Travels with Spaniels: Bread, eagle owls, forest glades and long freight trains

One of the joys of our travels over the last few years has been sampling the local bread in the countries we have visited. France, obviously, is brilliant at it, but is probably trumped by Galicia, the taste of whose rustic loaves lives on in the memory. On our current trip we managed to find lovely bread in Sweden and Denmark, while Norwegian supermarkets had a fantastic range of artisan loaves made from a variety of flours including barley and spelt. Finland has been something of a disappointment in this respect. Rye is the predominant flour, which is fine, but the Finns obviously prefer their bread factory made, sliced, and sold in plastic wrapping. We look forward to improvements as we go south.

Musk Ox having tea

Wolverines are very engaging

Northern Finland is sparsely populated with few large towns so finding places to visit is quite difficult. We did come across a wildlife park just outside the small town of Ranua which I was persuaded to visit. I say that because I have an instinctive objection to wild animals being kept in captivity for the public to gawp at. However, we discovered a real effort had been made to ensure the habitat in the various areas of the park was true to the surroundings in which the animals would live in the wild. Finland is rich in its fauna which includes wolves, brown bears, wolverines, reindeer, moose and various birds of prey. We peeked in at a sleeping otter, swapped glances with eagle owls, spied on a lone lynx sitting in the undergrowth and watched wild boar wallowing contently in mud.

I was ambivalent about the polar bear enclosure. While large it was bare and rocky, most unlike the natural Arctic habitat of these beautiful animals which like to roam over vast distances. No doubt the one bear we saw sleeping among the rocks will be happier when winter comes but I was left feeling a little sad about its surroundings. I was cheered up by discovering two animals of which I had never heard. Pallas's Cat is a small wildcat with a grumpy expression which is a native of Central Asia. There it is hunted for its fur and the appalling trade in oriental medicines which values its fat. Another endangered species we saw was the Dhole, a type of wild dog which looks much like our own fox, although without the bushy tail.

A Dhole having a bath

The Finns do like to blaze away at the local wildlife and 6% of the population hold a firearms licence. I have no problem with people shooting game which they will eat but hunting for animals for their fur is common so foxes, pine martens and racoon dogs fall prey to the gun and hunting trips to Finland are sold on the internet. Hunting moose with dogs is quite a thing too as is bear hunting with a licence. You really have some sort of mental issue if you enjoy killing these animals just for fun.

We were able to relax that evening in a forest glade. the state-owned forestry authority provides dry toilets, shelters and fire pits at a number of sites, so we found ourselves sitting by a wood fire while the spaniels wandered about sniffing at the undergrowth. It was the epitome of getting away from it all, watching the smoke rise and listening to the silence.

The pups enjoyed the camp fire

The next morning we took the spaniels for a walk through the woodland which gave us a chance to let them off the lead.We then headed south planning to spend no more than a couple of hours on the road. As I have mentioned before, driving in this part of Finland, with its long straight roads and forests on either side can become quite tedious. However, we were surprised when the road suddenly widened out for no apparent reason. It turns out that during the Cold War, the Finns had taken the option to land fighter aircraft on remote stretches of highway to counter any threat from Russia, Given the history of Finland, it's little wonder they are somewhat cautious about their larger neighbour to the East.

Luckily there wasn't an F15 coming the other way

We had planned to spend the night south of the small town of Paltamo where we stopped to take on fresh water and dump the cassette. However, the position by the lake was so inviting we decided to stay the night, the only disturbance being the long freight trains rattling over a nearby bridge carrying an iron-bearing ore called taconite from Russia to the Finnish port of Kokkola. It rained that night so the air was fresh the next morning when we took the spaniels for a run on wet grass alongside the lake.

As we drove south the landscape began to open up with fields taking the place of forest.

Ski-jumps. Common as muck

The place where we had planned to stay was displaying 'No Dog" notices so we drove on to the city of Kuopio, the largest settlement we had come across since leaving Tromso in Norway. We made our way to Puijon, a 150 metre-high hill crowned by a 75 metre viewing tower featuring a revolving restaurant at the top. The view from the balcony confirmed that this part of Finland is more water than land. We settled down for the night close to yet another ski-jump, the third on our journey.