THE PERFECT FINNISH

Sydney’s weather has been chilly and wet forever, it seems. I’ve never seen such a cool summer. In fact I think it lasted two, possibly three days!

So, feeling thoroughly summer-deprived now that it is mid-autumn and even wetter and chillier, when someone sent me a press release the other day about Finland in summer, it brought back a flood of yearning memories.

Several years ago we were lucky enough to visit Scandinavia in mid-summer. It’s a festival time with all sorts of old rituals – burning effigies of witches on bonfires, that sort of thing and a great sense of celebration. 

And before you groan ‘oh, no, these travel writers, they get everything on a plate’ you must know that this trip came from something else on a plate. I’d cut out and sent the barcodes from some imported cheese I was about to serve at Christmas lunch and WON a trip for two in a competition!

But getting back to my nostalgic little trip…..mid-summer in this part of the world is also the time of late, late evenings when, depending on how far north you are, the sun almost never sets. The locals seem to be enlivened by all that daylight, and they hardly sleep either. I remember waking up at 2am one night and seeing the streets busy with people walking around in the twilight which was really also the pearly pre-dawn.

It’s a time of fields blazing with red poppies too, and Finland with its 188,000 lakes, 647 rivers, and a greater number forests than any other country in Europe is especially blessed, with almost more beauty than it’s possible to handle. Try taking a photographer to a place like this if you want to see what I mean!

As part of our itinerary we travelled north to Rovaniemi and met an out-of-season Santa, still gamely nursing children for photographs, before we straddled the Arctic Circle line of latitude, and took our own pics, as you have to if you get that far. It was there too that we met some real Laplanders and traveled by canoe to their beautifully decorated tepee-like hut and met their herd of huge shaggy reindeer.

Yes, we also swatted those king-sized mosquitoes which come out in hordes in summer, but that was outweighed by so much else. Savonlinna,  for instance, much further south where we sat in on an opera rehearsal at the ancient lakeside castle which hosts an annual opera festival each summer.

I realized a childhood dream too and made it to the west coast to Naantali near Turku (Finland’s ancient capital) to finally meet the Moomin family, characters from a favourite childhood storybook. I found Moomin World sweet and delightful and not at all ‘Disneyed’ so that my much-loved childhood friends seemed just as I would have expected.

In Helsinki I remember most the waterside markets filled with fruit and vegetables, and breads I had never seen before or since, such as loaves baked with handfuls of whole tiny fishes inside. When cut, the cross-sections of their little bodies made a mosaic in each slice. It tasted good too, but I never did find out what it was called.

And the strawberries. In summer in Helsinki, fruit stalls pop up all along the city streets. Pedestrians pause to purchase punnets of these crimson fruit – perhaps better here than anywhere else in the world (sorry, Australia!)  – and snack on them as they walk along. The footpaths become littered with thousands of green hulls which are flicked away as they go.

Those multitudes of  lakes are lined with brightly painted summer houses, a Scandinavian indulgence. This is the place where families go to relax in what has to be the best season, maybe anywhere. Many of the islands seem only reachable by boat, and each home, its green lawns melting into the reed-fringed waters has a red or blue or white boat pulled up on the bank.

Whoops! This reminiscing is not good for my concentration, and it’s all thanks to that press release. So, in case you’re interested in going and snacking on strawberries and wandering the streets all night, I am told that you should visit www.visitfinland.com/au for a full list of summer tours from Australia.

I shouldn’t forget to mention all the other things I didn’t have time for such as hiking, fishing, canoeing or sailing, cycling or simply soaking up the long sunny days from the veranda of one of those waterfront summer cottages.

I’d also come back for more Finnish food which differs delightfully from other countries: heaps of berries, the best cold-ocean seafood, mushrooms, breads and Finnish caviar. And there is a vibrant cafe-bar scene in Helsinki too, I’m told.

Finland’s biggest summer festival is the city-wide Helsinki Festival starting in mid-August.  I missed that too. So there are reasons for me to return I reckon. 

Maybe I need to buy some cheese and start cutting out some more bar-codes!

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