Cold wind blows

Week 3 of my Lapland visit has gone by really quickly, on the job we have had plenty of visitors 6 days a week so besides work there haven't been much time to do anything else.
The weather haven't been very merciful here, if it wasn't close to -30C it was snowing a lot. On worst occasions both.


I'm starting to finally memorize many of the reindeers names and learning their personalities.

Few of the bigger and wilder ones have put out a real nice struggle at the times when we try to harness them for sledges. Unlike huskies, these animals ain't too excited to work and when a 120 kg animal decides to put up a fight it takes a lot of dedication to work with it. Luckily I have learned quickly to read when they are about to make a move and witch ones are more likely to do so.

It's also nice to see that the calves are finally starting to get used to humans and getting little bit braver everyday. One of them even now came to meet me when it was feeding time and ate from my hand.

People are strange

We also got our first non-UK group too, a group of 4 Germans. Their English wasn't so great so keeping the tour speeches was little bit more awkward than usual as I needed to simplify and slow down my English a lot and keep an eye on their reactions to make sure they understood at least some of it. But in the end they seemed like nice folk and even tipped pretty well.

The feedback from all the groups been pretty much just positive, nobody hasn't yet made a single complaint and most of visitors have left the farm with smiles on their faces. So I guess I'm doing something right here.

Was also nice to finally get some younger people on the tour groups too. Out here where I'm pretty much surrounded by just same couple of faces it can get a bit lonely so a girl's pretty smile always helps to go on another day.

Hit the road

To get some fresh scenery we took a road trip to the arctic sea on a day when we had only a single tour in the morning. We drove 200 km north to the Norway and right from the border the scenery already started to change drastically. Where on Finland's side it was mostly flat and desolate, on Norway there was mountains and hills all around us.

When we finally reached the arctic sea it was already getting very dark so we didn't spent there too long and just decided to turn back after a while, still the trip itself was really refreshing.

Hard working hardly working man

Now that I've spent the first week on my new job and I think it's good time to share my experiences about life here so far.

First of all I just have to praise the scenery in here! Sun is out only for few hours every day so basically we only got sunrise and sunset, both of them painting the horizon in beautiful colors. From the window of the house I can see nothing but trees and few hills covered in snow.

Reindeers enjoying the few glimpses of sun we get

First contact with reindeers was interesting, they really proved to be fascinating creatures. Each and every one of them seemed to have unique personality. I got to feed them and learned how to strap the sledge on them them and then I got to steer the sledge over the frozen river that goes between Finland and Sweden.

The reindeer really got into a nice trot after a while and even the owners dog Nasse couldn't keep up with it when it was on full speed. The steering was surprisingly easy as the reindeer mostly new the route and followed old sledge path.

I also got to play around little with a snowmobile and a ATV. Both witch I found to be really awesome toys for a grown up man.

The tours

View inside the Kota hut where
I keep my tour speech in

Tours usually follow the same formula, first I welcome the group to the farm, trow few bits of information about it and introduce our staff.

Then we usually split the group in half if there is over 12 people and half of them go for a half an hour reindeer sledge ride with the other guide while I tell the other group about the reindeers on our Kota tent while we grill reindeer sausages.

Then we do the same again with the other halves of groups and at the end of the tour visitors get to steer the reindeer all by them self.

The first tour went actually pretty well considering that everything I knew about the reindeers or Sami people was studied in one day. The first group even tipped me and they really seemed to enjoy their tour!

On the second tour one of the visitors even said "It really shows that you have grown up in here with these animals, you really are professional and enthusiastic about your work", to witch I had no chance but to smile and nod while trying not to smirk like a fool and laugh. It was a good illusion to give.

The training

Few days later it was more quiet day, only one tour group so we got some spare time to train the new reindeers that have been brought from the woods just few days earlier and haven't been used to the presence of humans before.

When approached these new ones went into panic and started circling around the poles they we're attached to like crazy. We just had to bravely go in dodging the rope and the reindeers antlers when releasing them from the posts before we took them out for walks.

This guy really was a handful of
work to walk

It became clear why we train them young pretty quickly, these animals can really put up a fight when they feel threatened. They punch with their hind legs and push with their antlers.

I found all 5 that we took for walks to have very different personality. The first one i took for one was too afraid to move and didn't take a single step himself. He just stood there and if i loosened the rope at all he took a huge leap to the deeper snow and tried to wrestle himself free. When I got close he just totally froze from fear and didn't move at all when i patted him.

My new favorite Reindeer

Then there was a complete opposite of that, one with a white fur gave a good beating if you wasn't careful but once you got to moving with him he walked very nicely behind and didn't resist too much.

I instantly started liking this one, it had some attitude and wild spirit in him.

Free time

After work there wasn't much to do around here. Distances are too great and there are very few people actually living around here. Sometimes the evenings can be little boring and I can see why some people fall to drinking quite often around here. My phones internet even refuses to work with my computer and on the phone itself working veeeeeery slowly, i mean loading a single picture for a minute.

Well luckily my flatmate has a portable modem that I get to borrow sometimes and I just ordered my own too witch will arrive sometime next week.

Good thing about this is that I have more time to get things actually done, I just found a good workout that I can do without gym equipment (Convict Conditioning).

On the first weekend the British seasonal guides held a party at the place they are staying witch was pretty nice. Got to meet few locals too since there isn't much else going on around the place, There isn't even a single bar in this town that Finnish are allowed anymore because of past mishaps they have had :)

Call of the Lapland

I graduated on 22th of December and was unemployed since that day.
I did my best to find suitable work on tourism industry with no luck. I didn't want a steady nine-to-five office job sitting on a computer all day answering phone or emails, not after I've just spent four months working in hostel and found out that I love to work face-to-face with people.

So with that in mind I tried applying to pretty much every hostel in Helsinki and many tour guide operators, but with no luck. Most places have their recruitment in spring and fall, and being unemployed for that long would mean canceling all my plans for the summer.

So i broadened my search to rest of the Finland, especially Lapland since in there the tourist season was still on.

I sent multiple applications that evening and the very next day I got a call from one of the places.
They needed a English talking tour guide and a reindeer herder quickly. I had no experience at all on working with animals and only seen reindeer few times on the mall during holiday season.
But somehow idea of it seemed so crazy that it felt like a experience, so I took the job.

The next day I spent packing my backpack and day after that I was already on my way to the far side of the Finland, 1050 kilometers up north. Many of my friends we're sad that I was going away again, I had returned from my last 4 month trip just less than a month ago.
I still feel sad that I didn't get to spent enough time or even meet all of my friends before my departure.

The housing I live in is around 20 kilometers from the farm I work in and there is basically no public transportation around the areas so I am really depending on the rides from my co-worker and flatmate.
Even the closest store is around 25 kilometers away.

Here I am truly in middle of nowhere on my standards.