Well, this embarrassing (as websites say sometimes). We toldm quite a few people we are resumjing our blog, and then did not more. In the meantime, there were q few visits to it over the last week nor so, and these faded away. please bear with us - we shall gvet going.
We are in St Petersburg right now, afgter 3 days cycling in Russia. But before going into that, we thought it would be good to paste an overall imopre3ssion of last year's trip and this post is to do that. There is also, somwhere, a file of photos all nicely edited, but as yeat I can't find it in my file base, so not just yet. Here is the text, really a bit long for a blog, but there you are:-
The
Iron Curtain Cycle Trail, Norway and Finland; recollections by Tom
and Katherine Marshall
19
June – 19 July 2014
Our
son described us as his “loony parents”, as we set out to cycle
just over 1,000 miles on the first leg of the Iron Curtain Cycle
Trail. But he had a point, we are not super cyclists doing regular
long distance rides and, being in our early 70s, do not have youth on
our side. The route runs close to the borders of the 4500 mile Iron
Curtain that used to divide East and West Europe. It was possibly the
historical aspect that attracted us, plus seeing new lands, in a way
that is not possible from a car.
It
started in Gremse-Jakobselv, a tiny village on the border of Norway,
Russia and the Arctic Ocean. The road is only open in the summer;
there is a bus there from Kirkenes in July and August. It was June,
so we cycled 36 miles to the start, then back; 72 miles on our first
day. Never mind; we were well within the Arctic Circle; the midnight
sun meant we could take our time and arrive back late. However, the
North was experiencing the coldest summer for 38 years and we had
hail, snow, sleet and wind and amazingly beautiful wild country,
including passing Norway's oldest mountain.
The
border with Russia was well marked and you were warned of high power
binoculars watching you. The Iron Curtain may be down but borders
are very much in evidence with several miles of exclusion zone in
Russia and Scandinavia. Norway and Finland are in the Shengen Zone
so patrolling the Russia border is important. For Finland, as for
most of Europe, borders have been something kings, presidents and
others have fought over through the centuries. For much of the ride
we learnt a lot of how border people had been affected particularly
during the WW2. Kirkenes, in Norway, near the start, was the most
bombed town after Malta, so all buildings there are post-war.
The
first part of the ride took us though Lapland, the land of the Sami
people. Traditionally they were reindeer herders. Reindeer migrate
throughout the seasons to find food, and (other) man's borders cut
across their traditional range. Another effect has been the large
exclusion zone on the Russian side. Bears and wolves feed on reindeer
and the Russian ones now find those on the Norwegian and Finnish side
are closer, so come for them. Nowadays Sami people work in all
fields but those we met were proud of their traditions and keen to
keep them alive.
The
cycling was not all unalloyed pleasure. The second day was cold and
very wet and began with a coach overtaking Katherine through a very
large puddle. The splash managed to penetrate cracks in clothing
where the rain had failed. But the day ended with an apartment in a
hotel annexe, with the softest, warmest duvet we have encountered.
The third day we crossed into Finland, the only sign of a new country
being a supermarket with considerably lower prices than Norway and a
language that we had not a hope of understanding, though we did get
'kauppa', a shop, and 'kiitos', 'thank you', pretty quickly. It took
us rather longer, a week in fact, to realise that Finland time was an
hour different to Norwegian. We wondered why everything seemed to
close early.
The
first week remained cold with a North wind, which had the advantages
of keeping the midges away and blowing us along. The route was
along fairly major roads, though the traffic was light, which meant
that the hill gradients were reasonably gentle. We passed over the
watershed of the Arctic and Baltic seas in a cold, bleak, treeless
place. In the next town, a ski resort, we found a warm and friendly
café in a supermarket and by evening we were settled into a log
cabin, with a wood fire, in Tankavara, an old gold mining town. Snow
falling at breakfast the next morning persuaded us to stay another
night and we enjoyed a fascinating gold museum, a Nature Centre with
good forest walks and met some eccentric people as well as tourists
panning for gold. We did not make our fortune but spent a happy hour
with our hands in freezing water for about 6 grains of gold.
