RUSSIAN DIARIES

Leka ja Leka seisomassa meren rannalla

Friday June 8th, 2018, Кемь, Kemsky District of the Republic of Karelia, Russia

“I wonder what will come out of this?”, Leka thought to himself as he gazed upon the sea opening up in front of him.

Although he already was a more mature duck with a decent amount of experience with water, the White Sea seemed a little bit scary. It had looked so much smaller on the maps. Now he felt much like going from a bathtub straight into the deep end of a full-size olympic swimming pool.

But he had no one to blame for all of this, save for himself. “Why must I always come up with such silly ideas?” he admonished himself. But just as a zebra cannot outrun its stripes, neither can a duck suppress its love for water.

While Leka thus felt these grand feelings (as is befitting a philosopher, he thought to himself, though this he didn’t say this out loud) the others were busy stuffing their kayaks. Into the bulkheads went socks, shoes, tents and sleeping bags, as well as cameras and towels. And very much food. For going out on an adventure without sufficient quantities of snacks is not only irresponsible, it is also decidedly much less fun. Kaisa in particular was prone to getting hungry every time she was to leave shore.

The thin plastic hulls creaked as Antti forcefully pushed more bags through the tiny openings in the deck. “I hope I brought enough soap” he said to Ea, who was busy deciding whether to bring along a second pair of mittens. One’s hands might indeed get cold, especially during the night time, she reasoned.

Kaisa, on the other hand, was particularly careful to pack all of her pens and small booklets into waterproof bags. She rechecked that her Rapidograph pens had enough ink in them. “I will write and draw something every day” she had promised herself before the trip.

You see, Kaisa had already in the spring resolved to keep a diary during the entire sea voyage, and had thus procured some very nice notebooks with serious-looking black covers. “I think it is important for a lady adventurer to make her voice heard!” she told everyone willing to listen.

*

What then became of the diary Kaisa kept during the sea voyage?

Well, all of the four notebooks she kept during the trip were compiled into a beautiful little volume aptly called “Russian Diaries”.

And within its 368 pages you can read all about the adventures and occasional mishaps that took place during the seven weeks out at sea.

Did the four friends eventually make it to the Gulf of Finland?

That is something you will have to find out by reading the book yourself!