I cycled 9,500 miles through 21 countries in 8 months with my best friend — these are the top 3 life lessons I learned from the adventure

• In June, Valtteri Heinila embarked on a cycling adventure from Helsinki to Singapore with his college roommate.
• They travelled across 21 countries in 245 days and cycled more than 9,500 miles.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Valtteri Heinila, 26. It's been edited for length and clarity.

Last year on June 18, our eight-month adventure began on a day with gnarly weather, which made it just a bit easier for my friend Alvari and I to say goodbye to Finland and chase sunnier days ahead in 20 other countries.

This all started with an interest towards new cultures, people, places, and unforeseeable experiences. We wanted to slow down time, to find space to think, and put our bodies to the ultimate physical feat.

Alvari, my partner-in-crime and roommate from college, had cycled from Helsinki to France before and liked it. But this 9,500-mile challenge was my very first cycling adventure, and my only regret was that I hadn't done it sooner.

One might think planning such an extensive journey would have taken us forever, but deciding our route and sorting out the visas for the countries along the way took just a few days. We had looked at a map and decided to end the trip in Singapore, solely because it seemed like the bottom of a nice peninsula at the very end of continental Asia.

Just a day before we left Helsinki, Alvari was still sorting out his equipment, getting a last-minute second-hand cycle bag from Tori.fi and hanging his frame bag on the bike with string.

And off we went, embarking on our 245-day journey from Helsinki to Singapore for memories we will never forget for a lifetime.

What began as a curiosity about the world around us, ended up being a deep dive into the curiosity about ourselves.

Here are the top three important life lessons I learned from the amazing adventure.

1. The worst moments create precious opportunities for growth.

When we were in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, there were times when nothing seemed to be going our way.

Our bikes were constantly breaking down, our tires were punctured 30 times, we had no food, no access to water, and to top it all off, speaking to my ex-girlfriend would constantly send me on a downward spiral.

The moment when it all starts piling on you always feels the worst. But, it is always in these kinds of emotionally painful moments where something transformational is about to happen.

It's essentially the excruciating process of shedding your old skin into a new one, a precious opportunity for growth when we gradually become at peace with the realization that we have no agency over the emotions that we may feel.

The moments of experiencing agonizing feelings that we have no control over and then letting them go, these "worst" moments are the ones that have made me stronger as a person.

2. Kindness really does transcend communication barriers.

In our eight months of traveling across the world through 21 different countries, there was not a single bad human encounter.

Our first cyclist encounter was a man from Slovakia. He was just so full of positive energy, and although neither of us spoke the same language, he was always busy spoiling us with food, spirits, and equipment.

For the whole day, we communicated with just body language and smiles, and yet we felt like we learned a lot from him, particularly the lesson that kindness is a universal language that transcends communication barriers.

In a world where we are constantly warned about how dangerous certain countries are, or how vicious humans can be, it is often easy to forget that there are many people out there who are so generous with their kindness.

The altruism that we were gifted throughout our 245 days of adventure was something you don't see much in the media. It was through the trip that I realized that it's often the people who have the least that want to give you the most.

3. Value doesn't come from the number of things you experience.

Prior to the trip, we often thought about the many things we would want to accomplish in our daily lives. Both of us frequently anticipated having a lot of friends, meeting a lot of people, going on lunch dates, volunteering, doing this, doing that.

There was always just so much going on in our lives, and because we were constantly thinking about what to do next, we were never fully immersed in what we were doing then.

It was only when we were forced to slow down during our trip, where I learned that value doesn't come from the number of things we experience, but the amount of attention and time we devote.

The simplicity of our day-to-day lives on the trip was truly something — if we needed food, we looked for food, and if I still had quite a bit of energy left after a day of traveling, I'd read.

Life was extremely simple, but also incredibly fulfilling.

We may have concluded our 9,500-mile journey in February, but that's just the beginning of many more in the future.

In the summer, I plan to be the first person to paddleboard from Finland to Sweden over the Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, we are also working on our documentary of the trip with our 3.5 terabytes of footage.

I'll also be writing a book to encourage more people to take on the practice of creating a healthy mental space to understand ourselves better in all the noise of today's world. But for now, bits of the diary I wrote during the adventure can be found on our Instagram page @curiouspedals.