Maybe it was the tiredness.  Maybe my body was physiologically in a state of conservation and repair.  I’d stopped fighting or thinking.  I was just existing.   With the first few bouts of fever, the sensitivity of my scalp, the persistent headache, the shivering, induced a state of despair.  I was  delirious and repeating, ‘ Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God’, worryingly reminiscent of my mother’s  anxiety dementia.  But then I seemed to give up and accept whatever would happen. 

 Such states of body and mind correspond to Hans Selye’s  General Adaptation Syndrome (1936),  in which he documented a stereotypical responses to stressors of all kinds, physiological, medical and psychological.   They all, he concluded, tap into the same mechanism. 

The first response to a stressor is to fight it with the sympathetic nervous system; hence the anxiety, the pain, the shivering  but this gives way to a state of sweating and sleep; a state of conservation  dominated by the parasympathetic nervous system.  You see the same response in animals, whose ultimate response to overwhelming stress is to curl up in the corner of their cage and ‘play possum’.   But both people and animals vary according to whether or how quickly they exhibit which response.     

Post Traumatic Amnesia is a kind of dissociation.  It is a response to overwhelming trauma and could be thought of as a mechanism that protects the individual from the knowledge that would destroy their sense of self, like risk of death, abuse, or the collapse of a key relationship.   It is often associated with other aspects of the post-traumatic stress reaction, such as nightmares, bodily weakness, and a variety of somatic symptoms.   If you cannot remember or deal with what has happened, then nightmares and somatic symptoms often remain to express the trauma in coded form. 

So what is the mechanism?  But what is the mechanism?   The stress response not only involves the autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), it also includes the hypothalamo-pituitary adrenal (HPA) system, which releases a cascade of transmitters and hormones (CRF, ACTH, cortisol, aldosterone) as a compensatory mechanism to offset the damaging effects of excessive and sustained  sympathetic arousal on the body.  The HPA system maintains the function of the organism in the face of overwhelming stress, maintaining energy supplies, damping down the immune system, suppressing inflammation and pain and blocking memory.  

So can it all be explained by activation of the HPA axis.   If so, why are Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Alexithymia (the disconnection of the emotional and rational expression), which may both coexist as part of the post traumatic reaction, associated with diminished cortisol responses.   Does this represent a state of exhaustion or switching off.  There is never an easy response to anything. 

With a days of the Malaria being treated, the tiredness disappeared is.    I became frustrated with  being in hospital and although still weak began, to devise strategies for discharge.  The will to live had reasserted itself; what would have been the point of remembering what it was like?

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But this illness was strange.   I know it’s cold here, but shivering that starts when you are sitting in  a warm room; the shaking that won’t stop despite going to bed in a balaclava and polar gear and covering yourself in layers of blankets; that’s not right.  And the headache, not so much a tension that twangs the muscles at the back of your neck or the throbbing nauseous pounding above the temples, but a persistent dull ache that makes your scalp so sensitive you can’t bear anyone to touch it. Then the sweating starts, the covers come off, and you have to get up in the middle of the night and wring out your cotton top and put it on the soapstone stove to dry.  

I’d been ski-ing the previous day.   A lot of falling over, frustration and swearing, but it’s a steep learning curve.  Did I really expect it to be any different on the first day?  I got very cold but lit the stove and put the heater on in the sauna.  Ah, what bliss to sit in the hot moist heat up until the temperature  was unbearable and then run outside, roll in the snow and then pick up handfuls and scrub down before returning to the hot room.   But is that what started it?  Did the exhausting day travelling, the frustrations and cold of learning to ski and the physiologic stresses of the sauna,  light up some lurking infection?  I was already harbouring a crop of cold sores.  Had something else lit up? 

It was still snowing when we awoke, light powder, blown by the wind into sharp edged slopes.  I cleared the veranda, relit the fire and generally tidied up before settling down to write.  Eero had cleared the tracks but it didn’t look inviting enough to go ski-ing.  Then about 11 o’clock, I started to shiver.  It was warm enough in the house, but my body felt cold.  The only thing to do was to get into bed.  The sweating came later that evening.  By the middle of the night my top was soaked.  What is going on.  There is nothing obvious to explain it. 

