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For some reason, until I went to Finland, I’d always thought of snowmobiles as an uninspiring cross between a kiddy’s sled and a ride-on lawnmower. And, thus, I was fairly sure that snowmobiling itself would prove to be no more than a noisy way to rumble across an expanse of frozen tundra with all the swiftness of, say…well…a ride-on lawnmower.

So, I was surprised to find that even a standard hire-out snowmobile could putter along at well over a hundred kilometers an hour. Which - based on the Laplander’s rule of thumb that a sleigh-pulling Rudolph stops for a pee every six kilometers - works out at a speed of somewhere around seventeen ‘reindeer widdles an hour.’ Which is very fast indeed when you’re crouched over the controls of something as squat, unstable and clownish as a golf-buggy on skis. Not that I was ever able to work out exactly what speed my chrome and black machine, with its heated handlebars and burbling engine, actually managed to hit whilst I was at its controls.

“The speedometer doesn’t work,” I pointed out as I brought the snowmobile to a halt after a short, pre-trip test-drive around the dirtied-up snow of the Tahko hotel car-park. Mikko, who was kitting me out for morning’s joyriding over the frozen lakes and through the spruce and birch forests near the Eastern Lakeland town of Kuopio, glanced over at the loops of stop-start skiddings I’d scribbled across the snow in a few brief minutes of high-revving enthusiasm.

He then looked back at me; “Joo, joo, we’ve learnt to disconnect the speedos, otherwise inexperienced riders…” he narrowed his eyes, whilst I shifted uneasily inside my thickly insulated overalls and squinted back at him through the letter-box slot of my crash-helmet’s open visor, “…keep looking down at them to see how fast they’re going, and then, KRAAAASH, they run straight into a tree…” he giggled, “or an elk…” he snickered, “…or Norway…!” He doubled over in laughter.

“You only need to know one thing with snowmobiling, really - only one thing,” Mikko continued when he’d calmed down a bit, “and that is, when you come to a tree make sure that you steer both runners to the same side of the trunk…if you take one runner on either side, then....KRAAASH!” More gasps of laughter condensed from his mouth in the minus 15 centigrade temperature, hanging in the air like cartoon speech bubbles.

Jari Virtanten, who was guiding me around all that Tahko had to offer in the way of snow-based fun, thought all this was pretty hilarious, too. Neither Jari nor Mikko confirmed to the stereotype of the gloomy, reserved, silent Finn, at one with the lemming and the dark silence of the northern winter. Nor, for that matter, did either shown any signs of being only a few bars of Sibelius away from suicide. Rather, both seemed to be exuberant, talkative and outgoing types, if rather too keen on bad jokes with ‘KRAAAASH’ as the punch-line.

Jari, revved up his snowmobile. I did the same and our two machines accelerated towards the horizon like a brace of buzz saws ripping through an infinite sheet of white cartridge paper. I realised, immediately, that I really shouldn’t be enjoy this snowmobiling lark, with all its elk-startling noise, acrid exhaust fumes and hooligan potential for speed. But I was loving it. As we built up speed across the marble smoothness of the lake’s frozen ice and then chicaned up a narrow track between snow-heaped trees I whooped with joy and gunned the engine, forgetting that in Finland snowmobiles are just a necessary form of winter transport rather than a joy-rider’s hot-wired thrill machine and that whoops were a bit over the top

To a Finn, whooping on a snowmobile to is rather like getting excited back home if offered the chance to jump into a Toyota Corolla and nip down to the shops for a pint of milk. But, then, even above the revving thrumming of my engine, I heard an echoing whoop. Jari had just whooped. Obviously it was fine to whoop. So, i whooped back. And I doubt if a single elk, or ptarmigan, or lynx, let alone any other person heard even the ghost of a whoop, because there was, quite simply, no one within earshot of even the loudest of our whoops.

Which was exactly why I’d come to Finland. Not specifically to shatter the silence of the northern lands, (though that was as much fun as anything naughty ever is), but just because the Finns have more winter, and thus more snow, more frozen lakes and more sparkling, blue-skied emptiness than pretty much anywhere else in Europe. And also because Finland spreads a population of a mere five million people across a land roughly equal in size to Germany (which, just for comparison, has 82 million people, though admittedly far better beer). So, what with having a third of its area above the Arctic Circle and a November-to-May snow season, when it comes to winter and wilderness and silence, the Finns have more than enough of all three to go around. Quite frankly, in Finland, me whooping whilst blasting the engine on a souped-up snow-kart probably caused less disturbance than some skier’s Lycra-clad thighs rubbing together would do down in the overcrowded Alps.

