Professional tourist guide

Remember how I wrote about the disastrous trip to France with my mother on her 50th birthday? Well, I have another story to tell about how a professional travel guide can not read a map. The professional here, would be me.

Some years back I got a guest from France who absolutely loved driving snowmobiles and just playing and being in the snow. I had promised him many times that when ever he wanted to come back to Lapland, I would take a weekend off and we would do all the activities he loves so much.
So when he finally did, I booked us a weekend in a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere and a snowmobile to drive all day long.

On our first day of the weekend we put a full tank of gasoline in the snowmobile and started driving off to a small lake behind the hills, only about 15 kilometers away from the cabin. Our intension was to do some ice fishing and eat the catch of the day for lunch and then spend the afternoon at the nearby husky farm.

As I was more experienced driver, native Lapp, born in the capital of Lapland and working for the safari companies, I got to start. After hours of driving we got a bit confused. 15km was not supposed to take THAT long. We started studying the map which was very difficult. There were absolutely no sign marks in the view. Sure the map had loads but our view was pure, white snow, loads of small snowmobile tracks and small hills, and no lakes anywhere to be seen. I had to admit that I was lost.

My friend wanted to keep on going as we had loads of gasoline and the day was just about to start rising. So we kept on driving, stopping every once in a while to read the map and kept on going. I started feeling hungry already and a bit scared that we would not find our way back and would die there in between the small hills in pure whiteness. After hours of driving, my friend decided to take the map away from me and after only some half an hour from that we were suddenly on a road that wasn’t even marked on the map. We got very puzzled, had a good break and wondered what we should do. The sun was starting to set (as it does so in the early afternoon in Lapland during winters) and I started to get paranoid hearing voices of hungry animals and seeing glittering eyes behind the thin, small, trees. I wanted to drive to get us faster home and we decided to follow the road, as it must lead us somewhere where we can at least ask for help. And it did. It led us directly to our cabin in ten minutes. We had barely driven 30 kilometers that day, missing our ice fishing lake by meters as we had driven around it most of the day.

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Sunny   14.09.2009 18:19