Europe Backpacking trip – An overview
After the IETF conference I have been travelling around Europe. The backpacking trip across Nordic Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) and the Baltic Countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) took 5 weeks. On this trip I travelled using quite a few modes of travel – air flights (5), ferries across seas and lakes (8), car (2), inter-city bus(11), mini buses, trolley busses, trams (6), domestic trains and intercountry fast trains (total of 11). The map of my travels is below:
Colour Code : Blue – Ferries, Black – Trains, Yellow – Bus and Red – Air Flights. Stockholm was the starting and ending point and it is marked in red on the map. Other cities which I stopped are marked with Blue placemarkers.
View Scandinavia and Baltics Trip in a larger map
The cities visited in order of traversal (can think of a better word 
were Stockholm (Sweden), Turku, Tampere ,Helsinki (all three in Southern Finland), Tallinn, Parnu (Both in Estonia), Riga, Salaspils and Liepaja (all three in Latvia), Klaipeda, Vilnius, Trakai (all three in Lithuania), Tromso, Narvik, Fauske, Trondheim, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger (All in Norway from North to the South), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Copenhagen (Denmark).
Along the way I visited 7 World Heritages sites in Europe.
- Historic Centre (Old Town) of Tallinn — 1997
- Fortress of Suomenlinna, near Helsinki — 1991
- Historic Centre of Riga — 1997
- Vilnius Historic Centre (Old Town) — 1994
- Drottningholm Palace, Theatre — 1991
- Bryggen — 1979
- West Norwegian Fjords – Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord — 2005
The journey took me from the cities to the national parks, from the fjords of Norway to the harsh Russian military prisons of Baltics, from the big industrial towns to small fishing villages. Along the way I met young people who had served in Kosovo, Latvians who had spent most of their life under Russian rule, entrepreneurial Estonians who are rebuilding the their country after the Russian rule (Skype was the product of an Estonian company), environmental scientists who are studying climate change in the arctic circle, Finnish cyclists that undertake cross continental bicycle journeys and the Iraqi immigrants seeking asylum in Denmark. In the process, I took more than 7000 photos of what I saw. Soon I will be posting the photos (with the stories) and the preparation that I needed for making this trip. So subscribe to the feed if you are interested in listening to the stories.