Ottawa, October 22, 2015
When I got back to Leysin from my
Danube bike trip, I was barely in town for 24 hours before I got back on
another airplane with my bicycle, this time on a solo trip to Finland, Sweden
and Norway. Terri had to go back to work
for her last term of school during July and August, so I was on my own. Finland and Sweden were the last countries of
Europe (other than the self-declared independent pseudostate of South Ossetia)
that I had never visited, so I wanted to visit them before I waved farewell to
Europe.
On July 9th, I hopped
from Geneva to Zurich to Copenhagen to Helsinki, where I found my friend JP
waiting for me. Unfortunately, my bike
box didn’t make the same connections, and we arranged for it to be delivered
the next morning to JP’s house in Espoo.
We headed off with JP’s mom with two mountain bikes on a bike rack of
her nice car. The plan was to hitch a
lift with her 40 km out of Espoo to the small town of Lohja and then JP and I
would ride the rest of the way to her house so that we could get some exercise
and I could see the southern Finnish countryside. We pulled up in Lohja, got out of the car,
and all stared like stunned mullets at the back end of the car: there were no bicycles there, and the bike
rack itself was gone! We looked a little
more closely, and discovered that the trailer hitch on which the rack had been
sitting had fallen right off. We
couldn’t believe we hadn’t noticed this, and were worried that we might have
unwittingly caused a serious accident.
We turned around and drove back and found the bikes, rack and trailer
hitch safe and miraculously undamaged on the road 100 metres back, where we had driven over a small speed bump
entering the downtown area. We breathed
a sigh of relief and set off on our bikes.
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| Nice view from JP's mom's place. |
The bike ride was pleasant,
through a rolling countryside that could have been taken from anywhere in the
Canadian Shield: small lakes, birch and
spruce forests, occasional farms carved out of the woods, little traffic. In fact one of the reasons why Finland was so
low on my to-visit list for years was that I knew that the countryside was
going to look familiar. In fact Thunder
Bay, my home town, has a sizeable population of people with Finnish last names,
the result of heavy Finnish immigration over the past hundred years, partly
because the area around Thunder Bay is so similar to Finland. We ended up at the house that JP’s mother and
stepfather live in, a summer cottage on a peaceful lake, now converted into a
beautiful year-round residence. We ate a
delicious salmon dinner, swam in the chilly lake and then had a few rounds of
steaming in the sauna and cooling ourselves in the lake. I slept like a log.
The next morning JP’s mom, an
executive with a big media conglomerate, headed into the office and gave us a
lift back to Espoo. Given the previous
day’s debacle, we took the wheels off the bikes and fitted them (barely) into
the back of the Volvo! JP and I managed
to get in an hour of tennis before the heavens opened in a Biblical downpour
that made us less excited about exploring downtown Helsinki. We did manage to drop by the harbour, where
JP’s brother owns a tall ship, the Swanhild, that he charters to groups over
the summer. A group was just assembling
to start a cruise, and we socialized for a bit.
JP often goes along on these cruises as the chef, so I was looking forward
to the food on our upcoming sailing trip!
In the mid-afternoon, we crammed
a car full of food, my bike box (freshly arrived from the airport), JP, myself
and JP’s girlfriend Miia and drove a few hours west, past the previous day’s
destination, out to a small yacht harbour on the island of Kirjais.
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| Typical archipelago scenery |
The south coast of Finland is a
cartographer’s nightmare, an intricate pattern of islands, islets, rocks and
shallow rocky shoals all emerging slowly from the waters of the Baltic as the land
continues its rebound after the most recent Ice Age. This emergent shoreline makes for thousands
of tiny islands and tricky but beautiful sailing, and it was where we would
spend the next week exploring. JP and
Miia actually had a two-week timeslot, but I was planning to hop off partway
through that period with my bike to catch a ferry to Stockholm.
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| Curves and lines in the rigging |
JP grew up sailing a lot with his
father and has the best of both worlds:
access to a boat without having to be an owner. His father and three friends bought a 36-foot
sailboat, Blondi, years ago and have a timeshare arrangement, rather like a
holiday condominium. As the original
owners get older, they don’t always use their full time allotments, and JP’s
father lets him use some of his time; in exchange JP does a lot of the
maintenance work on the boat over the winter.
