turned around and went back the same way. If we thought Finnish
streets don't have a lot of signs we soon realized that snow mobile
tracks have even less. There are at most two or three signs
pointing you in the right direction, but on the plus side, there
are no posted speed limits for snow mobiles, either. In somewhat
related news, snow mobiles can go at least 95 km/h. At that point,
the scratched and dirty visor of your rental helmet will keep
slamming down, forcing you to take one hand off the handle and thus
stop accelerating to maintain stability.
To round off the day, we heated up the sauna built into our
little wooden hut. Running outside three times to rub myself off
with snow from head to toes, I almost slipped and fell while
standing still. When your feet are too hot for the snowy ground,
you'll start to melt your own little pools of slippery water/snow
mush within seconds. File that one under "I would never have
guessed unless I had experienced it myself".
Generic
The MarkDown source of this blog post is not even 5 kiB in size;
even in a worst case scenario, pushing this to my ikiwiki instance
via git will eat up less 10 kiB of mobile data. Which is good
because I have 78 MiB of international data left on this plan. This
is also the reason why there are no links in this blog post: I am
writing everything off line and don't want to search for the
correct URLs to link to.
I really wish EU regulators would start to tackle data roaming
now that SMS and voice calls are being forced down into somewhat
sane pricing regions by regulations.
PS:
-rw-r--r-- 1 richih richih 4.6K Feb 11 22:55 11-Finland-I.mdwn
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Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 2.79 KiB, done.