Kestilä, Finland, 8 July 2008, 12:30, 64 deg 22' N, 26 deg 18' E
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(In case the last letter of the place name, Kest..., doesn't display correctly on your mail reader, it's an a-umlaut. There are lots of them in Finnish place names, as the following report will verify).

Report 5, by the way, was the one entitled "Latest Photos". It turned into a report when it was intended to be just a pointer to some photos.

That's right, I'm not yet at the Arctic Circle, and I promised to send the next report from N of the Arctic Circle. But the last 36 hours have been so fantastic, that I just had to "break radio silence" and report.

I have been in Finland some 8 days now and, up until late afternoon last Friday, I had been able to make progress north on minor roads without much difficulty or without having to make many detours. Then, from Jyväskylä, the only natural choice was to follow the E75. I did this during Saturday and Sunday, getting to Pyhäjärvi. The cycling was reasonably safe, there being a good strip of tarmac on the right to cycle on, and the weekend traffic was really not that heavy, but oh! the noise of the vehicles really gets to you and tires you out.

So yesterday, I decided to do extra kilometers and take extra time to pick quiet roads, and what a fantastic experience it has been. From Pyhäjärvi, I first went east about 10 km on Route 27 and then went cross-country on unclassified dirt roads for 27 km to cut a corner and eventually join Route 599 to Pyhäntä, where I spent last night. To be honest, it wasn't that remote going cross-country. It was a mix of forest and farmland, but the challenge of the map reading and the peace and quiet of the scenery made it exhilerating. There were no big wild animals to see, just lots of birds (fieldfares, lapwings and snipe (I must verify that with Werner at some point)) but one had the impression that an elk could be lurking round every corner. I saw 2 elk on the E63 last Friday, by the way.

The scenery is changing slowly. The strawberry season has been left behind, the forest is getting more threadbare and the wildflowers, which were dominated by lupins up until a couple of days ago, then became dominated by a very pale mauve variety of cranesbill. Today, even they seem to have given up and there is now the threadbare forest with silver reindeer moss and bilberry plants between the ever shorter trees.

I'm afraid that the libraries, which give one excellent Internet access in Finland, at least during working hours, quite understandably don't generally allow you to plug in cameras or memory sticks to their pc's, so there are no more photos at present.

Now the next report really will be north of the Arctic Circle, but it looks as though I'm going to have to survive at least one night of camping wild before then. There's a stretch of dirt road coming up which is too long to do in a day and with no campsites or hotels on it. We'll see. Last night I had to resort to a hotel for the first time in Finland as the campsite, which was shown on my map, had closed down in the meantime. I managed to survive that, so maybe I'll survive the wild camping too!

Best wishes,

David