Author Archives: Julie Hunt

Georgia day 5: the Old Town and the unexpected wine tasting

Day 5 – or day 2 – began in the usual way. A metro to Rustaveli, cross the road, use the underpass and then walk under the bridge and up the stairs to the Bicycle Statue, thus avoiding three scary road crossings. There were several buses today and the lady from the Georgia Tourist Board who was there to greet us yesterday was there again. Today there were four variants on Old Town tours departing, which meant quite the muddle over buses, people double-checking exactly what their tickets actually said and one person fleeing the bus at the last minute when she realised Old Town Day Tour and Cultural Heritage Old Town Tour were not one and the same. Cultural Heritage meant museums, one of the tours meant a zipwire across the botanical gardens and one was a gastronomy tour.

Mine was just a plain walking tour. We did a quick circle up to the Heroes roundabout and then down Rustaveli to the church round the corner from me. I’d left home well over an hour ago by now and I was back just five minutes from where I’d started. We were going to have a look at the king on the horse. This is the one who founded Tbilisi. Did I tell this story yesterday? Anyway, in the fifth century, King Vakhtang was out hunting, his hawk caught a pheasant and they fell into the sulphur springs and His Majesty decided there and then that he was moving his capital to this place – Tbilisi means something along the lines of “the warm place”.

Then it was back to the bus to cross the river and we left for our “two-hour walking tour of the Old Town”. We did the bath area, the waterfall behind it (blocked off because of recent rockfalls), through the narrow parts of the old town, through Meidan Bazaar, an underground bazaar, an array of churches and narrow cafe-lined alleys, an enamel shop that surely didn’t want a horde of tourists barging in and out again, the Peace Bridge, the Catholic Church and then the Caravanserai for a wine-tasting. Now, she’d mentioned the wine-tasting and lunch a few times and we were suspicious because that wasn’t on our list. Also, by the time it was 12:30 and we were still walking up to the last church, hadn’t had wine or lunch and I couldn’t see how we were going to get back to the Bicycle in half an hour with all that left, I kind of lost a lot of enthusiasm. This was a 10-1 tour. Why wasn’t it finishing? I wanted lunch. I didn’t want to taste wine.

The wine museum is underground behind the Caravanserai, which is a place where travellers on the Silk Road would stop and set up temporary shops on their way back and forth. We had a history of Georgian wine and then we were seated around a large table with nibbles and the wine arrived. The rest of the group were equally baffled, especially as it was gone 1:30 by the time we even went into the museum. The winemaster was astonished by the three of us who refused wine, apparently not knowing that we weren’t expecting this on our tour. There are lots of wine tours on offer and I have deliberately not booked any of them.

After the wine, it was time to get back on the bus and go for lunch. I escaped. I was in the Old Town, I just had to cross the bridge and climb up around the church and I could go home for my lunch of hamburger rolls and plastic cheese slices. I had a viewpoint photography tour at 5 and who knows how long this tour would go on for? It was already running over by an hour and a half and evidently there was plenty still to come.

Lunch, a book, the briefest not-quite-nap and it was already time to go for the viewpoint tour. I got myself to the Bicycle. There was no one else there. No surprise, exactly. This morning, no one had got on the bus until 9:59 although maybe they’d been milling around outside figuring out which bus they were supposed to be on. But there was no bus. What viewpoint were we going to? How we were getting there? Were they taking us on the scary metro? I checked the itinerary. Since I carefully copied everything into my notebook the day before flying out, the start point had moved! We were supposed to be meeting at the lower station of the funicular in… twelve minutes. Ok. How to get there? Rustaveli was the nearest metro. What bus did I need? Where could I get on it? In traffic, it would be quicker to walk. So I walked. It’s 23 minutes, which meant I was going to be late but I had a transport card and a group with big cameras can’t be hard to find. Or I could just go up there and take photos by myself. It’s not particularly far but it’s all uphill and the last stretch up to the road is almost vertical. One of the street dogs seemed to guide me to within the last couple of hundred metres, checking I was keeping up, pointing up the next hill and round the next bend and I enjoyed that. Tbilisi has as many feral dogs as Bucharest but these ones show no aggression whatsoever. They like to lie in the sun and amble around. One joined the Old Town tour, pressing its nose against our guide’s leg as she talked about the Georgian Patriarch and she scratched its ears. I asked why all the dogs have a yellow tag in their ears and apparently it means they’ve been vaccinated against rabies. Well, that’s nice.They’re a bit grubby but they’re pretty friendly and they’re about as undangerous as feral dogs can get.

I made it to the funi. A man was swiping a card to let people through. It wasn’t the blue transport card I had in my pocket. And then I looked at the other man, pushing a group of people through as the turnstile turned. I looked at the huge camera in his hand. I’d made it! The very last one was going through but I’d arrived in time to go up with them!

