Travel stories from around the world – focusing on the cultural experience, mixing it up with outdoor activities .
It all starts with the Alpine Clubs Words and photos: Jaakko Järvensivu For years I had been a member of the Austrian Alpine Club, or Österreichische Alpenverein, paying the annual fee of 69 euros, mostly due to the extensive (up to 25 000 euros) global rescue fee coverage, included in […]
“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 […]
