After dinner yesterday, the few fishermen who had been present at our campsite had disappeared and we had the whole place to ourselves. We brewed a cup of tea and took it down to the lake’s edge and sat and watched the trees turn golden as the sun very slowly sank over the glassy water. A truly tranquil spot.
“Our” lake at about 10.30 pm.
We were late getting to bed, but I’d barely drifted off when I heard Sarah and the dogs moving about. It was 2.15 am and Sarah had been disturbed by both dogs suddenly becoming restless, which is unusual during the night. Thinking they may have smelt something interesting like an elk or a bear she got up. When she got outside she found the most amazing beginnings of a sunrise. So she came back to tell me to get my camera and get up. I do not disobey a direct order from my wife so up I got. We went down to the lakeside together to take photographs of one of the best sunrises we’ve ever seen.
2.15 am at “our” lake
An impressionistic shot of the sunrise for a certain you know who at the camera club!!
I was therefore somewhat surprised to be woken from my slumbers at 8.15 am (don’t judge – I’m retired I don’t have to get up at work o’clock) by Sarah dressed in walking boots and saying she was going to take the dogs on the 6km circular lake walk we had got lost on the day before. Thinking nothing of it I made a cup of tea and started planning what we might do later in the day. I was just on my second cup when I got a phone call from Sarah. She had had the bright idea to leave the waymarked path (remember yesterday?) in order to cut a corner on a small path, which was marked on the map but she had failed to find. She had taken a photo of the map with her on her iPhone but had realised the top section was missing. She thought she knew where she was but wanted to discuss her best course of action.
So I nipped out of Basil to the big noticeboard in the campsite with all the maps and we had a conversation about how to proceed. It turned out that she did know where she was, but what she didn’t realise was that after relocating the marked track she needed to go off the top of her map!! There be dragons!
Sarah and Melek returned at 11.30 looking exhausted, with Mabel trotting along, covered from head to toe in mud (she’d been in a bog), ready for the next 50 miles!
While Sarah was romping about in the woods I had been considering the day ahead. We are now booked in to watch bears (exiting) on 9th and 10th July and so we have five days to kill. Central Finland is not exactly full of cultural highlights and we’ve had a fair share of lakes and forests. However I came across a description on the internet of Finlands most beautiful waterfall. Nothing ventured nothing gained, and we had nothing better to do.
Thus when Sarah had recovered a bit we set off to find the Hepokongas Waterfall. The first twenty miles was on forest tracks. It is easy to see why the Finns produce so many good drivers and especially rally drivers. These forest tracks, with a loose layer of gravel, over a smooth hard mud surface, must make a perfect training ground. After my experiences today and in other parts of Europe I think I might set up the World Motorhome Rally Championship. I could change my name to Mikka or Ari and with Basil I think we would do very well in over four ton class, for big boned motorhomes.
Finland is the EU’s most sparsely populated country and the part of Finland we are now entering has the fewest people per square kilometre in Finland. So as we drove north, although the lupins were still thick on the ground, houses were few and far between. The two towns we drove through were tiny: just a cluster of a few dwellings and a petrol station cum shop. One excitement was that the signs warning of elk have now changed to reindeer. We’re not sure whether we can now relax about elk or if we have to keep an eye out for both elk and reindeer. In either event we saw neither.
We eventually arrived at the small car park, surprisingly in the middle of a forest, for the Hepokongas Waterfall. As usual everything is marvellously well organised by the Finnish authorities. Toilets in the car park and a wheelchair and pushchair friendly one kilometre track to the waterfall. At the waterfall there is, as usual, as free supply of wood and a hut in which to make a fire and cook food.
Hepongonglas Waterfall – alright as waterfalls go
The waterfall itself was nice as waterfalls go. About twenty metres high and plenty of water, but the problem is that Finland really hasn’t got any mountains and so any waterfalls, even Finland’s best, are not really going to stack up against the best Europe or even Britain has to offer. Still it provided a focus for the day and a pleasant free forest campsite for us for the night (64.822495, 27.877454).