Nordkalk, Nauvo and a castle called Qvidja

a post from Mary

Leaving Turku this morning was hard for us. We enjoyed being in the homes of our hosts and it was sad saying good-bye. It is amazing how close you can get to someone in 3 or 4 days. Thank you Tapio, Eero and Marja-Liisa for taking such good care of us.

Our hosts from the Rotary clubs of Parainen picked us up in Turku at 9 am and brought us to visit Nordkalk, which is a limestone quarry on one of the islands in the archipelago. The limestone in this mine is used for cement, aggregate, for making paper and a few other products.

The first part of our trip focused on the mine. We drove down into a pit that was over 180 meters deep. ( The pit is only a short distance from the sea.) The trucks up on the road looked like toys in a sand box. It is really impossible to describe how big this place is. We went into a tunnel and went down another 100 meters or so. I would have taken notes to give you precise depths, but I wasn't thinking about you at the time. I was thinking about why there was water in the tunnel and how we would get out if it started to collapse and just how deep were we going???

We stop and get out of the truck to look at the machine that is grinding the limestone into pieces that can be moved onto a conveyor belt and brought to the surface. The photo you see if from the platform by the machine, looking back at our truck. This is all in a tunnel. The tunnel started to be dug in the 70's and possibly it will have another 30 years of limestone to be dug out. There is only one person who works in the tunnel. The majority of work is done by giant machines. We drove out of the mine on a road ( narrow) that is alongside the conveyor belt. The angle of this road and the conveyor belt is 17 degrees. The distance is 500 meters from bottom to top.

From there we went to the cement factory. The complex covers acres, and includes not only the grinding, mixing and firing areas but also a port for the ships that take the cement to areas of Finland and to Russia.

After lunch, we took a boat trip. We've been told that there are 60,000 islands in the archipelago. Some are tiny, others big enough for towns and a huge limestone mines. But from the water what you see are low islands, covered in evergreens. Some have houses, red with white trim, up a bit from the sea shore. A small building down by the dock is the sauna. There are other islands off in the distance as far as you can see. Even though the weather today was cold and gray, and the seas very choppy, being among the islands was beautiful.

We stopped at a small island that had a pilot house on it. The water in this area can be treacherous to navigate. In the past, if a skipper of a ship needed help , he would raise a distress flag and the pilot would come out the the ship and help navigate. There is a small museum devoted to the pilots.

We went on Nauvo, a very popular island in the summer. There are over 150 boats that stay in the harbor all summer, plus hundreds of other boats that have shorter stays. There is a sushi bar and a sauna, of course, along with other staples for use by the visitor boaters. Cruising ships stop here on there way from Estonia to Stockholm. There are flags of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Aaland Islands flying in the harbor.

One of our hosts for the day, Anders af Heurlin, invited us to his place for coffee and cake after the boat ride. He owns a castle that has been in his family for 6 generations, 4 of the generations a direct line. The castle is from the early 15th century, built over 40 years starting around 1419. It is the oldest castle in Finland still owned privately. The family lives in a house built in the 1800's that is across from the castle. At one time his family owned the entire island, some 6000 acres. About one third of their land was given to farmers who were displaced from eastern Finland when the Russians took control of those lands after the war. This was the case for all farmers outside of the captured region in Finland at that time.

The Rotarians of the Parainen clubs then handed us over to Rotarians from the clubs of Salo and Uskela. We will be here until Friday when we go to Helsinki and our exchange is over. The time is going so fast.