The next day I felt better enough to go ski-ing again.  I accomplished the push and glide movement and was even able to go downhill without falling over.  I skied down to the hut in the woods – such a special place.  Eero had skidooed a track along the river but the water was coming through in places.  Ice got into the ski clasps.  More delays.  I cooled down, but a simmer in  the sauna followed by a roll in the snow and another spell in the sauna  did the trick. 

It was not a good night.  My headache wouldn’t clear and I had a had to get up several times. In the morning, the shivering returned, followed by sweating.  It was late afternoon by the time the headache and fever receded, but I felt very tired.  So what was going on?  Why did the fevers seem to be coming every other day.  My God; it couldn’t be Malaria, could it?   The periodicity of the illness would fit and I didn’t taking the Malarone all the time in Indochina. I put the thought to the back of my mind and carried on.

I felt better the next morning and the outside temperature had dipped to minus 10.  The skis ran well though I was a little clumsy and fell a few times.  Upon reaching the Russian border, the headache and shivers returned.  I could not get back so phoned for a skidoo.

The paramedics were perplexed but agreed it might be Malaria, but it was Easter, I wasn’t unconscious and they wouldn’t get tests and treatment in north eastern Finland.  They left a bag of Paracetamol and advised me to drink plenty of fluid.  My urine was a very strange colour – fluorescent orange. 

Another sleepless night with headache and fever and I’d had enough.  At Kajaani District Hospital, they plated out a blood film and confirmed the diagnosis, but had to send me further across the country to Oulu University Hospital for treatment.

But Malaria? How?  I came back from South East Asia six weeks ago.  Why did I not get it out there?  Why has it come on now?   And how did I get it when I was taking prophylactics.  The last is easiest to answer.   I had agreed with the practice nurse that I only needed to take Malarone in the high risk zone and since it was not the rainy season, this was Laos.  But I also went to the jungle in Cambodia – down near the coast in the Cardamom Hills.  And there I know the buggers got me!   So was I just too fit and eager for them to get a hold then?  Did they lurk in wait somewhere in my reticulo-endothelial system until that unique Finnish combination of exhaustion and physiological stressors made them sit up.  ‘Hey, guys, it’s the sauna again.  Now’s our chance!’    

What did I know of Malaria before this?   I had learnt about it during the medical students course on Tropical Medicine I took at the London School in Keppel Street, but that’s book learning – absolutely no substitute for the real thing.  And then there are all those films where the hero, crossing Africa, gets Malaria but is saved by the care of the local tribes.  Mind you, travellers in Africa were given a concoction of Senna, Cascara and Julap, called Livingstone’s Rousers , to take for ‘everything’.  This was commonly acknowledged to be the source of the term, ‘The White Man’s Burden’.  But Malaria isn’t a romantic or even a humorous condition.  It’s a multi-system disease.  The little bastards get everywhere.   They invade the blood cells then explode them.  This releases haemoglobin which can clog up the counter current system in the kidneys and encourage the platelets to aggregate in the blood.  These mini-clots can then lodge in small blood vessels particularly in the brain where they can cause oedema, tiredness, psychosis, dementia and coma.   The parasites invade the spleen, the liver the gut, the lungs and everywhere they and their destructive debris lodge they set up inflammation.  So Malaria can result in multi-organ failure.  They used to say that a normal healthy person could stand only five bouts of fever before systems would decompensate, mechanisms run down.  That’s why I became so anxious when on my fourth bout, they kept me waiting in Oulu Triage for 7 hours before seeing a doctor.     

It might seem strange that for one of the most serious diseases, we are still using traditional treatments.   Quinine, in various derivative forms,  is still the classic treatment for Malaria.   It comes from the bark of the Cinchona tree, which grows in the Andes of South America and is named after the Duchess of Cinchon, the wife of the governor of Peru, who became ill with malaria 350 years ago, but who, after drinking a sample of infusion of drink of tree bark in water, made a full recovery.  The Jesuits spread the name of Cinchona’s healing properties throughout the tropical world, but it affected the ears causing slight deafness and tinnitus – the song of the Jesuit.   The Indians used to take quinine as tonic water.  Englishmen still enjoy a G&T on hot summer evenings. 

 Artemesinin comes from a Chinese tree.  In the year 341 AD Mr T Heng published a book on the treatment of medical emergencies in which he recommended the use of the medical herb Qinghao  from annual or sweet Wormwood for the treatment of fevers.  But it wasn’t until 1972, when Chinese scientists extracted an active principle with considerable anti-malarial activity called Qinghaosu.   

