All good things may come to an end (like the final episode of ST:TNG), yet every ending contains also a new beginning. I rather enjoyed documenting in a blog format my life and times while on an assignment in Singapore. While it was enjoyable to actually see that my ramblings were being viewed by thousands of folks globally, the most important takeaway for myself was twofold: now with hindsight I have realized that I am thoroughly enjoyed reading the old blog posts myself -- apparently the narrative format of documenting my own feelings and initial awe is something that just plain pictures cannot convey. In addition I noticed now that the old blog has finally come to an end, something is missing from my life. I found pleasure in the process of creative writing.
Easy solution for the ache caused by the lack of writing is to establish yet another blog! Once again I am predominantly nurturing my own self actualization, rather than writing for the masses. One area that I believe my future self would appreciate is for me to document the experiences I have had on various mountain hikes I have completed around the world. While I obviously do have the photos still with me, a small complimentary travel journey would be nice thing to have for reminiscence purposes and posterity. If the masses find my little content contributions to Internet beneficial in the process, then even better.
This blog is going to be somewhat different time-space-continuum-wise as opposed to your average chronological blog narrative of events happening through calendar time. There are plenty of hikes I have completed in the past (in Finland, Tanzania, Alps, Japan, New Zealand…) which I now need to be catching up with. In addition there is a never ending bucket list of hikes (Annapurna circuit, Haute Route, GR20...) in the not-so-distant future for me start blogging as they happen. Thus the dates of the blog entries will not reflect the actual journey times. And also some of the retrospectives of the hikes from past will be more picture than narrative driven because I didn't always take down written notes while there.
Finally, I probably owe it to the initial readers (both Finnish and all others) to explain the rather cryptic title of the blog. I have a (bad?) habit of coming up with my own words for various of things and repeating them until the words start to stick even with others around me. One of those words for quite some time has been “jolkko” [yolk’koh,] as a reference to hikes. Origin of the word clearly comes from slightly uncommon Finnish verb “jolkottaa” which seems to mean “to run” or even more accurately “to run slowly”. Somehow at least for me there feels to be a strong connotation of this verb to the slow tedious progress that is characteristic to hiking -- especially when ascending a mountain.
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