Best of Finland

Your private guide meets you at arrivals in Helsinki (HEL) and drives you into the city to the Hotel St. George, a design hotel by the Old Church Park. Once you are settled, you head to the Löyly sauna on the seafront, a folded timber structure built for the water's edge. In a private session you move between the heat and a plunge straight into the Baltic, the traditional way to settle in. Afterward you walk through the Design District at your own pace, browsing studios and shopfronts as the evening comes in. The rest of the evening is free: choose a restaurant from our shortlist or follow your own appetite.

After breakfast your guide takes you through the design ateliers and studios of the city, where Finland's celebrated makers work in glass, ceramics and textile. You visit the Aalto House next: the private home Alvar Aalto built for himself, a quiet lesson in Finnish modernism still furnished as he left it. In the afternoon a private boat carries you across the harbour to Suomenlinna, the UNESCO sea fortress spread over a chain of islands. You make your way through its tunnels, ramparts and old dry dock with the open Baltic on every side and time to stop for a coffee. You return by boat to Helsinki for a second free evening in the city.

After breakfast you leave Helsinki with your guide-driver and head northeast, the city giving way to forest and water as you drive into the Saimaa lakeland. Lake Saimaa is Finland's largest lake: a labyrinth of islands, channels and open water that is also home to the rare Saimaa ringed seal. You arrive at the lakeside resort of Järvisydän, a family-run retreat of stone-and-timber suites on the shore, and check in before the afternoon is out. As the day cools you board a vintage steamer for an evening on the water, threading between wooded islets. Dinner is back at the resort, by the lake.

At first light you set out by boat with your guide for a quiet safari across Lake Saimaa in search of the Saimaa ringed seal, a freshwater seal found in this lake and nowhere else on earth. You drift past rocky islets where the seals haul out, watching from a respectful distance as the lake wakes. Later you come ashore for a foraged lunch in the forest, tasting what the season gives: berries, mushrooms and herbs gathered nearby. Toward evening your guide brings you to a lakeside smoke sauna, the slow, soft-heated original that gives Finnish sauna its name, with the option of a cold-lake plunge. The rest of the evening is yours by the water.

After breakfast you leave the lakeland and fly north into Lapland, where the landscape opens into snow-clad fells and the season tips toward the polar night (or, in summer, the midnight sun). Your guide meets you on arrival and drives you to Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort below the Saariselkä fells, the original glass-igloo retreat with reindeer at the door. You check into a glass-roofed aurora cabin, where the whole sky lies open above your bed, and the afternoon is yours to rest and settle in. After dinner the watch begins: should the night stay clear, you keep your first northern-lights vigil from the warmth of the cabin, with a wake-up service ready if the aurora rises while you sleep.

Your day in the Arctic begins with a private husky expedition: your guide brings you to the kennels and your own team pulls the sled through the snow forest as you learn to drive and care for the dogs. A trailside lunch warms you at mid-day before the afternoon with the Sámi, Europe's only indigenous reindeer-herding people, who share their reindeer, their stories and the old ways of the fell. As darkness falls you set out on a night snowmobile run across the open snow, with the aurora a possibility overhead. Your guide is with you throughout, and you return to the glass cabin for a second chance under the lights.

After breakfast your guide-driver takes you south to the coast at Kemi, on the frozen Gulf of Bothnia, where the Sampo icebreaker waits at the quay. You cruise aboard her as she crushes a path through metre-thick sea ice, the floes splitting and grinding along the hull. Out on the ice you pull on a buoyant survival suit and float in the Arctic sea, weightless in the freezing water and dry. Dinner is in an ice restaurant, the tables and walls carved from snow and ice beside the SnowCastle. You spend the night in a heated glass villa on the seafront at Kemi, with the ice and the horizon visible through the roof.

After breakfast on your last Arctic morning you head out onto the white gulf for an hour or two of ice fishing, drilling a hole and waiting in the quiet, or take a warming forest sauna to close the journey. In the summer variant this finale gives way to the midnight sun, with the 24-hour light over the water in place of the ice. When you are ready your guide-driver transfers you north to Rovaniemi for your onward flight, the coast giving way to snow and fells. We see you off at the airport as you continue home, at the close of a journey that has run from the Baltic saunas of Helsinki, through the Saimaa ringed-seal lakes, to the aurora and ice of Lapland.