The first of Two Hiking Trips, this one in Finland

Copenhagen-Oslo-Stockholm-Tampere-Helsinki-Ankara-Cappadocia

Trying to relate my travels in a chronological manner will have to wait—I’m finding it difficult to do, and some stories keep leaping out at me begging to be told before their predecessors. So I’ll give in, and give you my trip in bits and pieces. Rest assured, however, that all parts have been pleasant, some have been fantastic, and none have found me begging to go home. Today I give you one story, about a hiking trip in Finland, and tomorrow I’ll give you another, about a hiking trip of an altogether different sort, this time in Turkey.

The next installment of photos has been uploaded as well; they can be found at the same place as the others, in my Scandinavia and Turkey photoset on Flickr.

Hell Hole

In Tampere, Finland, I stayed with Jamie Ann and Jukka Mäkinen and their three children (Ismo, Leo, and Nora; who are 17, 13, and 13, respectively) along with Mary (also 13) a family friend of theirs also visiting from the US. By far the most rambunctious (and yet, in many ways, the most relaxing) of my destinations so far, I loved every minute there. Jamie is a good friend of my aunt Kristi Rose, and I knew that I was going to have a good time when she sent me this email a few days before I left Boston:

By the way, it will be light all the time while you’re here. If you have trouble sleeping you might want to bring an eye-mask; you know, like Eva Gabor used in Green Acres, surrounded by ostrich feathers? Just a thought.

Anyone who spices their practical travel tips with allusions to Eva Gabor in Green Acres is right up my alley.

The weekend I visited the Mäkinens was the Midsummer Festival, which is celebrated all over Scandinavia. The Finns, true to form, are slightly different from the rest, and rather than just calling it Midsummer, like the other countries of Scandinavia, they call it Juhannus, after the feast day of St. John the Baptist. I saw no evidence of the saint during my time there, however; Juhannus, it seems, is the time when Finns drop everything and go to their summer houses, or, as Jamie put it, “It’s the BIG holiday when Finns go to the countryside to get drunk, as opposed to May Day when they get drunk in the town center.” As such, Tampere was basically closed all weekend, which meant that my options were “limited” to hanging out at the Mäkinen home, sweating with Mäkinens at the sauna, hiking with Mäkinens in the woods, watching movies with Mäkinens, and looking through Mäkinen family photos. In case you can’t tell, I was thrilled—after spending days and days visiting museum after museum, I had so much fun just being with these cool people, relaxing, and remembering that it’s summer for Pete’s sake.

I arrived on Saturday, and by Sunday, the twins and Mary were dying with boredom. They were in that special state of childhood misery that comes from having played every game, swum in every body of water, biked every trail, and basically done every thing within a reasonable radius (i.e., close enough for Mom to find you) from your house, and still having free time. Wisely, Jamie piled them (and me) all into her car (the doors of which I continually closed too strongly, causing everyone in the car to say, in chorus, “It’s not a Cadillac!”) and set off for the lake the Finns endearingly call Helvetinkolu, or “Hell Hole.” It’s my theory that whoever named the place did so to keep it all to himself—it’s a beautiful, clear lake at the bottom of a ravine that’s full of birch trees and the sweetest smelling air I’ve found in a long time. The kids (or, rather, as Mary pointedly noted several times, teenagers) bounded ahead of Jamie and me when we left the car at the head of the trail, leaving the two of us to follow behind them, talking the whole way (despite the fact that the last time I saw Jamie before this trip my age could be counted on one hand, I immediately felt upon my arrival in Tampere that I could tell her anything). The trail ended at a lookout at the top of the ravine from where you could see the lake below and the seemingly endless birch and pine forest beyond. The Finns have a close relationship with the outdoors, and on a beautiful day like that, one can certainly see why. The sky seems taller in Finland, and the colors of the forest were striking against it; the green leaves popped out of its rich blue, and the birch trees’ trunks were as white as the clouds. Later, when I saw Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s paintings of the Finnish epic the Kalevala both in Tampere and in Helsinki, I could understand why he used pigments that seemed exaggeratedly bright: in Finland (in the summer at least) that’s the way things look all the time.

We ate our lunch on the cliff at the lookout, and Nora, Leo, and Mary yelled their names into the ravine to hear them come echoing back to them. From there we clambered down over rocks to the lake itself, changed into swimsuits, and Jamie and I got into the water immediately, floating and treading water as the three kids paused on the dock, suddenly unsure of themselves. “Is it cold?” they asked. No, we assured them, it was quite warm, warmer than the lake after the sauna the day before. “Is it slimy?” No, it wasn’t—the water was so clear that I could see all of myself below the surface. “Is it deep?” Well, yes, in parts, but there are rocks near the dock that you can stand on if you want. After ages of coaxing, one by one we convinced them to come into the water, and quickly they discovered that it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t slimy, and it wasn’t too deep. Leo yelled and did flips off the dock into the water, the two girls swam around and laughed, and the whole group was generally loud enough to earn disapproving stares from the group of buttoned-up Finns who were having a cookout lunch at the fire circle near the dock (”I know that look,” said Jamie. “That’s the ‘can’t you Americans keep your children quiet’ look”).

When we’d had enough of swimming, we dried off, got dressed again, and climbed back up to the lookout for one last view of the lake before heading home. When we reached the head of the trail again, we stopped at the snack kiosk (a word, incidentally, from Finnish). The shop owners, though not good at math (the woman behind the counter took ages to calculate how much we owed, despite our getting three of one thing and two of another—not a great variety), were good at product placement, and had put out the not-very-creatively named “Toy Pops” (a toy and a large lollipop, packaged together) on a table in front of everything else, in the hopes that they would stop kids in their tracks. In our case, they succeeded, and the three teenagers walked away with three lollipops, two plastic barrette and earring sets (Nora and Leo), and one monster truck (Mary). As we re-entered the highway, joining the throngs of Finns returning to Tampere from their summer homes, Leo stuck his barrettes in his hair and his earrings on his ears, much to the delight of his sister and Mary, who, having borrowed my camera, took lots of photos of their mutual silliness. Sun-tired and happy, we went back to the city, and back to our weekend of non-commercial, non-museum, just right activity.