We’ve had a couple of fairly quiet, non-touristy days in Helsinki, sleeping in, cooking, doing washing, working out how and where to clean the car before we return it in Stockholm on Monday. It feels like the first section of our trip, the Scandinavian road trip part, is coming to an end and we’re getting ready for the Russian train trip part.
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
We did something today that Australians just cannot do, visit another country for a day, and be back home for dinner. We caught the bus early from our apartment into the bus terminal at Kamppi. The Kamppi bus terminal is underground, very modern and organised. It was then a walk for about one kilometre to the Linda line ferry terminal. We joined the long line to board the ferry where they checked our passports and we boarded. The trip across to Tallinn in Estonia is about 80km over the gulf of Finland. The Linda line fast ferry took 1 hour forty minutes. (people only – no cars there are other car ferries).
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
We are staying in Espoo, home of Nokia and the second-largest city in Finland. It’s actually just an extension of Helsinki. We are staying in another Airbnb apartment and you can have a little look at it here. Nice 1 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of a 4-storey apartment building, bus outside the door, shops and railway station about 10 minutes walk away. We’re here for 5 nights and will put the car and ourselves on the ferry back to Stockholm on Saturday night.
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
Aww go on, how many of you remember the Monty Python song? I recall sitting in a lecture sometime during my nursing training in the early 1980s and the guest lecturer, probably a doctor, mentioned something about Finland, and Sue Sanossian (waves to Sue if she’s reading) and I spontaneously burst into song. Do you remember that, Sal? I still giggle when I think of it.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
It’s the country for me.You’re so near to Russia,
So far from Japan,
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Eating breakfast or dinner,
Or snack lunch in the hall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.
You’re so sadly neglected
And often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium,
When going abroad.Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
Finland has it all.Finland has it all.
written and sung by Michael Palin
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.
Just some information on camping equipment we use that we find useful. Firstly our gasifying wood stove. Ours is a Woodgas Campstove, but there are several other brands of stove around. These stoves burn twigs and sticks (no bigger than your finger) very efficiently, and produce lots of heat from a very small amount of wood. It is about 8cm across and 15cm high and has a battery pack that takes 2 AA batteries. The battery pack drives a fan that circulates unburnt wood gas to make the burning more efficient. You just scout around for some twigs and with a few pieces of paper in a few minutes you have enough heat to cook with. We have used our stove now for nearly 40 camping nights including hiking the Larapinta trail. We have a MSR stove that burns multiple fuels and is very good, but suffers from the problem that it is very difficult to take on planes. There are rules that allow fuel stoves on planes, but they are getting tighter (Qantas wants you to to request written permission in advance now to take a fuel stove on a plane).
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.
This post probably won’t be of interest to our regular readers, but after spending ages searching the internet for information after we got our parking ticket, I thought it might help any other unfortunate tourists who get caught like we did.
So, a few nights ago we were staying in Tromso and decided to go out for dinner. In a restaurant, our first restaurant meal in Norway. We parked in a small private car park which had a parking metre in one corner. I went to buy a ticket and noticed that it gave a price of 23 kroner per hour, up until 2100 hours, or 9pm. I didn’t read any further, just put in enough coins to get to 9pm, took the ticket , put it in the car and we left. I really should have read all the instructions because there is also a charge after 9pm, of 10 kroner per hour. We got back to the car at 10pm to discover a yellow parking fine on the dashboard. For 760 kroner.
The parking fine is, of course, all in Norwegian, but it’s fairly self-explanatory. You can either pay with a bank transfer, or they give a website where you can dispute the fine. I visited the website and then searched all over the internet to see if I could just pay with a credit card online, but there doesn’t appear to be any option to do so. Paying with a bank transfer was really just all too hard to organise with one of my Australian banks … not to mention costly. So I did some detective work and by searching on the SWIFT code given with the banking details, I learned that Europark Norway uses DNB Bank to accept payment.
