Four months ago in Nordkapp we knew the journey we were about to start would change our lives, and we also knew we couldn’t possibly get to our final destination (Santiago) with the only supports we had at that time. Even in the most northern place in Europe, money was still a curse, a burden which was heavier to carry than our backpacks. But even if it wasn’t possible to finish our journey, we wanted to try and do it. We were really excited and we knew we could convince someone else about how beautiful our project was. And seeing how each day more and more people followed us and sent their support though our website and the media only kept our optimism growing greater and greater. Our thankfulness to all those people is greater than the challenge we set ourselves to, and a beautiful part of it.

The same as we had done over the previous months at home, we kept on working on finding more supports: then along came FootBalance, TresRazones, VisitFinland and 6MPuzzles, and they made our trip more bearable and our website better. However, money still failed to come.

We knew it when we left Santiago, we could only get to Poland. But we were wrong, we’ll get to the Czech Republic. In Prague, should we not find the economic support we need, we’ll have to go back home. And we don’t want to (I assure you!), that’s why we’re today using this space to send our last call to any potential sponsors.

We still believe in our dream.

Coru y Andrés.

But there are also many things that are still the same. We learnt some Norwegian, Sami, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish. We know which petro station companies are the best to go to the toilet. We are now faster than Bourne at finding sockets to get our mobile devices charged, and GPSs don’t hold any secret to us. We also learnt a lot from the people we came across, we learnt Samis’ history, we celebrated with the Finns the arrival of the summer, and we talked about Estonia’s relationship with Russia with some Estonian natives.

In Latvia we saw the way of life of a young rural working couple, and in Lithuania we discussed the topic of nationalism. We now know that if you enter a small Polish bar is well seen to shake hands with every customer, and that Polish people keep using their bikes and trains to go to work, and that it’s never too early for a shot of vodka.

We went through a lot of things, many of them we already told you about, many others are filmed, and some of them we’ve probably already forgotten. Now that we are halfway through, we stop to look back and remember every step we’ve taken, literally, and we once again stand by what we’ve always thought: this journey was, and it still is, a good idea.

Now we have 3,000 kilometres more left, and they look hard and uncertain, but that’s a topic for another post.

Thanks for taking every step along with us.

Andrés.

A sigh

Freshness, that’s what you breathe all around you when you take a daily shower.
Wisemen know that, a shower a day keeps the doctor away, and allows others to come closer. After a hot day, stepping under the cold stream before going to sleep is one of those great, tiny pleasures that make life more enjoyable, a feeling that not even the freshest of wipes could even dream of matching.

Satisfaction, that’s having to loose your belt after lunch.
Even after dinner. Stews, salads, grills, fish, cereals, cakes… so much variety, there are so many things beyond cereal bars and Chinese pasta. An individual dish for you to eat as much as you want is something you cannot pay with money.

Deeply, that’s the way you sleep between your sheets and the mattress.
Not having to inflate the mattress before going to bed helps to get to sleep, for some reason. Waking up the next morning without knowing whether there were stones or lumps under the bed is something I’m sure we all like.

After an evening sweating under the storm to make a few kilometres, having some nudels for dinner and moving away as many tree branches as we could, we went on to dream of holidays.

Coru.

We got to Riga under the son, and ran to find a shower.

We visited Riga, with its historical buildings and terraces. Until the night fell and we asked where to go:

– Are you looking for sex? Everybody comes to Riga looking for sex.

– We just came walking…

We entered a pub, no girl pounced on us. Which I don’t really get, we are quite handsome after all. And at the next pub, the same happens again. We enter with our “hey, you’re lucky, the party’s just arrived” attitude, and still nothing.

A bit let down, I go to one of those discos in which girls are dressed as warriors and there is no way I could ever fail again. And I wouldn’t have failed if I had happened to have a loaded wallet and hundreds of bottles of champagne on the table, which I didn’t. That kind of guys had girls in pairs! But I was at the wrong place again.

