Out Of This World

- Georgie Bradley

We’re working with four hours of low winter sun, hidden behind a moving drift of chalky clouds. Birch trees bend backwards under the weight of virgin snow. It’s apocalyptic, but magically so, without a foreboding sense of doom.

The world here is in black and white. Day and night are easily interchangeable. It feels like the most solitary piece of this planet, and the most primal. As we drive through colossal banks of thick mist, it’s like the land is keeping secrets from us. And we might be tricked into believing we are on another planet altogether were it not for sporadic signs directing to ski slopes, reminding us that others have traced their way through the sheer scales of snow.

“In Finnish folklore, an element of mystery is associated with Lapland,” enthuses Ari Kurulaa, our guide for the five-day trip – a self- and publicly-proclaimed travel guru, whose three-decade longevity in the industry and Lappish roots cannot be faulted.

Among large swathes of uninterrupted, bleach-white snow are 43 ski slopes scattered around the town of Levi, a force in Finland’s tourism infrastructure. Levi sits 170km north of the Arctic Circle and Rovaniemi City (Lapland’s capital), and is the largest ski and recreational resort in the country, complete with clusters of remote luxury igloos, cabins and villas. The compact town centre is dominated by cosy eateries, skiing and hiking shops, your standard franchise accommodations and some fluorescently zapping karaoke bars, as if plucked from the 1980s. Karaoke, Ari earnestly explains, “is taken very seriously by the Finns.” Think along the lines of America’s Got Talent – the final.