Day 7: Äkäslompolo

We didn't have any planned activities for today, so we decided to take the opportunity to explore the surroundings of Äkäslompolo in more detail. Instead of taking our usual route down to the frozen lake, we decided to try walking in the opposite direction, along one of the side roads which the coach had followed yesterday at the start of its journey to the husky farm.

We didn't have to walk far along the road before it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.

The peace and quiet was only destroyed by the occasional person driving a snowmobile, for which there was a separate track on the far side of the road. Luckily after we'd been walking for a while we came across a turning for a winter footpath, which was marked as being for pedestrians only.

We started following it through the woods. It was amazing to see some of the younger trees almost completely buried in the snow.

Although it is still quite cloudy today, the clouds weren't quite as low as they have been for the past few days, so we had a bit of a view of the surrounding hills through the gaps in the trees.

The path we were following led us into a little valley, covered in beautiful thick white snow.

Though you did have to be careful not to stray off the edge of the path

The footpath was taking us towards a place whose name began with V (Finnish place names are really difficult and we can't remember what it was!). It was about 4km away, so just the right sort of distance for us to walk there and back in the available daylight.

When we eventually arrived there, it turned out just to be a crossroads of two ski runs with a small cafe. It didn't matter though because the walk through the snow had been fantastic.

We managed to find a slightly different route back so that we weren't completely retracing our steps.

It's hard to imagine that these trees will recover from the snow, but hopefully they will!

It was about 2pm now and clear that the amount of remaining available daylight was limited.

We made it back to Äkäslompolo around 2.30 and went to our favourite restaurant to warm up and enjoy a rather large meal.

We're flying back home tomorrow, firstly with an internal flight from the local Kittilä airport to Helsinki, and then with a further flight from Helsinki back to Gatwick. There probably won't be any adventures worth blogging about tomorrow, but we've had an absolutely amazing holiday. Lapland is beautiful and we will definitely return if we can