After running out of time to look for love in Riga, and we got back to the road and the heat. Of course, we spent Saturday night in a forest, and this time, to make it all a bit more dramatic, we spent the night walking. Yep, tired of suffering the heat wave we decided to try a new strategy: walking in the cool air at night.

The night brought new sensations. The one we were most thankful for was the cool atmosphere, but also that at night you pay more attention to sounds: you can hear the wheatfields shacking, the bugs buzzing and singing, dogs barking in the background… Apart from that, landscapes adopt new shapes and the animals leave the forest and walk across the fields in front of you. There are less cars, but the road looks more alive.

Looking for a place to sleep turned more difficult than expected. In the morning, without having slept a wink, the sun increases the tent’s temperature making it impossible to stay inside. We get up and look for a shadow where to spend the day until the night comes back again.

We found that shadow in the gardens surrounding Bauskas castle.

The night fell and a storm with it. Cool and wet, we got ready to cross to Lithuania.

We are already in Lithuania…

What’s really defining these days is the fact of being out of connection. Estonia was a wifi paradise, in Latvia we somehow managed, but Lithuania is a dessert.

Last time I told you how we were all the time pretending in Estonia. And we were still pretending when we left Pärnu in the middle of the most intense heat wave anyone here can remember. Best summer in years, they say. Nonsense! So much heat is not good at all, especially if you have to walk with such a long hair as mine, one that made me feel proud in the past and has now become a heavy burden that I carry with style.

From Pärnu to Riga we followed the Baltic coast. White sand beaches, extremely high priced beach bars (the way beach bars have to be), millions of mosquitos and horseflies, and the sea… well, they call anything a sea! To start with, it’s almost saltless, which doesn’t help. And then its depth… you need to go really far to get to swim without touching the bottom with your fingers. And still, don’t take for granted that you belly won’t just drag along the sand.

And then we got to Riga, but I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.

Tallinn’s port was the first thing we got to see in Estonia, along with a fortress-auditorium from the soviet time, welcoming us into this historical city and the Baltic States, the only three countries completely new to us in this trip. Tallinn’s old town streets invite the visitors to get lost, and the prices to sit on a terrace and give themselves a little treat. Not that they give anything away, but coming from Finland everything looks cheap.

We stayed in a hostel and, of course, soon a group of inexperienced young interrailers needed our expert services. We didn’t let them down and we followed a noisy aussie guy into a bar. And there we realised that travelling by train is probably less tiring or that being younger is easier, because we couldn’t keep up with their energy and retired quite early from Tallinn night. Or maybe the previous nights in Helsinki had something to do with our lack of energy.

The next day dawned terribly warm, and we had to hide our wish of staying in Tallinn by carrying our backpacks, and we kept on pretending we didn’t want to stay while we were leaving the city through a long avenue surrounded by sober-as-teetotaler buildings, and we pretended the whole day until we found a place where to camp our tent. No more “Everyman’s Rights” here, we cannot camp at anybody’s garden anymore. But in the end we were so good at pretending that we kept on walking the next day. And the next one as well.

We walked across thicker forests, giant lawns, new and old looking villages. And we suffered the heat (it’s too warm!), because up here (so we found out) summer is a raining season, which makes humidity increase in a 3,000% aprox. We got to Pärnu, Estonia’s summer capital, payed a small visit to the beach and rested… I guess nobody would believe me if I said that after three non-stop walking days we went out to discover this village’s nightlife.

And today it’s time to pretend we don’t want to just lay down and spend the day on the beach…

Coru.

Laura and Katja come back from the pier, and Kaisa takes pictures of them. Ami tries to give Coru a massage, but something in the screaming I’m hearing tells me that Coru’s back won’t give in so easily.

I’m sitting on the porch of a small blue wooden house. In front of me, a clearing among the trees lets me see the lake. It just started raining, but something in the sky tells me that it will stop soon. I check the weather and the forecast is good for the weekend, which is important, given that this is one of the most important times in the year for Finnish people.

