If you ever drive on a Russian road, you will never complain about pot holes again! We drove to the border station in Kuusamo on normal roads, went through the Finnish side on a normal road and into Russia. Fari got put in a small interview/interrogation room with a drunk Russian for two hours and we had our passports and visa's checked three times, drove through the passport station on a normal road, had another passport check and then this...
OK, so this wasn't the road into Russia, I got this from the web. The road into Russia from the border station was much worse!! I couldn't get a pic cos the van was shaking and bouncing around so much. No pics of the border, I'm not sure if pictures are allowed but we were advised to keep our cameras in our bag's. After about 20 minutes we had driven past the watch towers and away from the camera's (if you think I'm joking about that think again) thinking we were finally on our way and there was another bloody passport check. No bother though, just a quick stop and we set off on a three hour drive on the mental road to the Paanajärvi visitor centre in some village.
I don't know if it was Paanajärvi village or not? all the sign's were in
Russian. All I know is that everyone drives a Lada and there were some
lush mullet's about.
At the visitor centre to get our passes to get in the national park
Another 60km drive to the park rangers cabin where we could leave the vans and trailer safe and our hike began. We didn't actually stay in the national park because it is forbidden to light an open fire inside the park and because we use open shelters we need to light a fire in the opening to help keep us warm, cook our food and dry our wet clothes.
This was the only time we hiked on a road and it was just because it was getting late and we needed to get out of the park quick to set up camp for the night. Every day of the trip two students were assigned as the daily guides. The guides were in charge of getting everyone up and packed on time in the morning, checking that the campsite was left as we found it, planning our route for the day including rest stops and lunch by water sources, the following nights campsite and getting us there safely, carrying the first aid kits, satellite phones, gps and 20m of rope.
Our first daily guides had a bit of trouble following a road and couldn't find
the intended campsite. Luckily they found a small stream crossing the
road that we could use as a water source so we headed into the forest a
little to set up camp.
This was my camp for the first night, as you can see it was a little cold during the night and we had some light snow, it was no problem in my new sleeping bag though so I didn't need a fire and I cooked breakfast in my Jetboil (a gas powered stove I found at a flea market for 15€).
The daily guide pairs were also food pairs for the trip. My pair was Seishi and we were supposed to camp near each other, set up a fire and cook together. As it was pretty much dark when we found this campsite, I thought sod that and just banged my shelter up as soon as i found some flat ground. I did go and find Seishi when I was done and we got our fire going, I cooked up my first pasta meal and as soon as I had finished eating it started hammering down with rain or sleet so I charged back to my shelter and jumped in my sleeping bag.
The next morning our daily guides got us up, we had a quick briefing about the day and headed off into the wild to try and find out exactly where we were. The daily guides had each a detailed map of the area they would be guiding in, but everyone had topographic maps of the whole area so we could keep track ourselves of where we were and where we were heading. We were supposed to stay on top of this and not just follow behind relying on our guides to get us to our destinations, the trip was basically a big orienteering exercise.
Our guides brought us to this lake, by taking a bearing of the direction of the lake and knowing which direction we had come from the road the night before we were able to identify the lake on our maps so we knew where we were. We took a short water break, watched an eagle flying over the hills on the left and carried on. This turned out to be an unexpectedly long day.
Just a quick note about the water. We drank the water straight out of the lakes and streams. 80% of the water in this area flows from Finland. There is no human interference, by that I mean that there are no towns, villages or anything between here and Finland. The water has a clear run, filtering though the soil, rocks, moss and whatever else and it is crystal clear.
The next part will be coming shortly. Laters
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