Common Sense and Whiskey

Midsummer Train

Rainbow by the lake at midsummer, and Rovaniemi in midwinter.

Having family and a little cabin on the lake in Finland, I check in most mornings on the latest Finnish radio news in English, from Finnish broadcaster YLE.

Here's something fun: There's a story about a special train that will travel almost all the way across the country this summer, Helsinki to Rovaniemi, starting on the eve of the midsummer holiday. Way up north there, it won't get dark the whole time. And they'll broadcast it live.

"The first programme of its kind, the 13-hour live show has sparked interest in Germany, Norway and France, which will also air the marathon train ride through Finland's nightless night."

And it'll be carried live on the YLE site.

The Hurtigruten ships that ply coastal Norway did a five day live TV thing last midsummer, and Google Maps offers a video that will take you 9220 kilometers from Moscow to Vladivostok, but that, too, takes several days. A live streaming internet trip across Finland will feature all the same birch trees as the Trans-Siberian, and it'll be considerably shorter.

There's still a way to go to get to midsummer, though. The forecast for Rovaniemi right now?

Winter in Finland - 6

 

My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. Here's the last in a series.

And so we’ve come to Saariselkä, Finnish Lapland, and we see that it’s possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more work, bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. There’s no idle standing around out there.

But there are even a few advantages. Dragging your groceries behind you over the ice on a little plastic sled called a pulkka is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means to walk with tiny steps, like you do to keep your balance on the icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, all the transport is in big, heavy, late model SUVs. There isn’t the choice of goods you might like, but we have that problem in our little town of 600 in Appalachia, too.

Once I would have thought “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but now we have a friend who does just that. And much to my surprise, a completely full 757 flew us back down to Helsinki (and a full Airbus flew us up) and they were doing three planes from Saariselkä to Helsinki the day we flew back.

In fact, the local folk of Finnish Lapland are entirely swallowed up by the tourist onslaught they’ve created. There are 13,500 hotel, lodge, igloo and rental apartment beds around Saariselkä. And the goal is 4.5 times the number of visitors by 2020.

Kuukkeli was the only grocery in walking distance. It’s part of a chain, and a bit of a dry goods and souvenir store, too. You could buy the usual Finnish dark breads and sausages and ready to eat heat-and-serve paistos, casseroles made of beets or mushrooms or potatoes and ham. And tins of moose, bear, elk and reindeer.

A word of advice: Just capitulate on the reindeer thing. Do not try to resist.

Winter in Finland - 5

 My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. We continue our series.

 Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Ärade kund,
Vängligeninte sätta eld på spisen.
Der är ur function och skall röka in I huset.

Now wait a minute! We might need the fireplace. It’s LAPLAND and it’s -16C outside.

But the nice lady explained that they only manage these little apartments, they don’t own them, and fixing the fireplace involves a capital expenditure. That will require a meeting to authorize funds, and we’ll be gone by then.

Well, everything turned out just fine. The apartment was mightily insulated with a double door entryway and a great heater and sauna.

And I had fun with the translations. I took “Ärade kund” as a plea in Swedish to be kind and understanding, and in the Finnish, Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa, I imagined they’d decided to confide to the natives that stupid Ethan had messed up the damned fireplace again.

Big Displays Up North

The big blast from the sun on Thursday, known scientifically as a coronal mass ejection, may bring some excitement for skywatchers today and tomorrow. Having stalked the aurora last month in Lapland, I can testify that it's a thrilling, thrilling moment when you spot the beginning of a display.

Just on the off chance that you can't travel to the far north tonight, here are a couple of web resources: AuroraMAX, from the Canadian Space Agency, has a live, 180 degree view of the sky over Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. And I learned something in Lapland - use Spaceweather.com. Here's its aurora gallery for this month.

Evidence There Will Be Spring

Under the title, Goodbye darkness - sun rises at Utsjoki, the broadcaster YLE writes, "Polar night is drawing to a close in the Finnish far north. The sun rose above the horizon in Utsjoki for about an hour on Tuesday, from 11:57am to 12:47pm." Utsjoki is Finland's northernmost town, up on the Norwegian border about 60 kilometers from the Arctic Sea.

