It’s nice cycling when you have tail wind. Especially if the temperature is 10-15 degrees: you realise it just when you stop, otherwise it’s like no wind at all.
The day started visiting Bugøynes, or Pykeijä in the local Finnish dialect. I was thinking to go there three years ago, but a worrying upcoming thunderstorm made me stop 20 km before the village, actually in the same place where I slept last night. Perfect location, just beside the sea and with a small creek where to take water. And blueberries, lots of them (see picture below).
Pykeijä is some kind of special place also for Finnish: during the last famine in Finland in the 1860s (not so long ago after all), the first people started to populate this nice corner of the fjord. A very remote place, the road to get here was opened just some 50 year ago. Before that you could easily reach it only by boat. Actually also nowadays: just think that the next bigger village of Vadsø (on the other side of the Varanger fjord) is about 100 km by car and 10 km by boat. You get the picture, I guess.
The other particularity of the village is that it’s one of the few not being burnt down during the withdrawal of Nazi soldiers in 1944. It’s remote location and no real roads to get there helped a lot, if you consider that all the other places I’m going through have been all rebuilt after WWII.
The journey continued to Tana Bru: although the weather was cloudy it didn’t rain, and a wonderful tail wind (rare, very rare treasure when you bike!), made me reach it much earlier than expected, so that I could do another 30 km and put the tent just beside the beautiful lake called Suohpajávri.
Day 02 – Bugøynes/Pykeijä – Tana Bru – Suohpajávri lake
Cycling distance: 134 km
Cycling time: 7 h 30 min
Very interesting area – we’ve missed it this year, but we’re planning to extend one of the tours of the “3 Laplands” to cover that area next year. Your post motivated us to do so, without doubt