A truism one is destined to hear in life sooner or later is how history sometimes repeats itself, such as when the great armies of Napoleon and the Third Reich met their ends when they marched on Moscow, or all those years the Cubs and the Red Sox came close to winning a pennant or the World Series but failed miserably and tragically in the final moments in heartbreaking fashion on repeated occasions (rest in peace Bill Buckner, history gave you a bum rap!). Thankfully those ball clubs eventually broke through whatever curse was bewitching them, and the days when an army might march on Moscow seem over forever, though some future Matrix or James Bond movie might get a good plot out of the unthinkable.
History repeating itself is actually a simplistic and likely untrue notion; Mark Twain came much closer to nailing it when he said that history never repeats itself, but that it does often rhyme. This notion was on our minds as the shadow of covid and/or a possible military action messed with our anticipation of this trip, which echoed similar but different concerns from our trip to Honduras back in the spring of 2016.
Remember the Zika virus? The one that started in Brazil and moved up into Central America quite aggressively and with much media coverage? The CDC was suggesting people avoid Central America as a consequence. On the other hand, unlike the current Finn-Russian tension, there was no threat of an invasion from the likes of El Salvador back then (they’d had their war with Honduras in 1969 and lost, I believe – it was called the “soccer war” at the time), but a few weeks before our trip a noted Honduran eco-activist from one of the native tribes had been brutally murdered as a result of her leading efforts to stop construction of a dam. That story made it to more than a few front pages in the states, quite out of character for a US media that tends to usually ignore such goings-on in “unimportant” places like Honduras. Perhaps the sheer brazen brutality of Berta Caseres’ murder made for a good story in the editors’ minds, along with concerns about the violence and lawlessness and corruption that generally prevailed in that country, which in itself was hardly news. Perhaps it had been a slow week on other fronts.
The upshot was that our group of eight who’d signed up for that trip was down to just the two of us by the time we arrived in San Pedro Sula. Our guide assured us we’d have no problems – the biggest fear by then was that the trip would be canceled, but he graciously and generously went ahead with it, though it probably helped that he could just use his own truck, and brought along his partner to join us. It all worked out splendidly.
The over-evolved human brain tends to be a hotbed of excessive and needless worry; many think of depression but the fact is that anxiety is also a major issue that brings people to psychotherapy, and the two go hand in hand. Mark Twain also said that worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe. Is there anything the guy didn’t figure out and comment on?
What matters here is that our fabulous Honduran experience happened despite the world’s widespread concern, and this made it easier to figure that this time around something great like that could just as well happen again despite everything, history not repeating itself but rhyming in the best possible way. Sure, none of this made much sense but neither does the illogic of anxiety, and besides we were feeling lucky.
Having committed to going, the next step we tend to take on these trips is to do a little preliminary/introductory fact-finding. For the Rick Steves crowd, places like Italy and France tend to not be totally unfamiliar – who hasn’t heard about Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution and Napoleon, or DaVinci and Mussolini and Lamborghini? not to mention all those movies and novels and paintings and sculpture in art museums and the simplified history of western civilization taught in US public schools – but for the eco-tourist, what have they ever heard regarding the history and culture of Costa Rica and Borneo, or in this case a northern European country like Finland?
There’s is much there to unpack, much of it beyond the ambitions of this reporter, but here are some highlights: 1) Finland in modern times was basically a population of homo sapiens sharing a common language and geographic area that tended to be dominated by Sweden or Russia, depending on the century, truly achieving independence after the Bolshevik Revolution, which had Finnish sympathizers from both sides 2) Finland had few economic claims to fame outside of lumbering and other agricultural production until it committed big-time to developing a tech industry after WWII, which succeeded spectacularly – ever heard of Nokia? By some measures, Finland is the third most prosperous country in the world 3) Finland is said by some who know to have the best public school system in the world and the “best educated” people, whatever the hell that means 4) Finland is ethnically quite homogenous, which is true for all the Nordic countries except Sweden, which has allowed much more immigration 5) The population of Finland is about 5.5 million people, about one quarter of whom live in Helsinki – the north is a very rural place, a key factor in our experience there of the natural world 5) Finland has had an especially fraught relationship with Russia in the 20th century, which at one point included siding with the Nazis to help keep the Red Army out – it is a complicated and fascinating story, but for our purposes, simply note that the current goings-on vis a vis Russia are just the latest chapter of typical endless nation-state conflict, a particularly tricky one in this case and one which Finland has handled adeptly and with much finesse in the past half century, to its great credit.
