We’re spending tonight in Riga, Latvia which is a stopover on our Air Baltic flight to St Petersburg. All Air Baltic flights hub through Riga, so we picked the flight with the longest time between landing here and taking off for St Petersburg to give us a chance to explore another central European city. We’re staying in a hotel in Old Riga. Greg has already been out for a walk to check out the local sights by night. We’ll do more walking and exploring tomorrow.

Before I get distracted by more sights and experiences, I thought I’d write down  few observations about our travels in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. It was all great, and I would love to re-visit any or all of these countries in the future We found all the ‘locals’ we talked to wherever we went to be universally friendly, helpful and nearly everyone speaks excellent English. Prices of most things in Sweden, Denmark and Finland were around the same as at home, with the exception of fuel which cost more everywhere. In Norway, everything was expensive. We had read about it before we left, and I think I was secretly hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as people claimed …. but it was. Everything just cost a lot of money. Getting a $165 parking fine didn’t help much either. We were very glad that we were able to spend most of our time in Norway camping and self-catering.

The economies of all 4 countries seem to be in good shape, with little or no foreign debt, limited exposure to the GFC, and Finland and Norway have both covered their future age pension commitments … I’m not sure about Sweden and Denmark.

People in Scandinvian countries seem have children earlier than they do at home. We saw lots of young parents out and about with babies and toddlers. Good, secure, well-paid work, generous parenting payments and parenting leave probably go a long way to bringing the average age down – this is just our observations, I haven’t gone hunting around for any statistics.

Summer is short. Very short. When we left Stockholm 4 weeks ago, everything was green and lush. Yesterday we went to Uppsala for the day and lots of the fields are now golden with grain crops, flowers have started going to seed and some of the trees have started turning yellow. Berries, currants and chanterelle mushrooms are the hot seasonal sellers in markets everywhere at the moment. In Finland there were also lots of peas in their pods, but I looked for them in Stockholm and didn’t find any. Must be a Finnish thing.

And I have to mention one last thing, even thought it’s not really relevant to anything else much, I just want to remember it – at the apartment complex we stayed at in Helsinki, the area around the car park and near the 4-storey building had been landscaped with white- and red currant bushes which all had almost-ripe fruit on them. I don’t know if anyone picked them to eat or preserve, but every time I walked past one, I would pick a handful to eat!

The dry fields around Uppsala

Viking burial mounds at Uppsala dating back to 600AD

Leaving Helsinki in the bright sunshine was fantastic, and a great way to remember a city we really liked. We were allocated a cabin at the stern of the ship, no windows (cheap tickets! ) but there were windows in the corridor that looked over the stern of the ship.

I got up at 4am when I heard the ship docking at Mariehamn in the Aland Islands.

Later in the morning we wound our way through the islands of the Stockholm archipelago.

Leaving Helsinki on a sunny afternoon the Ferry weaving its way through the islands

The islands off Helsinki

leaving Mariehamn in the Aland Islands at around 4am in fog

Winding our way through the Stockholm archipelago

We had good intentions of visiting Suomilinna, ‘the fortress of Finland’, today. It’s a short local ferry ride from the centre of town. We found some cheap metered parking and walked into the city, but it started raining before we got to the wharf and we had no wet weather gear with us. We took shelter in a David Jones-type department store but even after we had looked at all the electrical appliances we never knew existed – designer stubble electric razor, home fake nail kit, domestic laser hair removal instrument of torture – it was still overcast and raining occasionally, so we headed back to the apartment and baked apple turnovers for afternoon tea instead.

Tomorrow night we’re putting the car on a ferry and heading back to Stockholm, arriving at around 10am on Sunday. We have to return the car on Monday morning, and on Monday evening we’re flying to Riga in Latvia. We’ll spend a day there, then go to St Petersburg for a few days, catch a train to Moscow for a few days and then start our Trans-Siberian train trip.

We are offloading giving our camping gear (tent, chairs, table, various other bits and pieces) to the owner of the apartment. Not sure what he plans to do with it, but we’d rather he take it to use or give away or sell  on eBay or do whatever he likes with it so long as we don’t have to throw it out. We’ll hopefully then be down to one duffle bag plus our nice small Osprey that are within the size limits for carry-on bags.