Not being an owner frees JP from being the butt of jokes like “What are
the two happiest days in a sailboat owner’s life? The day he buys his boat, and the day he
sells it.” We met the crew who had had
the boat for the previous week (the son of one of other co-owners and his
friends, two of them professional snowboard photographers and videographers; I
wish I had had more time to talk to them), then moved our gear aboard in a
steady drizzle, and handed the keys to the car to the other crew to drive back
to Helsinki. (It was actually the other
guy’s car which we had driven from Espoo; boat handovers involve a fair amount
of co-ordination and logistics.) By 9 pm
we were sailing out into the intricate jigsaw puzzle of the Finnish
archipelago, searching for a perfect anchorage as the rain stopped and the
skies cleared. Since JP has sailed so
extensively in the area, he knows it like the back of his hand and found us a
spot behind the tiny island of Blyglo that was sheltered from any waves or
wind. We anchored, pulled out a portable
barbecue grill and JP grilled up a huge feast of veggies, lamb and
shrimp/scallop skewers. We fell asleep
at 12:30 with the sky still in twilight; early July in southern Finland has
essentially no true night. I slept
exceptionally well in my slightly coffin-like berth in the bow.
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| The skipper is also a pretty fine chef! |
The next morning we were up at
8:20 and JP broke with his usual tradition by switching on the boat’s
engine. We motored to a nearby island in
search of freshly smoked fish. JP knew
from bitter past experience that this little fish shop often runs out of fish
fairly early in the day, and was determined to be first in line at the counter. We moored next to a number of sailboats that
had spent the night there and walked briskly into the fish shop. Our alacrity paid off as we had our choice of
numerous species of fish, either cold-smoked, warm-smoked or fresh. We bought a small mountain of fish, loaded it
into the tiny onboard refrigerator and went out for a walk around the
island.
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| The world was a bit tilted that day |
Historically these islands have
been farmed, although the number of people willing to live in relative
isolation, raising a handful of sheep and cows, has been steadily declining. This island had two farms on it, but only one
is really in operation, and its animals had been shuttled over to a
neighbouring island, so we had the forests and meadows more or less to
ourselves. A lookout tower provided
wonderful views of the surrounding islands, so densely scattered over the sea
that it looked impossible to find safe passage through the maze.
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| Beer o'clock |
Back on the boat, we set sail and
tacked upwind in quite a strong breeze to the island of Berghamn. The names of most of the islands of the
Finnish coast, along with most of the people living there, are Swedish. The 7 percent of the Finnish population who
are ethnically and linguistically Swedish are concentrated along the coastline
and on the offshore islands. We walked
around another pretty hiking trail taking photos, then returned to the boat for
a feast of smoked fish, washed down with a fine mojito, JP’s drink of
choice. We carried a large amount of
fresh mint for the entire week just for the purposes of making a good mojito.
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| Perfect mojitos every evening |
At 4 pm we roused ourselves and sailed on an
exhilarating run at nearly 7 knots with a howling tailwind.
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| Me at the helm with JP charting our course |
I took the helm under JP’s watchful gaze and
loved the feeling of steering such a big boat, trying to keep a steady course
through the rolling waves. All too soon
we tied up in the yacht harbour of Noto, where the village festival was
scheduled for the evening. We walked
around the tiny, pretty village and played a wonderful Finnish outdoor game
called Mollky, involving throwing wooden blocks around the grass trying to
knock down numbered blocks to get a required score. More mojitos and supper followed before we
headed off to the annual village festival, the reason we had come here. It was a fun evening of dancing, drinking,
listening to music and chatting with other yachties. There was a wedding earlier in the day and at
11 pm the wedding party arrived in force to inject energy into the
dancing. JP and Miia, keen salsa
dancers, lit up the dance floor with their moves. Around 1 in the morning we wandered back to
Blondi to catch some sleep.
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| Miia at the helm |
The next day, July 12th,
we got up late and had a lazy morning, not leaving the harbour until noon. We sailed a short distance to the island of
Bjorko to hike and swim in a large freshwater lake in the interior of the small
island. It had been a dismally cold and
grey summer up until that point in Finland, and the lake, like the Baltic, was
quite chilly, but we all got in and felt slightly cleaner as a result. When we got back to the boat, JP decided that
since we had sunshine and a favourable wind direction we should head southeast
to the island of Uto, the southernmost island in Finland. It was two and a half hours of beating,
tacking upwind in a strong wind and decent swell. Halfway there, sitting in the open cockpit at
the back of the boat while JP steered, I suddenly felt seasick and had to head
to my berth to lie down and sleep it off.