Here's what the midday twilight looked like when we visited Lapland last month:

 

Lapland Photography

We're back on the farm and I've had a chance to put up a few Lapland photos on EarthPhotos.com. Here are a half dozen for your perusal.

Click them to make them bigger. See all we've posted so far in the Lapland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. These will all ultimately live in the Finland Gallery.

Welcome South Carolina Radio Listeners

Welcome to fans of Walter Edgar's Journal on South Carolina ETV Radio. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. Dr. Edgar is a gracious host and a fine human being.

As he and I discussed, we've just returned this week from above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. I haven't had time to get many photos up to EarthPhotos.com yet, but there are a few in the new Lapland Gallery, and I'll get more up over the next week or so.

I invite your travel questions to bill (at) earthphotos.com.

 

Photography - Housekeeping

Beginning a new Lapland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Not much there yet, but it'll grow over a couple of weeks, and after it's complete I'll put copies of the Lapland photos into the Finland Gallery, too.

Lapland - Wednesday HDR

HDR from six combined exposures shot last week with a Nikon D700. It's an old building atop the Kaunispää Fell, between Ivalo and Saariselkä, Finland. We'll have a few dozen shots up in the Finland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com shortly.

68.6 Degrees North Latitude, Here We Come

We're starting the long trip north this afternoon with a drive south to Hartsfield Jackson Airport. We'll be at our little cabin in Finland for a few days before heading further north. Photos and reports to come. Happy Holidays to all.

Lapland Weather Watch

Two weeks - fourteen days - until our arrival in the far north of Finland, and the weather for the next nine of them is forecast as, at best, mostly cloudy. Snow is forecast most every day. We need clear skies for a shot at seeing the Aurora Borealis. Good news is the forecast has it getting colder closer to our arrival. Colder = a better chance of clearing.

Click for a live webcam at the Ivalo Hotel, in Ivalo, Finland, the airport nearest our destination. Yep, snow. And dark.

And here's a video the Finnish Tourist Board says has been viewed over a million times in the last two weeks:

Adventure Travel Book Recommendation

Not a review, because I've just begun this book, but here's a recommendation. Looks like this bookmay be fun. In preparation for a trip up above the Arctic Circle later this month, we're doing our diligence. There's not a great body of work on Lapland to be found. (The polar regions are better covered. Sara Wheeler has two books, Terra Incognito about the Antarctic and her newer, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, which came out earlier this year to middling reviews.) There's also a chapter on Greenland in my book.

The Northern Lights is a nearly ten year old book (I'm reading the Kindle version). The author, Lucy Jago, opens with an 1899 scientific expedition into the Arctic Circle led by a Norwegian scientist named Kristian Olaf Birkeland. It's written in that breathless, play-by-play, you-were-there style, and it's really convincing. Can't say more at this point, until I've read a bit further, but right off the bat it conveys two key salient points about our upcoming adventure. Lapland in winter is dark. And cold. Here's how cold, at the moment.

Seeking to Photograph the Aurora

A month from today we'll arrive inside the Arctic Circle, in Finnish Lapland.

Maps suggest our chosen village of Saariselka is a little more than 200 kilometers from the Arctic Sea at the Norwegian coast and maybe about 300 k from Murmansk, Russia.

The little village calls itself the northernmost ski resort in the world, but in Lapland, beware the use of the term "ski resort," at least in the sense of Alpine or Rockies destinations. Lapland is a land of much more gentle topography, and it appears the highest point around Saariselka is Kaunispaa hill, at 437 meters.

We'll be up that way just days after the winter solstice to experience the Arctic night (At 67.333 degrees north latitude, Saariselka sits about a degree above the Arctic Circle) and to try to photograph the aurora borealis, so I've been doing my diligence, and to tell the truth, I can't find much in the way of aurora tutorials that tell much beyond the obvious: Dress warmly, use a tripod, try longer exposures, watch your histogram, bring extra batteries.

