1936 On the Continent

good walking tours. An association in Finland is trying to popularise hiking and is providing cabins where hikers can spend the night in the stretches between hotels and inns. The hiker who does not mind simple fare and rough accommodation can make many long and interesting tours through wild and varied scenery.
    Fishing
is one of the special attractions of Finland, and I have purposely avoided mentioning the subject inconnection with any of the special sites, as that would in any case have been to say too little. The best advice I can give the fisherman is that he procure a copy of the booklet “Fishing in Finland,” supplied gratis by the Association Finland Travel (travel agencies or John Good & Sons Ltd., Hull), for there he will find accounts of all the salmon and trout sites, advice as to flies, catch statistics, with information regarding licences, boatmen—where streams are not fished from the bank—briefly, all he will need to know. The best salmon waters are mostly in Lapland, in the magnificent scenery of the river valleys. Coarse fishing can be practised nearly everywhere in Finland, usually free, though permission must sometimes be asked where habitations are numerous.
Winter Sports
    I have dealt with Finland as a place to visit in the summer, for it is in that season that the great majority of visitors will enjoy their stay most. Winter sports, however, are extensively practised in Finland. Everybody skis, and all the towns have skating rinks. The visitor from abroad should bear in mind that the main attraction in this respect is the sport and not society life, as in Switzerland. At
Hyvinkää
, near Helsinki, there is good hilly ski-ing ground and a pension with music and dancing in the evenings.
Koli
has a comfortable inn for those who want wilder and grander scenery. The most exciting places are the Lapland resorts, still in their infancy so far as accommodation goes, but very interesting to the winter nature-lover. Here one can practise such unusual sports as sleigh-driving and joring behind half-tamed reindeer. The sunshine begins to be brilliant in March and the season lasts into May. Lapland can also be visited earlier.
    Finland is easily reached by sea or air, and can be entered overland from North Sweden and North Norway or Russia. Any travel agency will give particulars about the routes. It is probably about the cheapest country in Europe to travel and live in, a circumstance that well makes up for the distance. The visitor of moderate means can live well on less than 100 marks (about 9s.) a day, even as a stranger in the towns, and for the price of a room at a first-class London hotel he can have a roomwith private bathroom and all his meals at an hotel with the same standard of comfort in everything. To travel is notoriously dearer than living in familiar surroundings, but I would say that the visitor to Finland who avoids easily recognisable fashionable places and is content with modest hotels, or at health resorts with boarding-houses, (for addresses of which he will apply to the management—
Kylpylaitoksen konttori
), need calculate on spending no more than ten shillings a day, and that will leave him a margin for extra extravagances. The Tourist Association in the capital will supply him with addresses of pensions in the country at prices from about half-a-crown a day upward, and by consulting the hotel and restaurant list obtainable at the same place he can choose his hotel and restaurant to suit his purse.
List of Finnish Words
    The pronunciation of Finnish words is not difficult once the phonetic rules have been grasped. Vowel and consonant sounds are constant and not variable as in English. The emphasis is always on the first syllable. Short vowel sounds are expressed by a single vowel, long vowel sounds by two successive vowels. Double consonants also denote that the consonant sound is doubled (ala = a’la; alla = al’la). The vowel
a
is pronounced broadly—a short ah;
e
as in hay, but shortened;
o
approximately as in English;
u
as in bull. Additional vowels:
y
as French u in rue;
a
as in men;
ö
as French eu. In combinations of vowels, run the different short vowel sounds together;
ai
, for example, will be found to correspond almost to the first vowel sound in “hiding.” As regards consonants, English pronounciation may be followed except in the case of
r
(rolled as in Scotland),
j
as y in yet,
t
soft as in French,
w
as v.
General
good day (morning, afternoon)
= hyvää