hiidenkonttibeta

If I’m not mistaken, I moved to Oulu on this date, 10 years ago. I’m celebrating with .. let’s see .. a half-eaten bag of chili nuts, a small bottle of Spitfire Kentish Ale and a pretty strange Japanese movie 赤い橋の下のぬるい水 (“Warm Water under a Red Bridge”, Shohei Imamura, 2001).

And to clear things up a bit I should note that the last two Muddus entries were actually written today..

At 8:00 in the morning the beautiful singing of an angle grinder cutting through a metal pipe 5m away woke me up. It didn’t seem to bother Tuomo & Satu too much. Two hours later we drove to Kemi (using handbrake again) to get the car fixed.

This place called Auto-Patu did a good job with it. While waiting I started a new hobby of photographing sports cars:

With some time in our hands we walked around the city for a while. This is what Kemi looks like:

The buffet in the Chinese restaurant was good, though.

There was no more problems in getting to Oulu. First thing to do was to get in the shower, and then to the net. Or was it the other way around..

Ja myöhään illalla sain hyvin jännittävän viestin jolle en ole vieläkään lopettanut hymyilemästä :-)

Another fine morning. During the normal morning rituals (making coffee) I saw a reindeer swimming by. At first it looked like a duck with a duckling; after consulting my brain a bit further (the coffee was still brewing) I dismissed that option since ducks don’t usually have very big antlers.

A swimming reindeer looks like a different animal compared to a running reindeer – a running reindeer looks like it’ll stumble over it’s own legs any second. If you want to see applied chaos theory in action, watch a reindeer running for a while. But be cautious, walking may be hard afterwards. A swimming reindeer, however, glided past peacefully and majestetically, head and tail held high:

This was our last day here (our visits are always so short..), so the rest of the morning was spent cleaning up, packing, and installing some wiring for the solar panel system. The spotlights were to be screwed into the walls through their inch-thick bases with the supplied inch-long screws. Sunwind is so very clever.

It was a little windy on the boat trip back to the car. Even a few drops of water spilled in the boat, and as a result all our bags and the clothes we were wearing were wet. My turn at the wheel.

We had lunch at the top of Kaunispää. Afterwards there was a little time for wandering around, and I took photos of this little reindeer:

I continued driving to Sodankylä. So much reindeer on the road that the mailboxes and other stuff started to look like reindeers in the end. Coffee, switching drivers, next stop was the Arctic Circle.

There was a sign post showing directions and distances to some cities:

Only 7340km to 東京! But I had left my compass at home, maybe next time. There was of course a lot of Joulupukki this and that around, I only took one photo:

Uneventful ride to Tervola. More coffee. Switching cars again, and we continued towards Oulu.

For 10km or so, that is. Apparently Skoda “Faabio” Favorit didn’t like being left behind when we had fun in the north. Tuomo noticed there was something funny in the behaviour of the car, and stopped on the nearby bus stop. A smell of something appeared, as did a lot of smoke from the right front tire. It was too hot to touch – the brake had locked, stuck. We had been warned about this possibility.

It was 22 o’clock on a Sunday evening, but luckily we weren’t in the middle of nowhere. After we had tried a few tricks I called my cousin who lived a few kilometers away and asked if he could bring us some tools. Luckily he was at home and after he arrived I found out that he knew a lot more about cars than I had thought. When he got the brake unstuck we drove to his place where he attempted a quick & dirty repairing but the available parts weren’t tough enough for this kind of usage:

The tire was able to turn, but braking was only possible using the handbrake – otherwise the brake would lock the tire again. We drove back to Tervola to spend night there.

A lot of thanks to Sami for helping us out in the middle of the night in a heavy rain!

Oh, here’s a good chance for new superstition. If the first animal you see in the morning before drinking any coffee is a reindeer swimming in a lake, be sure to check the car brakes.

To see and show the light at night, two photos at 01:00:

A bit later today we hauled up the nets. There was a perch in the first one. And another. And another, and still some more. The net was a complete mess around a shoal of perch. Every one of them seemed to have got caught in it by their head and every sharp spike in their body (and they have quite a collection of those):

Turning them into a meal was a result of co-operation: me getting them out of the net, Tuomo to gut them, me to fillet them (first time, started to get a hang of it after a while), Satu to season & flour them, Tuomo to fry them, and Satu to eat them with coffee (honestly, she did, at least one fillet).

At some point I went to get more drinking water (it’s cleaner further away from the shore) and ended up lying in the boat, drifting in the wind:

In the evening we started installing a solar panel. Pretty soon a broken screw ended our attempt. Sauna, sausages, sleeping.

First thing in the morning (after making a fire in the stove and putting a water pot on it to boil for making coffee, obviously) I did was take a walk around, looking for mushrooms. This pitiful one was the only one I found:

A disappointment. It would have been nice to have some mushrooms – they might have been good with the rosvopaisti (a kind of barbecue made in a hole in ground) which we made on this day.

Here’s roughly how it’s done: dig a hole in the ground, about 70cm deep, wide enough for the roast to fit in easily. Fill the hole up to half way with fist-sized stones. Make a fire in the hole, burn it for 4 hours. Wrap the seasoned roast in aluminium foil and several layers of wet paper, tie with metal wire. Dig half of the stones up, insert the wrapped roast, put the stones back in and fill the with the sand/soil that was digged up. Make a fire on top, let it burn for another 4 hours. Dig the roast up, unwrap, eat. Here’s the whole thing in photos:

Not much more to do this day, just spreading the nets, going to sauna, writing SMS’s, making pancakes, sleeping. Here’s some views of the lake:

After buying 2.5kg of mutton (for three people) we took off. The next interesting event was a little sightseeing tour on the mouth of Kemijoki, after missing the access ramp. We crossed the river by the bypass road bridge and re-crossed it by Isohaara hydropower station bridge.

In Tervola we switched cars – unloading the first and loading the second and finding out that there was less space for our stuff in the new one. Later, when we went shopping in Rovaniemi, all of the food bags had to go to the back seat.

I drove from Tervola to Sodankylä, where we tuned our blood caffeine levels and switched drivers again. In the cafe where we stopped someone had created personal signs for the restroom doors:

North from Sodankylä we started seeing a lot more reindeer on the road:

The next interesting spot was the fjeld called Kaunispää in Saariselkä. Ice-cream time! Except there was a power failure and one of us didn’t get her ice-cream. Apparently Inari was also without electricity.

There’s a lot of small, creative cairns on the top of Kaunispää:

Here’s some scenery (wide-angle lens of the camera phone includes a lot of sky and ground in the pictures; if there’s too much sky, the ground part turns very dark – there’s no way to control the exposure, so I’ve compensated by tilting the camera so that there’s as little sky as possible) and a window of some building and some simple chairs from Kaunispää:

After some more driving towards the setting sun and watching out for any somewhat reindeer-like figures on the roadside we arrived at the lake. The sun is shining, the air is still, and there’s no black clouds of mosquitos around. After the final 5km boat trip (occasionally by rowing, over the rocky areas – the water level is still low) we have arrived at the destination:

After a little wondering around we had a fire going and sausages broiling (but not in these photos):

And so ends the first day.