Finland

Roads of Peace

Helsinki is not the most exciting city in the world, even though the sun only set at around midnight in the summer.

 
I met a traveler who was heading to Tampere, and I left my big backpack with him while I kept the smaller one. I walked to meet him there and covered a distance of 160 km in 8 days.
 
The nature was beautiful, and the nights were quiet while I slept in my tent. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and I intend to repeat it in another country, only this time for several weeks.

July 2009

Moments

Did you know...

- Finland is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union, with only 16 inhabitants per km².

 

- There are exactly 187,888 lakes (larger than 500 m²) and 179,584 islands within the territory of Finland. Both are world records.

 

- Finland was one of the last region of Europe to be Christianised, in the 12th century.

 

- Finland has only been an independent country since 1918. Before that it belonged to Russia or Sweden.

 

- Finland has been at the top of the worldwide Press Freedom Ranking list every year since the publication of the first index by Reporters Without Borders in 2002.

 

- Finnish language (a.k.a. Suomi) is an non Indo-European language belonging to the Uralic family, along with Estonian and Hungarian.

 

- The Finns are the world's biggest coffee drinkers, gulping down no less than 12 kg of the black substance annually.