Day 30 – at Rovaniemi

A cloudless cool morning good for the van’s health as well as mine, in that it can store up some solar energy.

The weather the area has been having has meant many mosquitoes already have died off, according to a German hiker I was talking to in the campground last night.

To celebrate my 61st birthday I put the laundry in first thing after feeding Roja. All being well it will be another 30 days before I need to do it again. After some reading I took a wander around town. If you can look past the Christmas tourism, which is big for the town all year round, but especially in winter of course, Rovaniemi looks like a really good place to live.

It has that outdoor sport vibe of Queenstown, Banff, Boulder, and the likes, though isn’t so well known. All around town are gentle forested hills covered in bike, ski and hiking trails. The town is where two big rivers meet, the Kemijoki and the Ousnajoki, to become the former, and head south a hundred kilometres or so to the Gulf. They give the town its identity, as pretty much everything is within a stone’s throw.

The average winter temperature here is -10C, and it’s not rare for it to be down to -30C. Certainly for 4 months it will barely get above zero.

I started by hiking out to the centre of the outdoor activity, Santasport and the Lapin Arena. It is a complex based around a hotel, which offers activity holidays, but the facilities are used regularly by locals, and are at an affordable price. It was built in 1985, so was just a couple of years old when I was last here. I seem to remember the few of us at the campsite visited, and used the sauna.

I then went into town and took a coffee at what looked like the only open cafe. Summer is over here pretty much. The numbers staying at the campground were low, and the various self catering and hotel facilities are emptying out. It will be the ‘quiet’ season, until the snow arrives.

Town has several, probably about ten, tacky looking nightclub / Irish bars, aimed at the 20s age group. I guess they try to create some sort of boozy after-ski type atmosphere, but it doesn’t fit in with the healthy sports image. I would have thought the majority of visitors would be older, and suit a more laid back social scene. But what do I know..

Late in the afternoon I took a sauna at Santasport. Things are expensive here, but a sauna isn’t, at 3 euros.. Any Swedish I spoke to on the subject stressed how much hotter the Finnish saunas were. That was certainly the case here.

There’s a good park up just a kilometre or so up the hill from the sports complex. Quite a few people exercise late, IPAs it’s still light until 10 pm, but after that all is completely quiet, just the hoof fall of the odd moose passing..