Finnish-ing touches: all you need to know before your trip to Finland
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Loading... - Badria Hadid
- 25 Jul 2022
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Finland is the kind of place a child with a particularly vivid imagination might dream up, complete with flying reindeer, the real Santa and so much snow.
It’s a place of extremes – of darkness and light, of bitter cold and unfathomable wilderness. And it’s bound to be right up there with your Nordic dream destinations, whether you’ve come to dash through frozen forests by husky-drawn sleigh as the Northern Lights flash overhead in Lapland, or hunker down in a back-of-beyond summer cottage on the shores of a placid lake in the undying light of summer.
If you love saunas, silence and nature, you’ll fit right in. Here are the things to know to help you plan and prepare your trip and stay safe and healthy in Finland.
Planning your trip to Finland
Consider arriving outside of Helsinki
Helsinki is the country’s principal gateway, though if you’re coming to Finalnd for a non-urban adventure you might consider flying into a regional airport like Rovaniemi (gateway to Lapland and Santa HQ) or Tampere (gateway to the lakes) instead. Once you’re in Finland, public transport is pretty good and efficient, with trains and buses joining the dots between major cities and towns. But if you’re heading into the wilds, you should count on renting a car, as distances are vast. Pack drinks and snacks for the journey as there’s little in the way of services between hubs.
The roads that sweep north to Lapland are often empty, but you’ll need to watch out for reindeer (the Porokello app warns of high-risk reindeer-crash areas) and ice in winter.
Summers are for primeval pleasures; winters are for festive magic
Finland is too big for just one bite, so plan carefully and resist the temptation to cram everything into one trip.
Summer, you say? The Finns would agree: after long, dark, snowbound winters, they embrace the lighter days of summer with a truly biological urgency. June to August is a brilliant period for hiking and camping in wilderness areas like the reindeer-bobbled fells of Urho Kekkonen National Park in Northern Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. It’s also a great time to jump into a kayak to paddle the Lakeland (there are 188,000), waving to seals as you drift from one gorgeous little speck of an island to the next in Åland on the Baltic. Read More...
