Arriving in Lapland

13 Sep. 2006 Kiilopaa



I am not a morning person at all, but I managed to get up at 3am in the morning. Poor my friend, she had arrived in Finland less than 12 hours ago, but she also made it. We packed our stuff, took a cab to the airport, then flew out for Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland located on the arctic circle, with Blue1, at 39 Euro.


It was worth to get up early. We saw beautiful sunrise out of the window while flying.

We got to Rovaniemi city center by mini-shuttle, then headed for Kiilopaa, located at latitude 68 degree north, by bus. It is not really a town. There is a resort center called Fell Centre Kiilopaa, which is right by the Urho Kekkonen National Park. So, you can easily go on variety of trekking from very short ones to overnight hikes. We were going to try a couple of day hike for 2 days.

While having been waited for the bus to Kiilopaa, a Finnish lady spoke to us. She said she was going to Saariselka this time of every year to enjoy walking in autumn colors. You can see beautiful autumn colors in early September there, so many Finns seem to do the same thing. She was very friendly so we enjoyed talking all the way to Kiilopaa.
“Congratulations! Now you have the new prince!”, she goes.
New prince? Well, we didn’t know that.
“Oh, didn’t you? I have just heard on the news. I think I can find it in the paper too…”
She looked over the newspaper, and then found the news.
“Here it is. His name is Hisahito”
Oh thank you for the information. It was a bit funny that we were told our prince’s name from a Finnish lady.

Do Finns love to talk to strangers? Just like this, we were spoken to by many people in Finland, especially in Kiilopaa. They made our stay even more pleasant so we really had good time there.



The bus took us to right in front of the accommodation. There, you can stay at different types of accommodation including hotel, cabin, dormitory, and mountain hut. We stayed at the mountain hut.
When we checked in, the receptionist told us that;
“You are lucky people. Today we have smoke sauna at extra 8 Euro. Would you like to have it?”
Of course, we would love to!
They have a normal electric sauna, and just twice a week, they also offer traditional smoke sauna for the guests. Smoke sauna is heated by wooden fire in the stove made by rocks. So it takes several hours to heat, and also the smoke will go into the shack, so you will feel the smoky smell. Sounds tempting, isn’t it?



We had assumed that there wouldn’t be any shops where we could buy food, and the restaurant would be expensive, so we brought some groceries like pasta. But there was a casual cafeteria at the site. The menu looked good. Anyway, we had light lunch cooking the pasta we brought, then went on the hiking.