We found the DNB Bank in Tromso and I went to see if I could pay the fine there. Success! Kind of. They will process the payment, but they charge a 75 kroner fee on top of the 760 kroner fine. I had to show ID (passport) and got a receipt for the payment … and I made very sure that all the reference numbers on the yellow fine and the receipt matched up so that there would be no further issues.
Of course, it goes without saying that it’s better not to get a fine in the first place, but if you do, I hope the above information helps.
That’s not the start of a riddle, it really does baffle me when people clap in the presence of natural awesomeness. My brother John told me years ago about visiting Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park and seeing people clap, and we saw the same thing when we visited last year … so I guess it’s probably happened nearly every time in the intervening years. And it happened at Nordkapp at midnight last night when the sun stayed high in the sky. Well, not really all that high, but definitely well above the horizon. And it was awesome. But I didn’t feel like clapping.
My mum asked me a couple of questions and maybe other loyal readers are wondering too …. Have we seen the Northern Lights, and can we see any stars at this time of the year inside the Arctic Circle.
The Northern Lights are a winter phenomenon, occurring when the sky is dark. We’ll have to come back in winter to see them, and apparently in Tromso they are at their most spectacular at 6pm.
I must find out more about them, but at the moment I’m still trying to get my head around the whole ‘sun doesn’t set for 10 weeks in summer’ and then the ‘sun doesn’t rise for 6 weeks in winter’ thing. I know it is to do with the earth’s tilt, and I’m sure there are plenty of Youtube videos about it all that we’ll watch when we get home. Or I’ll ask Dr Karl. He probably know lots about this stuff.
And the stars. We haven’t actually seen a star since we left home. Even as far south as Copenhagen, there are only a few hours of night at this time of the year, and the sky just never gets dark enough to have any visible stars in it. Within the Arctic Circle, the sky is always light, although at midnight it’s not quite a bright as during the day, and it does cool down by a few degrees overnight. Our Lonely Planet Guide gives lots of dates of when the sun sets in various parts of Norway. It will set in Nordkapp around July 29th, for the first time since mid-May. And then the first star/s will be visible in late August.The sun sets for the last time in late November and rises again in mid-January. I know, I know – it’s all just strange for us who live in places where our days and nights only vary by a few hours depending on the season ….. and to people who live close to the Equator and have equal durations of day and night all year round it must be almost inconceivable.
And I’m by no means an expert, but if anyone wants to know anything else, ask us a question in the Comments and one of us will try to answer it for you.
We got to Nordkapp yesterday afternoon and paid the hefty fee to go into the Information and parking area. On the way there Greg had been looking out for possible camping spots, but I was fairly sure that there was only one place for us to camp last night … at Nordkapp itself. And we did. There is a field just outside the toll booths into the Nordkapp area and people are allowed to camp there, and lots of people with RVs just stay in the car park overnight. We went and looked at the lookout and read a few of the many obelisks, markers, monuments and other assorted items of interest, took photos and I sent a postcard to my 6 year old nephew to let him know that we’d seen Santa’s reindeer and would keep an eye out for Santa. There’s a pretty good chance that we’ll find him in Finland …. Lapland to be precise.
So then we pitched our tent and waited. For our dinner to cook … for midnight …. for the sun to go down (or not). And it was well worth the wait. We were lucky that it was a reasonably clear sky with not too many clouds. Tour buses kept on arriving and disgorging passengers from cruise ships, motor homes and motor bikes rolled in and one young German woman arrived on foot. I had a good chat with her and found out that she was there to start walking the E1 Walking Trail, which is a 4900km route that starts at Nordkapp and finishes in Sicily. The route was officially opened just last month. She hadn’t been able to find the start, so I took her to the stone marker and took a photo of her with her camera. We had a nice chat about walking – she has walked the Camino de Santiago, so have we – and I took her to our tent, gave her some water, we wished her ‘Buen Camino’ and she started off on her very long walk.
Greg put a few more photos on the post below this one, to show where we have been so far this trip, and to give an idea of where we would be if we were in the Southern Hemisphere. I’m just going to state for the record that I have NO PLANS to camp at 71 degrees south, or anywhere within the Antarctic Circle. I’m not that brave. Or silly.
