Back from Holiday Again (part 5)

Two nights in Espoo gave us a chance to visit Hvittrask, a collection of houses built by the Finnish architects and designers Geselius, Lindgren and Saarinen, of which the most famous is probably Eliel Saarinen, father of another architect Eero Saarinen. The buildings are in what we would call the "Arts and Crafts" style and only open for a few days each week. Before emigrating to the USA, Eliel's most significant design was probably for the railway station in Helsinki which has been said to have formed the basis for the design of Gotham City in the Batman films. 

Son Eero made his name in the US, with numerous well known designs, of which the most significant are the Gateway Arch in St Louis and the TWA terminal at JFK airport.

The front of Saarinen's house at Hvittrask

Looking at the house from the side garden

Some of the design detail inside the house. In such a cold winter climate, fireplaces become important 

The main sitting room in the the house. There is a curious blend of styles with (at least to me) influences of Gaudi and William Morris

Helsinki's railway station as designed by Saarinen senior. It is a stunning design

The main entrance under the arch is bordered by two figures on either side each holding a globe, more detail of which can be seen in the picture below

 What to do next? We found a car museum with this parked outside!

A long way from home and it only has one previous owner. Inside, the museum is huge with cars on two floors. The exhibits are not pristine, but represent what the cars would have been like when nearly new. Here's just a small selection of what we found:

Dating from the end of the 1940s, the DKW Schnellaster was a mixture of the ancient and modern. An ancient pre-war 2-stroke engine provided power for the monocoque body that featured trailing arm suspension. I can remember these still smoking their way through Germany in the early 1980s

NSU designed their K70 to complement their rotary engined Ro80, but having run out of money were acquired by VW, hence the badges on this, the first front engined, water cooled VW . Having also acquired DKW and Auto-Union, a new company, Audi, emerged and the design of the original Audi 80 and first generation VW Passat can be seen in the K70

Citroen's management obviously permitted their designers free rein when deigning their "Ami" model, a larger version of the 2CV. For many years in the 60s, this was the biggest selling car in France. Pity Citroens are now just bland boxes - much better when they had some individuality.

1970s Datsun 100A Cherry. At one time, these were seen everywhere, often as cheap second cars, but they didn't like salt on the roads and the body work rapidly returned to its organic origin

Morris Marina 1.8TC - one of the world's most maligned cars. Yes - it wasn't anything special, but it was designed in no time on a shoestring and stayed in production for too long. But it did sell in large numbers to both fleet and private buyers and wasn't really that much worse than the opposition of the time. The press hated it due to the original front suspension design, but this was improved prior to production even if the 1.8 litre cars did prefer to continue straight on at corners.

Originally an Opel design, this was built by Moskvitch as their 400 model, basically claiming the Opel design and tooling as war reparations.

Rear engined and with a body design by Giovanni Michelotti, the BMW 700 was pretty much the model that saved the company. It set the style for BMW from the 60s and if you look at it quickly, there is a slight hint of the Triumph Herald, also designed by Michelotti to it.

Back from Holiday Again (part 4)

Leaving Savonlinna, we were heading to Espoo via Kotka and Porvoo. Here's the route. You'll notice that we came within spitting distance of the Russian border. When we did this same journey in 1981, we noticed that many of the trees along the road had the Finnish flag colours painted on them, presumably in case anyone got lost?

First stop was Kerimaki, home to the largest wooden Church (pause, Jeremy Clarkson style)... in the World. It could well be the biggest wooden building in the World. The risks with mixing wooden buildings with candles are obvious. Once again, the belfry is a separate building but on the same scale as the main building.

This building isn't big, it is **HUGE**.  Rumours abound that there were errors in the plans with feet and metres being muddled, but this it seems wasn't the case. Instead, the idea was to allow for everyone from the surrounding area to meet on market days and so a building that was substantially larger than the local population would suggest was built.

Inside, looking up to the pipes of the organ

 Onwards to Porvoo for a wander around the old town, preserved as originally built in wood. A selection of images from wandering around are below. Although it was a bright and sunny day, the blue skies are a little enhanced as I had a polarising filter on the camera.

Stand by for part 5.

Back from Holiday Again (part 3)

Now we're heading off to Savonlinna and with the aid of a sat-nav, this time we know how far we have to travel! The route according to Google, via the town of Joensuu is here. The reason for the detour is two-fold: first we never go back the same way as we came and secondly, with most of the day to spare, we wanted to find something to visit on the way. A botanical garden in the far north sounded interesting. There we found a tropical house and a desert house. I don;t think I would like their heating bill for the winter, but flying around freely inside were a number of large butterflies.