In Northern Laos, they use the tuber of the Tarot plant.  They boil up the milky flesh and drink it.  At first, it tastes sweet but when the mouth starts to itch, they know the parasite is gone. 

Each to his own.  They gave me Quinine intravenously then switched it to Artemesininin, which seemed to do the trick.   

Today, the pieces of this puzzle fell into place.  The consultant arrived in some state of animation.  ‘We have the answer.  You have Vivax Malaria.  Plasmodium vivax can have an incubation period that can vary from 17 days up to as long as a year.   It is a milder disease than falciparum but cannot be completely eradicated.  It can lurk in the liver for years, though apart from a tendency to tiredness,  does not cause undue debility and any flare ups can be promptly treated.   The enlarged spleen is a bit of a risk but should go down.

Bloody ‘ell!

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 I have just returned from the taiga, a wilderness of forest and swamp in Northern Finland. And I began to sense that for me, the essence of nature cure is about living in the present.  For years now, or so it seems, I have spent too much  time regretting the past or dreading the future.  I have analysed endlessly, rationalised, explained, even understood, but none of this has brought peace.  I am not denying the pleasures of nostalgia or the excitement of hope, but these are too often tempered by guilt or fear, whereas the present just is.  You have to get on with it. 

Being out in the wilderness focuses attention on survival.  You have to engage with the business of collecting wood, building a fire, preparing a meal, even hunting or gathering, making sure you have shelter for the night, dealing with the midge, getting to the next place or just staying put. 

And with nature, there is so much going on all the time, light, weather, plants growing or dying back, animals, birds, the river, the mood of the lake.  It’s like a never ending test series, a book you can never put down, but much more so.  Nature captivates, asks questions, inspires curiosity, demands engagement. 

The book that accompanied my thoughts in Finland was Roger Deakin’s ‘Wildwood; a journey through trees’.   In the first section, entitled Roots, he described how his love of nature was kindled by an inspiring biology teacher, who took groups of boys on nature expeditions to the New Forest.  Over the course of 8 years, the boys made a detailed ecological exploration of a three mile stretch of countryside near Beaulieu Station.  One of their projects investigated the links between the unusual preponderance of the dwarf buttercup, myosurus minimus, and the ancient habit of corralling of wild new forest ponies for selling by the commoners.  They discovered how the tramping of the horses hooves and the heavy manuring of the ground destroyed competing plants but is ideal for the buttercup.  Another project demonstrated how half of the seedpods of the Needle Whin, Genista anglica, were infected by a weevil, Apion genistae, which was in turn eaten alive by the larvae of a chalcid wasp, Spintherus leguminium.   How wonderful to have a teacher who could inspire such curiosity and fascination. When mental energies are focussed on the meaning of the present, there is little time for regret and worry. 

Ernest Neal, my biology teacher, might have been an inspiration to me.  He probably was.  He wrote Woodland Ecology, based on the analysis of a Somerset wood and his dedicated investigation of the intimacies of the Badger led to the discovery of delayed implantation, an ovum fertilised one steamy night in autumn would not implant in the uterus until the following spring.  But the nearest I got to ‘understanding the importance of being Ernest’ was when he leant over my dissection of the sex organs of the Dogfish and said with feeling, ‘You know, Read, sex is a beautiful thing.’  In my innocence, I replied with an enthusiasm I considered appropriate for the situation, ‘Yes sir, I suppose it must be.’      

The books I read then, I still treasure;  King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz,  The Peregrine by J.A.Baker,  The Life of the Robin by R.Lack,  all products of  detailed observation over a long time, a fascination leading to a complete immersion in the object of enquiry.  I got the impression that these authors were happy in their own skin.  The same kind of self sufficiency comes through in A Fortunate Man, which describes the author’s life as a country doctor or Oliver Sachs account of his chemical childhood in Uncle Tungsten. 

Engaging with life in the present takes you out of morbid preoccupations with the self or a dependence on others and a happiness that derives from a fascination with the external.  It takes you out of yourself.  But you need courage to let go of the familiar and entrapping and a will to commit to a wider purpose.  

