Got up too late for a long cycling day, packed my stuff, had breakfast, and checked out. The girl at the reception didn’t want to put a stamp on the immigration card and instead gave me slip of paper stating I’d stayed at the hotel. I was a bit skeptical, but she said it would be ok at the border.
Cycled out of the city and to the south-west. The terrain was unpleasantly hilly at first and I had a strong head-wind. I came through a couple of run-down, hm, villages? A village, in my book, has small houses, for just a few families each. These places, however, seemed to consist solely of a few of these ugly multi-story concrete buildings, grey in grey, from soviet times. In Тулома (Tuloma) the road-side ‘advertisements’ for the local agricultural company were still using the old soviet emblem and the ‘СССР’ letters.
The terrain got flatter and I rode on and on. After 156km, approximately half the distance between Murmansk and Ivalo, Finland, I found a dry spot to pitch the tent. Everything here is kinda swampy and it took me a while to find a place where I wouldn’t wake up drowned the next day. Went to bed around 11pm.
