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Friday, 7. January 2005: Anterinmukka - Kiertämäjärvi (20 km)

6:00

The alarm clock and Sami become active. I'm still feeling too comfortable.

6:30

Finally I find my way out of the sleeping bag. The same procedure as every day. Cooking porridge, eat, do the dishes, pack. I hoped the rubber boot would have miraculously become less broken over night, but that is not the case.

9:00

Finally everything is done. The other group still hasn't gone up. As far as I understood them, they want to stay longer in this place. I can very well understand that. However we have a long way to go today. For a long time we go next to some river, which mainly means that it's quite flat. Later we follow the road along the borderland.

It's now going constantly uphill, Sami is still pulling the big akio all the time. As it gets down pretty steeply on the other side of the hill I let it run really nicely. That's what these skis are great for. Then I take over the akio from Sami and start sweating quite a lot.

16:00

When we leave the borderland and head westwards there is no way and no track any more. We stamp through the deep snow and only make very little progress. Sami goes ahead making our track and pulls the akio at the same time. So I take another turn with the akio but I have to give it away quite soon. I simply can't make any headway at all. The skis slip away instead of giving foothold and with 70 cm of powder I can't even use the sticks. I'm wondering how Sami is doing this.

16:30

It's pitch-black and I'm starting to feel like I would prefer to being in a warmer place. Suddenly Anne says "Revontulia!". An indeed, the clouds are almost gone revealing gorgeous northern lights all across the sky. I'm totally enthusiastic and looking at the sky rather than at my skis. Even my back doesn't hurt any more.

18:00

We finally found the cottage by a lake. It's small and comparatively disappointing. For some reason I don't like it. It's cold and it's not getting warm for eternities since it's me who's trying to start a fire. We eat the remaining sandwiches. Before we start cooking we play "cards" with our instant-food bags. Just like these car card games in good old childhood times ("250 horsepower" - "270, I won!") we're beating each other with nutrition facts like fat, energy, natrium and so on - and laugh our asses off. In the end "caribic" wins so that's what we eat.