Exploring Herttoniemi
When I left the office today, the weather was a bit too sunny and I was feeling a little too jittery to go straight to home. Instead I decided to go and pick up a geocache a couple of kilometers away, near a Bronze Age burial site next to Itäväylä road. Cycling there was very pleasant and the cache was in a fun place to find, although the GPS gave me some trouble. I’m mostly happy with the Garmin Colorado 300, but the electronic compass acts rather funky a bit too often. You have to recalibrate it quite regularily, plus for some reason even minor vibration (such as holding it in your hand that’s resting on a bicycle handlebar) makes it go wonky.
A Bronze Age burial site next to one of the busiest roads in Helsinki. The site is basically just a huge pile of rocks.
I also found someone's lodgings. Nobody seemed to be home, so I peeked in.
Pages from porn magazines, a couple of tent mattresses, an ashtray and empty boxes of ice-cream etc. Looked more like a shack built by kids than the lodgings of a bum.
When I found the cache, I was still feeling energetic and the next caches were only a bit over a kilometer away, so I went looking for them. A very nice thing about geocaching is that it takes you to places where you’d otherwise never go. Going for walks without a point bores me to tears and I rarely go cycling without any aim, but geocaches give you a good excuse to poke your nose into all kinds of places. I used to live in Herttoniemi, on the northern side, but Herttoniemenranta-area really surprised me. It was a completely different world from the area of Siilitie – clean houses, nice yards, lots of kids and a distinct smell of money.
I found one of the caches, the second one was inside a dog park, where I didn’t want to go and the third one was right next to a very busy road with a lot of people (it’s a really fucking cold day in hell before I start calling bystanders ‘muggles’). The people walking past made searching for the cache without revealing its spot pretty hard, so I left it for another time.
Herttoniemenranta seaside has nice tallish cliffs, which I’ve been meaning to check for some time now. When I returned, I arrived handily right above them – on the other side there is a harbor, which is closed with fences and barbed wire. The cliffs were surprisingly clean. I was expecting a ton of old beer bottles and stuff like that after the summer, but either it had been cleaned or it didn’t attract that many people. From the top of the cliff I noticed some old rusty barges and to my surprise a smaller tug-like boat that was huddling quite close to the cliffs.
The barges were rusty and massive. They were behind a serious looking fence, which I didn't want to try and cross in full daylight.
It was full of clothes hung up to dry, boxes of plates and other dishes also set up to dry and so on. There was a gap in the fence on top of the cliff and I just had to go through and climb down to check the boat out. The it was anchored next to a concrete ledge on the bottom of the cliffs – surprisingly there didn’t seem to be any way to the ledge apart from going there by boat, unless there was a door on the cliffside. Somehow the boat with all the stuff and the ledge was the coziest thing I’ve seen in ages.
A view from the top of the cliffs.
The boat was covered with laundry and all kinds of stuff.
There was a barbeque, plants, more clothes, ornaments like the small lighthouse, and all kinds of small stuff on the ledge. It looked like like someone's front yard.
When I was pedaling back towards home, I was feeling good and peaceful. I’ll have to get a few proper urban exploration trips done before the end of the summer – maybe a certain abandoned prison or a factory, or a Russian era ammo dump. Poking my nose into old ruins and often just poking my nose into places a bit off the beaten track always manages to put me in a strange but very good mood. It’s kind of peaceful, timeless and weird in the sense that I feel like I was remembering something very old. I can’t place the memory and strangely enough I remember feeling like that when I was a kid too. I wonder whose memories do I have.
Nevertheless, feeling good and peaceful. Now a bit of gaming, some food and then early to bed.
Geocaching, Raspberries and Rain
Friday
Last weekend I finally had time to go to the cabinside – my fortress of solitude – all alone. I once again got on the way a bit later than I would have wanted, which meant that I arrived around seven in the evening. There was still plenty of light out, so after I got my food in the fridge and everything else unpacked, I pushed off to the lake to case out a place for my first geocache and to pick out one which I hadn’t found in the wintertime.