We found our hotel in the centre of Savonlinna without problem and went for a walk before finding somewhere for dinner.

Looking over the town across the lake. Our hotel is the blue and pink building at the end of the bridge with a view across the lake. A bonus as I'd only booked the most basic room, but a smile and a friendly chat with the receptionist frequently results in the keys for a room upgrade.

A restaurant just around the corner provided a typically Nordic meal of fried fish, washed down with the local beer at (gulp!) £6 for a 33cl bottle. Next morning, we walked around the lake to Olavinlinna Castle, originally built by the Swedes to keep out the Russians, then as the border moved back and forth prior to Finland becoming a sovereign country, it switched between Swedish and Russian control before becoming redundant as a military asset and ending up as a cultural centre, most famous for an Opera Festival annually and occasional jazz festivals. There's a few images of the castle below:





 

Then, wandering around afterwards, we came across a selection of historic boats that form part of a cultural museum. Much later in the day, we discovered that we were supposed to have purchased a ticket to visit the boats. One is an express service passenger ship that came to an unfortunate end in 1898 when it was rammed and sank and the other is a steam powered timber barge

Salama, which means "Lightning" in English was built to carry up to 60 passengers on lake services until accidentally rammed and sunk

The stern of Salama which  was raised in 1971 from where it had been sunk and has now been restored

"Mikko" is a timber carrying steam powered lake freighter dating from 1914. Its main purpose was the carriage of lumber for construction and of firewood around the lakes

"Savonlinna" is another of the museum's collection, but was moored in the town on the day of our visit and surprisingly is newer than Salama despite appearances. Its main task was as passenger transport to Savonlinna, particularly bring guests to the spas in the area,

 After two days, we moved on again for two nights at Espoo, a modern suburban development to the west of Helsinki built around an historic settlement dating back to the Middle Ages. The area is a curious mix of modern concrete suburbia and typical Nordic countryside with trees, water and huge outcrops of granite. There are few hotels in the area and we managed to find one that is actually a massive, impersonal conference centre that is of a style that makes the former Tricorn building in Portsmouth appear to have a beauty of its own! It was just for two nights.

The journey to Espoo and what we did next will be told in the next instalment.

Back from Holiday Again (part 2)

We were halfway between two large towns. I use the word "large" in a comparative sense, of course... to the south of us, around 50 kms away was Kuopio famous for being a port on the lake waterway system and a location for ski-ing and to the north, about the same distance, was Iisalmi.

First trip was into Kuopio and first stop the observation tower located on a hill overlooking a large ski-jump.

Luckily, there is a lift that takes you up the tower to the obligatory cafe and observation areas, one inside and the other outside - but carrying a warning that the wind might be strong. And they were not kidding! 

About as tall as Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower, on top of a hill and with nothing higher until you reach the Urals to the east and probably the Rockies to the West, I can confirm it was windy. Enough to blow you over. We went back to the inside viewing area, so you'll excuse the next couple of pictures being taken through the glass.

View from the tower, looking vaguely north. Our cottage is more or less on the horizon towards the left of the view

Looking over the town of Kuopio and the lakes

Next stop - let's investigate the possibility of a lake steamer trip. Out of luck as it is Monday and Monday is maintenance day... But that means a couple of boats are tied up, ready to be photographed. Bonus!

Hopefully we'll get a boat trip later in the week. Next, we head north to Iisalmi, where the only location of interest seems to be a brewery museum. That was worth a visit we thought...

Amongst the many exhibits in the brewery museum is this 1920s Ford model T based delivery truck

...and outside is this large brewing vat that has been adopted into some form of sculpture

So, now having gone south and north, logically the next trip took us east to a resort of Tahko. While a ski resort in summer doesn't sound too promising, we'd read that the ski lift operated during the summer to allow the opportunity to walk along the summit and enjoy the views. Well, despite earlier comments about heatwaves, it was absolutely pee'ing down with rain and cold. That just left a trip to the west.

Which took us to the highest waterfall in Finland, Korkeakoski, accessed via the small town of Maaninka. Another "blink and you'll miss it" town, but home to an interesting wooden Lutheran church.  There will be a couple more of these later in the trip.

We later discovered that the churches are built huge so that they could accommodate the entire population of the surrounding area on market days. With wood being the most common building material, fire is a continual risk and as a consequence, most churches have the bell tower built separately to avoid the risk of the bells falling.