I re-emerged as JP steered us into the harbour of Uto, feeling much
better but having missed quite a pretty passage between the rocky islands.
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| The fine art of sailing sideways |
Sitting in Uto harbour we took
advantage of Finland’s absurdly fast 4G mobile phone data network to connect
JP’s computer to the internet and watch the last set of the Federer-Djokovic
final at Wimbledon. As Federer fans, we
were both disappointed in the outcome, but I found it amazing that we could
watch it so easily over the mobile phone network at the utmost extremity of the
country. We dined on a wonderful sausage
and blue cheese omelette that JP whipped up and then went for a stroll around
the island. Uto has always been a key
spot, controlling one of the few deepwater shipping channels through the
archipelago, and is adorned by a huge lighthouse, old military bunkers, a
cemetery for the generations of ship pilots who have lived and worked on Uto,
and lots and lots of wild strawberries that we picked and gobbled down by the
handful. Miia was happy that she found a
geocache near the cemetery that she had been unable to locate the previous
summer.
The next day we woke up to the
sound of someone wanting to leave his docking spot; since the harbour was
crowded, our boat was in the way, so JP rapidly moved it while I lay in my
berth in a slight daze wondering what the noise was all about. Bacon and eggs followed for breakfast before
Miia and I tackled a small mountain of dirty dishes.
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| Karlsby harbour, Kokar |
At 11:45 we set sail for a longer day of
sailing, crossing from the Finnish archipelago to the autonomous Aland
archipelago. As we sailed out of Uto,
through a maze of small islands, the wind died and we spent hours floundering
and becalmed, watching the Uto lighthouse not getting much smaller astern. Finally at 5:15 we gave up, turned on the
engine and motored for a while until we caught up to some wind to take us into
Karlsby harbour on the island of Kokar.
The harbour was small and very pretty and full of yachts. We put on running attire and went for a
50-minute run halfway across the island.
After four days on the boat, it was a relief to stretch the legs and get
some serious exercise. On our return we
took advantage of the harbour’s sauna (Finns build saunas absolutely
everywhere, as a basic human need) before taking our grill ashore and having
yet another great supper, watching the colourful perpetual twilight of a
Northern summer night.
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| More typical Aland scenery |
We took it fairly easy the next
morning, doing some much-needed laundry, showering and shaving and then renting
bicycles. It was clear and sunny and
perfect weather to explore the island.
We rode out to the island’s church and the ruins of its Franciscan
friary, then hiked out to the remains of a Bronze Age sealing camp from 1000
BC, when the island was an amazing 17 metres lower above the Baltic than it is
now.
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| Kokar church |
We next rode out to an apple
orchard where we had a lovely fish lunch, bought apple ciders and ate an Aland
pancake. The pancake wasn’t what I was
expecting; it more of a savoury Spanish omelette than a pancake, but it was
very tasty. The bicycles we had rented
were upright one-speeds, but they were fine for such a flat island. The roads were full of groups of cycle
tourists; by combining cycling and ferry rides, the entire Aland archipelago
can be explored by bicycle, and it is probably the most popular cycling tour in
all of Finland. Back at the boat we did
dishes, had a shower and finally left at 5 pm.
We sailed west, then north along the west coast of Kokar and finally
northwest towards a deserted anchorage near Huso which JP had spotted on his
chart. I took the helm again for a while
so that JP could cook, an impressive feat in the rolling boat. We ate a delicious pasta with tuna and
tomatoes, then sailed into the little cove.
All went well until it was time for either Miia or me to jump ashore to
tie up the boat. Miia didn’t like the
look of the drop onto the steep rock of the shore, so I volunteered to
jump. I landed perfectly, but the rock
had slippery moss on it and I lost my footing and slid down into the
Baltic. I swam around to the stern and I
thought that no damage had been done until I realized that my binoculars were
around my neck. Despite valiant attempts
to dry them out, that was the end of those binoculars as optical
instruments! JP found an adjacent landing
spot and Miia successfully tied us up while I changed into dry clothes.
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| JP: the fearless skipper |
My Baltic swim aside, the island
was beautiful: completely uninhabited,
with a dense forest and the droppings of moose who swim from island to island
in search of grazing. We went for a walk
around searching for berries; no blueberries showed up, but there were lots of
tiny strawberries instead. It was an
unbelievably peaceful spot to spend the night, with barely a ripple on the
sheltered water and the cries of terns and gulls the only sounds as I fell
asleep.
