If you really want to go off the beaten touristic path while travelling you should visit a post office and try sending parcels from abroad. Here are our highlights: Bolivia, Ethiopia and Russia.

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July 25, 2018 Petrozavodsk, Karelia, Russia On a sunny but cool morning, we jumped out of a train arriving from St Petersburg at a cracked platform in a train station in Petrozavodsk. In spite of the arrangements we had, nobody was waiting for us to bring us to the kayak basecamp, that our 5-day long kayak adventure tour in Russian Karelia was going to start from.

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We leave the Arctic Circle behind and move back southwards. Travelling Karelia brought us to the conclusion that the wooden villages, churches, and the great outdoors are the best sights of Karelia. While the outdoors is jaw-droppingly beautiful everywhere in this part of Russia, you may find some great architectural landmarks here:

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Valdai is a great destination for a weekend trip from Moscow and St Petersburg or a perfect place for a break on the road from Moscow to St Petersburg.

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On our road trip from Moscow to the Arctic Circle and beyond it, we leave the paved road for the water road and set off for the Solovki Islands. Solovki embodies all the reasons we love the Russian North for: the beautiful nature, the remoteness and historical architecture. However, these idyllic isles have some obscure history of their own.

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It's incredible what you may find on the Kola Peninsula beyond the Arctic Circle in Russia! A great outdoors with tundra, Arctic deserts and fjords is just one of the examples. You can certainly have some unique experiences here - like doing a tour on a nuclear ice-breaker or visiting a reindeer and husky farm!

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We arrived at the East coast of the enormous Onega Lake and my mind was blown away. That was just exactly what I dreamt to find in the Russian North: harsh and wild land, so scarcely populated that it might almost be called 'virgin', left and forgotten, and still beautiful in its decline.

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...When we left Moscow at the end of August, it was burning hot. The city was glowing. Just 450 km north - or a one-night-long drive away - the temperature fell to 12 degrees and the sky was rainy and grey. But with every degree off the thermostat, the landscape around was getting more and more beautiful. The burned yellowish meadows turned to ankle-high wet green grass. Deep dark forests, lakes, swamps and seldom villages built of wood appeared behind the car's window.

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We had an epic time on our road trip to the Arctic Circle, exploring the northern wilderness in the European part of Russia: Karelia and the Kola Peninsular. This part of the world has everything we are fond of: pristine nature and it is far off the beaten path. There is room for both peaceful contemplation and wild adventure.

We are up to summarize our experiences into a series of articles. Maybe it will inspire you to put the Russian North on your bucket list or if it's already in your plans, our stories might provide you with some travel tips and a sample itinerary.

This first post is devoted to the things we learned on this trip: some of them were more or less expected others got us by surprise!

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