The Travels of Päivi and Santeri

Photos of our 18th wedding anniversary in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic on our never-ending honeymoon trip.

We had been hoping to go to Guadeloupe for years but the island was closed during the recent flu hysteria. When France finally reopened it, we rushed immediately in.

What can one say about Sarajevo? It is charming yet brutalist; there are ruins of an old Ottoman caravanserais but also dilapidated Soviet style housing blocks; the streets feel safe, yet the memorials and remnants of war abound, everywhere.

We wanted to escape the high season in the coastal Mediterranean Balkan states and so were asking around for suggestions where to go. Upon this mission, we got into contact with Portuguese Vicente on BeWelcome hospitality exchange, which is a free alternative for couchsurfing , and got interested in the place where he had been staying on and off for some years. The place is Kalna in Stara Planina Mountains that run from Serbia to Bulgaria.

We travelled to Kalna , Serbia to interview 28-year-old Vicente who left Portugal eight years ago to travel the world. In this Global Nomad interview, Vicente is talking about his life on the road, the hippie community where he has been staying, his projects and future plans.

Our visit to Skopje had a mission: we wanted to be positively impressed. The previous time we were in the city — ten years ago — we only changed buses at the main bus station and had a somewhat a miserable time. We were waiting for our connecting bus to Serbia in the late hours of a Friday evening. All seats in the waiting area were taken by local hooligans, and we didn't have a single Macedonian dinar to pay a visit to the toilet. Nobody wanted Euro at that time and the only currency exchange booth was closed. When our connecting bus finally arrived, we were happy to leave.

This wasn't our first visit to Albania. We had crossed the country on our previous Balkan tour ten years earlier but didn't get a very good impression then. Now everything was different. We stayed longer, tried different parts of the country from north to south, and fell in love with the Mediterranean coast. We ended up staying in Saranda close to the Greek border, a 30-minute ferry ride from Corfu. Saranda is a small former fishing village with approximately 15 000 inhabitants. It is big enough to have different kind of supermarkets and services and small enough for it being laid-back.

Dear Mr. Niinistö, I am deeply concerned about the current state of affairs in Finland. We left Finland in 2004 to travel the world. We have been living in 102 countries around the world, and travelled through countries devastated by the US, NATO, and Russia. The last three years we lived in Georgia , which is at war with Russia . There is a ceasefire agreement, but a peace accord was never signed. Russia – the second biggest arms exporter in the world right after the US – benefits from such instability.

We had our first winter in 17 years. Snow looked incredibly beautiful and we enjoyed the opportunity to see many of our friends and relatives in Finland and reconnect with our roots .

Photos of our 17th wedding anniversary in Tampere, Finland on the never-ending honeymoon trip.