It's 8:00 in the morning. In a sleepy village at the end of the world, with a few houses, a petrol station and two supermarkets, we are waiting for the bus. A few kilometres from the border with Norway, fifteen kilometres from the Arctic Ocean and about 500 kilometres beyond the Arctic Circle. Instead of a bus, a van for some twenty people arrives, and two children run out of a house by the roadside, heading for school. They will be our only passengers on the three-hour journey back to the airport in the Lapland town of Ivalo, where our journey through the wilderness began a week ago.

Forests and lakes pass by outside the window, the driver occasionally brakes hard and jerks the wheel to avoid the ubiquitous reindeer. I think about the past few days and it all seems absolutely unbelievable. I come back from places where there is no one and nothing. No settlements, no people, no roads. From places with untouched nature, where the lakes and rivers have water so clear you can just lean over the edge of the boat and drink. Where the forests are full of pines and birches, blueberries, cranberries, mushrooms, and basically everything one needs to live.

I'm returning from places where night doesn't come in summer, where there is no signal or internet, where time passes slowly and everything is kind of normal.
And I already know I'm gonna have to come back here.

"Come in the summer, my friend, I've been wanting to do a week-long tour of Lapland for a long time," Alpo tells me on the phone. And a few weeks later, he's out of a small twin-prop plane at Ivalo airport, with reindeer grazing in front of the airport hall, a pack on his back, a few clothes in it, a sleeping bag, a mattress, a packraft, a paddle, a fishing rod and a bottle of rum, because we wouldn't be able to get it in the shops in the evening thanks to Finnish laws. We buy more food for the week, about a kilo per person per day, according to Alpo's belief, and get going.

Vätsäri spoiled with sun

The area is located in the north-eastern part of Finnish Lapland. It is a roughly 50 km wide and 120 km long strip of land located between Route 92 leading north from Inari and the Russian and Norwegian borders. Apart from the towns of Ivalo, where there is an airport, and the aforementioned Inari, there are only a few small settlements along the road and a few cottages scattered mainly on the shores and islands of Finland's third largest lake of the same name, Inari. Otherwise nothing. No one even lives in the northern part of this piece of the world, which is called Vätsäri. The last person to live here permanently died in 1985.

"I'll put the other bag on," Alpo says, and I try to fit mine into the trunk of the small Volkswagen, which still has two rifles in its packaging. We hitch a ride in the only car that evening, heading from Ivalo to Nellim, the last village on our route. There were more cars here two years ago, but the road goes over the Russian border and the crossing is now closed due to the political situation. Our driver is a woman in her sixties or so and plans to shoot a bear. In fact, she has obtained one of the four permits that are given annually for bears in this area. "Are paws really the best part of a bear?" I ask, informed by Sam Hawkins' backwoods knowledge from the first episode of Vinnetou. The lady just smiles, uncomprehendingly - a bear is no great treat. There are only a few of them in the whole vast area we're heading to, I'm told. Apart from them, there are also several wolf packs, reindeer, elk, a few species of smaller mammals and, of course, endless fish and birds.

Around ten o'clock we jump out of the car on the shore of the lake, in a few minutes we have our boats inflated and in an hour of paddling we are already setting up the tent and starting the first fire on a nameless island full of pine trees and blueberries. It's a light twilight, the sky is tinted red and, wonder of wonders, there are no mosquitoes...

"I'll try to go as long as possible without a mosquito net over my face, but you'd better buy one," Alpo advises when planning our expedition. "When the mosquitoes are at their worst, you slap yourself on the shoulder and then run your palm across your arm to your wrist and feel the flesh of dozens of mosquitoes roll down your arm. Short shirt and shorts are useless or they'll eat you alive. Don't forget a sleeping bag for zero and rain gear. If we're unlucky, it'll be really cold at night and it could rain for a week."
Whether it's ever really that bad in Lapland, I don't know. When I got off the plane, all the passengers were taking pictures of the thermometer at the airport, which read 33 degrees. It had rained for about 3 hours in total all week and we hardly saw a mosquito. The ground was more than ready for an experience to remember.

College of Forestry

The first morning is indescribable. I open my eyes, the sun is high above the horizon, glistening in the clear water of the lake. You'd think it would be noon, but it's only six o'clock. I can see all this from the warmth of my sleeping bag, because Alpo's tent has two of its four walls made only of netting. He made it himself, it weighs well under a kilo and fits in his jacket pocket. It's not self-supporting, though, and needs to be pitched between two trees, or at least a tree and a paddle, but otherwise it's the best tent I've ever slept in. "When I was about eighteen, I didn't have a dime and I desperately needed a bivy sack. So I took my mother's sewing machine and sewed it," is Alpo's simple answer when asked where he learned to sew. And it certainly doesn't end with the tent.

A thirty-year-old waterproof pack without a waist belt and any pockets, a sleeping pad and a life jacket in one, a quarter-century-old goretex jacket that Alpo had covered with silicone after it started to leak. "Now it's waterproof forever, it just doesn't breathe - when I'm hot, I just open the zipper and that's it..." And on his feet, ordinary rubber boots for ten €. "You can't get better shoes, any other kind will always get wet eventually, because you can't avoid stepping in the lake when you're constantly getting out and into the boat." Alpo's gear looks ridiculous at first glance, but every piece of it is tested by years of wilderness movement, so it ends up playfully pocketing all my brand new modern outdoor gear from reputable brands.