Usually,
we camped at night. Most Finnish campsites were by beautiful lakes
and had saunas, very welcome after a day's cycling, especially when
it is cold. Our guide book said that after the sauna Finns jump naked
into the nearest lake. We looked at the lake by our first sauna and
were pleased to find this ritual was not being practised. At the
start campsites or other accommodation were reasonably close
together, so daily distances were no more than 40 miles. Later the
country became more remote and distances longer. The furthest was 76
miles, arriving in sunshine at a quarter to eleven at night. Then, in
the morning we found they did breakfast. We spent a leisurely morning
indulging ourselves on a smorgasbord breakfast, that rolled into
morning coffee and cakes. We discovered Finnish porridge, with a
fruit compote. Quite delicious. Sometimes accommodation marked on the
map was no longer there but we always managed something, though it
could be surprising, like the campsite which was almost entirely
overgrown and the owner said he had been a spy. What, we wondered,
was in those huts now overgrown with vegetation?
As
the sun came out so did the midges and mosquitoes, looking for a good
meal. Remote countryside meant that the gradients on the roads were
steeper and quite often gravel. A well-maintained dirt road can be
excellent but going downhill on a road that suddenly deteriorates can
be terrifying. We will not forget the one on our last day when there
was a choice between continuing at speed over bumps and loose gravel
or braking with a risk of skidding. Downhills were invariably
followed by uphills, with the hope that there is enough speed to get
most of the way up. There were a great many hills, some looked steep
and then turned out to be gentle, some looked pleasant and then had a
very steep part, at maximum tiredness, just before you the top and
that could be the moment for mosquitoes to strike. Nearly all roads
had bus stops. Often there was a stop at the top of a hill - some
with shelter and a seat. Much appreciated for a rest. Always there
were the conifer and birch forests and lakes. Millions of lakes, some
vast, some tiny, but almost an overload of beauty.
Although
much of the countryside was remote, we also went through a number of
small towns, many with museums which gave an insight into Finnish
history and culture. In Kuhmo we learned a bit about the Kalevala, a
set of epic poems “uncovered” in the 19th
century, the period when Finnish national consciousness began. At
that time it was a Duchy of Russia, though previously it had been
part of Sweden. Finland became a separate country only at the time
of the Russian revolution; Lenin had promised this when Finnish
nationalists helped him get to St Petersburgh. But Stalin tried to
reclaim Finland and attacked in several places along the border on
30th
November 1939. Our 76 mile day had included a 'museum road' which
commemorated what is now known as the Winter War and where 20,000
Ukrainian troops were sent in at this point, with insufficient
clothing, almost all of whom perished, killed by the the 'white
death', Finnish loggers in white overalls and rifles, used to the
cold winters and skiing through the forests, or from the cold or
starvation. The museum to this was very moving, with a field of
boulders outside, one for everyone who had died, Finnish and
Ukrainian. All the way along the road there were reminders of what
had happened. Other museums told the story of the Continuation War
with Russia and the German support, ending with the wholesale burning
of all buildings as they retreated.
Another
“museum road” further south was the course of an old road between
Sweden and Tsarist Russia, and proved to be very different. We
expected museum buildings, until we realised the road was the museum.
It had prodigious, if short, gradients and one wondered if
designating it as a museum absolved the road people from improving
it.
Thinking
back it is often the stops that we remember: the sound of birdsong;
the sight of reindeer in the forest or stopping the traffic while
they loiter on the road; the wild flowers with giant dragon flies;
the wayside cafés with coffee and homemade doughnuts. Perhaps above
all, in a sparsely populated region, it is the people we met: the
Spanish cyclist who stopped because he had not seen another cyclist
for several days, the American couple riding a tandem, the Korean and
then the Thai women running cafés, the man who spoke no English but
who came out of his house to help mend our bent cycle gear and the
innumerable people we chatted with in campsites, cafés and museums.
And
next year? Perhaps the next stage, through St Petersburg and along
the Baltic coast to Poland.
