Le Grand Pont (Deux): Star Flyer 1

We’ve finished our hike around Mont Blanc and thought it would be good to get another blog entry up asap. This is about the first 3 days of our Baltic Sea cruise on the Star Flyer, which is a sailing clipper and is operated by a company called Star Clippers. We’ll post another blog shortly covering the rest of the cruise as well as some general comments about ‘cruising’.

DAY 1

We left Stockholm at 10pm on Saturday and the departure from Stockholm was quite the stage production. The German captain (Klaus) played the bagpipes as we moved away from the dock. Then opera music started as some of the sails were raised and we made our way out through the Stockholm archipelago into the Baltic.

All on deck for opera, champagne and sail raising

Looking back across at the lights of Stockholm in this northern twilight was very lovely

Of course we soon realised that the ship runs under power all the time and that the sails are largely for show, although they may provide a little speed assistance from time to time. We also discovered that the sails go up to the strains of opera music every time the ship leaves a port. All good marketing!

One really good development was that they declared that (most) drinks were on the house, or the ship in this case. On our first evening we ordered and paid for a bottle of wine with dinner but some of our fellow passengers soon discovered that if you ordered glasses of the house wine with dinner that they were also free. So we didn’t end up paying any more for alcohol. YAY

DAY 2

Our first stop was Mariehamn, which is the capital of a Finnish island called Aland. Although Aland is now Finnish it was historically part of Sweden and everyone speaks Swedish.

We signed up for an organised bicycle excursion that we really enjoyed.

Along the way we met Debbie and Tracey, friends from Florida, who we dined with most nights and spent more than a few hours at the bar with, enjoying the free alcohol. We bonded with Debbie and Tracey after they and Dale became lost on the bike ride. Dale blames them after their Cher like antics on an old cannon compelled him to stay behind and make comments.

Debbie and Tracey (in their natural habitat)

The bike ride took 3 hours and the highlight was stopping for a traditional dessert, which was like a clafoutis and was served with a prune sauce and cream. The island is very rural so we rode through the country side past lakes and fascinating traditional farm houses.

Ed. – I am forever looking at cars, and I spotted this lovely 1960 Oldsmobile 98 parked off the side of the road. This particular 2 year period in GM design has attracted me since childhood when a 1959 Chevy Impala sharing the same basic body was parked a few sites up from our campsite at Tallangatta every Xmas.

There was also a lovely Norwegian/Danish lady on the bike ride with her annoying 9 year old son who kept speeding up alongside the adults and cutting us off. We also rode through the town of Mariehamn and had various housing architectural styles explained to us.

After the bike ride, and freshening up, we met up with Debbie and Tracey for drinks in the bar. At this time we also met the eccentric Ms X, who came across and introduced herself to us because she said that Australians are always the best fun. Ms X is an apparently quite wealthy property investor from California who also insists that she is a left wing hippy who lives off the grid. She is spending about a month travelling on the Star Flyer and has done this a number of times in the past. She was fascinating to talk to in the beginning before the ‘loopy’ warning signals kick in. At dinner one night she declared that she needed to leave because she was late for a date. She returned a few minutes later to clarify that the date was with a book and that she wasn’t sleeping with the crew!! We’d assumed that she didn’t have a date and just wanted to get away – and it never crossed our mind that anyone on the crew would be interested in sleeping with her.

DAY 3

Our next stop was an Estonian island called Saaremaa. We had time for a walk ahead of the organised tour. However the port was on the unpopulated side of the island so Dale, John and I just wandered off into the countryside to see what was about. We came across some old windmills converted into folk characters.

Later we went on a tour with a guide who was an American lady, Martha, who has been living on Saaremaa for 15 years. She was full of wonderful information about the history of Saaremaa and Estonia. She probably talked for a good couple of hours in total. She started with the first recorded settlements on Saaremaa and went right through to the end of the Soviet occupation and the present day. Some of the information she provided about the history of the Vikings and the German colonisation of Estonia was truly fascinating. The stories of the Nazi occupation were also harrowing. Out of a population of 1000 Jews, 300 were unable to escape to Sweden and were executed.

During the Soviet occupation it was forbidden to visit the island because it was used a spy base. Martha said that today the main thing that is holding the island back economically is the lack of population.

We stopped along the way to see:

- local wind mills,

- a church built in the middle-ages,

- and an intriguing lake created by a meteorite

We ended up at the main town on the island where we were able to do some shopping. Along the way we were entertained by Martha’s views on Pentecostal Christians, non-organic food (she admitted to being the main propaganda writer for the organic farmers), ridiculous supermarket wars (why do you need 5 different supermarkets on the island?) and appalling Soviet architecture (if the locals had their way they would all just be bulldozed).

At the end of the day Dale was able to do a mast climb. He climbed up rigging to a crow’s nest that may have been 20 meters high.