HOLIDAYS TO FINLAND

A NEW YEAR BY LAKE INARI

DAY 1 UK - LAPLAND Depart Heathrow at 10.20 on Finnair scheduled flight(s) to Ivalo via Helsinki. Arrive 17.35 local time and transfer to Nellim. Check into your room, welcome drink, programme briefing and dinner.

DAY 2 NELLIM Nellim is home to Skolt and Inari Sami, as well as ethnic Finns, and after breakfast your guide will introduce you to some of them, recalling their antecedence and telling of their contemporary lives. Your walk round the village takes you to a kota, the orthodox church of St Triphon of Petsamo and a reindeer corral, after which you travel by car along the shores of Inari to the Russian border at Ressi. Lunch back at the hotel before an afternoon of games in the snow on the sloping bank running down to the lake with snow shoeing, tobogganing, ice fishing and reindeer lasso throwing practice. Dinner at the hotel.

DAY 3 NEW YEARS EVE After breakfast, climb aboard your snowmobile for a safari through the pine forests surrounding Lake Inari and a lunch of salmon soup washed down with hot berry juice in a clearing in the forest. New Year’s Eve is celebrated around an open fire in a traditional wooden Kota with a menu replete with trout from Lake Inari, King Crab from the Barents Sea and cloudberries from the lake basin. Celebrations are not constrained by time zones: the New Year comes in early for the Skolt, an hour later for the Inari Sami and an hour after that for the Northern Sami. As the evening wears on there will be traditional dishes with Russian, Finnish and Norwegian flavours; fireworks, dancing and fortunes told from the shapes formed by melting tin!

DAY 4 NEW YEARS DAYS Day at leisure with time to either just chill-out or to take an optional husky safari along one of the ancient Skolt Sami trails running through the Inari forest. Dinner at the hotel.

DAY 5 LAPLAND - UK Breakfast and time for a last toboggan before transfer to Ivalo and return flight(s) via Helsinki to Heathrow, departing at 13.20 and arriving at 17.10.

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