Day 10 – Tour de Finlande 2010: Ivalo – Kaamanen

Now I know: the world starts from Ivalo. Or at least the scenery changes drastically. Today it was the most touristic day so far, and the entire road from Ivalo to Inari was a spectacle of blue lakes and sky, with a wonderful shining sun in the background. And warm it was, with temperatures reaching 23 degrees it was the first day since the beginning of the tour that I had to take off the long johns and show to the world my wonderful skinny calves made completely red not by sun tan, but by mosquito bites, hyi!

Ok, getting back to the journey: I left Ivalo around 10:30 and Laura suggested to stop and see the Karhunpesäkivi, the Bear's den stone. It is actually a huge rock from the last ice age, which has been carved inside by the ice itself, making it extraordinary beautiful.

It's so big that the legend tells a tired hunter went there to sleep and in the morning he woke up and realised that a bear was sleeping there as well. I'll put a picture of it later on when I get a better internet connection (I'm once again in the woods tonight). By the way, the cafeteria on the road at the beginning of the bear hole route sells coffee and bun for 1.50 euro and poronkäristys (sautéed reindeer) for 6. A real bargain!

After that I head to Inari. The road started to be hillier, but this beautiful day with almost no wind made it very easy. I had to stop many times just because there were so many spots for pictures. Inari in itself is a very small village, and the first one on my route with an important number of Saami inhabitants. It has a beautiful wooden church (where I happened to hear also some organ training) and the SIIDA, a huge museum of Saami culture, with also an open-air museum composed by many wooden houses resembling a typical Saami village of the beginning of the last century. It's worth visiting, even because they have also guided tour, and being there with a bunch of Americans, I just had to follow them from a reasonable distance 🙂

As the day was very good, I then followed the route towards the north, reaching the crossroad to Utsjoki and Karigasniemi. The road follows the Kaamasjoki river, which is surrounded by a nice forest, so I decided to stop at a kiosk, buy a beer (well, a dry cider, as they had only 1-litre cans of beer) to salute the midsummer, and find a nice spot to put up my tent.

Here the amount of mosquitoes is unbelievable: the more to north, the bigger is the price of blood you have to pay. Fortunately today I found (at the Bear's den stone) a nice hat with an "embedded" mosquito net, and finally I decided to buy some mosquito repellent. However that was enough for them not to bite me, but not to avoid eating them: really, they were so many flying around my face, that all the time I was raising a spoon of pasta towards my mouth, I had to blow to get them off the air in between… and by blowing sometimes they went straight towards the spoon. Well, wasn't life in the wilderness what I was looking for?

Joka tapauksessa: hauskaa juhannusta kaikille!!!

Day 10 – Tour de Finlande: Ivalo – Kaamanen

Trip distance: 86 km
Actual trip time: 4 h 50 m

 

View Larger Map