JPFreek - Index

JPFreek - Spring 2008 - Index

Destination
North:A A Sub-Zero Adventure
Text and photos by Hendrick de Backer
Spur of the moment! In October 2007, a trip to Morocco
we had been planning for a few months turned out to be
difficult and impossible to accomplish. We needed a new
destination to test out our 2007 Wrangler Rubicon
Unlimited, and It didn’t take long to decide that turning
the map upside down would offer a nice alternative:
going north, up to the Arctic Circle in Finland. So, a few
nice ingredients for an interesting journey came
together: a cool destination, a three-week holiday, and
an opportunity to drive our Red Rubicon Unlimited to
get us there.
We decided to plot an initial route by boat from
Germany to Helsinki, starting with an 800-kilometer
drive to the Lubeck Harbor. Then, a 27-hour boat trip
would deliver us to the south of Finland. From Helsinki
on, we would travel upward along the west coast of
Finland for a week and a half to reach the Arctic Circle
near Rovaniemi. We would then descend back down the
western border of Russia and relax with the rental of a
traditional Finnish cottage (with a sauna, near a lake) for
a week of rest and calmness in between.
The boat journey is great; only a few non-commercial
passengers sail on what essentially is a cargo vessel for
trucks and containers. Internet onboard and in the
cabins provides us with a great planning tool for the
journey ahead, plenty of time to spend on reading travel
journals, and even learning a few words of Finnish.
Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of
languages of which the only related modern language is
… Hungarian. Luckily, most of the younger Finnish
people speak English very well.