Day 4: Saariselkä

Yesterday evening we set out for another night-time walk around Saariselkä.

We'd spotted a restaurant earlier in the day whose menu looked promising (and not too expensive by Finnish standards). Admittedly, the restaurant looked a little tacky from the outside, with a giant illuminated burger sign...

...but inside the decor was a lot more tasteful.

We ended up with a rather special table that resembled a wishing well, decorated with fairy lights.

Tim ordered a kebab, while I opted for a Hawaiian pizza. Somewhat unexpectedly, when the pizza came it turned out to be drizzled in a yellow sauce. It tasted a bit like the sauce in a carbonara. The overall effect was a bit odd!

Never mind, it was fun to go out and it was snowing a little bit as we walked back to our cabin. When Tim woke up this morning, he saw a digger coming to sweep up the snow which had fallen overnight and keep the road clear

By the time it had got bright and we set out for a walk outside, the snow seemed to have stopped and the sky was starting to clear up a bit.

Our plan for today was to explore a winter walking trail which we'd caught sight of yesterday when walking back from the supermarket.

We weren't actually sure where it went, but it looked really pretty and worth exploring.

Luckily it seemed like someone had been out with a machine recently to compact the fresh snow and make the surface of the path easier to walk on.

There was plenty of snow weighing down the trees we walked past; it's hard to believe that they spring back when the snow melts, but they do!

We passed some really beautiful trees and it was hard not to take photos of all of them.

The path started off fairly flat, but after a while it began to lead gradually uphill.

We reached a point where we had to cross over a cross country ski route and realised that we were actually quite high up.

We could see what felt like miles into the distance, with a view of the endless forests outside Saariselkä.

In the far distance we could even see that the sky was slightly pink, I guess with sunrise although it must have been 11 o'clock in the morning by this point.

As we climbed higher, the trees became even more snow-covered!

This one was my absolute favourite  

The landscape was so white that it's almost hard to make out the trees on some of our photos.

As we got higher we could see more and more snow-covered hills in the distance...

...and we realised there were some houses up here, at the top of the hill we were accidentally climbing.

We didn't make it quite as far as those though, because the path became increasingly difficult to walk on.

You might just be able to make the path out on the photo below; it's towards the right of the picture, marked by a pole.

Increasingly often we'd find that the snow wasn't compacted enough to bear our weight, so we'd fall down a hole in the path  

We decided we'd need snowshoes to go any further, so we'd better turn around.

The good thing was that it was a lot easier walking downhill than uphill and we got back down to Saariselkä fairly quickly  

After a bit more shopping at the supermarket, we went back to the apartment to warm up for a while before hopefully heading out for another evening walk.