Lapanese mushrooms with garlic

The first days are marked by the conquest of the huge Lake Inari. We paddle along the rugged coastline, between islands and here and there we take a short cut across the mainland, when we don't feel like paddling around the peninsula. We jump out of the boat, throw our packs on our backs and drag the packrafts behind us on a line like dogs. Over blueberries, roots, rocks. There are no roads. I remember the first time I rode my packraft on the Vltava with my son, I cursed every touch of the boat with a rock on the bottom and feared I would puncture the packraft. Now I'm mercilessly smashing it through the woods and I don't worry about it. It's really holding up.

"This is what it looked like in the Stone Age!" laughs Alpo. After a bath in the icy water, we sit on the hot boulders on the shore without clothes, eat Czech goulash from a bag with Finnish black bread and drink great water straight from the lake. It seems to me at that moment like the absolute pinnacle of freedom - one can do what one wants here, regardless of others. There are no others.

We hear a boat engine about twice on the huge lake, occasionally come across a fire pit and once on an island where a family from Helsinki is camping. "We've been coming here for twenty-five years. At first there were fires blazing on the shores in the evenings, but recently they have disappeared. People seem to have stopped coming for adventure," the tanned woman in her fifties says thoughtfully, while her husband hands us two cold cans of beer. "These are for the road, you'll need them tonight!" He waves until we disappear around the bend of the island.

And the evening really comes in handy. Even though I've never fished before and only had my friend Karel give me a ten-minute fishing lesson the day before we left, we pull a nice pike out of the water in the evening, just big enough for dinner.

"Cut off her head!"
"Yeah, and watch out for the bile!"
The fish skewered on a stick and cooked over coals tastes delicious. And it's free. Actually, it's less than 20 euros; that's the price of a fishing permit for the local lakes.

Sailing the wind

On the third day of the trip, the wind finally starts to blow and it's time to hoist the sails. Sure, you can sail on the packraft. We inflate the sail, tie the boats together and with the chant "What should we do with a drunken sailor?" on our lips, we glide across the open sections of the lake. The next day, Alpo the smoker makes his own sail out of a tent and branches, but it turns out to be damn heavy. At the nearest island he deftly remakes it into a smaller model from my bivvy bag, and it works much better. With the wind at our backs, we finally conquer the end of the lake at the mouth of the Surnukoski River. There is a fairly long rapids and little water.

"Bomb me!" Alpo shouts - he's stuck on a rock somewhere in the middle of the rapids and when I hit him, the boat breaks free. It's like a racetrack. Like little boys, we run up and down the rocks with packrafts. All the way round. Then for dinner at the next rapids there are well-deserved flints and bread cakes on the rocks. After a thirty-mile day, they taste delicious. But I've already told you that.

As we move north, the landscape changes. We jump from lake to lake through forests, which are thinner now. The pines are dwindling and the birches are growing. At the top of Lake Surnujärvi, the landscape is already very open.

"Terve!" comes from the shore. A Finnish greeting from a group of fishermen. They've been dropped off here by seaplane, which is the only way to get to this area if you don't want to make our pilgrimage. "The pilot charged us 100 euros for the trip, but he had to fly three times," explains the inveterately tattooed fat guy, the prototype drummer of a metal band. "The bigger plane costs 300 euros a flight, but the co-pilot just had a falling out with the local clan of families and won't carry tourists." We've heard about that, by the way. The guy says he flies instead to his favorite spot on one of the smaller lakes, where he has built a structure for a sauna out of branches and a huge oven out of rocks. These get hot, a simple tarp is thrown over the structure and the sauna is up and running.

In the heart of Vätsäri

We are in the heart of Vätsäri. With our packrafts on our backs, we wander the open countryside wherever we please. Just follow the stones, the blueberries or the reindeer trails. There are countless of them, just like the reindeer we almost trip over. "They're not too scared, they're not wild animals," explains Alpo as we climb a high fence, one of those that stretch across Lapland. A cluster of Lappish families fence off their reindeer herding territories. "Every spring, they bring all the reindeer from the territory into one fence; the young ones are still with their mothers by then, so each family can mark theirs. Then in the autumn, the whole process is repeated, except that they sort the animals in the pens into those that are headed for slaughter and those that are kept alive," Alpo refutes my assumption about the ferocity of the reindeer.

The journey continues along the Norwegian border through the Routasenjoki river canyon. We run packrafts on jagged rocks, climb over waterfalls, scramble on rocks that form wild rapids in the spring when the snow melts, and even take a ride here and there. Or at least our boats, which we nudge from the shore with our paddles. The water is scarce, but the canyon is really beautiful and the splash is worth it.

The last day arrives and the golden sands of the Uutuanjoki River, which we let drift as far as it will go. Then it's just the last ten kilometres on the road to Näätämö, where a well-deserved Budvar and frozen reindeer meat await us to make a last delicious dinner. The next day we board the bus at 8am and by early evening I'm sitting at a table just outside Prague in the Czech Republic, some 2500 km away eating apricot dumplings. It all seems like a dream to me.

But it wasn't. The place really exists. And it's within arm's reach. Just a two-hour flight to Helsinki and another two to Ivalo. Less than ten thousand for a plane ticket and about a hundred euros for food for a week of wandering. The result is an experience that no travel agency can offer. And with it the realisation that the world is still normal. All you have to do is find it...