Stockholm; Friday, 31 May, 2024

Breakfast completed we headed down to the centre of the city, stopping off at the historic Tehuset in Kungsträdgården for a quick morning coffee before wandering down to the Strömma tour boats boarding point close to the royal castle to take a water tour around parts of the city that we hadn’t previously visited, with the highlight of the tour being a journey along the narrow Djurgårdsbrunnskanalen.

Unfortunately, it looked like someone may have left the plug out of the Baltic as the tour was unable to actually head down the canal as the water levels were reported as too low, so instead we sailed around the other side of Djurgården and then back into the centre of the city – still an impressive tour, just not what we were expecting.

From the waters edge we retraced our steps back to the hotel to grab our luggage and then caught the bus out to the Värtahamnens terminal to pick up our final night ferry of the trip, the Silja Line service over to Helsinki.

Of the six terminals we’d experience on this trip this was, by some margin, the largest and most comfortable, with plenty of space to sit, meaning we could sit out the rush of passengers heading for the ship as soon as boarding started and waited until we could just stroll through the boarding gates and onto the ship.

After dropping off luggage we headed out onto deck to sit and watch the departure from Stockholm.

Unlike Kiel and Oslo which involved long fjords the departure from Stockholm is characterised by a long, and relatively slow, cruise through some of the many thousands of islands that make up the Stockholm Archipelago. We stayed out on deck for a long time watching the beautiful scenery glide by before it was time to head inside and grab dinner.

Whilst the terminal may have been the largest and most comfortable the Silja Symphony wasn’t. Originally built in the 1990s a lot of the common areas don’t look like they’ve been updated and consequently the buffet does resemble a canteen rather than a restaurant and it was accompanied by an almost inevitable bun fight as people grabbed at food.

Having eventually eaten we headed back out on deck in time to watch the very last of the islands slide past and the ship enter the open water of the Baltic on it’s way East. After a quick night cap mum decided to turn in but I stayed out for a bit longer as we were slowly closing in on perhaps the most unusual part of the trip – the Åland Islands.

Autonomous Swedish speaking Finnish Islands the Åland Islands have a unique relationship with the EU allowing them to sit outside the customs union, meaning that any ship calling at them being able to offer duty-free shopping on board, which when you’re travelling between two of the countries with the highest alcohol duties in the world makes for a convenient draw for passengers.

Which is why just before midnight with twilight still in the sky the Silja Symphony was the second of three ships within 30 minutes (and one of at least six overnight) to sail up the fjord and into the islands capital of Mariehamn.