The End Is Nigh

Last you’d heard, we’d done a lot of skiing. My favourite Jack Dee joke has echoed through my mind a lot this week, where he takes the piss out of the Winter Olympics (“Just a selection of various forms of sliding”) saying how absurd it is that people can get so over-excited about a range of activities that you could do just as well if you were dead. But, while I concede that my skillset during the reindeer and husky safaris was pretty much limited to laughing and taking photographs, the skiing element has definitely required some effort.

After our successful three hour foray into downhill skiing on Thursday, Grania and I went back to Levi on Friday for a full day’s extravaganza, once again breezing through the absurdly efficient rental shop and lift pass purchasing process in a matter of minutes, a level of organisation that alone would justify the decision to ski in Finland, even without the non-existent lift queues, empty pistes, sparkling lavatorial facilities and breathtaking scenery. Once again, I found the new design of modern skis absolutely faultless, cruising down black runs without incident where previously I would have caught an edge or lost my balance on an icy patch and come bone-riskingly unstuck. I was going slightly faster than ‘stationary’ when I fell for the second time, losing my balance on an entirely flat stretch of off-piste snow between two runs, when I’d been pushing myself along with my poles. I had been moving marginally faster than an unstressed walrus, and coincidentally resembled one when I fell, as once again I found myself entirely unable to stand up unassisted. Pathetic.

Lunch was a delicious pizza in a piste-side restaurant, accompanied by two extortionate glasses of omnipresent Jacob’s Creek Semillon Chardonnay, the only wine available. Grania had the local speciality beverage which appears to be hot ribena with rum, which I’m sure is delicious if you like hot ribena and/or rum. (I do not.) As our plates were being cleared, I said thank you to our waiter, who answered with a phrase not dissimilar to ‘No worries.’ His accent was not Finnish. “You sound like you’re from East London!” I remarked. Turned out I was about twenty miles out, as he revealed he was from Rochester, in Kent. So over-excited were we to meet a chatty fellow English native that Grania and I went into giddy obsessive mode, peppering him with questions. He was, it emerged, 25 years old, and a fully trained electrician, but preferred life as a traveller - he works in Greece during the summer. He proudly told us that he is the only UK national working as a waiter in Levi, with his salary paid by a Finnish company, and that he has, he hopes, “paved the way” for other people to do the same. Having had my Jacob’s Creek, I was afflicted by what Grania affectionately calls my Tourette’s, and told him he had ‘player hair’ and that he looked like a heartbreaker. He said his hair only looks over-coiffed because his younger brother is training to be a hairdresser, and because everyone else in Finland has such terrible styles. I have to agree on that point: if Mrs Sassoon wants to help her husband avoid a stress-related heart attack, they should steer clear of the Arctic Circle.

Following our meal, we had a fantastic and too-short two hours on the piste in the afternoon before we had to rush back to meet our team for the taxi back to base. With a seven minute window pre-car, we decided to scamper to the shops across the road as fast as our Moons would carry us, on the hunt for some of the amazing reindeer fur boots we’d seen sported by the locals on the farm the day before. Sadly, the nearest we found were a pair of incredible grey boots that I loved until I found out that they were a) 350 Euros and b) made of seal skin. Later we discovered that they have now been banned by the EU, which perhaps would explain why the shop assistant had been so keen for me to buy them.

On returning to the hotel, we headed off for our daily sauna (with the first syllable rhyming with cow) and freezing cold plunge pool regime. While the other women in our ten person team haven’t seemed especially desperate to become bosom buddies with us while we are wearing clothes, the moment we hang up our dressing gowns and join them, starkers, on the pine benches in the 84 degrees Fahrenheit heat, they can’t get enough of gossiping with us. Maybe our British clothes gave off an unfriendly vibe. Personally I can’t think of many scarier sights than a naked me, half-baked in a Finnish sauna, but I’m glad I seemed approachable.

Since several of our group were leaving on Saturday morning, Friday night was our farewell meal, where we were presented with a huge wooden platter featuring smoked salmon, herrings in a dill and mustard dressing, another misc. fish (delicious), an incredible mushroom salad, potato balls and every conceivable type of reindeer: smoked, unsmoked, liver and some sort of pate. That was the starter. Then we had reindeer stew on mash with redcurrants, then delicious selected red berries and cream for dessert. It was freaking delicious. The food has been excellent all week – low, perhaps, on plate appeal, but extremely tasty, hearty, pleasingly fattening and educational. The highlight of the meal, however, was when our guide, Pascal, presented us with our Official Reindeer Driving License, valid (bafflingly) for five years. I shall treasure it always.

