It takes only a short time spent in Finland before you appreciate how much they love Sibelius. Helsinki has a Sibelius Park, a green and lovely public space near the grey-blue sea. This park is home to the Sibelius Monument - a vast, abstract and somehow emotional arrangement of steel tubes suspended to resemble organ pipes or northern lights. His music can be heard in elevators, on the telephone and is piped through PA systems on buses and trains. Each house the man ever visited is a national monument. In the former capital of Turku there is the Sibelius Museum which exhibits items of clothing, manuscripts and even a half-smoked cigar. This museum is a place where music-loving Finns take their lunch hours and listen to recordings of selected Sibelian symphonic highlights.
Oh yes, Sibelius is big in Finland. A country that for centuries was the pawn of territorial power struggles between Sweden and Russia. A country that achieved independence for the first time in 1917 and is intensely proud of her national heroes, or hero really.
Finland is a difficult country to get to know. The Finns are friendly open-hearted people but are wrapped in almost impenetrable foreignness. No one in the world but a Finn can speak Finnish, with its 15 tenses and comically compounded vocabulary. As a culture, they have spent so long struggling merely to survive that they are only just beginning to think about the rest of the world. The landscape itself is aloof and difficult yet strangely, almost eerily, compelling.
Helsinki is on the Baltic located south of the most featureless part of Finland. They have a very efficient railway system that quickly takes you through the lakes and forests of the midland and up to the land of Lapps; the mystical, mysterious place of the stark and haunting reaches of the north. I was there in the summer and feel that it is a trip that must be taken. I bought a ticket and went in search of the midnight sun, directly north of Helsinki.
Directly north of Helsinki is the lake region which was amazing. It is like a hallucinatory chain of mirrored water with inlets and Islets bays, rapids and channels all set against the backdrop of thick green forest toward the Russian border in the east there is more water than land. At times when the wind is still and the lakes hold the sky in their steel surfaces it becomes hard to remember whether one is inland or part of some northern ocean archipelago.
The industrial towns and settlements of the region rose to service the timber industry and paper mill. They also developed in random places in which they achieve a weirdly attractive harmony with the land. As I passed through Tamper, the region's most important town and a place, I was also amazed. It is bordered by two lovely lakes; Nasijarvi and Pyhajardi, and is very scenic. The Tammerkoski rapids are in the centre of the town and are fringed on either side by a pair of wood processing factories that look so true you have to shake your head and remind yourself that factories are not a part of nature.
It's a long way north. The track rolls up with the Gulf of Bothnia and through Ostrobothnia which is scattered with fishing villages, hard-drinking trans-border Swedish communities and a numbingly dull landscape. A fellow named Paavo, across from me in the carriage, glared through the window and muttered dark Finnish imprecations while reaching furtively for a bottle of Koskenkorva, a brutal type of local vodka. He wrapped it in his jacket, drank heavily and then passed it on to me. There are iron-fisted drinking laws in Finland and for once I wished they had been applied a little more strictly. I nearly wept as the Koskenkorva went down. It was like swallowing a length of pine bark that had been studded with nails and set on fire. 'Aaarghhnew,' said Paavo. I could only gulp and nod weakly.
The heartland of Finland is called Kainuu and is lightly populated and tightly forested with trees dense as a plush green carpet. Past it all I went, ever north and onward to the midnight Sun.
I disembarked at Rovaniemi, the official home of Santa Claus and the closest town to the Arctic Circle. The official marker post for the circle is permanently 8km north of Rovaniemi. There, I like every other tourist and day tripper who has ever passed that way, posed with one foot shivering in the Arctic and the other safe in warm and balmy climes. It's a bit of a cheat, of course. The Arctic Circle is not fixed or static, like the equator. It is defined as the southern limit of where the midnight sun can be seen in a given season and moves around each year by some 100m or so.
Rovaniemi is a peculiar and not especially scenic place. Its streets are designed to resemble reindeer horns from above which are one good reason to fly over the place rather than walk around there. There is a museum of artifacts documenting the natural history of the Sami - the seminomadic reindeer herders who still roam the tundra and northern forests making clothing from polar bear fur and raincoats from seal guts and tents from reindeer hide. The interest lies in Santa Claus Village. At the village you can meet Santa Claus, who lives in a suspiciously well insulated log cabin, and wave to the reindeer team grazing in the adjoining meadow. There are polite signs discouraging tender hearts and the Christmas hopeful from feeding or bribing the reindeer. Even with a glass of milk and cookies.
Lapland stretches a good deal further, way up to impossible Norway. You don’t need to go too far into the Arctic in order to feel the place. I hired a car and made my way some 120km up the Arctic Highway to the Pyhatunturi National Park, just south of Sodankyla. I stayed a day at the hotel there, rambling across the marshland and pine forests, climbing craggy fells, listening to the loud and keening solitude of the wind. It was the kind of noise that makes a place seem more silent.
And there, near the top of the world, I walked across a landscape so strange and movingly desolate. I watched the pale sun move across the horizon like a raw egg in a bowl of milk and felt how wide the world really is and how alien it can be. I felt tremendously happy to be here, wrapped tight with my cheeks flushed and exultant, feeling the fleet, sweet illusion of glimpsing even if just for a moment and got something of the Finnish soul. As I walked back to the hotel, so help me, I whistled 'Finlandia'.
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