Digger with Latitude

Driving a mini-digger 1000km across the Finnish forests

 

Dodging traffic, climbing steep hills and navigating your way through the Finnish wilderness with nothing but a toy donkey for company is not your average traveller’s idea of fun. But for eccentric Finnish entrepreneur Jukka Mutanen, 26, it’s a breakthrough adventure.

His journey is far from orthodox. Mutanen is undertaking his 1000km (620 miles) route on an excavator: a miniature tractor with a maximum speed of 4km (2 miles) per hour. His month-long expedition started at the most southerly point of Finland, and will – hopefully –end close to the mountains in the far Arctic north. Perhaps the oddest thing of all is the grass-roots support he’s been shown by the public. Watching a Finn drive a tractor through the forest for a month has become a genuine social media happening: Jukka has nearly 100,000 friends on Facebook, a loyal blog following and even broadcasts a live video feed of his journey on Bambuser, a mobile streaming service. 

Mutanen fired up the digger on 1st June in the small bilingual port town of Hanko, 130km (80 miles) from Helsinki. He’s expected to arrive at his final destination Kuusamo, a centre port for winter sports, at the beginning of July. 

“It’s been an interesting ride so far,” Mutanen tells WideWorld.

“This has been a very challenging trip for me. Although I am reasonably fit and have a good physical condition, sitting down for long periods of time has been hard. I do make short breaks and walk a little bit, which helps.” 

So what is Mutanen’s biggest challenge? Is it staying awake? Keeping himself entertained? It seems that his biggest problem has been keeping the excavator going. “These machines are not designed for hours on the road. Plus, my excavator is forbidden from the highways due to Finish traffic laws,” he says.

So, with pure chutzpah, Mutanen has embarked on a rather complex cross-country route, taking him through some of the remotest parts of Finland, which he recounts with numerous anecdotes.

“I’ve had a few hair-raising moments with some of the local traffic,” he says. “That was rather scary. But generally my biggest concern has been finding fuel. There are a lot of uncertainties surrounding this trip, but that makes it exciting.”

Mutanen has been laying his head in some of Finland’s most basic hotels and motor homes, complemented by a diet of takeaway food from passing service stations.  “It’s not ideal,” he explains, “but I do get to see my family and check my emails in the evening when I’m not driving. I certainly couldn’t do this without the support my wife and son and of course my fans.”  

Since beginning the schlep at the start of the month, Mutanen has already inspired millions of people across the world - so much so he was greeted with a hero’s welcome this week when he arrived in the city of Hameenlinna, in the heart of the historical province of Hame. The mere sight of the digger prompted a local band to perform a specially-composed song celebrating his inspirational, if bizarre journey. 

Devised over a casual breakfast with his family back in April, Mutanen’s reasons for undertaking the project were pretty simple. “I have never done anything like this before and as far as I know, nobody has ever tried it,” he says, with one eye on entering the Guinness Book of Records. 

Nevertheless, this bold mission was approached with a degree of trepidation. Believing it to be an unreachable target, he created an event page on Facebook, stating that he would only take up the challenge if he got 50,000 fans. To date he has over 86,000 fans and it shows no signs of abating. The response has been huge,” explains Mutanen. “Now the amount of fans has gone sky high and Finnish television has already made many programs about me and this project.”

For small-town man Mutanen, it’s a different world from his workshop, where he services Sunward excavators - not too dissimilar to the contraption he is using for his trip. 

Now, fully aware of impending celebrity status, Mutanen is excited about the prospect of becoming the next internet star. “I think this will be a breakthrough for me,” he explains.

“The publicity has been such that I will be known internationally on this machine. It will be great to be known across the world as Excavator Jack.”

But it’s not all about personal glory, Mutanen hopes to raise funds for his main sponsor, CE Rental Oy, which provides much needed donations to children’s hospitals. “I promised to do it when I reached 50,000 fans on Facebook,” he explains, “and I keep my promises.”

Blogging and updating his Facebook followers have been brilliant ways for the Finn to keep going, but he says that the greatest aid to publicity has been mobile broadcasting platform, Bambuser. With a small camera attached to the digger, he can give a live feed to anyone in the world of his trundling escapades, write text to go with the video feed and show his location on its GPS system.

“Everyone can see what I am up to whenever they like,” he adds. 

“They can see what the road is like, what the weather is like and where my excavator is exactly at any time day or night.”

Despite only being half way through his adventure, Mutanen is eagerly anticipating future opportunities. “Finland is very good place to live, but I do want to see more places like England, for example,” he says. “But my plan is to have a long rest once I finish this journey.”  

You can follow Mutanen on his landmark journey here