The evening was extremely relaxing. I rowed about 8km around the lake, climbed on a cliffside of a rocky island which I had chosen for the site of my first cache, and found a great hiding place for it. I once again surprised myself by not being particularily tired after that. I spent time finishing Penny Arcade adventures, but after a very late night sauna I didn’t need much help falling asleep.
A view down from the top of the cliff.
Saturday
Friday evening had been sunny and the lake had been calm, but Saturday dawned cloudy and rainy. I set together the cache, rowed back to the island and spent some time hanging a bit too high for my comfort without a rope.
Climbing to the cache site.
...and there it went.
There were some kayakers having a picnic on the island and we started talking about the layout of the island. They told me about this one island owned by the local church and used for confirmation camps and such. Apparently one of the buildings on the island had burned time some time ago, so of course I had to go and check it.
It seemed that there had been some time since the fire, because the place was pretty well cleaned up and the foundation of the building was used as a some kind of an open air platform for speeches and such – at least judging by the chairs set nicely on one side of the foundations. There wasn’t that much to see there, apart from some charred trees.
The foundation had been cleaned up and the old fireplace used as an open air barbeque.
A nearby shed was as bit charred too.
Plus a large pine some way off the ruins.
It started raining a bit, but not severely. I returned to the cabin, had a very quick and light lunch and packed up some stuff for a trip to another geocache, one that required going through something that looked (and turned out to be) trackless forest. Luckily I ended up taking a rain cloak with me, since the weather didn’t really take a turn of the better.
There is an old road, which hasn't been used in years and the nature is starting to reclaim it in a beautiful way.
Don't know if this happened by itself or if someone dug up the road on purpose.
I ended up trundling through something that was more or less open swamp, very thick stretches of planted birches (thick as in having visibility of two meters), jumping over ditches and going through stretches of chest high ferns. All this protected by just a flimsy rain cloak and wearing running shoes, in pouring rain. The experience wasn’t bad, though – quite the opposite. The air smelled fresh, the forest was quiet and beautiful and whenever I started feeling even a little pissed off, I ran into a batch of raspberries which were so ripe that they fell from the stalks when you brushed the bushes. I must have eaten a liter or two of them during that trip, which according to the GPS took four hours and spanned about eight kilometers.
The small rocky hills covered with lichen practically glowed in the rainy afternoon light.
There were a lot of raspberry bushes nobody had apparently found at all this year. Maybe because they were right in middle of a godawful thicket nobody in their right mind would bother walking through.
For some reason I wasn't hungry at all when I returned to the cabinsite.
In the end I didn’t find the geocache, which was hidden in or near a very small bridge meant for riders. I was muddy and wet, but no amount of crawling around the banks and hanging down from the bridge revealed the hiding place. In the end I didn’t mind, though – when I finally got back to the cabin, I was so wet that I have literally fallen on bodies of water and come up drier. The caffee and the carelian pies tasted incredibly good, not to mention the pork chops.
The rest of the evening was spent waiting for my clothes to dry, saunaing and playing Runaway: A Road Adventure. The premise of the game sounded good and I was a bit surprised about the mediocre reviews it had got. Not so after I actually played through the first few chapters. The game wasn’t bad, but it was old-school in all the wrong ways. By this I mean completely illogical and contrived puzzles, that didn’t make a lick of sense most of the time, plus a shitload of hunting barely visible items and having to check bags and such again and again, because more stuff popped up in them. The game had its good moments, though, so the 12 euroes or so I spent didn’t feel like wasted money. When I realised I was progressing mostly with a walkthrough, I called it a night.
My plan was also to try and look for some mushrooms, but I didn't find any I recognized as edible.
Sunday
On Sunday morning I woke up feeling incredibly good and alert – it had been ages since I had slept that well. I spent the rest of the day chopping and stacking firewood, before it was the time to start packing my stuff. The atmosphere outside was perfect – it was cloudy but reasonably warm, there were high winds that made trees hiss and billow and no mosquitoes anymore. Pure zen.
The weekend was very good, the only thing to complain about was the fact that somehow I managed to lose my iPod. I didn’t take it to the forest trip, at least as far as I remembered, but the damn thing had vanished. I spent an hour turning over the cabin and the car, until I gave up and left for home. This will be making the rainy day trips to work rather boring, though. Well, win some, lose some.
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