Here I am again, mom, ready to tell more about our trip to north!
During our trip I learned to say "Good day!" in two languages, finnish and sámi. You should be very proud of your little doggie, mom!
Here I write the expressions:
In finnish: Hyvää päivää!
In sámi: Buorre beaivi!
So we drowe towards north.
The trees were getting smaller - shorter and narrower, and the weather was getting cooler, the sun was high on the sky troughout the night and the amount of the mosquitoes multiplied.
We stopped in a village called Tankavaara to see a small museum about the life of the men who came here to search gold from the rivers.
This is a small turf hut the sámi people were making high up in the fjells when they stayed there some days catching salmon or making the annual reindeer counting.
here we are driwing a small steam engine in the museum village.
After Tankavaara we drowe to Inari, where we went hiking into Pielpajärvi wildernes area.
The wildernes area was a wonderful mixture of swamps and pine forest and small streams and mosquitoes.
Henna told us that this amount of mosquitoes is nothing!
When it is the real peak time of them there can be so much of them around you that it is hard to see through the cloud they form around you. The cloud is called "räkkä".
This is the northernmost proper pine forest in Finland. From this area upwards the pines become rarer, the spruces disappear totally, and the main tree species is a fjell birch, which grow only maybe 1,5 meter tall. Then high in the fjells even the birches disappear. It is too cold.
It was a nice walk. Rendolph especially was exited all the time, speaking about "returning to the homeland of his foreparents" and running here and there investigating everything.
We found this nice place to have fire and wanted to spend the rest of the night there.
Henna was a bit doubtful at first - "And how can I be sure I´ll still find you anywhere near if I shut my eyes even for a wink?"
We all told her in a choir we will sleep like good toys near the fire, but I saw Zoe and Veronica crossing their wingtips behind their backs.
Anyway, we lit the fire and had some tea and then we went to bed, but sometime at night Zoe woke me up and asked if I would like to go with her and Veronica to collect some herbs we would need next evening to make some midsummernight spells. Of course I wanted!
Henna was snoring slightly and didn´t notice anything!
So we wandered trough the forest and swamps and collected each of us twelve different flowers, and then we sneaked back to bed.
Next morning we walked some more kilometers and saw Pielpajärvi wildernes church - a church in middle of forest, no ways leading there, the only way to get there being the same way trough the forest we had hiked, or rowing along the rivers and lakes.
I´ll go to bed now and go on again tomorrow with this.
Kisses from Torsten!