I made a good start in the morning without too much messing around. However I deecided that I had too many clothes, a leftover from my disorganisation from staying with friends in Helsinki, so I abandoned two pairs of socks (not before using them as rags to clean the chain), turned a pair of underpants into rags for future use and liberated a tee shirt by leaving it in the washroom (it was a London Pride brewery tee shirt that deserved a more caring owner). I was finally getting into the right mind set. There were a lot of Baltic challenge vehicles in the campsite from fire engines to sports cars, but none passed me on the road so they must of all been going south. As I left Inari (after shopping!) a convoy of 15 Italian camper vans were amassing in a layby – they wouldn’t pass me for 50 kilometres, so I’m not sure what they were doing. I rode north out of Inari on the road 4, there was more traffic on this road than during the previous two days (which is no surprise) but was still very light. After passing the turn off to road 992, which is a direct route to the North Cape, the traffic dwindled to practically nothing. I started to really get into bicycle touring!
I came across one of the strangest lay-by cafes ever. I had to wake up the old lady running it (they never hear the bike coming!) and have a coffee and shortbread in very strange surroundings for somewhere so remote.
Initially the route had more hills, but nothing too severe, and with more roadside crash barriers more there was opportunity lean the bike up, enjoy the silence and watch unknown specices of birds. The second half of the day was spent following the beginnings of many tributaries that feed the Tana river, so was mainly downhill. I stopped at a roadside monument, which was a mystery at the time but I now suspect was related to the destruction of all the villages in Finmark at the end of WW2. At the time it seemed like strange memorial miles from anywhere.
At one point I came across a group of reindeer, with one particularly big, and unusually, white stag. They started trotting along the roads as usual, then he turned and for a few moments I thought he might charge – great relief when he turned back to join the others.
The other feature of the day was the disappearance of the spruce tree, with the mountain birch being the main tree this far north. The spruce can’t survive under the weight of snow and they get too damaged.
I arrived in Utsjoki in late afternoon without ever getting a good view of the Tana river. Utsjoki is a border town (with Norway over the bridge), with very little except petrol stations and a supermarket that stocked very specific, and I expect, tax efficient goods. It did sell enough food for my dinner. The campsite was good but slightly more expensive (€13) than the superb Inari site.
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