A few words about Finland. When on a work camp in Killarney National Park in county
Kerry I met two people from Finland. After the camp I read up a bit about their country. The
more I read about Finland the more impressed I became and soon I decided to travel there.
Unfortunately I had not got the really great microphones for those journeys as a lot of what I
was recording needed truly super-low noise and high sensitivity. My overall impression of the country is the purity of the environment, the quiet, its coolness and the forest that seems to go on forever.
If I was to write about all my experiences and the various parks the volume of text would be enormous, so I will only mention my most favourite park and some of my thoughts about it. The first national park I visited was Patvinsuo, this is very close to the Russian border about one third way the up the country. There was no busses to the park, only to a town some kilometres away, where I got a lift to the park entrance, from there it was about a three Km walk into the park hostel. Of the four parks and an island I visited in Finland on the two visits I liked Patvinsuo the most. There was a certain amount of snow left over from the winter. Made for some beautiful pictures. The hostel was not open for a further day at least so I spent a night or two out in the open. A short distance away through the pines was a lake, this was mainly frozen over, only the first few meters at the shore had melted. During the short night I heard to my delight some distant black grouse, I found later that the sound came from a group of birds displaying out on the ice. Some days later I recorded the sound of them in the medium distance with the sound of broken ice tinkling against each other, this is one of the recordings I am most happy with from both visits. In some ways it was a lonesome visit as there was almost no one around, sometimes I saw the park rangers, they bought me more supplies in the town some distance away, this meant that I was able to stay for a few days
longer till one morning I opened the curtains to find a lot of snow had fallen during the night,
this meant I had to get out and back to the town and onto the next park somewhat further
south where there might not be too much snow, this turned out to be the case. Part of the
park was bog land, very beautiful in appearance but it was poor from a sound recording point
of view. A group of people was supposed to come and fill the upstairs part of the hostel, so I
was given a snug little room on the ground floor. This was perfect as I had equipment so
getting up and downstairs would have been difficult sometimes, also I loved the little room
with its all pine walls and small wood burning stove and oil lamp, (indeed I am building my
extension on a similar design). One evening it was raining, in the distance was thunder, it was
perfect, loud enough to be hears but not so much that it shut-down the recording level gain,
some birds nearby sang all the while. I got a lovely recording from the doorway of the hostel.
The best recordings were generally near or around the clearing where the buildings were, the
deep forest could be fairly quiet (I found this in Belize too).
After being in this park I went back down to Helsinki for a night before going out to the nearby Nuuksio national park, even though it was fairly near the city it was still quiet most of the time. It is amazing how different the sound is in a different location. I can tell just by the character of the sound where it was recorded.
On my second journey in 1999, I stayed with friends near Porvoo, from there I went to two national parks Seitseminen and Valkmusa, after this my friends brought me to an island called 'Onus' this is between Porvoo and Helsinki. On another day they brought me to Valkmusa National Park, this is a bog area near the south coast.