Tromsø; Sunday, 22 July, 2007

I must have got a couple of hours sleep at least, as I was woken up by the sound of my alarm going off at 6:30, typical, the one time you get some sleep is the time you have to be up early to catch the bus!

There is one bus a day that makes the 11 hour journey from Tromsø in Norway to Rovaniemi in Finland. It leaves at 7:30 and I had to make sure I was on it for the rest of my journey plans to still work. In the end I needen’t have worried. Whilst the bus may have been almost full 11hours later when it pulled into Rovaniemi, at 7:30 it set off from Tromsø with me and four other passengers. For the first two hours or so we ran through the Norwegian countryside, a fjord always visible on one side or another, in a light drizzle, stopping twice but on both occasions leaving with exactly the same passengers that we had started with in Tromsø.

The bus climbed into the mountains and came to where Norway, Sweden and Finland all meet. Despite the Norwegian/Finnish and the Norwegian/Swedish border being those between a non-EU and an EU member, there appeared to be nobody around, and no one in the customs office to stop us from smuggling all that really cheap Norwegian booze into Finland!