A honeymoon cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki on a Clipper tour around …

By
Serena Atkins

PUBLISHED:

04:32 EST, 25 February 2014

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UPDATED:

10:07 EST, 26 February 2014

Cruises, once the aristocratic holiday of choice, have acquired a more dubious reputation in recent years. Gone is the image of Edwardian nobility sipping GTs and playing quoits as their graceful vessel skims the ocean waves.

Instead I imagined a floating steel skyscraper – an affront to seafaring’s fine aesthetic history – filled with one of two demographics; incapacitated youths downing alcopops or septuagenarians wondering where they left their teeth. But not all cruise ships are made the same.

Glorious: The Star Flyer was Serena and Christian’s home for 10 days during their tour of Northern Europe

Cruise converts: Christian and Serena on-board the Star Flyer and, right, Christian explores the ship’s deck

Star Clippers’ elegant vessels are designed to inspire sea-feverish poets and are characterised by gleaming varnished wood, tight portholes, carefully-coiled ropes and crisp white sails. Every evening, as our beautiful Star Flyer set sail, we gathered on her scrubbed decks, listening to the wind as it whipped around us.

The ship was to be our home for the next 10 days as my husband Christian and I embarked on a honeymoon tour of Northern Europe.

Our cabin porthole was not far above the waterline; on a port tack I could happily watch for half an hour as the flung spray and the blown spume leapt gleefully onto the glass with each wave.

Island hopping: After two days in Stockholm, the peace and quiet of Visby is balm to the soul

It wasn’t long before we were distracted by the smells coming from the dining room. Every hour of the day, it seemed, delectable offerings where laid out – one occasion we were even presented with a roast suckling pig. The chef – who didn’t speak much English – told my husband ‘we have another one in the hold still alive’ (it turned out he meant ‘still uncooked’).

Our fellow passengers, of course,
were sailing enthusiasts and were as entertaining a bunch as anybody
could wish to spend a week at sea with.

Nudges
and winks aside, we could easily have spent much of our honeymoon on-board. But the point of a cruise is to disembark every so often, so we
sailed out of Stockholm to Visby island.

A life on the ocean waves: The interior of one of the Star Flyer’s comfortable cabins

For the full impact of Visby, you really need to spend the previous 48 hours experiencing Stockholm’s Old Town, Gamla Stan, at the peak of tourist season (imagine our own Viking city York without the hen and stag parties).

Stockholm is beautiful and the food, although pricey, is exquisite – reindeer steak and smoked prawns (rostadreker) should be on every gastronome’s bucket list – but after two days’ hustle and bustle the peace and quiet of Visby is balm to the soul.

We ambled aimlessly along near-deserted streets, which were as picturesque as any in the capital, through the market and down to the seafront to take our pick of 200 flavours of ice cream. If you’re a little overwhelmed by that choice, saffron – a popular ingredient in these parts – is pretty hard to beat.

Step back in time: Tallinn is the sort of place that historical and fantasy fiction fans get excited about

Back to the boat, and on to Saaremaa,
home of the notorious ‘Estonian Vikings’, who ruthlessly plundered
Scandinavia until the 13th century, when the Danish (by now ex-Vikings)
tired of the taste of their own medicine and sent a crusade to give them
a pasting.

Understandably,
the crusading knights received a frosty welcome on the island; so
chilly in fact that they felt the need to build fortress-like churches,
for prayer perhaps but more pertinently to retreat into when things got a
little hot in the surrounding countryside.

Cultural feast: Christian and Serena in St Petersburg

The
main (indeed only) town on the island, Kuressaare, could be described
as ‘sleepy’ in much the same way as the Pope can be described as
‘Catholic’; impressive for a place that has been conquered by the
crusading Livonian Brothers; sold to the Danes when its bishop turned
Protestant; handed over to Sweden after Denmark was given a thumping;
burnt to the ground by Russia while plague-ridden; and occupied by a
Nazi-Soviet collaboration before being appropriated into the Soviet
Union.

We wandered happily around the castle
for a while before visiting the local shops where Christian bought
himself a wedding present; not a whole case of wine or a set of crystal
glasses but a square foot of solid inch-thick pinewood, which he tells
me is a chopping board. Still, it was a lot cheaper there than in John
Lewis…

After Saaremaa we sailed to Tallinn, the oldest capital city in Northern Europe and the sort of place that historical and fantasy fiction fans get excited about. Medieval Tallinn was two cities; the Upper Town, where politicians and churchmen held office, enforced the law, kept the populace in order, and did their best not to notice goings-on in the Lower Town, where the merchants plied their trades behind a well-guarded city wall.

