«Trip to Scandinavia»

Due to some technical problems with our transportation, we had to stay the whole day in Niittylahti. If it weren't for Kari we couldn't proceed on our journey. Kari is a tall, blond man, vigorous of frame. I called him 'a Finnish bear'.

This morning I was sitting for a while on the lakeshore listening to gentle waves murmur when they met the rocky shore. Seagulls were flying over the lake's unruffled waters. A gentle breeze was caressing my face. Serenity reigned in this corner of the world. Everything around me looked very familiar to me; in the Karelian Isthmus near St. Petrsburg, on the banks of the Gulf of Finland and the Ladoga Lake, we have similar scenery.

The weather was nice, and a group of local boys was swimming in the lake. Their dog, a light brown Labrador retriever, was lying on a small pier close to me. I asked them a few questions, first in Swedish and then in English, and the older boy replied. In the evening, after dinner, when I was sitting again on the pier, a man and boy came on bicycles to swim. I recognized the boy: he was here this morning. I talked with the man, the boy's father, in English. When they were about to leave, I asked them to say hello to their dog.

At night, we had the opportunity to go to the sauna again!

Early in the morning, we set off on another journey. From the bus, I saw three cranes feeding in a field of oats. Our next stop was in the woods. We went into the woods to see a giant rock of tectonic origin, broken by a glacier, dated to be around 5 million years old. When the giant rock broke, it formed a cave that was supposedly used by people of the Neolithic Age. "Wow!" exclaimed some of the people in our group.

In the afternoon, we arrived in the town of Hameenlinna where we had a very warm welcome. The town is much older than Joensuu and is also called 'the town of parks.' One Russian lady, who is married to a Finn and lives here, gave us an excursion around the town. The largest park, which is called Aulanko, is situated on rocks and is amazingly beautiful.

We also visited a private museum called the 'Stone Garden' - a two story building where the owner and his wife kept a large collection of stones and minerals from all over the world. They brought stones from the many countries they visited. There is also a butterfly collection there.

We stayed overnight in a camping ground on a lakeshore in front of the Aulanko Park in comfortable cabins. And again, I had a chance to go to the sauna. This sauna was larger than the previous ones and had a stove for wood.

At half past eight in the morning, we set off from Hameenlinna to Vaasa, a maritime port on the Gulf of Bothnia. Scenery in the southwestern part of Finland is slightly different from the east: hills with coniferous woods, larger cultivated fields and houses of different architectural style.

In Vaasa, after having bought boarding tickets, we went to look for a place to eat, and we found it on a bay shore. Then we went to explore a round crater five kilometers in diameter - resulting from the impact of a meteorite that fell about five hundred million years ago.

Then we returned to the port to embark on a ferry. It took us four hours to cross the gulf.

Yesterday evening we came to the Ljumvikens camping ground, located near the maritime terminal right on the seashore. The hospitable owner, Bo, lodged our group in small comfortable cabins. Early in the morning we left the campsite and headed southwest following the E 4 highway, which goes along the coast.

Our first stop was in Skuleskogen National Park at a tourist center located by the highway where we saw an exhibition and watched an impressive video about geological history of this area. I read in a brochure that "The High

Coast has the greatest isostatic uplift in the world since the last Ice Age. This is the main reason why the High Coast has been designated a World Heritage site. The relative isostatic uplift climbs to 285 meters above the current sea level, and the land is presently rising by 8 mm a year." Indeed, scenery of Höga Kusten, the High Coast, is absolutely gorgeous, and I regret that we couldn't stay there longer.

Our next destination point was Brunflo, a town by the Storsjön Lake. We wanted to find the Lockne crater - result of another meteorite impact that occurred in the area some 500 million years ago. We were following a map and some notes that I had translated from Swedish before the trip. A friend of mine in Sweden sent them to me. I asked a young lady who lived in a nearby house about the area but despite the fact that she had lived all her life here, she had never heard of the crater. Her face showed great surprise when she found out that we had come all the way from Russia to see something that she never heard of or seen.

Another young lady came up to us; she new something about the area and gave us directions. She sent us to a village. After we finally found it, we parked the bus on a dirt road in the woods. It was drizzling. A professor went into the woods and unexpectedly found a big rock that was described in the materials. This massive piece of rock split from the bedrock when the meteorite impacted the earth's surface, then was covered by a sea, and flew a few kilometers from the epicenter. Now there is a lake, Lockne sjön, at the impact's epicenter. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to continue the route described by our materials. After lunch we continued our trip to Norway.