User:JIP/July 2006 travels

In July 2006, I went on two trips. I had been wanting to go to the World Bodypainting Festival since 2005, but at that time I went to BoundCon instead. This year, I decided to go to the festival.

I had originally planned to visit the festival on July 20 through July 24, and then remain in Helsinki to participate in the shooting of Blood Ceremony Films' latest film. However, the shootings were postponed until April 2007, so I decided to go on a fishing trip to Lapland with my father instead.

I left for the festival on July 20. My plane left so early in the morning that I had to wake up at 5 AM and take a taxi to the Helsinki-Vantaa airport. This time there wasn't such a big rush at the airport as last year and I got to the plane right on time with no need to hurry. I forgot to bring a cap with me, so I had to buy one at the airport. It said Suomi on the side and had the Finnish coat of arms on the front. I couldn't find any cap featuring anything other than Finland.

I switched flights in Frankfurt am Main. There I purchased a 1.0 GB memory card for my digital camera (actually it was my mother's, but she had lent it to me for me to start up photography). It cost me 80 €. Then I took the flight to Klagenfurt, Austria.

The two things that struck me at Klagenfurt airport were:

• The airport was the smallest I had ever visited.
• It was unbearably hot outside. It was at least 30 °C (86 °F) in the sun.

At first I couldn't find the bus connection to Seeboden, but then a German man and woman asked me if I was going to Seeboden too. I said yes, and they showed me the bus. In the bus, we were nine people: Me, the Germans I had met, a German man, a German woman with three children, and the driver. I was the only non-German passenger.

On the trip from Klagenfurt to Seeboden, I was simultaneously amazed at the beautiful scenery, and excruciated by the awful heat. Of course I had forgot to bring a bottle of water.

According to the woman with the three children, the air condition of the bus wasn't working, and the driver should have fixed it. Even though the festival website said the bus couldn't drop us off at the hotel, we were dropped off at our hotels anyway. The woman and her children were dropped off first, then the two I had met at the airport, then I, and finally the last German man.

It turned out that the hotel (more like a Bed & Breakfast home) at the end of Römerweg was on top of a hill. And of course there were no stairs to speak of, only an inclined road leading there. Why couldn't I have seen this on any map beforehand? The family owning the hotel were very friendly. There was some confusion at first, as they thought I was participating in the bodypainting festival, not just visiting it. It turned out that unlike nearly everyone else I had met, they tended to only understand German, not English.

To be able to visit the whole main event, I had arrived one day early. This meant that I couldn't actually go to the festival on the first day I was there. I went sight-seeing, and happened to meet the two Germans again. We became acquintated, and went sight-seeing together. We went to the Seeboden Kulturhaus to see photographs of the previous festival (2005) and see a 3D photograph presentation.

On the first day of the festival, I went straight to the festival area when it opened at 11 AM. It was very nice looking at all the men and women being painted (mostly looking at the women, though). I started photographing the models, and soon after I found out that if I take a picture every time I see a model, that's all I'll ever have time to do, and I'll have to buy lots of memory cards. So I decided to only take one picture of every model, as attractive as topless women can be.

I stayed at the festival area the whole time until 9 or 10 PM when it got dark and my camera had run out of batteries. It was kind of strange to see it get dark so early - in Helsinki the previous days, it was still quite light at the same time in the evening. During the whole time, all the food I ate I bought from the snack bars at the festival area.

I met the two Germans again, and had a conversation with them. It turned out that they were not a married couple, as I had first thought - they were only artists working together. The man had placed an announcement seeking an assistant, and the woman had spotted it and answered it.

Getting back to the hotel in total darkness, slightly intoxicated, with my legs worn out and wearing sandals that ached my ankles, in a town I had never been in before, was easier than this makes it sound. All I have to complain about is that damned hill that Römerweg runs up. The next morning, I had a chat with the hotel owners and they told me that of all the guests, I arrive the latest at night and wake up the earliest in the morning. They were also very eager to know more of Finland, especially Lapland, which I had told them I was going to after getting back to Helsinki.

On the second day of the festival, I was surprised to find two Finnish teams competing in the festival. One team had four people: a man and a woman as artists, and two female models. The other team had two people: a woman as an artist, and a male model. The Finnish teams were even more surprised to see a Finnish visitor than I was to see Finnish teams. It was quite a nice experience to be able to have conversations in Finnish so far away from home. I don't know why, but on trips abroad, I find it refreshing to talk in Finnish when I'm at my destination, but on the way either there or back again, hearing Finnish spoken annoys the heck out of me. Maybe it's some psychological thing.

Of the three teams I got acquintated with, only one of the Finnish teams (the one with the female models) was qualified for the finals. From my conversations with the German team, I found out that not all artists bring their own models to the festival, some request models only after they have arrived, and when they're done, they give them back for other artists to use.