We'll have much more in a month or so.

Here are a few pertinent photography sites:

On Luminous Landscape

From Niebrugge Images

From Gadling

And here's an the aurora forecaster.

Northern Lights

 The TV just told me that right now in Yellowknife, Canada, it's 40 below fahrenheit. Weather.com backs 'em up:

A while back, we posted resources for planning specialty travel that included travel to see the northern lights, including this neat aurora forecaster, which shows as I write that for aurora viewing, Yellowknife would be a great place to be right now. Check out, too, this informative Guide to Seeing the Northern Lights on GeckoGoneBlogging.

Coincidentally, the Wandering Aramean has just been in Yellowknife in the last week or so and has several posts, some including pictures, and this one including pictures of the northern lights. His succinct review: "Downtown Yellowknife does not have a lot to recommend it."

Iceland Volcanism

All this Icelandic volcanism has prompted me to go find a photo I took on a trip to Iceland in 1991.

First, a digression: I'm positive it was 1991 because, as sometimes seems to happen, our plans were changed a little bit by world events. We spent a good deal of our time in Iceland watching the U.S. ("This will not stand") invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I, which began with an aerial bombardment on 17 January 1991.

O.J. Simpson interrupted an afternoon of our Vancouver, B.C. vacation with his slow speed chase on 17 June, 1994. Hafez Assad grabbed a little of our time in Hanoi on 10 June, 2000, as we watched reports of his death. And on 9/11 we found ourselves about to board a long train from Buryatia, Russia, for Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Sure enough, first thing on our first (and maybe only) of three days in Mongolia, we canceled everything, ordered up food and watched CNN all day.

Meanwhile, back in 1991 in Iceland, I'm not sure why, but rather than staying in downtown Reykjavik, we chose the Hotel Loftleidir, smack on the runway for Reykjavik's small domestic airport. This photo from the room shows what I mean by smack on the runway. You can see a small plane right in the center of the photo:

So, why not - we chartered a very small Cessna for a flight over to Heimaey, the only populated island in the Westman (Vestmannaeyjar) archipelago off southern Iceland, and en route we were thrilled to witness this actual, honest-to-goodness awesome (in the real sense of the word) volcanic activity:

(Photos from the Iceland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. There are more showing geothermal activity, and a few aerial shots from over Reykjavik there, too.)

From the Eventual Book: Greenland

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Previous entries: Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay and Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today we're in Disko Bay, Greenland.

    You know those gauzy coffee commercials where cozy people savor their morning brew, steam rising in circles from the cup? In the midst of one of those, we were cradling our cups in our hands in Silva’s kitchen when, with a great low rumble, an iceberg broke apart just offshore from Ataa camp, Greenland.

    Boulders of ice plunged into waves around the berg, now off balance, as it rocked side to side in slow motion. Silva stoked the commotion, cursing and scurrying for his video camera (he did this more than once). He was sure someday he’d be in National Geographic.

*****

    Silva ran the Ataa Holiday Camp. The tourist service down the coast in Ilullisat cheerfully recommended it, because Silva was a Man Of Some Repute in Ilullisat.

    He was in year eighteen in Greenland, first as an itinerant musician from Denmark, invited up here to play hotels for a month, then three, then a year and one thing led to the next. Now he ran Travel Nature Touring Company and he was having a go at redeveloping the abandoned trading post at Ataa into a tourist camp.

    In 1915 Ataa boasted 59 residents, 58 Inuit and the station chief, the only Dane. They lived in six houses and three tents, with a school, the manager’s house, a workshop and a storehouse for seal blubber.

    Seal hunting kept Ataa alive, and that year they collected 137 barrels of seal blubber, 42 barrels of shark liver, five blue and eleven white fox skins, 70 seal skins, eight and a quarter kilos of tusks and four and a half kilos of eider down.

