In 2012, five Finnish friends drove over 20,000 kilometers from Finland to Nepal in a 1989 Volkswagen Transporter nicknamed "Heffalump" (Möhköfantti). Their journey became Finland's first 100% crowdfunded documentary film.
The Journey
The route took them through Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, and India before finally reaching Nepal. Along the way they faced border crossings, mountain passes at over 4,500 meters altitude, car breakdowns, and countless adventures.
The Cause
But this wasn't just about the adventure. The trip was organized to help Nepalese women and children. Thanks to donations:
Two new schools were built in Nepal where children from all castes can study
Jewelry made by women from difficult backgrounds at a Nepalese shelter has been sold in Finland, giving these women income, education, and a better future
The Movie
The hugely popular journey, followed by over 10,000 fans on social media, was turned into a documentary film. The story is an incredible collection of dreams, drama, successes, failures, and outright miracles.
"We want to inspire people with this film. The Driving to Nepal story deserves to be heard by everyone." - Juho Leppänen
Watch the Full Movie with subtitles
Blog Posts
Posts are in reverse chronological order, oldest first, so you can follow the story from the beginning.
Phew, finally! The blog is almost ready and we can start writing updates about the progress of all the preparations. There’s things to change and add still but the main thing is that postings are now...
Yesterday I promised that I’ll tell you today about all the things that have happened so far. It’s difficult to put the month long planning into one blog post but I’ll give you some high lights. Le...
A short overview of the project. Drivers Mikael and Juho have now been involved in this project full time while running their own businesses. Rico and Misa have been working very long days in thei...
Beads Hannes and Elina have accomplished a lot during the past two weeks in Nepal with sorting, cataloguing and taking photos of the jewellery. The biggest challenge for them has been to delive...
We should leave tomorrow but our MacBook Pro just crashed. It won't start anymore. We hope that we'll get a new one or this fixed today. Otherwise our start may be delayed and we'll have problems with...
We left today 2.8.12 klo 7.45AM from Tampere to Helsinki. Hope we have all stuff with us. We try to update our blog as much as we can while we are still in Finland and internet works. Juho & Mikael...
First day behind. We said hello to Misa and Rico and we exchanged some documents and gear. We visited Assebly (huge gaming event in Helsinki) and to our surprise we noticed that people didn't think we...
We left in the morning towards Russian border. At the boarder we found out that the car'soriginal registration document was left in a copying machine. Three copies were with us but those weren't valid...
Traffic jams, testing cars suspension and first contact with Russian polise. Not like this. Like us on Facebook: www.fb.com/autollanepaliin Video: www.kuvastin.fi Music: www.revivalhymns.com...
Long drives are slowly affecting drivers when we left Moscow. In Kazan and Ufa we asked about peoples dreams. We found good internet so we could upload these videos in FullHD! :) Mikael H...
Astana We woke up to a morning in Astana, aiming to be at the Finnish Embassy by 9 am. From there we collected our double passports, which would help us c...
Bishkek Bishkek is a big town dressed in green. The streets are filled with big trees and every street has a wide space for pedestrians in front of the buildings. The leafy trees cover the buil...
Morning We got up quickly, wiped the sleeping sand off our eyes, and were ready to hit the road quite fast. As morning exercise, the Heffalump had to climb...
To my pleasant surprise the publicity for Autolla Nepaliin (By car to Nepal) has worked surprisingly well even though I sent the first bulletins during the hottest (or should I say rainiest) summer ho...
From the border I was huddling in the back seat of the car with the shivers, while Rico and Mikael drove further and further up the mountain towards the hig...
To India The customs officers in Pakistan were really strict about the van’s Carnet. They just said that they wouldn’t let me out of the country either if t...
More Surprises Since the week had already been quite eventful I hadn't bargained for more surprises. Nevertheless, there was more in store for us. Ncell i...
We'd planned to write about the return trip in chronological order, but now we have to make an exception, since our situation is so critical right now...
AWESOMELY GREAT NEWS! A Nepali private person has donated a plot of land for the Shreenagar village school! This means that the school can establish a permanent school building and continue to de...
Sad lady Heffalump was still sitting on the truck even though we had been at the Volkswagen service store yard for five hours already. She would hav...
On a beautiful sunny morning on the wonderful hillsides of India Mr. Juho Leppänen and his loyal sidekick Misa "Misacorp" Jokisalo awoke full of excitement and joy in their extremely cost effective...
The Bad News Our struggle to get Möhkö back in shape and into a ship towards Iran is still ongoing. Today we should have gotten Möhkö in order until 12 o’clock, so that it could have been...
The Lump has been repaired! At least that’s what they told us on the phone yesterday. We haven’t seen it yet zipping aroung in the Mumbai traffic. This was an extremely tough challenge for us, but...
Problem with video files is now gone and at last you can see how the beads are made in Nepal. Here"s clip from Princess Beads where we purchased 5000 beads. You can soon buy them from www.storeofhope...
Putting Heffalump into the shipping container was supposed to be a simple one day process, but nothing really is in India. We picked up the car from th...
After touching down in Dubai we certainly had lots to digest. At last we were up to speed again and there was something else than huge question marks on our next week’s agenda. The taxi was going well...
When we were in Nepal we visited another project which emphasizes support for schools that are run by government. They improve schools through educating teachers and fulfilling the needs of the childr...
In Dubai weekend runs from Friday to Saturday so our weekend started a day before yours in Finland! For the first time on this trip we had two whole days during which there was nothing we needed to ge...
The grandeur and booming consumerism in Dubai felt really strange after all that we had seen in South Asia. The surrounding society’s whole way of thinki...
In Kazakstan Mikael got our double passports and continued our journey to South. Blog text:https://autollanepaliin.fi/wordpress/en/days-9-10 Journey videos are a bit behind so don't be amazed by...
Sleeping on the ferry turned out to be quite a process. We had reserved three rows of padded seats at the rear of the ferry, where we could just about squeeze in. We fell asleep quickly on the soft se...
Saturday On Saturday we woke up excited! We packed our bags and cleaned the biggest thrash from the room. We were ready to leave as soon as the call would come, as we were already tired of wait...
Great news from Nepal! The reason of our project is to help the poorest people in Nepal. Thanks to our media attention second village we visited has now got a drilled well with hand pump where childre...
None of us could sleep properly on the night before the departure. We tossed and turned restlessly in our beds for four hours. Apparently the excitement of the departure had this effect on a Finnish g...
We left Qazvin early in the morning again. The sun had already risen, but there was nobody in traffic in the city. During the trip it has been surprising to notice how different rhythms different coun...
After a magical morning in Cappadocia, we packed into Heffalump and were about to hit the road when we noticed something strange in the parking lot: the right front tire was almost two centimeters thi...
We slept late in the warm embrace of the Austrian student dormitory. The stress level had somehow dropped significantly for the whole group, and everyone enjoyed peaceful sleep...
We woke up to the Dresden morning in mixed moods. Heikki and Misa had had a very warm night with plenty of sleep, while I had been cold in the early morning hours...
"Finland!" There's no other way to express that amount of joy. It felt unbelievable to drive down the ferry ramp onto the solid bedrock of our homeland after everything we had experienced...