For too long,  I have sought enlightenment in endless analysis.  This has led to a kind of understanding of the human condition.  But happiness, health?  I question that.  The paediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott indicated that the purpose of emotional development was to enable people to be themselves in the company of others.  I would suggest that this might be extended to encompass self sufficiency in the natural world too.  Perhaps therapeutic camps could help those enmeshed in the misery off their lives.  Maybe whittling could be part of an analyst’s stock in trade.

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It was just a few yards from the river, on it’s own small peninsula, where the dark stream from the forest joined the larger flow of water coming down from the lake.  Trees grew all around it, birch, spruce, and tall graceful pencil pines that caught the sun on their chestnut trunks and the shimmering aspen.  The forest floor was covered with bilberry, heather, small bright green ferns that made intricate patterns like an oriental carpet,  sphagnum moss, horsetails and Ledum paludris, swamp rosemary.

The hut was a raised roofed box, 15 foot square, constructed of  broad horizontal planks of pine, weathered grey and caulked with resin.  To the right of the door was a  single window divided into four squares of glass.  In front, the roof was extended over a veranda and supported on corner posts.  The floor was loose and springy sending cups tumbling off the rough wooden table.  A wooden railing ran and hand height half way round.  Access to the veranda was by a tilted block of cemented red bricks.  There was a blackened metal coffee pot hanging from a hook to the left of the door. 

 To the right of the hut was a simple open woodshed with a lozenge shaped opening that tapered towards the floor.  Stacks of logs stood to the side of it and more logs were arranged against the wall of the house.  A narrow path led to what looked like a tilted wooden sentry box with a door and a wooden latch, the sort of casual contruction, Australians call a ‘dunny’!   

 A key was hidden in a round hole above and to the right of the window and the door opened with a subdued and respectful click.  The space inside had the kind of rustic cosiness, I enjoyed as a teenager; my den!   The walls were rough and lined with fire- blackened planks of wood.  The pine floor was new as were the rugs, a homely touch.   A stove rested on a metal platform in centre of the room.  It was the sort of stove you would find in a sauna, an oblong box with doors and topped with large pebbles, and a black chimney that was cemented into what looked like a big tin box below the ceiling.  The red paint on it was faded and flaking. 

 There was a wooden bunk in against the back wall to the right of a simple oblong window that looked back into the forest, and another adjoining bed on the right wall.  On the left hand wall were shelves and cupboards which held mugs, matches, paper towels, red plastic bowls, a large saucepan for boiling water and smaller cooking pot with a metal handle.  A small axe, its blade protected in a leather sleeve hung up besides saws and knives, an assortment of fishing equipment and three pairs of carpet slippers.

There was a table to the right of the door.  It was made of pine and varnished to a smooth shine. I could ‘see’ pencils, notebooks, a sketch pad, my favourite pen with the silky nib, a field guide to the flowers and trees, a slim volume of poems, some trophies, a stick chiselled by a beaver, some polished stones, pine cones, a small branched antler.

I could work here.  I’d sit there and gaze out of the window at the river, the white clouds over the dappled greens of the swamp, the play of light on the pines, lulled by the breeze in the trees, the occasional muffled riff  of water and the soft lilt of a forest bird. There is a melancholy peace about it, a place to rest, a creative meditation.  

 In the evening I’d make a fire and cook the pike I had managed to hook earlier. I’d mix up a sauce from the  mushrooms that sprung up after the rains and perhaps, if was lucky enjoy a dessert of cloudberries.  Then I would sip my coffee, gaze into the fire and let the river, the fire and evening work their spell.

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The white dog froze, one paw raised.

The green boat turned slowly,

The forest echoed to splash of his oars,

Our smoke cast a mist over the water.

He rose from the lake with a grin;

a belly roll above battle fatigues,

hung out by the fire.

I had no beer, no Finnish. 

‘Fish not good; one so big’,

 he spread his arms.

Berry, he counted fingers;

one, two, three week, maybe.

There was a box tied round the dogs neck

Global positioning system.

She find moosa, I find her with phone. See!

I shoot moosa. Bang!

Next month, a hundred migrant workers from Thailand will arrive to pick the berries.

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Dark eyed, tired, seemingly bored with life, they lumber salivating out of the forest dark,  enticed  by the sound of the tractor and the scent of one hundred kilograms of salmon hidden under logs in four caches. 

