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We had gone to bed at one at night (Finnish time) in our luxurious cabin, but at four o'clock Teije woke up by a call coming from the cabin loudspeaker telling that some people had to disembark now for Åland / Marianhamina.
Finland
Elisabeth & Teije2004-03-06 13:51:51
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more impressive. There is a lot of alternation, more than we have seen in Finland until now.
At Sodankylä we visit the oldest church of the Samen in Lapland. The wooden building dates back to the end of the 17th century, but close to it a newer stone church has been build.
In this village there is also a famous statue, called the Samen with his reindeer. After the nuclear accident at Tsjernobyl a lot of the reindeer had to be killed and the Samen were threatened in maintaining their way of life, depending as many of them were (and are) of reindeer breeding. By mail we were later informed this was the case in Sweden, not in Finland.
The Samen are now divided into different economical groups and the tourist-Samen is a growing one; as a tribe they can be compared to the American indian tribes. They have little choice of how to make a living and have to find new ways to survive. Hopefully they will be able to preserve their culture despite this yielding to tourism.
Tourists like we are, who are eager to buy their cheap goods and want to have a picture of ourselves with 'wild' reindeer. We run into this flock accidently, they were on an intersection on a road with much traffic. But we would have arranged a setting like this, if we had been Samen, just to lure tourists into the shops nearby.
Even the reindeer use the crosswalk, well educated as they are!
We run into reindeer 10 times today, from a single one to this group of almost 30 reindeer!
One of them made Teije try out the anti-break system of the car; he didn't notice a reindeer standing on the road and smoke rose up from the tires when we continued our way. So we drive on in a slower pace than the permitted 90 km. an hour...
Along the well passable road to Ivalo, Teije has to take once more a side road and we take it from Kakslauttanen. Along this unpaved road we see trailers everywhere and even a wooden
...
See photographs from:
Sweden Gallery
,
Norway Gallery
,
Finland Gallery