One interesting thing to notice was that some artist team (a foreign one, at that) had chosen Hard Rock Hallelujah by Lordi as their soundtrack when presenting their finished model. It made me a little proud to be Finnish.

On the evening of the third day, it started raining. I remembered I didn't have a photograph of the Germans I had got acquintated with, and in my hurry, I had to take a photograph of them in the rain. This broke my digital camera, and it doesn't look like it can be fixed. At least not for cheap. So sorry, no pictures of the trip to Lapland.

Getting back from Seeboden was another experience, and it seemed more difficult than it really was. I had to wake up at 5:30 AM, to be able to catch the bus back to Klagenfurt at 6:30 AM. Except it wasn't a bus, it was a taxi, because there were only three passengers - I, one of the Germans I had originally seen at Klagenfurt, and some Italian guy. Back at Klagenfurt airport, I was able to relax and catch the plane to Vienna in peace. From Vienna, I had a connection flight back to Helsinki.

The entire switching of trips from the World Bodypainting Festival to Lapland was made in 31 hours. At 6:30 AM on Monday, I left Seeboden. At 2 PM the next day, I and my father arrived in Tulppio. The path the trip took was:

• Seeboden - Klagenfurt - Vienna - Helsinki - Tampere - Seinäjoki - Oulu - Rovaniemi - Kemijärvi - Pelkosenniemi - Savukoski - Tulppio.

The overall length was about 2722 km (1691 miles), and the average speed was 87.8 km/h (54.6 miles/h). Of all this time, I managed to spend the whole of two hours at my own apartment.

I met with my father at 5 PM on Monday. At 6 PM we went to eat at the Helsinki Central railway station. I was very hungry, because the only thing I had eaten during the whole day was a small pizza slice on the plane from Vienna to Helsinki. At 7:20 PM we got on the train to Rovaniemi. There wasn't much to do during the train trip, but in Tampere we did go outside for a short walk in the city centre, and go to a bar for a glass of whiskey.

When we arrived at Rovaniemi at 7 AM on Tuesday, the first thing I noticed was how cold it was. In Seeboden, the temperature had lowered to 15 °C (59 °F) at the lowest at night. In Lapland, this seemed the highest it rose at day. The nights must have been 0 °C (32 °F), if not even lower. This would have been a drastic change if I had arrived by plane directly from Vienna to Rovaniemi, but a stop in Helsinki along the way helped to adjust to the change.

Another thing we noticed in Rovaniemi was that we had arrived there too early for any place to be open. We saw an official dedication plaque to Lordi at the city centre, but couldn't be bothered to find the kebab place that serves the famous "Lordi kebab" - 400 g (14 ounces) of pure kebab meat, and Mr. Lordi is said to eat two of that every day.

We bought the necessary equipment in Rovaniemi, and started driving further north. We reached Tulppio at about 2 PM. To our surprise we had got a better cabin than we had originally asked for, this one had its own cooking facilities. We went on one hiking/fishing trip to the nature every day, for a total of three days. Each trip was progressively longer, with the longest one being about 12 km (7.5 miles). And all this in the Finnish Lappish nature with usually only a narrow path to follow through the undergrowth, if even that.

The only major downside of the fishing trip was that we caught hardly any fish. All the fish we managed to catch were small trout-like fish called tammukka (I don't know what it's in English). My father caught about three of them and I caught one. They were too small to keep, so we put them back in the river.

On Friday, we left Tulppio and went to Tuntsa to stay one day at a laavu. The first couple of hours, we only rested at the laavu and talked with other visitors to the same area. Some had come to fish, some had only come to pick cloudberries. At about 7 PM, we went on our last fishing trip to the nature. We tried to walk along the river all the way to the Russian border zone, but got too tired, and went back to the Laavu after a little more than halfway.

On Saturday morning, we started driving back to Helsinki. The only major stop was at Kuusamo where we went to a restaurant, and both ate a big garlic steak. The trip back to Helsinki was really boring with nothing to do except sit in the car. We finally arrived in Helsinki at 2 AM on Sunday.

It would perhaps have been better if the trips were made in the opposite order. Travelling on my own to Seeboden is a lot more exciting and fun than going on a fishing trip to Lapland with my father, and the excitement should only increase with time, not decrease. However, I couldn't very well change the date of the bodypainting festival, and both I and my father had lots to do at work before the festival. And, walking 12 km in the Lappish nature every day is a lot more work than walking 2 km on the nice paved roads of Seeboden every day, so the lighter exercise served as training for the harder exercise. I did not get at all tired on the hiking trips. I'm not sure if it would have been the same if I hadn't been in Seeboden beforehand.