At the market in Helsinki

Floating Restaurant. Helsinki has lots of islands and inlets

One of the main streets in central Helsinki

We arrived in Tallinn to find no passport control, it was left to us to wander off into the city over a strange aging soviet-era plaza. We found Tallinn old town and eventually the tourist bureau to get a map. Tallinn old town has been left pretty intact with lots of old buildings dating back hundreds of years. However what surprised us was the number of tourists – it was packed. The last time we saw this many tourists was Bourbon Street in New Orleans on a Saturday night. Tallinn old town was packed to the point it was a struggle getting along some of the narrow lanes in the town. After wandering around in old town for a while we left the tourists and headed for Tallinn new town and a shopping centre for lunch. We found a eatery that was a jazzed up modern cafeteria and had a cheap meal for 3.20 euro (meals in tourist trap Tallinn old town where 11+ euros).

After lunch we braved the tourists again and climbed to the top of the hill in Tallin old town to enjoy the view.

We were suffering from the cold. The weather forecast for Helsinki had been 23C and partly cloudy, and our previous day in Helsinki had been warm. So we didn’t take our jackets with us (we were very under equipped for visiting another country) .

We headed back to another shopping mall to find afternoon tea/dinner and get warmed up. We then headed out towards the ferry terminal past several bottle shops selling cheap Estonian alcohol. We knew that Finns travel over to Estonia to get cheap booze, but we were somewhat surprised by how much people managed to take back. Finland has a state owned monopoly on selling alcohol (except beer in supermarkets) called “Alko”, and and a result alcohol is expensive, although not as expensive as Norway.

We got the Ferry back at 7pm and saw a sign on the wall showing the fast ferry had been built by Austal Ships in Western Australia in 1999

Just one Finn with his pile of cheap alcohol from Tallinn waiting for the Ferry back

Old Town Tallinn packed with tourists

We decided to go into the city and have a look around today. It was overcast this morning but the forecast was for a fine day with temps in the low 20s. That’s double the maximum temperatures we had while we were within the Arctic Circle!

So … even though there’s a bus outside the door, we walked up to the nearest railway station and dithered around for a while working out where we were headed and how much it would cost. As Espoo is in Zone 3 of the local train network it was going to cost us 4.5 euros each. So we thought it might be cheaper on the bus and headed to the nearest bus stop where we boarded a bus and paid …. 4.5 euros each. Okay, so now we have all that worked out. We’re going to Tallin, in Estonia, tomorrow for the day and we wanted to check where the ferry leaves. The ferry terminal just happens to be near an open air market that I wanted to visit, so that was all rather good planning, or luck.

The market stalls are all selling berries, currants, cherries, peas and new potatoes at the moment so we bought some little new potatoes and peas still in their pod for dinner and strawberries and raspberries as well. I was interested to see that fruit and vegetables are sold by volume here, so I bought a litre each of peas, potatoes and strawberries, and the raspberries were already in a punnet. There were also a lot of stalls selling cooked food, with little tables and chairs set up. We went to a seafood stall close to the water where Greg had whitebait, fried potatoes, vegetables and salad, and I had prawns, fried potatoes etc. All freshly cooked, all delicious.

We wandered around to the ferry terminal and collected our tickets to Tallin, then did a modified walking tour of the main points of interest in Helsinki – the Lutheran Cathedral, the National Library which is currently closed for renovation, Pohoisesplanadi – Helsinki’s equivalent of the Champs Elysee and the highlight of our walk -  Temppeliaukio Kirrko (The Church of the Rock),  a 1960s church hewn into solid rock. A really simple but magnificent space, with a glass and copper dome and a beautiful organ. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any photos, but if you click on the link above there are some good photos with the Wikipedia article.

We caught a train back to the apartment, partly so that we could experience the full gamut of Helsinki public transport, but also because we couldn’t work out where the heck to catch the bus back out to the suburbs!

