Urban Exploration: An Old Russian Fortification (1915)
A couple of weeks back Sameli, whom I knew only as a handle in local UE websites and Flickr, asked me to come with him to check out one of the World War I fortifications that can be found a-plenty around Helsinki area. We had talked about them earlier, but I’ve never been energetic enough to find out more about them by myself. Now, apparently, a new suburb is going up right next to one of them, so this autumn is the last time to see the place before retards with spray cans and beer bottles mess them up completely.
So, I drove to meet Sameli, masterfully going initially to the wrong train station. This week the weather has been really nasty, but today was the eye of the storm or something: nice, beautiful and crispy autumn day. Our target was specifically Base XXVIII:19, that was built in 1915. It consisted of three underground caves/tunnels blasted straight into the bedrock, which is really close to the surface in here because of the ice age. Additionally there were plenty of trenches, a large rampway built out of boulders and pieces of rock, and remains of abovegrounds fortifications and buildings.
The full photoset of the trip can be found in my Flickr and I’ll let the photos do most of the talking. The trip was really pleasant ending for the day and a nice change for sitting far too much indoors lately. There were also some quite surprising finds. In one of the caves there was fungus on the ceiling that was glinting metallic silver, there was a variety of butterflies that gleamed like brass and in the final cave there was a fungus on the wall that glinted like gold in the beams of our flashlights. Don’t believe me? The only thing I don’t have photos of was the spider, whose eyes gleamed gold. Seriously.
In any case, here’s a sample of photos from the trip.
(See the full photoset on Flickr)
Geotrip Featuring an Abandoned Kindergarten
Last weekend I went for a short geotrip, but ended up finding a few cool places – like a windmill near the area I used to live for years and an abandoned kindergarten. That’s the cool thing about hobbies like geocaching. You end up going to all kinds of weird places you’d otherwise never see.
I couldn’t get in to the kindergarten, but the yard itself was pretty atmospheric. You can find the photos in my Flickr.
Utö / Park Victory – Wrecks, Fortifications and Toads
Last weekend I and a number of people from our diving club went for a two day trip to Utö to check out the Park Victory shipwreck. Utö is the southernmost inhabited island in Finland, it has some military presence and a population of 50 or so. The island has been inhabited from the 16th century and in addition to a lighthouse, a radar station and a military watchtower there are some old fortifications in the southern tip of the place.
The main event of the trip was to go diving on Park Victory, a massive steam ship that sank on 1947. It’s the largest wreck in the Finnish national waters and a popular, although challenging dive location weatherwise. Additional challenge is provided by the fact that the ship is in military waters, so you need a permission for every person who dives there.
As it happened, on Saturday the wind was too high to even think of diving. The waves were over two meters high and the wind was calming down, but not fast enough. I hadn’t been feeling that well during the morning and the day, so I went to sleep off the achy feelings. After we met at the boat in the late afternoon to decide that an evening dive was out of the question too, I went to explore the island.
All in all Utö is ridiculously idyllic. There are small red and white houses, boathouses all along the waterline, an old lighthouse and so on. In addition to that you have a couple of military structures, which break up the idyll a bit.
I had a fun afternoon jumping from boulder to boulder and photographing stuff. Of course my camera battery started running out right when I found the abandoned fortifications on the southern end of the island, and I didn’t have my flashlight with me. After a dinner and a sauna I simply had to go back properly equipped.
Yes. A stormy dark night on an island with an history of shipwrecks and drowned people, me alone exploring abandoned fortifications with the sea pounding the rocky shore nearby. No, I have never seen a horror movie, why?
On the next morning we got up before six and by the time the sun was rising, we were already on top of Park Victory wreck. The waves were still quite high and the only sensible way to get to the buyoy and the rope leading down to the wreck was to pull ourselves there with an another rope – swimming was too difficult. I almost fucked up and forgot to set my dive computer for nitrox (again). Luckily I caught the error when me and my two dive buddies were only five meters deep, so I could come back up to fix the situation. Unfortunately trying to set the computer with the waves rolling over me and my brain still foggy from too little sleep was too difficult, so I had to drag myself to the stern of the ship and back again, before diving down. How’s that for a morning exercise.
We did three dives around the wreck that day and it was worth every dime. The visibility was 10-15 meters, which was excellent because the sheer size of the ship is one of the attractions of the place. Lying on the sea floor, looking up at the bow of the ship you could only imagine the racket it made when it slid down the rock wall. You can still see the gouges it made.
All in all, an excellent weekend. There was good food, sea air, sauna, geocaching, light urban exploration and obviously diving. Right now that makes up at least 3/4 of my favourite activities in one weekend, so not bad at all!
