Short Winter Trip To Finland (December 13-14) - Archive

Destination: near Ruokolahti

Total distance: ~85 км

Highlights: building a door out of discarded wood boards and fir branches, making tea from snow, bean explosion, joghurt warmer, mini-sauna experiments, 3 falls, 3 discovreed laavu.

As there was no snow in the middle of December in Saint-Petersburg, we decided to get some new experience and go for a short winter trip to Finland, spending the night in laavu (a special place for travellers, which often has a simple wooden shed and a place for a barbeque, but sometimes there are cool huts with some useful stuff like pans).

We started in Svetogorsk around 11. This day was supposed to have the most snow, and yeah, there were lots of it as you can see. At first we planned to be a bigger group, but due to some visa problems/ unexpected food poisonings and other reasons there were only two of us left.

First we wanted to reach this laavu: Soininmäen kota

... but it soon became clear that this was an unrealistic goal because of the amount of snow: bike lanes were covered and haven't been cleared from it yet as it was pretty early in the day.

We figured that we would be able to reach only 3 nearby laavus which we wanted to check out, and would have to choose one of them for overnight shelter.

First one was 25 kilometers from the start: Oritlammen kuntopolku

It's a very nice cozy laavu located in a good spot (you can see it on the very first picture in the post). It has a stove inside and even a pan and a pot. An unexpected bonus - electricity (there are a couple of sockets). Someone even put up some lights. There is a toilet too.

I should mention that there is a "designer" floor inside, which is made out of round pieces of wood: very convinient for tripping, as they are just thrown on the floor and not attached in any way. But it is still a great laavu.

Second one was a bit further, several kilometers away. 

Even though I took some show covers and rubber gloves, they were no help: my feet and hands got wet pretty fast (shoe covers were destroyed by spikes on pedals, and I guess I remembered to put rubber gloves on my regular gloves too late - they were already wet).

When we got to the second laavu it was alrady dark. It didn't look very cozy, but offered us a great opportunity to gain a new skill: building doors! (which was very exciting: we thought about Dual Survival and Bear Grylls, and it seemed like Robert Peary was telling us "That's it, guys").

Near this laavu there was a very nice Finnish house

So we decided to go check out the third laavu before settling for the night. It was again several kilometers away. Part of the way we had to just walk: there was to much snow for bikes. Pushing bikes through snow revealed some never-before-used muscles in my upper body which I felt days after we were back.

This one was Aholammen laavu, and it was a basic 3-wall laavu which didn't meet our needs at that point, so we went back to the second one.

So we built our door and dried our feet and clothes near fire. We were lucky to have some wood inside the hut, which was useful for a hot dinner and surviving the night. I brought some canned beans, which I put in the fire to warm up, but I haven't realised that the built-in opener made its top much weaker, so there was a bit of an explosion shortly after the beans got warm. Some of the beans still stayed in the can which was very good as I needed some comfort food to balance the falls and soaked hands and feet.

My travel buddy fell asleep quite fast but I had a messed-up sleep schedule at that time and so I haven't slept most of the night.

I made lots and lots of tea from melted snow, and it wasn't bad at all.

Charged my phone: finally I tested my portable charger (I got a 10000 mAh). Altogether it lasted for my Lumia's (2000 mAh) 3.5 charges and iPhone's (I think it was 1560 mAh) 2.5 charges. Not bad.

I also made a warmer out of joghurt bottle (not as Bear Grylls recommended - with urine (not to waste the precious stuff), but with hot melted snow), which my travel buddy appreciated a lot. It didn't quite work for me though: couldn't get through my 4 pairs of socks)

Laavu looking much cozier with a door

Then I experimented with some really weird stuff like making a mini-sauna from hot bricks. As expected, it didn't help room temperature. Even though the hut was small, steam from the bricks wasn't enough to fight holes in walls.

Anyway, by morning we were a lot happier (just from having survived the night), it wasn't snowing and the roads were cleared, so we biked 35 kilometers back to Svetogorsk very quickly.

All in all, nice trip. Even my 3 falls (tires didn't do very well in snow) haven't changed the mood a bit.

I want to try to stay in a tent in winter some time now: I've read that snow can serve as a good isolation and it seems that it might be even warmer than that holey hut.