While the other guests retired (sensibly) to their rooms, Grania and I ordered our second bottle of wine and wandered through to Pilot’s Pub, which is conveniently the hotel bar and also the only bar in our village, hence jam-packed with excellent locals doing Finnish karaoke. Grania, who is always nicer to strangers than I, was inexplicably welcoming to two older gentlemen who were loitering in our area; they have since been referred to as ‘the man with no neck’ and ‘the man who kept touching my face’, which should give you some idea as to their desirability. My abiding memory of this portion of Friday, however, was when Grania seemed unable to stop begging me to do karaoke, and – my intelligent, clear and highly rational arguments clearly getting me nowhere – I resorted to making an exasperated growl of unmanageable frustration, which came out sounding somewhere between a snarl and a scream. Then I went to bed. We laughed a lot the next morning when she conceded that singing Dancing Queen to a room full of Finns would probably not have been as funny as she’d envisaged.

And then it was Saturday. Ten centimeters of snow had fallen overnight, making the countryside appear even more flawless. With most of our group homeward bound, there were just five of us who set off on a day trip – Pascal, the two of us, and the wonderful Geert and Trudi from the Netherlands, who were in their sixties and cool as ice, happily nattering to us throughout the week about topics such as Botox and hair highlights. They had met through a Catholic church group when they were in their late teens, and dated for two years before they decided to get married. Geert would come over to see Trudi, and at 9.30pm every night, Trudi’s dad would stamp on his bedroom floor to tell the young people in the kitchen below that their time was up. Forty years later, they were in Lapland to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Refreshingly, however, Trudi smilingly told us that she’d dumped Geert twice before she agreed to marry him, saying that she was worried that he was “too serious”. Clearly first impressions aren’t always to be trusted. They were a fantastic couple.

Our outing had been suggested by Pascal – strictly speaking it was his day off, but he’d found a Sami festival about 150km further north and we’d begged him to take us with him. The five of us bundled into his car and set off for a ten hour round trip that at one point took us about 50 meters from the border with Sweden to the west, and, later on, about 50 kilometers from the border with Norway to the north. Our first major stop was a town called Hetta, where we went to the market and ate delicious sausages out of paper, before bundling back in the car and going down the road to the festival. In a trip full of once-in-a-lifetime sights, this was one of the most extraordinary, a true snapshot of local Finnish life. The Samis are the indigenous people of Finland. Some of them wear the beautiful traditional costumes of heavily embroidered blue and red felt, ornate fur bonnets and the aforementioned reindeer boots, while others wear waterproof ski gear and heavy duty snow shoes, or a combination of the two. The mixture of old and new pleased me greatly. The four day festival was culminating on Sunday with the finals of many events, including lassoing and husky races, but on Saturday afternoon, we witnessed the heats of the young competitors’ solo reindeer races. These involved girls and boys aged around 13 wearing tight shiny lycra suits, helmets and cross country skis, being pulled around a long track on the stunningly beautiful and seemingly endless frozen lake where we were all standing, by a single reindeer, who was enticed to run faster by a rope threaded through his legs that was snapped against his testicles by the plucky racers. The animals shot out of the stalls like nuclear warheads, and the brave kids were jerked along behind in their tracks at terrifying speeds. It was fantastic. About two hundred racer reindeer were lying around in a pen nearby, waiting patiently for their turn and occasionally getting into fights. Other than that, not much was going on. It was exceptionally peaceful and seemingly timeless; an immense privilege to be there. We watched several heats before reluctantly returning to Pascal’s car, enticed only by his promise of a ‘really big souvenir shop’. But first, a stop at his favourite petrol station, clearly a Sami community hub, where we ate the world’s most delicious omelettes while Pascal had his cherished reindeer kebab, and I nearly bought a stuffed squirrel before Geert told me it was illegal to take taxidermy into another country. Then back into the car and a detour up a tiny white road, moving further north to the point where the altitude changes to the extent that the omnipresent pine trees can no longer grow. There was only birch here, and the landscape was totally different – eerie, still and stunning. We walked down onto another vast lake as the sun was setting, and were reminded of the salt beds in Arizona and Utah – I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever seen such massive flatness as that created by the frozen whiteness. It was humbling and awesome.

We got lost on the way home and took a frozen track for several kilometers, uneven and full of humps as only the main roads are covered in asphalt. The only major incident was a near-miss with an errant reindeer, who ran into our path and then pounded along in front of the car like a stupid sheep, before finally darting into the woods. After dinner, Grania and I donned our snowsuits for one final attempt to see the Northern Lights, but they were sadly unforthcoming, despite our best efforts to entice them with slightly inebriated singing of musical numbers including I Know Him So Well, My Favourite Things, I’m Getting Married In The Morning and Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat. Still can’t believe that didn’t work. Then we tried to do cartwheels and yoga positions in our snow gear, before waving goodbye to the star-crammed sky and heading back to the hotel. Although I was sad not to see the NLs a third time, there was something about a failed attempt that made me realise how lucky we’d been with our other two sightings. One more day left before our Sunday evening flight. I will be extremely sad to leave.