Ursus arctos  may have a muzzle like a dog, but it also bears some resemblance to us.  That’s why we infantilise them, find them endearing like characters in children’s stories; Teddy Bear, Winnie the Pooh!  They can stand upright, but they walk on all fours, not like dogs and horses that spring on tiptoe as it were, but the way we might walk on all fours. Bears have proper feet and knees in the same place as us.  And they use their hands in the same way as we do, as tools, pulling logs away, leaning on their elbows to hold their food, sitting on the ground and scratching themselves.  They have cute round ears positioned like antennae at the top of their broad heads, their eyes are close  together in the front of their face, giving them a short sighted binocular vision and their mouth, seen from the side, is set in a permanent smile.  No wonder we find the thought of them cuddly and endearing.  They are anything but.  Their body is massive, at least 200 kilograms, and has a hump like a bison between the shoulders.  Dark of pelt and intent, one swipe from those big muscular arms could knock you unconscious, their long claws could rip your stomach open and a hug would crush the life out of you.  But they are shy creatures.  They avoid humans unless they get between them and their cubs or I suspect, their food.     

Only the males are present at tonight’s feast.  The females, smaller and honey blonde, come earlier in the season, attracted by the scent marks the males leave on the birch trunks.  Couples even make love in the restaurant; and believe me, the earth truly moves. But then the females go to have their cubs and don’t return with them until the next season.  If the cubs tagged along, the males would attack them. I doubt if they ever took any of their feast back to the dens in the forest; they seemed too intent on gorging themselves.  Maybe the males have little to do with cub-rearing anyway.  In any case, it seems likely they are so seduced by salmon, they no longer protect their mates and young, though family groups are seen in the forest.  .   

Left to themselves, bears tend to feed at dawn or dusk or night.  And they eat everything,  leaves, berries, hay and carrion.  They rip open ants nests for eggs, hives for honey.  They will fish for salmon in the rapids like Kodiak Bears in Alaska, take young deer and have even been known to attack an elk.  Bears are such massive animals, it must be difficult to get enough energy and nutrients.  With no males to help, how do the females get enough food for the survival of the next generation?       

The season is soon over.  Arola is on the arctic circle.  The first snow comes in September and before that the hunters.  Eero stops feeding them at the end of the July.  They must learn to survive and avoid the guns.  Then as the snow begins to settle more thickly, they trudge across the frontier under the soldiers’ watch towers and hibernate in Russia.    

   .

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Exhausted with the pressure of  work, the bustle and clutter of city life?  Then don’t head for the crowded beaches of  the Mediterranean,  follow the geese; go north to Finland.     

Arola farm is in the region of Eastern Finland known as Suomussalmi, just south of the Arctic Circle and within sight of the watchtowers of the Russian Federation.   It lies on the edge of Martinselkonen National Park,  a Tolkienesque wilderness of dark lakes, vast open forests of spruce, pine and birch, and broad expanses of grassy bog; a magic land of moss and lichen.  Here, over a hundred miles away from the nearest town, you can wander all day in complete solitude, your every step monitored in the tree top conversations of Ravens, the laughter of woodpeckers and the mocking call of the Cuckoo.   

Suomussalmi is on the migration route.  Many of the birds that overwinter in England, such as Whooper Swans, White fronted and Brent Geese pass through here en route to their breeding grounds in Siberia. Others such as Fieldfares, Redwings, Brambling, Waxwing and Golden Plover breed up here but are much more colourful, extravert and  flambuoyant than they are at home.  Bramblings,  small dull finches with stripy wings and narrow white rumps when glimpsed flying up from Cambridgeshire fields on dark wet winter’s, stand sentry in their smart black and red uniforms and announce their presence in long drawn out whistles. And one morning while canoeing up river, we came within a few feet of a Red Throated Diver,  late for the wedding in his light grey morning suit, black and white striped shirt and crimson cravat.  A few Siberian species have also taken up residence in Suomussalmi; Bluethroats, Cranes and Siberian Jays.    

