Reindeer burgers

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What we thought was a fairly simple request turned out to be much more difficult. In the end we did get our Rudolph burgers but they were far from tasty.

We have spent the last 10 days in Finland, and as it turned out a bit more of Norway too. After taking the infamous duty free ferry from Stockholm to Finland we picked up a hire car and headed north. I have always wanted to go to the Arctic, so thats where we went.

Stopping by Santa's house on the Arctic cirle in Lapland I put in my order for a Chamonix ski trip for christmas. Santa turned out to be very non-committal telling me that I could wish and have a day off anyway. So sorry Tanya, Thomas and Crampton, Santa was not really in the mood for taking orders this far out from Christmas.

I had expected the Arctic to be lots of tundra, however it turned out to be an endless forest, so we continued north. On the way north we passed hundreds of reindeer (they really are just everywhere), busy towns much to my surprise, a moose, a few foxes, even some dolphins in the fjords before hitting the end of the road...literally. We ended up driving all the way to the most northerly point of the European Continent called Nordkapp in Norway, which is 750km above the Arctic circle.

When we arrived there, there was an A$40 charge to stand on the lookout at the end of the road, so as one does we did a u-turn and went back. It was no great loss though as the real most northern point is 9km back down the road and you have to walk there.

I did get my Arctic tundra, however it turns out that it is only really true tundra for the last 50km before you hit the coast. The landscape up there is an amazing combination of cliffs, fjords, snow, reindeer and rock. Really cool.

From Nordkapp we took what we thought was an ordinary car ferry across the fjord to another point which claims to be the most northerly point of mainland Europe (Nordkapp is on an island). The ferry turned out to be a cruise ship, so as we sat in the spa cruising though the Arctic sucking on Stellas, we had to pinch ourselves to remember we came up here for the nature.

While we were in the area we thought we would go check out the Russian border with Norway which although wasn't all that spectacular was kind of cool.

So 3,800km later we made it back to Helsinki for a bit of familiarity. At "Aussie Bar" we got just that, complete with Aussie bogans trying to be Tom Cruise and Brian Brown behind the bar. As you can guess there were broken glasses all over the shop as they weren't very good.

So after a month in Scandanavia our bank accounts have finally persuaded us to head for Eastern Europe. We are currently in Tallin, Estonia. Being ones for culture, we headed to a UEFA Cup early round game between Tallin and a Norwegian team yesterday. Good fun but not a lot of support from the locals. Tallin is great, a beautiful old town, cheap meals and best of all cheap beer.

From here the road takes us south.

Cheers
Christian

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