Why it takes a telephone call to reserve a cabin week in Finnish Lapland
You could set up half of this week yourself in one evening. For the rest, the plow arrangement on a private track, the key at nine at night, the wood stacked before you land, the hard half needs a telephone call, and it rings in Finnish. That is the half you are hiring when you reserve a cabin week in Finnish Lapland.
- Starting figure, per person
$3,040
- Nights
- 8
- beds you will learn
- 1
- Country
- Finland
- How much of this you could arrange without us
- the hard half needs a telephone call
Confirmed as a final figure once the supplier holds the dates. Getting to the country is not included.
- Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
- No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
- A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.
The half you could do at your own table
Start with the part that is not ours. Your own flights are your own affair. The cabin has an owner who reads English and answers inside a day or two. A car can be reserved on a website in four minutes. Do that much and you have the visible half of the week in hand.
What is left is telephone work, in Finnish, with people who publish no email address at all. The last 4 km to the door, about two and a half miles, is a private track, and it stays open only because somebody keeps an arrangement with the man who ploughs it after every fall over about 15 cm. Firewood is ordered by the cubic meter and wants stacking before you land. The well pump has to be run and bled after a long empty spell. Somebody nine kilometers away has to agree to hold the second key on a night when your plane is two hours late.
We make those calls and we write down who promised what. The supplier settles a commission with us afterwards. You pay this office nothing at any stage, and no card number ever passes through it.
Sixty-eight degrees north, and what it costs you in daylight
The cabin stands a little above 68 degrees north in the western arm of Lapland, 27 km beyond the village of Muonio and 110 km from the nearest airport, which is an hour and a half in winter conditions. That puts it some 180 km inside the Arctic Circle, and at this latitude the sky does the deciding.
Around the turn of the year the sun does not clear the horizon at all for about three weeks. That is not the same thing as darkness. Midday still gives some four hours of blue light, enough to ski by without a lamp, and clean snow gives back most of what little there is. By late February the sun is up seven hours and gaining about six minutes a day.
The cold is dry and arrives without much wind. January and February sit between minus 10 and minus 25 Celsius, which is 14 down to minus 13 Fahrenheit, and most winters put in a week at minus 30. Snow lies from late October into mid May; by March it is 70 to 90 cm on the level and shoulder high where the plow has thrown it.
The road to the village is plowed and gritted and never salted, because salt gives up below about minus 7. Reindeer stand on that road at dusk and will not move for headlights. The country counts some 3,000 collisions with them in a year, and you are required to report one, however small it looks.
Wood, water, and the two hours before the car will start
The stove is masonry and takes two loads a day, one about seven and one about four, three armfuls each. The mass holds heat for eight hours after the flame is out, so the knack is feeding it before the room cools rather than after. The sauna is wood fired and wants 45 minutes to an hour to come up, which is why people light it when they get back rather than when they want it.
Water comes from a drilled well with an electric pump. When the power drops, and once or twice a winter it does, the pump stops and you carry from a hole in the lake ice that you keep open with a chisel each morning. Sixty centimetres of ice takes some persuading if you leave it two days.
Then the car. A block heater hangs on a post by the door with a timer on it. At minus 25 you give the engine two hours on that socket before you turn the key, and if you forget you wait, because there is nothing else to be done about it. Studded tires are legal from the first of November and are on the car when it is handed over. Locks freeze; you learn to carry a lighter in a pocket rather than in a bag.
Ten in the morning until the light goes flat
There is no program, and the week will not fill itself. A maintained ski track passes about 1.5 km from the door and runs 12 km out to a shelter with a fire ring at the door of it. Snowshoes take you off that track into ground nobody has crossed since the last fall, which in practice means since yesterday.
A day goes like this. Light the stove, eat, out by ten, three hours on skis or snowshoes while the light is blue and the sun is low, back before three when it goes flat. Sauna at four. Cook. Read. Dark and silent by five, and the silence is thorough in a way that takes some people two days to stop minding.
Ice fishing needs no permit on most water here: an auger, a short rod and patience through 60 cm of ice. One day of the eight goes on the shop run, 54 km there and back, with the list written the night before.
On clear nights people put a coat on and stand in the yard. The lights are reported over this latitude on a great many nights a year, and cloud pays no attention to that figure. Of eight night stays, some get four showings, some get one at two in the morning through thin cloud, some get none at all.
Who this suits, and who should take a different week
From $3,040 per person across eight nights. That holds the cabin to yourselves for the whole week and covers the plowing arrangement, firewood delivered and stacked, linen, the end clean, and a car on winter tires waiting when you land. It does not cover your flights, fuel, food, or whatever you decide on once you are up there. The number is confirmed in writing at the point of reservation, on the owner's contract rather than ours; our part is reading it back to you in English before you agree to anything.
It suits two people who can spend eight days in each other's company with no schedule, who cook, who read, and who do not object to the day ending at three in the afternoon.
It does not suit anyone who wants dinner out at seven, anyone traveling with somebody who cannot cross packed ice to a car in the dark, or anyone who has promised a child a green sky on Thursday. If your dates are locked to one week and the whole reason for going is the light, we would sooner say that now than take the reservation and hope.
Tell us what you are after in your own words and we will say which half of it we are any use for.
Short answers to the usual doubts
Can you reserve our flights to Finland?
No, and not as a matter of convenience. Carriage by air and by sea sits outside what this office does at all: we hold no agreement with any airline or shipping company, so the flying stays in your name from reservation to boarding, and so does any change to it. What we will do is read your times and say whether the arrival leaves daylight for the drive north or hands you ninety minutes of grit road in the dark. If those times move, tell us that day, because the key and the car both hang off them.
Will we see the northern lights?
We do not know, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Two things have to line up: the sky has to be active and it also has to be clear, and this far north the second one is what usually fails. Nothing in the price is attached to the lights and nothing in the week falls apart without them, which is the only sensible way to sell eight nights under a sky nobody controls. Plan the week for the snow and treat the rest as weather.
Could we do this without hiring a car?
Not in any form we would want to arrange for you. A long distance coach runs the main road once or twice a day, and the track to the cabin leaves that road nine kilometers short of the door. The village and its shop are 27 km the other way. In deep cold the car is also shelter, and it is how 40 kg of firewood and groceries gets home. If you would rather not drive on winter roads, this is the wrong week, and there is no version of it that works on foot.
If something goes wrong at eleven at night, who actually answers?
The neighbor who lives nine kilometers down the track, holds the second key, and whose number sits on the kitchen table when you walk in. That is the honest answer for a power cut or a door that will not shut at eleven at night. This office is in Kansas City, eight hours behind you, so eleven at night up there is three in the afternoon here, which is convenient more often than not. Anything to do with money, dates or a change to the reservation comes to us, and we deal with it inside the working day.