Things to do in Saariselkä

Saariselkä is a small tourist village in mountainous northern Finland which offers a beautiful landscape, various snow-based activities to get involved in and, of course, an opportunity to see the Northern Lights.

1. Freeze to death

This is the Arctic Circle, which means temperatures that will probably freeze urine in your urethra if you ever found yourself unable to find a toilet. Temperatures are typically about -15°C, regularly dipping below -20°C without including wind chill. There’s not much difference between day and night because, let’s face it, Saariselkä’s feeble winter sun is nothing more than a symbolic gesture. As long as you’re dressed in warm water and windproof clothes, you’ll barely feel the elements, especially when you’re working up a sweat climbing up hills or racing through (and inevitably followed by tripping into) foot-thick snow. Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee you’ll stay warm if, say, when opening the door to your cabin the key breaks inside the lock and you have to wait an hour outside for some guys to jimmy the door open with a crowbar. Making things worse is imagining the sauna that you could’ve been in all this time rather than staving off frostbite while you try to pry the key out with a Swiss army knife.

2. Toboggan down a slope

Making gravity do all the hard work for you has always been entertaining. The problem arises when you’re careering down a slope at ridiculous speeds but you suddenly need to steer to avoid an impromptu meeting with a tree, which is a lot less trivial for a beginner than those little Finnish kids whizzing past you make it seem. Or more awkwardly, you could be on a collision course with someone walking up the slope who dodges left and right to avoid you, much like trying not to walk into someone in a street, except at much higher speed. You use your legs to dig into the snow, which works rather well except it then throws a load of snow straight into your face, blinding you and making you feel like you’ve just been socked in the face by a snowman.

3. Go snowmobiling

Riding machines with motors not much smaller than themselves is always a laugh tinged with the risk of forcing you to ride a wheelchair forever after. Several companies offer snowmobile trips outside town to get a better glimpse of the Northern Lights that are pretty safe since you’re stuck behind whoever’s behind you and no room to overtake. It’s a bit like being in traffic but with better scenery. Except you can just slow right down, build up a bit of distance between the vehicle in front and then slam on the accelerator if you feel like the ride is too pedestrian for you. Just keep your eyes peeled for the stop signs where roads cross the path, because if you’re crossing those at 60 kilometres an hour when a car is coming down the road like I did, there’s no chance in hell either of you are going to brake in time on snow and ice. There is also the hazard of doing this down a stretch that isn’t quite as flat as you thought, which results in the snowmobile rocking side-to-side momentarily losing contact with the ground, making you shit bricks for a few seconds as you prepare to flip over. Apart from that though, it’s perfectly safe, I swear.

4. Eat reindeer

Yeah, they’re cute; get over it and tuck in. You’d expect it to taste a bit like venison but instead has a mild beef flavour, which isn’t that exciting but beef is just as expensive there so why not? Besides, you can sing Jingle Bells in a maniacal voice between mouthfuls of braised reindeer, pretending you’re eating Rudolph or Blitzen. If that doesn’t take your fancy, you can get it in pretty much any other form: smoked (utterly delicious with sautéed potatoes and cheese), thinly sliced and cured (or eaten frozen) - even canned.

5. Burn money

It seems like a common theme among Nordic countries that the price of everything is as if they’re using the notes to fuel a smelter to melt the coins into model reindeer. A simple reindeer burger will set you back €5, while a proper meal is a “good deal” at about €13. You may want to pack your suitcase with food to make things more affordable, which has surprisingly little shame to it given how much you‘ll save. Oh, and if you want to get festive bring a bottle - there’s a monopoly on the Finnish spirit industry pushing a litre of vodka up to about £40.

6. See the Northern Lights

Strictly speaking, you don’t need to go to Finland, or even Northern Europe for this. On occasion there’s enough solar activity to make the Aurora Borealis visible as far south as Newcastle, which is somewhat galling for anyone who travelled specifically to see them. Nevertheless, they are pretty much what you expect them to be: green, wispy cloud-like formations that dance across the sky that take your breath away if the -20°C air doesn’t do that already. If you book more than a week in advance it suddenly becomes a bit of a lottery whether you see them owing to weather conditions. Thankfully, Saariselkä has enough to offer to make the trip worth it in the event clouds do ruin your day, as if they’ve sensed that you’ve come from England.

7. Buy racistly-advertised child toys

Good luck working out what emotion that facial expression (bottom right image) is meant to convey. The racism isn’t immediately evident until you notice the chain round his neck which either implies he’s too poor to afford even a gold-plated one (damn you, Finnish income tax!) or that he’s meant to be a slave. What we can definitely infer though is that Finnish children get mad amounts of pocket money: you need at least €20 to get all ten grills.

8. Throw your circadian rhythm into chaos

The good thing about long nights during winter is that you get a huge window to see the Northern Lights. The bad thing is that the day lasts maybe four hours in January which means that the Sun pops up slowly, only to come back down before it has a chance to go from red to yellow. The result is looking up at the sky and having no idea whether it’s sunrise or sunset, and when you’re out hiking in the wilderness constantly wondering whether you’ve wandered past the border into Russia, it’s easy to lose all sense of time.

9. Pretend you’re on an alien planet.

First, you have the Finnish language: it’s hopelessly unlike any European one apart from some in the Baltic countries, but nobody cares about those. It can be rather frustrating being unable to make heads or tails of it if you have a general knowledge of a wide range of European languages, but in practice you’ll have no trouble because everyone speaks English there. Throw in the clouds that glow orange from the lights below, tree lines in the horizon that look like cloud cover at night and everything on the ground glazed with snow and you have yourself the perfect setting for a sci-fi flick.