Traveller, blogger and videographer from Australia, retired at 35 and travelling the world, aiming to visit every UNESCO World Heritage site.

Documenting our journey on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldHeritageJourney

Horezu was our first visit in Romania, and our first encounter with an Orthodox monastery since focusing full-time on World Heritage sites. It's quite an enjoyable site - the walls hiding a brightly-painted Katholikon surrounded by flowers. The portico and interior of the church are both covered with bright paintings done in the "Brâncovenesc style", considered to be the only original Romanian art form. Unfortunately we couldn't film inside, but managed to get some fantastic shots on the portico.

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This was the second site we visited on our tour through Finland. Generally speaking I've quite enjoyed industrial Heritage sites like those in Germany and England, and I quite enjoyed this one as well. The large main mill building is excellently preserved, and is apparently much as it was when the factory shut down in the 1960s.

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We visited Petäjävesi on an overcast day in early July, as part of our tour around southern and central Finland. This really is a very small site, just the church and it's surrounds. We've seen lots of small wooden churches now on the World Heritage Journey, in Slovakia, Poland, Romania, and neighbouring Norway, and this one felt quite similar as well.

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This was our last site visit in Finland. We visited in the late afternoon after spending most of the day wandering around nearby Rauma, and only spent a couple of hours here. But that's really all you need to see the majority of the cairns. Call me a little uncultured, but ultimately, these are just piles of stones. The large rectangular-shaped cairn was interesting, though the intricacies of the others (spirals, cisterns etc) went largely unseen by my non-expert eye. We've been to quite a few other Bronze Age burial sites now, and this unfortunately is not one of my favourites.

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This is another in Norway's collection of slightly oddball World Heritage Sites. It reminded us both of the Copper Mining Town at Falun in Sweden, just across the border (though admittedly Falun was far more developed). It was a surprisingly popular spot for Norwegian tourists, lots of them around enjoying the mid-summer sunshine. Not many internationals though, still too far off the beaten path I guess. My favourite part was the well-preserved old wooden houses in Slag Road, where people lived quite literally in the shadow of the slag heaps. The large "smelting building" is actually a 1980s reconstruction, though admittedly quite well done.

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