The waterfall is the sort where the water tumbles over a steep rocky incline into a wide gorge, so the only option is to descend via a wooden staircase that has been provided for the old and doddery like us. It is about 300 steps top to bottom. And then back up again! Unfortunately, it is a hot spot for mosquitoes. An Finnish mozzies are vicious little beasts!

Ann puts her Girl Guide experience to good use

One of the things about being this far north is that it doesn't get dark at night. Although not strictly far enough north to be in the Land of the Midnight Sun, the darkest it gets is approaching dusk in the UK, as the next picture shows:

For those of us living at more southerly latitudes, it is hard to believe that this is about as dark as it gets. The sun has just dropped below the horizon and will reappear in about 2 hours

And, at last, the promised boat trip! Just a 90 minute trip from Kuopio on board "Koski" as seen earlier. When you consider how much of the country is actually water, it becomes obvious that using the water was the obvious way to travel.

Looking back over Kuopio as we head out across the lake.

Passing a private island with a nice house and summer house / sauna down by the lake.

With our week at the cottage now over, the next leg of our trip took us to Savonlinna in the south east of the country. Savonlinna was once the border between Russia and Sweden and so is home to a very large castle that now hosts an annual Opera Festival (which we missed) and is a nice touristy town. For us, it was a return visit. When we were living in Finland, we had read about a boat festival being held one weekend in Savonlinna and so thought we'd make a visit, completely forgetting to take account of the scale of the map. It's around 250 miles each way from Helsinki and in 1981, not only were there no motorways of any substance, there weren't many dual carriageways. We got there just in time to turn around and head back, so this time we put a little more planning into the trip.

Back from Holiday Again (part 1)

My regular reader will recall me writing back in October last year about booking a holiday in Finland. we're now back from just over two weeks in that glorious and under-rated country, so it is time to update the blog...

It was May 1981 when I first visited Finland. I had taken a job with an industrial company called "Nokia" who at the time no-one outside of the Nordic countries had ever heard of. This was long before their moment of fame with the mobile phone. In fact, Nokia only got into the phone business by purchasing another Finnish company called "Mobira". I was shipped out to Helsinki for 3 weeks for induction training and later that same year, Ann and I spent the best part of 3 months there on an assignment. We said that one day we'd go back for a holiday and having been scorched last year in the deserts of the south western USA, we thought somewhere a little cooler might be a good idea. With between 20 and 22 hours of sun, although the Finnish summer is quite short it warms up quickly and with great timing, we went during a heatwave, although we did experience some cool evenings and wet days but then we were as far north as Iceland.

We decided on a week in a rented cottage in the middle of Finland followed by a slow meander back to Helsinki for a further 4 days calling in at the small town of Savonlinna on the way.

Despite my extreme dislike of flying, there isn't really an alternative now that all the ferry routes from the UK to Scandinavia have been withdrawn. Having flown well over a million miles during my working life, it isn't that I am frightened of flying, more that I dislike airports and all the hanging around. And this is despite usually being able to find a deal and upgrading to sit at the front of the plane...

The flight is around 3 hours duration and with a two hour time difference, it takes half a day to get there. Having collected our rental car, it was a little way north to the town of Jarvenpaa for the first night. The car was interesting - the first time I have ever driven a hybrid and the lack of engine noise when you "start" is quite disconcerting. 

Next morning, the journey north started, but not before a visit to a local landmark - the home of probably the only Finn that most people will be able to name - Jean Sibelius. Those who have ever watched "The Sky at Night" or the old "This Week" programmes on the telly will be familiar with his music even if you hadn't previously realised it.

The main building, chez Sibelius

...and the summer house in the garden containing the sauna

Having ticked this off the list, we pointed the car northwards along this route with a couple of stops along the way.

Our cottage fully met expectations. Rather than being a sterile holiday let, it is the owner's summer cottage that he lets out when not using it and comes with an encouraging note to use it as though it were your own home and just to replace anything that you use while staying there.

The main cottage building. The upper floor has two large bedrooms, but a low roof so we just used the downstairs room

Not just a barbecue, but a wooden gazebo with barbecue, hotplate, smoker and a couple of other cooking things like a wok burner and paella cooker. The building in the background is one of the log stores.

Even summer cottages need a "summer house", so here was ours, overlooking the lake. A simple sitting room and a wood fired sauna.

The sitting room in the summer house

And the sauna. We managed around 75 Celsius, but declined the opportunity of a dip in the lake to cool off

The view over the lake from the summer house. We even had our own private beach!

Next instalment: Our week being tourists around Kuopio.