today it was time for farewell. nina's parents[01-02] had their last day on this holiday trip, and their flight would be in the early afternoon from ivalo back home. on our way to ivalo we had a little stop at a place called karhunpesäkivi[01-13], the bear cave. although this place only existed because one can crawl into an abandoned bear cave, i basically got the impression that they do not really like bears, looking at the various exhibits[03-05,​13]. all bears were scary and/or placed in strange ways. another strange thing about this place was a promised view over lake inari - this really huge lake (3rd largest in finland) in the north of finland. to get it, one has to climb quite a lot of stairs, to finally see... a tiny glimpse of a lake on the far far horizon[12]. well, at least we had a little workout. besides that, there is nothing we could recommend - strange, and weird place. soon we arrived at ivalo airport and once nina's parents were heading through security checks we left for the fell centre in kiilopää [15-61], which is right next to uhro kekkonen national park, the second largest national park in finland. we drove to the k-supermarket in saariselkä to get some provisions, then on to kiilopää. there we checked in at the hotel (this time no scandic one), got a map of the nearby hiking trails, and decided to start with an 8km hiking trail. but before we started, we joined a workshop to make your own pan cake[16-19] over open fire, which was taking place in a tent[19] right at the starting point of our trail. we managed to get a few good, not too burned, pancakes - delicious. we started the "niilanpää päivätupa" hiking trail[20-61] in an area where there was still loads of trees[20-24], but soon the trees got fewer and fewer, and soon there were almost no trees at all[25-44]. why we had no idea, it was not like we had a steep ascend above the tree line. maybe it was the ground, or deforestation ages ago that kept the trees from growing. there are emergency huts[37-38,​57-58] with supplies of fire wood. one can chop themselves if they find themselves caught here in winter (or so we thought). so we chopped a few pieces of wood for fun [37-40]. with the sun and the hot temperatures of around 25°C this soon began to end in sweat and exhaustion. so we stopped doing that again, knowing that we could chop if we would have need of it one day (maybe in winter, when being caught here). the landscape did not change much during the entire hike, but at least it was a beautiful landscape, with lots of tiny rivulets[48-56,​60-61] and wide open spaces. we found another hut[54] but this one seemed abandoned. we only found some empty beer bottles and a campfire. and we found other hut[57-58] that had fire wood again and even a little stove. this really looked cosy. we stayed a while to eat our snacks, drink some water for the fluid balance, and rest a little. although it was totally silent - besides one bird every half an hour - we spotted wildlife. there were bugs, big dragonflies, tiny butterflies that nina likes a lot, a frog, a mouse, and a partridge. at least it looked like one. and of course reindeer, but only from afar. they seem to be very shy and cautious. back at the suomen latu kiilopää hotel it turns out we did a 10km hike, not an 8km one. either we took a wrong turn somewhere (which might easily have been the case), or the trail was labeled wrong. we don't know. but it was nice having a hike again. track for day 08, track for day 08 hike.