This being a birding/nature tour, the other preliminary research involved perusing the trip potential-species list and taking a look at our European field guide (of which we’ve only one, as opposed to many for our home territory) and familiarizing ourselves with what might show up. With North American trips, this tends to be a relatively easy task, as much is already familiar. In the case of this trip, it broke down into an interesting mix: there were the birds we knew, and the realization that polar birds – those which spend time in the far north a lot or just in breeding season – can turn up south in many parts of the planet; there were the birds we knew except that this time we’d be seeing the awfully similar “Eurasion” versions that the life-lister can tick off as different, a fact about which we cared little; and there were the many many birds about which we knew nothing at all. Given our age and currently ambiguous future travel ambitions, it was also possible we’d see the latter this one time and perhaps never again. For some this might mean to not bother to familiarize oneself, at all, for what’s the point?
Ah, but we are fine and curious people, good birders to boot, and we did happen to have this field guide sent all the way from England (the Collins, and the best). When you go to the candy store, you take it all in at first, even those caramel-creams you know you can’t stand and aren’t about to purchase. European Honey-buzzard! Eurasian Hobby! Ring Ouzel! Whinchat! Bring it on!
There is much to love about modern air travel, and much that is quite abhorrent. Let me just say that international travel through four different airports and overnight across seven time zones can get quite rigorous, especially if one does not splurge for business or first-class, where one can lie down. Also, the gigantic footprint of some major air hubs can involve an unbelievable amount of foot travel, usually in a big anxious hurry. It helps to have much experience in this realm, which we thought we had, but learned that in some ways we really and truly did not. Let me just say that it helps to be in good physical condition in the first place (we bike a lot) and that we made it from Boston to NYC to Helsinki to Oulu without fainting, even once.
All of which got us to the Airport Hotel in Oulu, as that is its name. “Airport Hotel” evokes any number of visions of parking lots and teeming traffic arteries accompanied by the constant whine of high-bypass turbofan jet engines and that awful smell. In Oulu, the name is evidently meant ironically (oh, those witty Finns!), to our great benefit and delight. The place was some miles from any airplane tarmac and just a few hundred yards from a salt marsh on an inlet that led to the Gulf of Bothnia and then the Baltic Sea. A short walk could turn up the usual mallards but also shovelers and tufted ducks and great crested grebes (in breeding plumage – this was June, after all, a special time in the natural world as we’d be reminded over and over again), and then there were snipe and terns and marsh harriers and redwings and fieldfares and Eurasian curlews, and more. Some of them “displaying” as in males showing off for the ladies with these swoopy aerial antics so as to tempt them to “get it on” so to speak. And all of it there, at the Airport Hotel. In Oulu. We felt we’d arrived, and that this trip, despite all, was the great idea we thought it was two years before, jet lagged and all.
Settling into our hotel room, we were immediately struck by the bathroom-with-integrated-shower, or maybe it was just one big shower-with-integrated-bathroom. The “separation” was comprised of a one- inch stepdown into the shower itself. Was this also Finnish hi-tech practice? Looking out our window we faced, not 30 feet away, our first exotic Euro/Eurasian species, though it looked for all the world like our homegrown American robin (except for the coloring), and it moved just like a robin and I took a picture of it. As has happened before, that first bird one sees at the hotel is often there because it is a bird that will turn out to be everywhere for the duration of the trip, in this case, the fieldfare, a thrush, as is the robin. In Costa Rica, this same role was scripted for the tropical kingbird on our trip there. No doubt this scenario plays out in any country one might name; one wonders about Madagascar and Borneo.
We arrived a day early to get our bearings, which also allowed for a few hours in Oulu (OH-lou), a prosperous city of a couple hundred thousand. Wikipedia says the place is a center for IT and “wellness technology” (developing new and better yoga apps, no doubt) along with more traditional industries. A walk around the pedestrian and bicycle mall that comprises downtown reminded us that we weren’t in the US anymore, big time. I’d heard about the Finn passion for salted licorice, and a (perhaps ill-advised) visit to a candy shop resulted in a nice young woman leading me around to the many bins that contained varieties of this curious confection, with exclamations about how each one had its own fabulous qualities. She was so good at her job that I filled a pretty good-sized bag that cost 13 Euros, which I guess was a lot. Let’s just say it turned out to be money well spent, more or less, as we shall see.
So here we were in a city where downtown was all bicyclists and pedestrians and a MacDonald’s with no arches in sight, also no drive-through window nor any cars at all, in fact, except out along the edges, and then that salted licorice in the form of little skulls and fish and jujubes and mushrooms (or maybe phalluses, depending on one’s frame of mind), and a few amorphous ill-defined shapes leaving all to the imagination. The jet-lagged, time-zone disoriented mind could start to wonder: was this the end of the world?
