Scandinavia Cool

It's the crack of dawn when Matti collects us in a van camouflaged white by snow and ice. In the middle of a northern Finland winter, dawn cracks at a comfortable ten o'clock in the morning, just my kind of pace. Today Matti's guiding five of us on a snowshoe walk, and we all turn out to be far-from home Aussies. Matti's just relieved that we're all English speakers. "Last week I took a Chinese group snowmobiling by mistake," he says. "They couldn't explain that they'd actually booked an ice-fishing expedition."

On a mountain overlooking Rovanieme, the capital of Lapland, we pile out of the van, admire the winter wonderland movie scene, and shiver in the below-freezing air. Matti puts it differently: "It's a bit warm for snowshoe-walking today, you'll sweat too much." The Arctic Circle is just over the horizon, and we've arrived dead on winter solstice time. If the day got any shorter than this, it'd disappear altogether, and that's exactly how it works in every town north of here.

"The hardest thing about snowshoe-walking is putting them on," Matti says, pulling six pairs from the back of the van. Snowshoe technology has come a long way from my image of gallant explorers strapping tennis rackets to their feet. These contraptions look more like trampolines, with all the fastenings of an overly complicated backpack. My chilled fingers fumble with the icy straps and then my first attempt to walk ends in failure. As I try turning to laugh about my clown feet with the walker behind me, I collapse in a giggling tangled heap, one snowshoe gripping the back of the other. "Feet wide apart, knees high, and think forwards," Matti instructs, and it gets a whole lot easier. The Finnish-Australian conga line is soon in motion.

The previous 24 hours of horizontally flying snow have made the mountain souvenir-book beautiful. Matti grumbles that our snowshoes will sink too far into such fresh snow, but I'm just happy to see unblemished white slopes and trees of ice and snow fingers. The small drifts covering rocks are like heavily bleached Saharan dunes.

"This is like walking on beach sand" the Sydneysider says when we stop for a hot chocolate breather. Everyone grins agreement but a beat later thinks, "Apart from the cold, the snow, the outfits, the dark . . ." It's after midday, and the sun has never made it above the horizon, just skirted it, giving us an eerily inseparable dawn and dusk.

Buoyed by chocolate energy, we stumble from one Christmas-card fir tree to the next while Matti explains the seasonal nature of his work: five months of winter guiding and the rest of the year off. To make enough cash for the year he works 300 hours a month, mostly outside in the cold and often in the dark, too.

"It's fine," he says. "I tried an office job and it was so boring." His favorite safaris are all-day or overnight trips by snowmobile. "When you get further away from the city, there are some really pretty places." Call me naive, or just Australian, but I thought we were already in spectacular country, and I wonder what could change to make it even better.

"What do you do the other seven months of the year?"I ask.

"Go fishing," he says. "Up here we go fishing all night in summer."

Playing in the Midnight Sun sounded fun, but I have one question: "How do you sleep when it's light all night?" Matti laughs and says, "We have curtains."

After a few hours, those only-used-for-snowshoe-walking muscles are telling us to quit. Back at the van, we release all the buckles and catches and enjoy the weightlessness of having our feet back. I take a last look over the snow-drenched hill, now littered with our clumsy snowshoe prints. It's getting darker after all, it's two in the afternoon.

"Wow, sunset," I sigh, mesmerized by the glowing oranges and purples.

"Sunrise, you mean," Matti says, and it takes me a confused moment to realize he's pulling my leg. At this strange other end of the world "Down Over? Upside-Down Under?" everything's so backwards I can't keep up. But the Finns sure make a good job of it.

LOWDOWN: To learn more about the dunes of Lapland, check out tourism.rovaniemi.fi, or to get set up on your own snowshoe trek, visit arcticsafaris.fi.

Photo by Ian Dorant