Because Finland, believe it or not, has been designed for summer. Lakes, forests, good weather, and an ever present sun make this place a wonderful location to be during the season, and Finns are aware of it. And that’s why today, with the sauna on, a really cold bear, and staring at a lake, the whole country welcomes the summer season.

Andrés.

(This post was written on June 23, Saint John’s Eve).

This is my seventh time in Finland, so I’ve already visited many areas of the country, especially the north and the south. But there is a Finland that was still unknown to me, even though I had passed by it many times: rural Finland.

We travel on foot, which makes it easier to observe and really enjoy all those landscapes that usually just run behind the car’s window, and that way, discover that, behind those beautiful red wooden houses, lies a forest and stockbreeding activity I had never known about.

I always knew about the forest activity and I guess I somehow thought that the inhabitants of those houses would make a living from wood, but I had no idea about the stockbreeding life hidden just a few metres behind the line of trees that can be seen from the road.

Farms, cattle, sown fields, tractors, and all of those things surrounding stockbreeding and agriculture that, for some strange reasons, I didn’t expect to find here. And it makes me happy to come across something to remind me of Galician farms, and I’m surprised with some of the differences (did you know that there are 8-wheeled tractors?). But, most of all, I realise that no matter how much I’ve visited this place, how much I love it or how much I believe to know about it, I keep on being surprised by simple facts such as finding a field full of cows laying under the sun.

I guess I keep on being a tourist after all.

Andrés.

Nordkapp and the road that takes you from there to Rovaniemi are quite touristic and, therefore, filled with services for tourists, especially caravan drivers and bikers. But these people (out of good criteria) only come three months a year: june, july and august. So most of these bars, shops, gas stations or resting areas are closed this time of the year.

Carrying more food and not having where to take shelter when the weather became terrible were our main obstacles. But we also had our advantages: roads without traffic, topic of conversation (most of our conversations with the locals started with “Why are you here so early?”) and, especially, peace.

Travelling the Rujanpulko in the National Park Urho Kenkonen without finding anyone on the way was a complete luxury. 30 km through forests and wild nature. Enjoying an ocious life in Saariselkä with all hotel services for us was a pleasure. Stopping in any of the opened stores and being served without hurries, even starting conversations with the shop assistants, an absolute curiosity.

We said goodbye to the Polar Circle only with one fault: we didn’t get to see the Midnight Sun. And we were close, but we were faster walking south. We left Nordkapp only a few days before the sun would stay over the horizon during the 24 hours of a day, and now in Rovaniemi it’s still a few days until they’ll be able to enjoy that all-time sun. Maybe next time, who knows when, maybe at some future edition of the Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival.

Coru.

Since we entered Finland, kilometres keep on passing by, but the landscape stays almost unchanged.

We crossed the border with Norway a week ago. We got one afternoon to Karigasniemi, a border village, western-like, we entered the saloon after leaving our horses outside, I mean, we entered the bar after leaving our backpacks next to a wall. We ordered two beers, as usual.

-¿Habláis español? -a lady asked in a trembling Spanish -yo aprendí con “listen and repeat”. And there stayed her Spanish.

Hockey, beer, karaoke, sauna, strange characters and a great hospitality, until the morning kicked us out to the road again.

Three days went by until we reached Inari, three days of mixed forests, reindeers and frozen lakes. Finland is a beautiful place, it’s a shame the trees won’t let you see the forest. Literally.

Inari looks no longer like a western, it has less shops. We entered the saloon again, which also happens to be our hotel. Hotel Inari, it’s Saturday night and they say we are in the right place. We put our clean t-shirts on.

Gold hunters are not the most festive people I’ve ever stumbled upon.

More mixed forests, frozen lakes but already on their way to thaw as the season keeps progressing (at huge paces), and more reindeers.

Today is time for extreme resting in Saariselkä, surrounded by a spectacular mixed forest… but this time we are on the mountain, and there are places you can see the forest from.