Jouni Laaksonen
News 22.4.2024: A new and updated edition will be published in May 2024. I’ll add more information soon.
Guidebook Hiking in Finland was published in June 2019! The whole name is Hiking in Finland – Day Trips and Backpacking Expeditions. Is it any good? Book reviews like the book: “This really is guidebook writing at its best.” “This is a must if you are going to Finland to hike.”
How to buy it? It’s sold on many web bookshops. Scroll to the end of this page, there’s a list with links.
There are 304 pages in the book (even if some bookshops claim something different), and you’ll find in it everything you need to know about hiking in Finland. There are three major parts in the book:
I Hiking skills in Finland
- Including different seasons, the needed skills, clothing and equipment in summer, autumn, winter conditions, Finnish map and coordinate systems, Everyman’s Rights, code for behaving in a wilderness hut, hiking with children and so on.
Some example pages from the book.
II Nature and history
- Describing Finnish nature: vast forests, thousands of lakes, arctic fells and so on; the visible traces the last Ice Age left; and what kind of interesting human history from centuries or millennia past you can see along the trails.
III The very best hiking destinations in Finland
- There are great destinations both for you who want to book an accommodation and do wonderful day trips to different trails each day, and for you who want to hoist a backpack and head for a week-long backpacking expedition.
- There are over 120 trails described in the book, and also a GPX track of each described trail is provided, here. (You need a password to get to this GPX Tracks page. The password is given in the book, on page 128.)
The blue quadrangles show the areas where there are maps in the book, and also they show the hiking destinations described in the book.
One of the destinations in the book, Kolovesi National Park. Or rather, here you see two pages out of the 10 pages long Kolovesi and Linnansaari National Parks section.
Here you can see the contents of the book.
If you are interested, there’s info about the book also in my earlier blog post Guidebook Hiking in Finland.
Note that there are some extra features also aside from GPX tracks. See page Extras (no password required) to find out about 60 internationally interesting bird species found in Finland, and to see special destinations for children, and so on.
Where to buy?
The book is published both as a paper book and as an e-book. Here are some bookshops where you can buy the book. Note that there are big differences in prices. (And note that not every one of these are selling the book any more. However, at some point the book was sold in every one of these, and if there’s one in your country that doesn’t sell it right now, they probably can achieve it if you ask.)
www.booky.fi (paper book, site in English and Finnish)
www.ellibs.com (e-book, site in English, Finnish and Swedish)
www.arktisversand.de (paper book, site in German)
www.stanfords.co.uk (paper book, site in English)
www.aventurenordique.com (paper book, site in French and English)
www.adlibris.com (paper book, site in Finnish)
www.kartbutiken.se (paper book, site in Swedish and English) (and note that the price is here in Swedish krones!)
www.adlibris.com (paper book, site in Swedish) (and note that the price is here in Swedish krones!)
www.freytagberndt.com (paper book, site in German)
geobuchhandlung.eshop.t-online.de (paper book, site in German)
www.piedaterre.nl (paper book, site in Dutch) (not working in April 2020, I’ll check on this later again)
www.zwerfkei.nl (paper book, site in Dutch)
www.dezwerver.nl (paper book, site in Dutch)
www.librairie-voyage.com (paper book, site in French)
resiliencenordic.fr (paper book, site in French)
www.stella-alpina.com (paper book, site in Italian and English)
www.karttakauppa.fi (paper book, site in Finnish; this is the publisher’s own webshop)
www.amazon.com (paper book, this link goes to a site in English, but there are many language versions available) (For some weird reason Amazon says the book is hardcover and has 96 pages. No. It is paperback and has 304 pages. I tried to tell that to Amazon with several e-mails for two months, but they say it’s impossible to correct. Strange policy! However, now finally they made it possible for me to sign in to Amazon Author Central. I can’t touch the product information, but I was able to add some text explaining the book.)
Also you can buy the paper book straight from me. For example if you’d like to have a copy with the author’s signature, then send e-mail to me: jouni.laaksonen @ iki.fi. Or if you want to ask a question about the book, send me e-mail. I promise to answer every e-mail about the book. (If I don’t answer, then my mail operator has for some reason deemed your mail as spam and I haven’t seen it. Unfortunately sometimes just English language is enough to trigger that. I try to remember to check my spam folder every now and then, but that may be the reason for delay. Or, I might be hiking in some remote wilderness, and can only answer when I have returned to civilization.)
My price for the book is 22 euros, but I have to add to that whatever sending the book to your country costs. The postal fee is 16,10 euros to Europe and more to other countries. That’s in Economy class, Priority (faster delivery) costs more. If you live in Finland, sending is much cheaper (5,90 euros).
Hiking in Finland is my only book in English. If you can read Finnish, then you might be interested also in my other books. They can be found at www.iki.fi/jel (that page is only in Finnish).
Finnish Way of Hiking 