Hiking in Nuuksio

Today about 20 of us went hiking in Nuuksio National Park, which is just outside Helsinki. It's what you'd expect really, heavily forested with quite a few lakes, which our Finnish guides had a habit of jumping into.

There are over 200,000 lakes in Finland. This is one of them.

We hiked for about 5km and had lunch by a lake, then we were offered the choice of going back to the bus stop with one of the guides or continuing on a much longer and tougher walk. Needless to say I chose the latter.

This was the easy bit

We ended up walking for many more hours, in the almost 30C heat, taking a 'shortcut' that involved going off the path and through the dense foliage, ducking under low branches, walking along precarious planks of wood and climbing up and down steep inclines.

A lake. Yesterday.

It was much tougher than I expected, but definately worth doing. There's no point coming to Finland if you don't want to see the wilderness.