Ivalo to Enontekiö

Our time in Ivalo has come to an end and we are starting to go to bed to get ready for our trip tomorrow.

The skies are clearing and the temperatures are plunging in the next few hours, its around -8 now and will be -20 by the time we get to Enontekiö. A fierce wind has been here today and yesterday evening; bringing the temperature down to around -13 so if its windy tomorrow it will feel very very cold.

We trekked into the forest last night to see how far we could get and went around 2 miles in total, very difficult with full camera gear and 4 foot snow drifts, obviously the other guys were not carrying gear and still struggled!

Today we filmed and went onto a frozen river, the Ivalo river to see what it was like. But all in all its been a pretty easy day, exploring the local town with all 4 shops and generally running around in the cold. Steve and Anton built a snow cave and realised that in the 10 minutes getting hot and taking their gear off within 2 minutes of stopping they were freezing again.

So far the diet has been Fish and bread as its all that really exists thats any good. You can have cooked food but it is all convenience food such as burgers, pizza or chips. They don’t really sell any Finnish food in this part. Probably, as all the people you meet are generally tourists for the northern lights, do not have any cold weather gear and stay inside all day until the tour. So here for 1 or 2 days then go – the guys we have met haven’t seen it due to heavy cloud cover – but its clear for the next few days!

They must think we are mad being outside all day. It seems that we are by far the most outgoing and loud in the whole town, leaving people cursing the British no doubt. (Anton gets bundled with us). It does strike me as very odd that they do not go outside to enjoy the environment.

A long trip in the car tomorrow then to enjoy a very remote part of Finland where, safe to say, we will no doubt be the only tourists.