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July 4: Rovaniemi, the Arctic Circle, and the Midnight Cloud

Our tour commenced in Helsinki airport, where I met up with Patrick and Gemma. The plan was to get standby tickets from there to Rovaniemi in northern Finland, and then work our way down to the south coast via the interesting bits. We had been hoping to see the midnight sun (in Rovaniemi¹, it rises on June 6 and sets on July 7), but the further north our flight got, the less likely became the prospect of any sun, midnight or otherwise. The last twenty minutes of the flight seemed to be through solid cloud. We landed around six, and were greeted by a cold, damp breeze and steady drizzle.

Rovaniemi airport was a novelty, at least to anyone whose conception of an airport is a vast, well-lit shopping mall with the odd plane parked outside. Here, the arrivals hall was a large, draughty tent by the airfield, where you waited until the baggage train rolled up and grabbed your bags before they got too wet. We took a taxibus south into town (crossing the arctic circle on the way) and made it to the campsite.

Finnish campsites, it turned out, are really great. Patrick, having invested £60 in a hardcore camping stove which would work in temperatures of -40C and burn anything from meths to codliver oil, was a little disappointed to find a full range of kitchen facilities.

This was my first chance to practice my Finnish. The only way to do this, of course, is not to let on you're English. Usually, if they know you're English, an attempt at Finnish is rewarded with a mock-impressed, slightly amused smile, as you might give a toddler who has just presented you with a particularly flamboyant finger painting. They then drop into flawless English, satisfied with your token attempt.

If you manage to conceal your Englishness, the result is something like playing tennis against a world champion. Your opening shot is volleyed back at native-speaker speed, and the rally continues for a few brief seconds until an overlong pause or a puzzled expression gives you away. At this point it's back to English again, of course. Often you get a little frown of puzzlement as to why you didn't speak English in the first place. Occasionally, on short conversations in loud places with simple subject matter (buying lunch, say) I managed to complete a rally without being found out. On a few sublime occasions I found myself dealing with a Finn who wasn't fluent in English, and was able to bask in the usefulness of my limited Finnish.

The rain stopped as soon as we got to the campsite and we put the tent up. Occasionally we would excitedly point out to each other a tiny patch of blue in the sky, but the sun showed no sign of coming out by midnight, or ever for that matter.

We walked into town to buy food. Rovaniemi is not an overly pretty city: like many northern towns it was razed to the ground by the retreating German army at the end of World War II, so there are no buildings older than about 50 years. But it's not actively ugly, and the scenery's lovely. We ate at the campsite (Patrick and Gemma taking a surprising liking to the Finnish delicacy of silli, or pickled herring) then went to walk the streets again. We found a bar in the city which brews its own beer -- a true rarity in Finland, where the standard beer range consists of about a dozen distressingly similar lagers.

At around half one we left the bar; it was no darker than when we arrived at the airport. As we walked home the sky began to clear with breathtaking speed, leaving just a smudge of cloud on the horizon. Eventually, around half two, the sun peeked through. Satisfied, we went to bed.

Footnotes

... Rovaniemi¹

or, as our pilot pronounced it, Rrrrrrrrovaniemi