This is the second part of the blog post series Finns on Bicycles – encounters on the road. This time let me introduce to you: Antti Aittola, a 23-year-old man from Porvoo, Finland. Antti left his hometown together with his friend Lauri Ketonen in March 2014, and after spending 27 months cycling through Asia, Australia, South America and the East Coast of USA, he finally returned to Finland in July 2016. (more…)
Tag: How to meet locals?
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FINNS ON BICYCLES: KAISA LEKA
This is the first part of my new series of posts called Finns on Bicycles, encounters on the road by other Finnish long-distance cyclists. As I’m definitely not the only one who is continuously meeting wonderful and helpful strangers on the move, I’ve decided it’s high time to share the adventures of other cyclists and strengthen my claim that the whole world is filled with amazing people. So, I’ve asked a few of my countrymen (and women) to share with you five people related stories about what I would call the good-heartedness of the human species. Please, let me introduce to you my first guest writer: Kaisa Leka! (more…)
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1000 KILOMETERS OF HOSPITALITY
In my last post, I stated that people are just way too afraid of each others. Lovely, friendly people often warn you about bad people. “The world is full of weirdos”, they say. Yet, most people in this world are just as lovely and friendly as those people warning you about the bad guys. To show what I mean, here are the people I stayed with in Northern Argentina – cycling through the provinces of Formosa, Chaco, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán. This is what I call 1000 kilometers of hospitality! (more…)
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SOHVASURFFAAJAT: TV SERIES ON STRANGERLESS TRAVEL
This is not about my trip in Latin America, but I just felt like telling you about a great TV series we did in Finland on Strangerless travel and couchsurfing a couple of years ago. It’s called Sohvasurffaajat and it’s about…surprise, surpise: getting to know cultures through people!! The series is in Finnish, but the first season has been subtitled into English. (more…)
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FLYING: WHO WILL SIT NEXT TO ME?
The anticipation of a flight for me is the anxiety of who will sit next to me on the plane. I don’t particularly enjoy flying per se, but I love imagining the people I meet at the airport and my future travel companion (I guess I’ve watched one American movie too many, but I often think I’ll meet someone I’ll fall madly in love with…and nope, has never happened). (more…)
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WHY CYCLE LATIN AMERICA?
A bicycle really is all you need if you want to meet people in another country (disclaimer: these pics don’t really look like it, do they?). And I’m not saying this solely out of my own experience, but also from the experiences of those who have cycled around the whole world. So, why cycle Latin America? Because A bus or a car is great if you want to go from point A to point B, but a bicycle is what takes you to all those middle places between point A and B. (more…)
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URBAN HITCHHIKING: WALKING WITH STRANGERS
Would you like a spontaneous encounter with a stranger in the midst of your day-to-day life? If the answer is yes, then Urban Hitchhiking is for you! Created by urban-space-mastermind Lauri Jäntti and myself, Urban Hitchhiking is all about unexpected encounters in an environment where collective rush often hinders the mental space from extemporaneous meetings with new people – the city.
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TRAINING FOR LATIN AMERICA WITH A PINK RIKSHAW
How on earth do you train for long-distance cycling and contact with strangers if you live in a city? Unless you’re one of those people into Urban Hitchhiking [sic!], meeting people on the streets of a city can be a tricky business. However, with a spark of imagination, there are loads of things that will draw people towards you. Being a taxi driver on a Saturday night is one option, but an other, more ecological and mentally less challenging one is getting yourself a pink rikshaw!