But Eastern Finland is not just for the birds.    If you go down in the woods, you’ll, be sure of a big surprise. Martinselkonen is a refuge for the few remaining really large European mammals. There are Brown Bear, Elk, Wolves, Lynx and Beaver in the forest.  It is just like being in Canada.  Arola has its own bear hide, at the side of a forest clearing a few miles from the farm.  Every night, Eero, our host, leaves 100 kilos of fish and elk meat out under a log.  With their own five-star restaurant,  the bears, normally shy, venture cautiously out of the forest in the long light nights often bringing their cubs with them to feed, play and even make love.  European Brown Bears are enormous creatures.  The male weighs in at over 200 kilos and stands over ten feet tall.   The female is not quite that size, but when they make love, the earth really moves!    But this is no zoo; these are wild animals.  In the hide we speak in whispers and cover our skin to disguise the smell.  Bears have a very good sense of smell.  The slightest whiff of human presence and they gallop off into the forest.  

Bears are not the only creatures to come to Eero’s restaurant.  Occasionally a Wolverine, a kind of large polecat, will venture out for a snack if he thinks the coast is clear.  And a pair of White Tailed Sea Eagles balance on the topmost branches of a spruce tree, fending off attacks from the gulls and waiting until the bears have gone to grab some fish. 

The Sappinen family have farmed in Arola for generations, even throughout the chaos of war when this region was occupied first by the Russians and then by the Nazis.  In 1939 it was Eero’s mother, Lempi, who bundled her children in a blanket, put them on a sledge and escaped across the thawing river to warn the people of Juntusranta that the Russian soldiers had come across the border.  In Finland, as in many parts of Europe, life for small farmers has become increasingly difficult.  And so Helena, Eero and their son Jeru gave up the farm just two years ago and decided to open their farm for tourism.  Visitors can stay here at any time of the year.  Helena once worked as a nurse in Plymouth and speaks English fluently.  She can accommodate up to 11 people in two houses; the old farmhouse and Hevonkuusa,  a lovely log cabin, 500 metres down the track by the lake.  The latter comes with its own smoke sauna and diving platform.

A week in Arola will broaden your mind.  All you need to bring is a love of the wilderness and a sense of adventure.  Children will love the excitement of it. There is so much to see and do.  Trekking in Finnish National Parks is very easy.  The trails are well maintained  and marked,  the traverses across the swamps are dry and boarded and there are comfortable huts equipped with stove and fuel and clean toilets, where you can stay  overnight at no cost at all.  In the summer you can canoe up river to the rapids, trek all day in the forest, watch the wildlife and return for a wonderful sauna and nerve-tingling dip in the river. But in the long winter, when the forest is transformed into a wonderland, you can ski all day along forest trails and return to your log house, warmed by a stove constructed from the local dark soapstone.  Or perhaps you would prefer to go by sledge, pulled by teams of eager huskies. 

Self catering is an option,  but it would be a mistake not to enjoy Helena’s wonderful traditional Finnish cuisine.  Locked in by snow for half the year and with the nearest store 5 miles away, self sufficiency is the by-word.    So berries picked late in the season are boiled and bottled; the delicious dark crimson blue berries swollen with sweetness,  the creamy cloudberries with their subtle hints of butterscotch,  cranberries from the bog and my favourite, the wonderful combination of sweet, sour and bitter flavours of the lingonberries.   Mushrooms are also stored over winter.  Some need to be boiled twice to remove the toxins and then dried.  Others are pickled in brine. Made up into a sauce, the rich earthy flavours are a delicious complement for the tender sweetness of fresh pike or the meatiness of Elk.  Fish is caught locally all the year round.  In the summer, swarms of roach can be caught by net, cleaned and cooked slowly in salt, onion, olive oil and lemon and bottled with tomato.  In the winter, pike can be caught by rod and line through a hole drilled through the thick ice of the lake.    Elk is shot during the brief hunting period in October and kept frozen overwinter.  It tastes like beef, but does not have the fat content.   Reindeer is smoked and salted and is lovely as midday snack in the forest between two slices of freshly baked rye bread.  Beetroot, cabbage and potatoes grow quickly during the light nights of the Finnish summer and can be pickled and stored through the winter. 

To book a holiday at Arola, visit the website at www.arolantila.susmussalmi.net or write to Helena Sappinen at Arolantie 5, FIN 89920 RUHTINANSALMI. (Tel/fax  +358 8 734 403 ). Travel is remarkably inexpensive.  Flights from various airports in England to Helsinki can cost around £200.  Then take a flight to Kuusamo (£80 return), from where Jeru will collect you and drive you the one and half hour journey to the farm.

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