    Nobody lives here full time now. The nearest settlement today is at a place called Qertaq, thirty kilometers away. Ataa camp sits at the base of ancient, rounded low hills under 1000 meters, Precambrian gneisses finally exposed only 7000 or 8000 years ago, when the ice cap most recently melted away. Ataa means “its lower part” - the base of the hills.

    Mirja and I got there by speedboat. A Quicksilver 3000 Classic bounced us across choppy water, under a lowering gray, 70 kilometers from Ilullisat to Ataa. Its pilot, Jergen, with his broad, expansive head, buzz cut and ready smile, was Greenland Man.

    The wind kicked up. We spied the spray of a finback whale, spun around and saw him dive, and in the spinning spotted a seal.

    Jergen pounded the Quicksilver’s butt into the tiny harbor at Ataa, where Silva bobbed aboard a zodiac, perched uncertainly and growling. He wore the only clothes we ever saw him in, Nikes and a running suit.

Would You Sleep in a Truck with 18 Others to Get Photos of Polar Bears?

Okay, not exactly a truck truck. A tundra buggy.

The other day we were on about how spending days in close quarters with the same people - like on a cruise - can get to be just the least bit stifling. Now here are some truly close quarters: Much as I would dearly love the chance to photograph polar bears on Hudson Bay in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, I'm not so sure about spending several days with 37 others in the Tundra Buggy Lodge. 

From the web site: "The lodge consists of five large, modular units on huge tires, linked together like a train with a large-scale interior. The five units consist of two sleeping modules (complete with shared bathrooms and shower facilities), a lounge, kitchen and dining unit and a module which houses supplies and the camp's power station."

Maybe. I'm just not sure.

Here's a couple of screen grabs from a video on YouTube, which you can watch here.

   

Fabulous Destinations When Money Doesn't Matter #8

We're not much for cruises. There are good, practical reasons like this, but also because after four or five days of lockdown with strangers, it just seems like time to move on.

It's not the cruise itself - I began to feel the same way after a few days in Zermatt one winter. Same folks, same single main street, same couple of restaurants. Just a little stifling.

But here's one cruise that just might work - fifteen days aboard the icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, for a trip to the north pole. Might work except for one teeny detail - money really has to be no object, because the price tag is, um, well, a little robust.

Here's another cruise that doesn't have the cachet of the North Pole, but which cruises around above the Arctic Circle. And hey, it's a bargain, starting at a mere $10,000 per person.

(Photo from the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

On Arctic Travel

"Suppose you do fall in. By the time you reach the surface, the hole you fell into may have frozen over already. If you can punch through ice with lungs full of 35° water, maybe you deserve to live, but then you’re soaking wet in subzero temperatures, and you will spend your last few conscious minutes too delirious with hypothermia to be thankful that your next of kin will have something to bury."

A happy thought from a long article on northern travel called Is Your Workplace as Rough as The Arctic?

 

(Photo of a fisherman on Disko Bay, Greenland from the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

The Far North. Really, Really Far.

We're tentatively planning a trip to Svalbard in August. Because of that, in the course of due diligence, we're learning about all things Arctic (best book to read so far, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic by Alun Anderson, which has a chapter on the author's trip to Svalbard).

Today's FT tells us that Russia plans "to sail a large oil tanker the entire length of its Arctic sea coast for the first time, opening a strategic energy trading bridge between European Russia and the far east," suggesting "that the Arctic could emerge as another area in which China starts defining global strategic interests, following its increasing investments in Africa and its moves to build a presence in the Indian Ocean."

*****

Svalbard, over which Norway has sovereignty, is the farthest north one can buy a passenger ticket (three hours north from Oslo), just 800 miles from the North Pole. As Alun Anderson points out in his book, as a result of the Svalbard Treaty of 1820, though Norway has sovereignty, all other treaty signatories have the right to fish, hunt, trap, set up mines and commercials enterprises, and acquire mineral rights. 

Maybe we'll just stay and sell cheeseburgers.

(Photo of icebergs in Disko Bay, Greenland, from the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)