Terve kaikille! After to weeks of successful procrastination an unknown higher power made me to sit and finally write something, what I’ve already forgotten. As you may know, I lost all my photos from this trip as well, so I must say an enormous THANK YOU to Zuzka for her pictures and all the photos in this post are from her (except of the corrupted ones). It seems like years ago, before this passive stage our overly active Czech friend Zuzana (it’s not an insult but compliment, thanks for taking us with you, ZiZi) asked us (me & Jani) to come with her, her mom and Píďa to Koli – national park north from Joensuu.
So after never-ending fight with our laziness we agreed and started to plan the trip. Well, I did nothing, Jani looked for accommodation, Zuz for a ride and I was studying Finnish (still very enthusiastically that time). Everything went just fine, we got Ford Focus from Hertz, arranged meeting with cottage owner to pay and pick up the keys, but then I came in to mess it up. Found different cottage/appartment, told everybody that we’re gonna stay there, they couldn’t do anything but agree, so we went to infocentre in Joensuu to book it.
Very nice lady gave us instructions how to find a place and we were good to go. We took off on Friday evening, made our last stop in Lidl to buy some Karhus (Finnish beer) and had a nice, safe journey to Koli village. Just two buildings – tourist centre and shop, luckily, no way to get lost. Got our keys from some kind of outdoor key vault with 4-digit code and cotinued to our final destination. With keys we got a map with highlighted route to the cottage. We’ve been affraid of not finding it in the dark , but we got there with no problem, thank to our driver and co-driver – Zuz & Jani, respectively.
We unpacked, turned the sauna on (after an hour turned out that it wasn’t on, I didn’t know which potentiometer was for heating power and which for time delay, I just set everything on maximum = 8 hours delay until it starts heating). Fortunately Jani put everything to order. Our czech visitors brought many balms for our hearts like schnitzels, czech bread, czech meat paste and czech bier. It was delicious! Me & Jani grilled some chicken drumsticks, Zuzka took the guitar and we played for a (long) while. We fell asleep, looking forward for tomorrow.
I don’t really remember when we woke up, actually, hardly remember anything cause I’m writing this more than month later. Basically we hopped into the car and drove to the Luontokeskus “nature center” somewhere in the middle of the park. A thing that surprised me was free parking (in Slovakia you’d have to pay at least 5 EUR) and from the parking lot we climbed few stairs going along exactly the same cableway/train/accordion vehicle as they have in Jasná. In luontokeskus we took some leaflets, bought nothing and went straight for adventure. Almost from every place in Koli you could see the Pielinen lake, especially from huge flat rocks. Just browse these photos, no comment needed :).
After hiking we felt to bed dead, maybe we played guitar and talked before…don’t really remember, too tired…
The plan for today: another national park. It was about 80 km from Koli, we found the shortest way for recently discovered rally driver tallent and her co-driver. The whole “race” it was raining and I really felt like sitting in rally car with Hulmi Houkolen. We were cutting curves, drifting on gravel and dodging approaching cars like pro racers. But we all believed in Zuzana and finally we got to our destination – Patvinsuo.
During a thick rain we entered to a small infocentre in the middle of park. On the first sight one could tell that this is much less “mainstream” park than Koli. We were the only foreign tourists here and nobody spoke English. So I tried to use my really poor Finnish on a nice lady in charge. After not so short time and with help of all body parts we learnt where to go, what to see. The coolest thing in here was Vanha Kalasauna (an old fish-smoking hut). When we heard the word “sauna”, there was nothing more to say, we took off there right away. As we found out later, it was just a small dark hut with no working sauna, not even any fish there.
So we headed back and spontaneously asked for an accomodation. This was too quick for me but after 15 minutes we were sitting upstairs in a very nice cottage, drinking tea made on gas hobs, drying our socks using fire flaring in oldschool oven. After a short rest we decided to go out again (still raining like hell) and go for a walk to some bird-wathching tower. So we went into the apocalypse outside to enjoy our last moments alive. This park was totally different from Koli. No mountaing, just flat landscape made of one large mire (swamp). You could move just on narrow wooden rotting paths, if you stepped somewhere else, you would be slowly swallowed by swamp, eaten by local birds and used as fertilizer for all the berries. Fortunately, nobody was dumb/clumsy enough to step in. Managed to rescue some of my photos from here so you can look forward to lots of panoramas again…enjoy :).
Today’plan: third national park, why not if we’re here already. So we got up, packed and left the place very early because we had to bring back the car at 4 pm. First we headed to small town/village Ilomantsi, a place full of traditional Finnish architecture. We had a nice coffee or tea & pulla in traditional Finnish kahvila with traditional Finnish staff and traditional Finnish regulars. Just sitting & sipping there, no noise, chat, anything. Again, we were the only tourists in town, so we didn’t have to wait long queues and fighting our way through the crowd and the kahvila lady was so glad that at least somebody came.
Then we went to an orthodox church that was closed, took a picture that I deleted later and went ot Petkeljärvi, national park 20 km from here just rock-throwing distance from Russian borders. This one was the smallest, but way more better than the one yesterday. No rain, no swamps, beautiful autumn colors, minor hurricane, but mainly plenty of huge addictive berries (mustikka, puolukka). Didn’t have enough time to enjoy all the beauties of the park and eat all berries there, because we were running out of time and had to bring back the car. No problem with our racedriver ;).
ficblog 