Our next day, July 15th,
was perhaps the best day of sailing of the entire trip. We woke up at the fashionably late hour of 10
am, breakfasted and then sailed through a succession of dramatic narrow passages between
islands before beating upwind to the town of Degerby. The Alands are far more populated than the
Finnish archipelago, and Degerby was the biggest town I had seen since we left
the mainland. I debated hopping off the
sailboat there and catching a ferry to Marienhamn, the capital of the Alands,
but JP convinced me to stay aboard until we sailed to Marienhamn. I was very glad that I listened to him, as
our late afternoon cruise
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| The Aland flag |
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| OK; we're not really heeling over that much! |
out of Degerby was perfect. We had sat out a heavy rainstorm while eating lunch on the boat, but the sky cleared and we sailed under sunny skies and good winds, beating upwind at over 6 knots. I got to take the helm again and loved the feeling of being in control of such a complex machine. Soon enough we were motoring into a perfect cliff-lined anchorage surrounded by a landscape straight out of a Tom Thompson painting.
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| Salsaing up a storm on the granite boulders |
The next day, July 16th,
was my last day on Blondi. We had savoury
crepes with smoked fish for breakfast, then lazed around reading, doing dishes
and watching JP swim in the chilly Baltic.
He had been disappointed with the weather for the trip, as the previous
year in early July it had been 30 degrees and he and his friends had sailed in
swimsuits for a week, swimming in the Baltic every day. I hadn’t swum yet once in the Baltic, aside
from my involuntary dunking the day before, and I hadn’t even been tempted,
given the air and sea temperatures.
Eventually, around 2:30, we lifted anchor and sailed towards
Mariehamn. It took three hours, most of
it in strong winds that had us scudding along at between 6 and 7 knots.
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| Another memorable meal |
I had my last turn at the helm as we raced up
the long sound leading to the capital. Just
as we arrived, a massive rainstorm hit, and we sat indoors, waiting for the
squall to blow over. While JP and Miia
went for a run, I took my bicycle out from under the tarp on the foredeck where
it had been lashed for the past week and put it together out on the quay. By the time JP and Miia came back, I was
ready to roll. I felt sad saying goodbye
after such a great week together, but it was time to start cycling. We discussed meeting up in Lappland in a
week’s time, as they were planning to go fishing up in another family cottage
in the far north and I was headed in that direction too. One last round of hugs and I was off, riding
through the big, bad city in search of a ferry to Stockholm.
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| The last evening at our perfect anchorage |
The Aland islands are a legal
oddity. They’re ethnically Swedish, but
were once the westernmost bit of the Russian empire. When Finland became independent of Russia
after World War One, Finland got the islands, and the first case ever decided
by the International Court of Justice was between Finland and Sweden over which
country could have sovereignty over the archipelago. Finland won the case, but Aland was granted
extensive autonomy, with its own customs, post office and license plates. The Aland flag with its red cross
superimposed over a Swedish yellow-cross-on-blue background flutters proudly on
many flagpoles. The Aland produced a lot
of emigrants over the years (including the grandfather of my American friend
Cris Lindquist), along with plenty of sailors and quite a few wealthy shipping
magnates. Their turn-of-the-century
mansions still line the main street in Marienhamn.
I waited until the wee small
hours to catch a Stockholm-bound ferry at 4:30 am. I was pretty bleary-eyed when I tumbled off
the ferry and rode to the train station to see what the scoop was on taking a
train north to Swedish Lappland. The
scoop was simple: no dice. Swedish trains don’t accept bicycles unless
you have a folding bike, which seems like a very retrograde policy for a
progressive country like Sweden. I
checked out the possibility of taking a bus north, but that wasn’t a whole lot
better, plus there were no tickets to be had for days. I decided to buy a ferry ticket back to
Helsinki (the first one available was for the following afternoon) and then
headed off to explore a few sights in town.
I loved the National History Museum for its great prehistoric section,
featuring stories of a number of bodies found over the years, and for its Gold
Room, full of wonderful gold crowns and coins and reliquaries. I also stopped in at the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences to look around the Nobel Prize Museum.
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| The Royal Swedish Academy |
It’s small but very
well done, with lots of video information and a video installation of a number
of laureates talking about what is important in life and learning. The old neighbourhood outside the Academy,
Gamla Stan, is Baroque and charming and full of tourists and street
musicians. I had a truly bizarre
conversation with a middle-class Iranian tourist. Was it true, he asked, that if you emigrated
to Canada, the government would give you a farm for free and a hunting and
fishing area for yourself, again for free?
