More than ten years on, let’s have a look at my first ever solo travel trip. I was 23, which actually wasn’t as young as I felt at the time. I’d done quite a lot of travelling at university because I spent a year studying French in Switzerland and so I used all my free time exploring my adopted home.
But Finland… that was a different story. To this day, I have no frame of reference for Finnish. The only words I know still are kiitos (thank you) and linna (castle). I took a taxi from the main station to my hostel in the dark, which is something I absolutely don’t do nowadays – I mean, that’s the bit where I always get hopelessly lost but that really doesn’t bother me now. In fact, I feel a bit like I’m doing something wrong if I don’t get lost. As for the dark, I soon discovered that Finland in November gets dark by 3 or 4pm and going out in the dark was going to be nigh-on unavoidable.
On my first full day in Helsinki, I took the tram down to the harbour. Well, according to my diary I got off after just two stops for reasons that now escape me. It may have been that my idea of Helsinki’s geography was so very hazy and the presence of so much water confused me – maybe I thought a lake or a bit of inlet was the harbour. Either way, somehow I made it down to the harbour eventually, via the indoor market which I mistook for the ticket office – I bought myself a very crunchy baguette before I eventually managed to get a ticket to Suomenlinna.
The real ticket office turned out to be a ticket machine and I figured out the machine by coping what someone else did and then having figured it out, I had to show another tourist how it worked. My diary says I ran away from a crazy man who spoke English but didn’t understand hearing it, who rambled on about having an appointment with the president but not knowing where the meeting was and expecting someone to try to kill him. I don’t remember that.
So it must have been about lunchtime by the time I actually boarded the ferry for Suomenlinna. Normally I’m a big fan of going outside on boat trips but I’d underestimated the temperature of the Baltic in November. Actually, I probably didn’t know I was on the Baltic at the time and I probably didn’t know that “Baltic!” is Britspeak for “really cold!” I had my long grey New Look wool coat that I bought to go to Russia in 2002, I had a pair of Primark sheepskin-esque mittens (which still survive to this day, although I don’t use them much) and I had a shawl-thing. None of it was sufficient against the sea breeze in Helsinki harbour.
Suomenlinna was also freezing but remains one of my fondest memories of my decade-and-a-bit of travelling. It’s a former sea fortress, founded in 1748 and on the UNESCO World Heritage list. It’s now more or less an open air museum with just the faintest hint of continuing military presence. There’s plenty to do, museums, tombs, terraces and the like but I just wandered. Just being on my own in a foreign country for the first time was enough of a novelty and there was plenty to look at. Suomenlinna is on several small rocky islands so I enjoyed the miniature cliffs and views across the harbour and the other thousand little islands, the icy-cold air, the sea, the humps and bumps and tunnels and yes, quite a few cannons.
By early afternoon I was experiencing my first taste of the polar night when I realised the sun was already on its way down. It would be quite a while before it actually got dark and Helsinki’s not very far north so it doesn’t have polar night and its dark winters are probably not a whole lot worse than at home. It was quite a long time between ferries so I had a long enough wait when I got back to the jetty to have to go into the cafe to hide. My diary says “retreated to the tables inside […] for a few minutes” which suggests that I didn’t get anything to eat or drink. I do remember sitting down on a bench at the far end of the archipelago to eat that nice crunchy baguette and a Mars bar.
I knew I kept a travel journal of this trip but I haven’t had it out in a long time. I hadn’t realised how much stuff I’d gathered – there are entire pages of tourist brochures stuck in, there are maps, I’ve got all my tickets, I painstakingly cut out a map of Suomenlinna with all the islands and glued that in and I’ve even got a hint of my Bucharest trip in the book – a couple of pages of journalling and a pocket of scrap – a few leu, some tickets, something that I suspect is the label from an orange drink. Back in Finland, there’s postcards and stickers and cut-up paper postcard bags and this was where my travel blog originated. I discovered public computers at the station and began writing a couple of paragraphs so my mum knew I wasn’t dead, on my own in a foreign country. That’s not this blog – I keep a digital diary elsewhere which is still kind of mostly so she knows I’m not dead but it’s also a really useful resource for looking back at when I write stuff for this blog.
By the way, I’m back from Russia now but I’ve spent the last week at work and at Brownie camp so there’s been no time for blogging and I wrote and scheduled this post in mid-June.