Rønne; Saturday, 23 August, 2025

The other advantage of staying at the airport hotel was that I was an equally short walk from the airport train station for the journey the following morning, which meant I didn’t need to checkout until a couple of minutes before the train and then then just wander down onto the platform to pick up the train over the Øresund Bridge into Sweden and on to Malmö Centralstation.

In theory I could have had a shorter journey if I’d changed trains further back down the line at Malmö Hyllie, but that would have been a tighter connection, and I had a hunch that the train may well fill up quite a bit at the central station, which turned out to be correct as I was able to get a comfortable window seat, and two stops later people were standing for a couple of stops until the train emptied out a bit.

It was 45 minutes from Malmö through the Skåne countryside to reach the port town of Ystad where I had a very smooth connection into the ferry terminal station, located just a few metres away from the station (though it looks like at one time there was a much grander station that covered the whole complex). I arrived just as the inbound Express 5 Catamaran – the worlds largest Catamaran at the time of travelling – was pulling into berth.

A smooth check in process for the ferry then up a flight of stairs to the basic waiting room where, after about 5 minutes we were allowed to board the ferry even while the inbound cars were still driving off. It meant that as foot passengers we all had first choice of seats on board, so I quickly grabbed a seat in the front windows looking out over the bow for the crossing.

The process was all very efficient and right on time the engines started up and we headed out into the Baltic for the 80-minute crossing and for the second time in the day I crossed the Swedish/Danish border and re-entered Denmark. We landed a few minutes ahead of schedule, and we were soon all disembarking onto the island of Bornholm.

From the ferry terminal it was a short 10-minute walk up the slight hill into the centre of town and my hotel for the trip – a fully self-service hotel in which I didn’t once interact with a member of staff. I’d been sent a door code which would work the main entrance door and my room from 1pm until 11am on the day of departure and that all worked smoothly. It was slightly weird staying in a hotel for two nights without once actually interacting with a member of staff!

With my bags all dropped off I headed back out into town to go for a wander around the islands capital, Rønne. As it was opposite the entrance to the hotel I first headed into the Store Torv or the main town square and from there explored some of the pretty streets that make up the centre of town. Whilst wandering down one of those I came across the Hjorths Fabrik, a museum dedicated to the Ceramic industry on the island, housed in the former Hjorths factory.

I spent quite a bit of time in the factory museum so had to walk quite briskly across town to make sure I got to the Bornholms Museum, otherwise known as the Culture and History museum, with enough time to look around that. There was quite a lot to see and in the end I managed to see everything, but only with a couple of minutes to spare before the site closed. There was just time though to quicky look in the shelter that had been built in the grounds of the museum (which had been a hospital at the time) during the second world war.

From the museum I headed back into the centre of town and had a look at some of the restaurants in the main square for ideas for dinner. The main idea, based on the exchange rate, being to make use of the Netto supermarket on one side of the square to grab stuff for dinner from, even then it was still well over £10 for a basic hotel picnic dinner – Denmark isn’t a cheap place, and a small island a long way from the main part of Denmark is even less cheap!

After dinner I headed out to take in some more sights of the town just before sunset, visiting the Lille Torv, the smaller of the towns two main squares, before heading down towards the harbour to take in the spectacular views of the sunset over the harbour – it faces west so gets some pretty good sunsets, which then help to bath the large St Nicholas Church and the Lighthouse, two of the symbols of the city, in a warm orange glow. With the sun set bringing a quite quick drop in temperature and a bit of a stiff breeze I headed back to the hotel to turn in for the night as I wanted to be up early the following morning.