I assured him that this was definitely not the case, but I wondered
whether similar tall tales fuel the current wave of migration, filling people’s
heads with pretty unrealistic ideas of how wonderful life will be in the
West. I noticed that there were
noticeably more non-European migrants on the streets in Stockholm than I had
seen in Finland; Sweden is, along with Germany, the preferred nation of many of
this summer’s surge of migrants.
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| A Nobel Prize winner with whom I went to grad school |
I was already suffering from
price tag shock (Sweden is far more expensive than Finland), so I decided to
ride 12 km to a big campground on the outskirts of the city. It was an interesting ride, through a gritty
hipster area and then through endless low-rise apartment blocks out to a pretty
lake. I put up my tent, cooked up some
pasta and then slept for 11 hours, making up for the previous night’s lack of
shut-eye. I woke up to rain which
persisted all morning, so I stayed in the tent and read. I also checked out some Norwegian road maps
which I had purchased the previous day; I needed to figure out how far into
Norway I was likely to ride, so that I could choose a departure airport.
The rain finished around 1:30 and
I packed up the tent and retraced my tracks back to the ferry dock. I rode onto the massive ferry, parked my
bike, brought my sleeping mat and sleeping bag on board and installed myself in
the ship’s huge nightclub to get some free wifi. I bought a ticket for the all-you-can-eat
dinner buffet and stuffed myself silly on great food, before having a beer at
the pub where a drunk Swedish motorcyclist gave me 700 Swedish crowns (about 70
euros!) for my trip since “it’s better that you use it for your trip than that
I buy even more beer!” I found a
somewhat quiet spot in a hallway to sleep (the cabins were booked solid) and
tried to sleep, interrupted by late revellers and early risers. Another all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast and
I was back in Helsinki. In my
bleary-eyed state, I managed to lose the 700 crowns that the biker had given
me; he should have bought more beer for himself after all!
My priority in Helsinki was to
get a train ticket, so I rode straight to the train station and bought a ticket
for myself and my bike to Rovaniemi for 6 pm that day. Finnish trains give cyclists no hassle, as
they have a separate luggage carriage with space for lots of bicycles in
it. I had a few hours to spend in
Helsinki, so I headed to the national museum (good, although a bit drier and
less engaging than the Swedish museum) and then went round to the two big
churches (one Orthodox, one Lutheran) that dominate the downtown skyline. Both were closed to visitors, but I got some
good pictures and got to listen to a bell-ringing group giving a free concert
outside the Orthodox cathedral.
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| Lutheran cathedral in Helsinki |
It was
cold and windy and grey, threatening rain, so I decided to go back to the
history museum to warm up and use their free wi-fi. I could have gone to the station, but I
thought it was a dodgy place to leave my bike.
This was ironic, as when I emerged from the museum at 5:30, I found that
someone had stolen the big backpack that I keep strapped across the back of the
bike, over the panniers. That meant I no
longer had a tent, sleeping bag or sleeping mat, which was a drawback if I was
going to camp up in Lappland. I was
really angry and saddened by the theft, and went off to report it to the cops,
only to find the police station closed on a Sunday night. I rode off to the train station and headed 14 hours north to
Rovaniemi (Santa Claus' official hometown) with my bike to start the cycling section of my trip.
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| Orthodox cathedral, Helsinki |
Overall, the sailing and ferries
part of my Nordic trip was fantastic.
The scenery in the Finnish archipelago and in the Alands is wonderful,
very elemental and boreal. I can’t thank
JP and Miia enough for their amazing hospitality and for showing me such a
remote and hard-to-get-to part of Finland.
I think that the Baltic islands and Lappland are the parts of Finland
that are most distinctive and are most worthwhile visiting for a Canadian tourist. I liked what I saw of Stockholm, although I
was bummed that the Swedish train company’s policies prevented me from
exploring more of the country. And while
I was saddened by the theft in Helsinki, I am pleasantly surprised by how
infrequently this sort of thing has happened to me during the years that I have
spent on the road with my bicycle. I’m
not sure when I’ll be back in Finland or Sweden, but I enjoyed my time there
(much more than I enjoyed, say, Papua New Guinea!!)
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| Lots of twilit evenings like this |
