Goodbye Harriniva, goodbye - 30 degree temperatures

It's my last day here and I went out for a walk this morning in the -30 degree air.  It was nicely refreshing.  My eyelashes were covered in ice in minutes; the eyebrows took a little bit longer.  But I felt comfortably warm the whole way.  I think I'm getting used to it.

Yesterday we had a free day.  I decided to give cross country skiing a try - and so did everyone else in the group so it was quite nice to have company along the way.  We had no guide and no instructions, but we'd googled and found an youtube video the night before so we were experts.  I had to ask how to put the skis on....  After one person fell over in the driveway, we decided to walk to the beginning of the track.  It's a nice 3.2km track (4.6km if you count the bit that we walked) and we were soon skiing along nicely.  I only fell over once, and that was when I was trying to walk my skis around another group of people.  It was a very pleasant way to spend the morning.  One half of the group did an hours extension, but I knew I had snowshoeing planned for later and needed to conserve my energy.

That evening we had a taste of Finnish foods menu.  Everything was delicious.  The starter was a selection of fish dishes (smoked salmon with lightly horseradished cream, lightly salted white fish (salmon), smoke fish and herring in a mustard sauce) cold smoked reindeer (the best reindeer I tasted all week), warm smoked reindeer liver with a mushroom, onion and some kind of cream salad, and Lappish potatoes (boiled with parsley).  For me, the starter was the highlight of the meal.  The main was grilled char (another type of salmon) on vegetables with butter sauce and roasted potatoes, and dessert was a cloudberry compote with ice-cream and cream. 

So I was nicely stuffed for my evening snowshoeing activity.  We headed out at about 9pm in -25 degree temperatures and we struggled to find a snowshoe with bindings long enough to deal with my humongous boots.  We headed south along the river and it was pretty easy going.  Then, while the fire was getting started, we went bush.  Following no trail we wended our way through trees and tree stumps.  I had imagined that the snowshoes would sit nicely on top of the snow and I'd feel as dainty as a fairy.  In reality, me feet sunk up to the knees in the snow - sometimes further - with just about every step.  Tough going.  We went down a small ditch and I fell in - the first of three times.  Instructions for getting up when you have fallen over in the snow wearing snowshoes:

1) stop laughing (this can take quite some time)
2) roll around in the snow for a bit (it's good for your skin) ending up face down
3) get to your knees (this is easier if a fellow snowshoe novice allows you to put your hands on his snowshoe)
4) if you can manage to get up from here more power to you, but most likely you will need someone either side of you hauling you up.  I managed to get to my feet once by myself, but had help the other two times.

I had a bit of trouble with my snowshoes falling off several times, but it was a great adventure through the forest.  Conversation between the two guides:

guide A: should be go over that ditch?
guide B: it looks like a stream, it might be running water underneath
guide A: I'll test it [jumps in with both feet]

It was fine but there was no way through the trees on the other side so we walked down the ditch for a bit.  Somehow, I ended up leading the way - which is a b*tch because no-one has packed down the snow a little bit before you.  Unsurprisingly, this led to my second fall.

We had a nice break for lingon berry juice and biscuits beside the fire before we headed back following inland tracks.  I'm not entirely sure that our guides knew where we were going but we ended up back at the hotel about midnight.

The hotel had nicely arranged for me to be able to keep my room and my outside gear until I left at 4pm, so I walked to Sweden this morning.  Some of the group had done it the day before by following the river, but I decided it would be easier going on the road.  It was nice walking past houses and about a kilometre down the road there is a bridge.  The hotel is next to the river Muonio which is the border between Finland and Sweden.  There's a sign in the middle of the bridge which shows where the border.  So I walked across and walked back.  There's a customs building on the Finland side, but there didn't seem to be anyone about.

Then it was back to the hotel to have lunch, pack and end up here - at the Kittila airport waiting for my flight back to Helsinki.