Saturday, April 19, 2014

Do you even know what it looks like, smells like?

Sometimes one can get overwhelmed with a landscape, and so happened to me today. A friend suggested that Porkkala peninsula would be a nice place to go for a walk, and today afternoon I decided to check it out.

The road to the peninsula is a narrow one, curving a lot, going up and down small hills, and driving the car was an experience in itself. In fact, there were bicycles and motorbikes on the road as well. I had to stop a couple of times to read the map, and parked the car in a place which wasn't so good, but next time I'll know better.

From the car I walked up to the Telegrafberget hill, and that was already something, as there were little pockets of trees and even swamps bitween the rocks on the hill. And from the top of the hill there opened a panorama view over the blue sea - blue all the way to the horizon, and blue sky above.

From the hill I descended to the west side of the peninsula, and walked on top of the cliff toward south, taking quite a lot of photographs on the way. I walked all the way to the south end of the peninsula, Pampskatan. There were some people walking with dogs, a couple of people camping, and some people observing the birds.

I returned via the east side of the peninsula, where there were some well-traveled paths, and a parking place nearer than where I left the car. I guess parking place may be hard to find during busy summer months, but now there were only a dozen cars.

The wind from the sea felt good, but I started to wonder how it would feel during a storm. Maybe the best time to visit the peninsula would be during an autumn storm. Hmmm, I have to remember this.

The photographs that I took may not be that good, as the ground was very dry, and thus colors were muted. But the experience of the landscape was profound, and I have to return to Porkkala at some point. However, the drive takes almost an hour, so this isn't quite so easy as going to Meiko or Nuuksio.

The photographs were taken yesterday at Korkeasaari Zoo. This fellow, a European bison, seemed to know how to handle a piece of wood.

(Posting title is from the poem Everybody Has a Heartache: A Blues by Joy Harjo.)

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