Travel stories from around the world – focusing on the cultural experience, mixing it up with outdoor activities .
“Out of service” the three words you don´t want to see plastered on the hotel elevator door on the fifth floor, in the early hours, when you´re in a rush to get down with a full ski bag, several pieces of luggage and two kids under the age of five. […]
From above, our group of skiers and snowboarders looks like a slowly moving pearl string necklace, as we navigate our way through snow-covered thin spruce trees to the Karhunjuomalampi wilderness hut, following the ski track laid by our guide Katja Heikkinen. The surrounding Pyhä National Park has received a foot-deep […]
The border formalities on the Finnish side go smoothly, but on the Russian side the bureaucratic Soviet influence is still evident: I have to fill several small entry forms and then queue with them from one counter to the next. As I am crossing the border by car I have […]
The water cascades down a steep rocky path with a roaring sound and disappears under a stone bridge, it forms a near vertical waterfall on the other side, before finally reaching the valley floor some few hundred meters lower. The surrounding Belle Époque style village of Bad Gastein in Austria´s Salzburg state […]
As the summer was approaching my girlfriend Laura and I were busy sketching plans for our first road-trip with the newly purchased Volkswagen T3 Syncro. We had already roughly decided on the route, starting off from Helsinki, heading towards the western and north-western parts of Finnish Lapland, then crossing the […]
The combination of a unique culture, rich food tradition, local hospitality and one of the world’s best snow records has in recent years made Japan a stable in ski destination bucket lists. Japan has hundreds of distinctively different ski areas on two islands, which can make planning your first trip […]
It is two a.m. and dark outside. I watch heavy wet snowflakes gently floating down in the halo of a solitary street lamp behind the tinted glass window of our traditional ryokan style room. Unable to sleep, I get up and quietly push open the sliding door with the paper panels, trying […]
After spending a sleepless night in a hotel situated in the middle of Kabukicho´s red light district in Shinjuku we headed for the busy Tokyo Station. Sleep-deprived, we pulled our ski bags through a constant stream of people trying to read the signs written mostly in Japanese. In the end we managed to find […]
Words: Jaakko Järvensivu, Photos: Juha Laine The wind is moving the snow like a fast magic carpet on top of the rock-hard snowpack that is covering the surrounding fells under a layer of white wavy formations, with rocks protruding here and there like small islands. The whirling snow stings you […]
The Dachstein mountains rising up to 3000 m are known for the high number of karst caves in the area, some of which are 60-80 km long. The inner Salzkammergut region, which includes the Dachstein massif and the town of Halstatt have been declared as a world heritage site by […]