And that’s another thing. Finland doesn’t really have mountains – its highest peak is 1,328 meters – and so, bluntly, doesn’t have the best down hill skiing in the world. Which is just great because, though the numerous slopes the Finns do have are still good and provide all that’s needed in the way of powder snow, zippy lifts and prepared pistes, unlike most Alpine ski resorts the Finnish equivalents aren’t over-packed with stroppy locals, show-off ski-freaks, conscripts to the international snowboarding army, and identikit slope-hogging family groups from Chelsea. Up north there’s enough of everything, even skiing, to go around.

But, better still, skiing isn’t the be-all and end-all of winter activity in Finland. Because when you get tired of going up hill slowly and then going down hill fast, - over and over and over - there’s still dog sledding, reindeer driving, lake ice skating, cross country skiing, ice fishing, winter horse riding, cross-country skiing, and ice hole swimming to try out. In fact, if there’s some way of sliding, falling, skidding, zooming or swooping across snow or ice and the Finns aren’t doing it then you can bet they gave it a good try and it just plain didn’t work. The Finns even use snowshoes. And, believe me, I’ve tried them and snowshoes come as close to ‘didn’t work’ as, say, salsa dancing whilst wearing swimming flippers would.

Unlike snowmobiles. Which work just fine. Jari and I straight-lined over the hills and lakes before, a few reindeer pisses out from Tahko, we cut the engines on top of a low peak. The sudden silence sifted in on our ears, as we crunched, heavy booted through the snow to where we could look out over a fair number of Finland’s 188,000 lakes. “In Finland we mix the best of the new and the old,” Jari explained, “so we use snowmobiles to get out to the wilderness and then we stop and turn the engines off. So there’s a chance to see wolverine, elk, wolves, bear, beavers – oh! – many things. You can appreciate the emptiness and the peace. And, once you’re out here, then you can walk, or ski or sledge or whatever.”

In Kupio I managed to cross a whole lot of ‘whatevers’ off my ‘things to do with snow’ list. So, I skated, inelegantly, on Lake Kallaves. Cantered an Icelandic ‘horse’ who, though tiny, energetically snow-ploughed his way through the drifts that rose up around his chest in a white flying spray. Strapped onto skis, I then let gravity pull me down the pistes, in something approaching snow-warrior style. Though, when i debuted at snowboarding, the same G-force merely pulled me face down into the same short patch of snow, again and again. And again. With a lot of violence. Giving the impression to any curious onlookers – of which there were a growing number – that I was enthusiastically beating myself up.

And I cross-country skied for two days, encouraged and tutored by Finnish ex-champion, Reijo Vornanen. Though I quickly discovered that, lacking his racehorse fitness, I was never going to get much beyond slotting my thin skis into the hundreds of kilometers of prepared ‘tram line’ tracks and gently pumping my way around a 20 kms or so circuit of breathtaking scenery, before reckoning it was time for a drink. Or many drinks.

Apart from tasting the confusing variety of local alcohols, (‘tar liquor’ made from the resinous sap of spruce and mesimarja-likööri or ‘arctic cloudberry liquor’ amongst them), there were still some more ‘whatevers, I wanted to try out in Finland’s frozen landscapes. But for those sports I was going to have to go even further north. Thus, the following winter found me in Levi above the Arctic Circle, in Lapland. This, the northern-most province of Finland, is home to the country’s small indigenous population of Sámi, the ‘reindeer people.’

The far northern snowlands seemed even more elemental and mysterious than those around Kuopio. On my first night in Levi, I listened to Sámi shaman Niils Jouni thudding out rhythms on an intricately decorated drum with a ptarmigan-leg-bone beater whilst singing the melodies of Lapp joik songs. It was a strange music that resonated uneasily within the walls of a warm room as an accompaniment to glasses of wine and plates of food. But travelling to the Sámi village of Harjula, early the following morning I could see that Jouni’s timeless, reindeer-paced keening complimented and appeased the endless monochrome silence perfectly.

In Harjula, men dressed in merry red and blue felt costumes were harnessing reindeer between the narrow shafts of sleighs like little cockle-shell boats. A plump rump and scutty little tail bobbed above Senja, my companion sleigher, and I as we sat back amidst deer hide blankets. I flicked the single rein running to the beast’s head-collar and ran through a repertoire of animal accelerating noises. Our reindeer began stalking forward at a not-very-brisk pace. I redoubled my ‘geeee-up’ and ‘chirruping’ clicks and ‘kissy kissy’ sounds. The deer broke into a shambling trot, his wide, splayed feet making a soft ‘thrumping’ in the snow, like the sound of pushing one’s fist very slowly though repeatedly into a feather pillow. We were going slower than the coming of spring.