Buying fruit at the market

More market stalls in Helsinki

Its not a disease! The common name for Street food vans everywhere but Australia

Anyway, here we are. In Finland. Lots of trees, lots of lakes and lots of mosquitoes at this time of the year. We have camped ‘in the wild’ for the last couple of nights in nice spots in forests, and last night we were near a small lake as well. Tonight is our last night before we get to Helsinki and we’re staying at Vaihelan Tila, a ‘farmstay’ hostel a couple of hundred kms north of the capital. It’s still a small working farm, but the large barn has been converted into accommodation. It’s lovely – all timber inside and sleeps around 14. There are several self-contained huts on the property as well, but tonight we’re the only ones in the large converted barn, which also has a wood-fired sauna. Our hostess told us about the various accommodation options and mentioned that her house has an electric sauna ‘and it’s not as good as a wood-fired one’. So we have had a sauna which Greg liked so much that he’s planning to have another one in the morning. I did like it but I tend not to sweat (and that’s nothing to do with ‘ladies don’t sweat’, it’s actually a nuisance as I don’t cool down easily when I’m hot).

We have been so excited to be back in a country that doesn’t require a second mortgage whenever you go shopping that we have visited at least one supermarket a day, mostly just to see what’s available. Norway is not part of the EU and the range of food available there is quite limited and more expensive than in EU countries. Here in Finland, food, fuel and accommodation are all cheaper. We still have some food that we bought in Sweden a couple of weeks ago – pasta, mashed potato, pasta sauce and a jar of beetroot (what was I thinking I would cook with that when I bought it? I have no idea) and I’m looking forward to being able to use an oven in the apartment we have organised in Helsinki, I’m a bit tired of one-pot cooking on a camp stove.

I thought I’d share a recipe that I kind of made up last night:

Mince and White Bean Hot Pot
250g mince
1 small onion, diced
tomato paste
1 can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed
1 small can corn

Fry onion in oil, margarine or butter, add mince and cook until browned. Add a couple of tablespoons tomato paste with some water and cook for a couple of minutes. Add cannelini beans and corn, cook until hot.
Note: Don’t try this at home, it probably only tastes any good when you’re camping and you’ll eat almost anything and think it tastes great.

Judy at the “official” Santa Claus post office at Santa Claus Village on the Arctic circle

Too much Santa Claus is barely enough. Santa Claus village with myriads of souvenir shops, post office and restaurant, all sited on the Arctic Circle

Crossing the Arctic circle southwards (conveniently marked)

Reindeer meatballs!

camped by a lake in central Finland

The Finnish wood heated sauna we tried out where we are staying

the route we have taken from Nordkapp through Finland so far

roadside stop for lunch Finland

Reindeer meat for sale everywhere in Lapland

Cooking dinner camped in a forest in Lapland Finland, still above the Arctic circle

The gasifying wood stove is not a problem on planes because the fuel is wood, and you don’t take that on the plane, its just a metal cylinder with a battery pack and an electric fan, perfectly safe. We have had some problems in the extreme north with finding enough dry wood, but with hindsight we could have collected some along the way, it would have taken little room. We also tried using BBQ briquettes, but found they didn’t really burn hot enough.

Having a stove means we can self-cater, buying food cheaply from supermarkets and cooking it on our wood stove, and not have to pay to eat out at restaurants (especially in expensive Scandinavia).

Secondly our next item of essential equipment is our Coleman fridge. This fridge is not very large and uses the piezzo effect cooling, so it only cools relative to the surrounding environment (when its hot it struggles more). However it is light, and small enough to take on the plane as carry on luggage. It plugs into a cigarette lighter socket, and means we can carry milk, meat, and other things saving money. An Australian 4WD camper would scoff at the Coleman fridge and they would prefer a proper fridge like an Engel (which we also have). However an Engel is very heavy (never get it on a plane) and large (never fit it in the back of a small hire car), and expensive. Our coleman fridge cost us $60 at Walmart in the USA (there are other similar fridges around). We even have a 240v/12V adaptor so we can run the fridge in a hotel room if there is no fridge.

Thirdly our 10 litre Kitchen sink. We have a smaller 5 litre one, but our 10 litre sea to summit kitchen sink is great. We bought it for the Camino Portuguese to use it to soak our sore feet in. However it has many more uses. Washing up and carting water. It folds up into a little container.

Woodgas stove

$60 coleman fridge piezzo electric

Sea to Summit kitchen sink 10 litres