Letting off steam

You fly to Helsinki and pick up your hire car at the airport. In about two hours you drive to the archipelago coast near Salo. This is where you’ll find Mathildedal, an old nineteenth-century ironworks village with wooden houses, a bakery and little shops. It borders Teijo National Park, with walking trails through the forest and along lakes.

Take the time to have nothing you need to do here. Hire a kayak or SUP, swim in the lake or the sea, or add one of the activities nearby: baking cinnamon buns in the village, dinner in the middle of the forest or picking berries on a farm.

• The ironworks village of Mathildedal
• Hiking in Teijo National Park
• Kayaking, paddleboarding and swimming

Pikku-Keisari is a log cabin on a rocky slope, ten metres from the sea. You have your own wood-fired sauna, a jetty with a rowing boat and a terrace where you can watch the sun sink into the sea.

In three hours you drive to the lake district near Tampere, to the shores of Lake Näsijärvi. Here you go completely back to basics and spend two nights in a glamping tent without electricity, on a farm by the lake.

Tampere calls itself the sauna capital of the world. During the included ‘sauna tour’ you’ll visit, among others, the oldest public sauna in Finland and a smoke sauna. Afterwards you can read a book by your tent, swim in the lake and do absolutely nothing else.

• The lake district around Tampere
• Swimming in Lake Näsijärvi

Tahlo Ventures is a family business on a farm by Lake Näsijärvi, about 40 minutes from Tampere. You sleep in a spacious glamping tent with a real bed. There’s no electricity, so the evenings are for candlelight, the lake and the bright summer night.

Today you travel to the westernmost point of Finland you can reach by car. Via the Replot Bridge, at more than a kilometre the longest bridge in Finland, you drive into the archipelago, to where the road ends and the open sea begins.

The Kvarken Archipelago is Finland’s only natural World Heritage Site. Since the last ice age the land here has still been rising, by about a centimetre a year, so new islets keep emerging from the sea. From the Saltkaret observation tower at Svedjehamn you can see the long, narrow ridges the ice left behind. 

• Hiking in Kvarken
• Saltkaret observation tower
• Included: a sauna visit during your stay

Kalle’s Inn lies at the end of the road in the outer archipelago of Vaasa. Here you sleep in a glass igloo overlooking the sea. On clear days you can see Sweden on the other side! Breakfast and dinner are included, and the saunas with hot tubs are heated up for you. There are very few places on earth where you can hear the sea and the birds from the sauna. This is one of them.

From Kvarken you drive about 5.5 hours back south, to the forests and lakes of Nuuksio National Park, three quarters of an hour from Helsinki. Here you won’t need the car for the next few days.

Your cottage is on a quiet lake, with its own sauna, its own little beach and a rowing boat. Walk through the forest of Nuuksio, pick blueberries along the trail in late summer or row out onto the lake at sunset. And in the evening? Then you fire up the sauna and jump straight into the lake.

• Hiking in Nuuksio National Park
• Your own sauna, beach and rowing boat
• Optional: meditation sessions in a hammock, building birdhouses and picking mushrooms/berries with a guide

Hawkhill Cottage Resort has a handful of detached houses on the lake, each with its own sauna, little beach, rowing boat and campfire spot.

Today your trip comes to an end. From Nuuksio it’s less than an hour’s drive to Helsinki airport, so you still have plenty of time in the morning for a last dip in the lake. Then you return the hire car and fly back home.

In Mathildedal, a baker teaches you in two hours how to make real Finnish cinnamon buns: from the dough to the knots and the spices. At the end you eat them with a cup of coffee.

At Teijo National Park you sit down to a four-course dinner in the middle of the forest, with local berries, game and herbs. Meanwhile you’ll hear all about Finnish food and Finnish culture.

From late June to late August you pick berries with the farmer on a farm near Salo, with a picnic in between and a basket of berries to take home.

Prefer a hotel? Instead of the log cabin, you can choose a premium room at Hotel Mathildedal, in the old ironworks village itself, with a rooftop sauna.

Half an hour from the airport there’s a traditional smoke sauna built into the ground, next to Sipoonkorpi National Park. A lovely way to round off your last day.

Hire a sauna raft with a wood stove and spend four hours on the water near Espoo, with a captain at the helm. There’s room for up to ten people.

By arrangement, all accommodation can be upgraded to more luxurious rooms or other places to stay.