With Senja singing a Finnish travelling song at my side, we voyaged between the trees at this stately pace. It was only when we got back to the village that one of the Sámi herders showed me the Lapp method of speeding a reindeer up. He leant over, grabbed the animal’s rabbit-like tail in his rough fist and gave it the same kind of rough turning I’d given the snowmobile’s twist-grip, handlebar accelerator. The reindeer reared up, jumped forward, and galloped off at a breathtaking speed. For about two meters. And then stopped dead. I began to see why the Finns had take to the snowmobile with such enthusiasm.

In the village restaurant we spooned down bowls of ukko hutun ketto – ‘old man’s soup’ – boiled up from chunks of reindeer, in an example of Sámi recycling. This recipe alone, I thought would have been a greater incentive than tail-twisting to encourage reindeer to put a bit of effort into sleigh pulling. By then, though, I was getting used to Finland’s super-organic, ‘fresh from the rivers and tundra,’ ‘survival of the fittest’ school of cuisine. In the space of a few nights feasting I’d already had elk steaks, salmon soup, cod lips, and the ‘heavenly feast;’ a chunk of uncooked salmon, clumps of fish roe and handfulls of freshly caught, raw small minnows. This, particularly, seemed to be a dish for which the Finnish equivalent of bon appetite, hyvää ruokahalua - ‘good food desire’ – seemed the most necessary encouragement.

Next we went to the dogs. Huskies, apparently, were rather different from reindeer. Encouraging the animals to pull the light birch-wood sleighs wasn’t the problem, it was stopping them heading off towards Russia, with or without a driver, that took skill. If the reindeer sleighs had crossed the snows like slow and beamy rowing boats, the husky reki were like swift kayaks running white water rapids. At Reijo Jääskeläinen’s kennels, I prepared to set off with my own team. The sleigh was tied to a tree against the force of the nine dogs, which leapt and strained at the ropes hitched to the reki.

“Ready! Menääkö – let’s go!” The ‘mooring rope’ was untied and my team of huskies set off between the trees following in the tracks of the lead team setting the pace far ahead. I clasped my mittened hands hard around the sleigh’s swept back handles, sprinted a few paces and then jumped onto the thin runners at the back of the sleigh. I felt as if I was riding a run-away Zimmer-frame. At first the huskies yapped and barked like mutts chasing a cat. But then, as we came out onto the open expanse of frozen lake, they fell silent. Suddenly there was only the sound of the sleigh swishing through the snow, an occasional glassy scraping as I stamped the ice-spike down to slow us going into a corner, and the soft crunchy thrumming of 36 paws cantering hard across the emptiness. It was snowmobiling but even better. Too good even for whooping. Husky travel seemed to me to be the synthesis of all the best snow pursuits I’d tried. I could have gone on forever. Instead I went swimming in a hole knocked through the ice of a frozen lake. Which is just what people do when it gets really cold in Finland.

The Finns sum up their culture under the ‘three Ss.’ Sauna, Sibelius and sisu. Sibelius obviously, being the Finnish equivalent of Sweden’s Abba, and allowing all of Finland’s Nokia mobile-phone owners to use a few bars of his Finlandia as their ring tone. Sisu, meanwhile, translates, roughly, as ‘guts’ or the mad energy needed to face the challenges the life throws up in a Finnish winter. Such as a visit to a sauna. The sauna idea is, of course, very fine. As most reasons to take ones clothes off are. In fact the Finns consider it rather pervy to want to wear anything other than a thick film of sweat and a large bottle of beer whilst sauna-ing, though they’ll tolerantly allow foreigners to wear swimming costumes if that’s what turns them on.

Late at night, I sat with a mixed group of locals in a lakeside sauna. I was warming up nicely after a day spent outdoors doing silly things with snow, and was just contemplating both opening another bottle of beer and moving up a ‘shelf’ into even greater heat, when there was a sudden shout from our ‘sauna leader.

“KIIREHDI! Come on, everybody. Let’s go.” Politely I joined the scramble out to the starlit snows and hopped the foot-searingly cold fifty meters onto the frozen lake surface. There a largish, white trapdoor, lit by an unearthly light, opened down into the ice. There was a splash, as the first faintly illuminated pink body climbed down through the hole and disappeared from view. Then there was a gasp like a breeching porpoise and the same body, radiant, cold scrubbed and scoured shot back out onto the ice like a penguin leaping from the seas onto an iceberg with a leopard seal snapping at its flippers.

I was next. I stood on the ice looking down into the black hole of icy water. This was my sisu moment. I climbed onto the ladder suspended in the water and lowered myself down. I sank into something so cold it felt like plunging into a gas, or into outer space or into a pool of fire. I burst back to the surface and climbed onto the ice. And then I whooped. All I needed now was for the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights, to send its shimmering, shooting green curtains across the sky. Optimistically, and stark naked, I lay back in the snow through the shimmering starlight and dancing ice crystals towards the pole star. The temperature was somewhere around minus fifteen centigrade. I was getting used to Finland.

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