Coming from Scotland, we all have a passion for the outdoors. Although Finland has significantly less mountains than Scotland, it does have a huge amount of forests and lakes designated into national parks. We decided it would be great to get out of the city and explore what Finnish nature had to offer, and we weren't disappointed.
We took a Foli bus to Tortinmaki, which is as far north as you can get on the Turku Foli bus cards. From here we walked up the side of the road to the start of the national park. We had planned to walk through the woods towards the lake until we found a path, but this was a bit wetter than expected. As Finland is so flat there were large areas of boggy ground which were difficult to cross without a shoe full of water. We persevered however, and eventually found a path. It was here we found that the Finnish solution for pathmaking through this boggy ground was a raised wooden boardwalk (shown below).
This made for much easier progress, and we followed this path north to the side of the lake. Once at the lake we stopped for a well deserved lunch break and sit down. We then followed the path around the lake, meeting many Finnish people and their dogs along the way.
The scenery was amazing and there were a variety of photogenic spots. Michael also had the chance to bring out his reckless side, a nice change since he has been focussing on minimising risks in our project! To the disappointment of the rest of the team, Mike managed to stay dry after walking out for this photo op!
We then headed back towards Tortinmaki, this time following the path the whole way. The path varied between the new strong wooden boardwalk, dry rooty ground, and then a large section where the boardwalk was quite rotten and under repair. This made the walking much more exciting as the old boardwalk was very slippery and moved around as you walked along it. With the help of some singing and dumb jokes we managed to keep spirits high as we reached the end of our walk.
While our route was a little unconventional, it was a great adventure into Finnish nature. In all we were out walking for about 8 hours and covered around 25km. A map of our approximate route is shown below, however if you want to keep your shoes dry we would suggest just following the paths.
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