Strolling through the 11th century streets of the Lower Town you will see churches everywhere, not because the merchants were particularly pious, but because goods stored in a church building avoided tax. Just outside the city, the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds birthed the Singing Revolution, which culminated in Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Vast: You could spend a week in The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg

After leaving Estonia we had a day at
sea before reaching the highlight of the trip: St. Petersburg. The
biggest problem with visiting Peter the Great’s city for only two days
is rather like my problem describing it adequately here: in such a short
space, you cannot possibly do it justice.

You
could spend a week in The State Hermitage Museum alone, and there would
still be the city canals, Catherine the Great’s Palace, and the
Peterhof Fountains to explore – not to mention the iconic Church of Our
Saviour on Spilled Blood, or the Peter and Paul Cathedral, final
resting place of the doomed Romanovs.

If you do visit the Hermitage, and are unfortunate enough to have only a day to spend there, my advice would be to lose your guide at the entrance; he will try to take you through every single room in a few hours, when it would be better to explore one floor at leisure, and leave the remaining treasures for another visit.

Opulent: Every wall in the Amber Room at Catherine’s Palace is lined in the fiery glow of fossilised pine resin

Catherine’s Palace was described by a
fellow sailor as ‘a series of rooms, each one trying to outdo the last
in ostentation’. None can possibly outdo the Amber Room, its every wall
is lined in the fiery glow of six tons of fossilised pine resin.

Built
in Germany, this Eighth Wonder of the modern world was given to the
Peter the Great, looted and lost during the Second World War, and
painstakingly reconstructed over the last few decades of the 20th
century – largely funded by donations from German company Ruhrgas AG.

Having
seen a few of the treasures on display in just one Russian city, I’m
forced to admit that we Brits just can’t compete with that level of
opulence. On the other hand, as a fellow traveller put it with
Australian bluntness: ‘Blimey. No wonder the peasants revolted against
that lot…’

Antidote to ostentation: Helsinki’s Lutheran cathedral overlooks the city with Neo-Classical understatement

Our next port of call, Helsinki, is a
good antidote to Eastern ostentation: rather than cramming every spare
surface with gold leaf, the Lutheran cathedral overlooks the city with
Neo-Classical understatement. The streets likewise, instead of being
crammed with tourists from all corners of the earth, allow a little
breathing space after the frenetic pace of St. Petersburg.

It
was then on to sleepy Hanko, where naked Finnish children splashed in
the shallows, before reaching our final destination, Mariehamn.

Theoretically
Finnish, Mariehamn and the surrounding Åland region in fact form an
autonomous territory that is Swedish-speaking, demilitarised, and
conveniently outside the EU, at least when it comes to paying VAT.

Two wheels good: Christian discovers the benefits of pedal power in Mariehamn

We were greeted off the boat by two delightful ladies in local dress, bearing rye bread, cheese and Åland flags – just in case we were tempted to call them Finnish. We hired a pair of bicycles, stopping to buy a tea set in an antiques shop.

As someone who regularly commutes by bicycle in London, the roads of Mariehamn made a very pleasant change – even Christian was (almost) convinced of the benefits of two-wheeled travel.

On our final evening, as we dined at the Captain’s table, we reflected on the variety of places we’d visited on our trip: from sleepy backwaters to St. Petersburg’s cultural feast. We would have perhaps liked to have had longer to explore each stop but we were left in no doubt as to the best way to get there; on board our beloved, glorious Star Flyer.

TRAVEL FACTS

Star Clippers offers fully-crewed sailing voyages on board the world’s largest tall ships in the Mediterranean, Central America, the Caribbean and Cuba.

A three-night Mediterranean cruise on board the flagship Royal Clipper costs from £695 per person during 2014, or from £1470 per person for a week’s Mediterranean sailing on board the four-masted Star Clipper.

The price is based on two sharing and includes breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, entertainment, port taxes and all port calls. Caribbean sailings cost from £1205 per week.

Call 0845 200 6145 or visit www.starclippers.co.uk