We went up to the restaurant and TV tower at the peak of Tbilisi, 770m. Looking down, I’d climbed at least a third of the height from the Bicycle before even reaching the funi. It wasn’t actually ideal conditions for viewpoint photos. It was hazy and the sun was hiding behind thin clouds. We walked round through a theme park to the ferris wheel and took some photos through and around it. The sun was setting and making some faint streaks of pink and blue. We got some snowy mountains and towns on the other side and then we retreated to the cafe for hot chocolate so thick you couldn’t drink it – had to eat it from a spoon – and a Napoleon cake the size of… well, I don’t know what size it was. Maybe the size of a cake, except it was supposed to be one portion for one person. Impressive thing.

Back at the bottom, we got three Bolts, which is the local equivalent of Uber. There was a drinks and nibbles thing that everyone had said they were going to pop into just for half an hour, having drunk more than they intended at the welcome drinks on Tuesday that I didn’t go to. I wasn’t entirely planning to go to this one but getting in a Bolt with these people seemed easier than figuring out how to get home without walking 2km in the dark.

At the place, I met a couple of people from this morning’s tour. Dylan gave a nice succint run-down of how the tour had gone and then said they’d done quite well and had finished by 4. Another 10-1 tour hadn’t finished until 5. This is beyond our tour guide’s GMT, Georgia Maybe Time. Anyway, I didn’t stay long. This was another case of “how do I get home from here?” but it was ok. Walk down to the main road. Walk along it until it ceases to be one-way. Stop at the first bus stop going in the right direction. Get on a bus. Bus drops at Avlabari. Home by 9:15, which is the latest I’ve been out – but then again, it’s only the second night. Too tired after a long day to write the blog.

Georgia day 4: Chronicle of Georgia, cable car & sulphur bath

This morning started with a tour out to the Chronicle of Georgia, which is just north of the city but would take quite a while on public transport. It’s a monument, according to the scroll at the entrance, to Georgia’s 3000th anniversary as a state and its 2000th anniversary of adopting Christianity, despite the dates being out by 3-400 years. The Chronice was started in 1985 and abandoned, not quite finished, somewhere around 2009. There are walkways above single-storey buildings curving around the edge of the monument and it turns out these are classrooms and workshops for traditional Georgian craft, including the work of finishing off the monument.

The Chronicle of Georgia is 16 pillars, 35m tall each, with stories from Georgia’s history, myth and from the Bible. Unfortunately, the sculptor didn’t leave a list of what each artwork represents, so there’s a certain amount of guesswork required even for the Bible scenes. It’s a weird and wonderful place, on a hill overlooking the Tbilisi Sea. Apparently this was once three salt lakes, now joined up, but it’s also a reservoir that supplies most of the city’s drinking water. I could see before even doing the reading that this was a reservoir. There are boats on it and it’s a popular place for swimming and watersports in the summer. I had a look – I could see dinghies moored offshore and pedalos on land but no sign of kayaks. I would have liked to do a kayak trip.

Lots of people have compared the Chronicle to Stonehenge and almost as many people have wondered why. It’s because it kind of looks like Stonehenge – lots of upright stones, only bigger, blacker and more foreboding. This is absolutely the place alien overlord will greet Tbilisi from one day. It was freezing when we arrived and there was a heavy mist over most of the view but a lot of it cleared and the sun came out and by the time we returned to the bus I had to take off all my layers so as to not die of heatstroke before we got home.

I went straight back to the hotel for a little lunch and then back out to Europe Square via the church around the corner from me. I’m not entirely sure what kind of church it is, only it’s the kind where I’m supposed to cover my hair (with a scarf from the box outside the door) and you can’t take photos. From there, you have a great view over the river and over modern Tbilisi. A few things stand out. The tethered hot air balloon, for one. The Peace Bridge, which is a great glass curving canopy over the river. The City Hall, known locally as the Mushrooms because it looks exactly like a great big chunk of fungus growing from a tree. And the cable car which goes up to the fortress on the other side of the river. So up I went. It says on my transport pass that it’s valid for the cableway but it isn’t – or not this one, anyway. So now I have two transport passes!

Anyway, up I went. There’s a botanical garden up there which mostly looks like a forest in its January misery and I have no idea how you actually get at it, as all the paths are a dizzying distance below. I only had an hour to get to the sulphur baths and now I was on the right side of the river, I thought I’d make my way down the mountain and hope I popped out in the right place. I skipped the fortress – we’ll be back here tomorrow on our Old Town tour – and zigzagged down the paths and viewpoints and unexpected restaurants until I found myself popping out, sure enough, in Abanotubani, the bath district. This place is unmistakeable – not from the smell but from the weird brick roofs and domes that form the ground around here. Once there were hundreds of bathhouses but apparently there are only five now. I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure I could see more than that. I had a booking at Chreli Obano, which is the most famous, most spectacular and most expensive – and also the only one where you can book online, although you seem to need a Georgian phone number to verify the booking. For 100 GEL (about £30), I could have my very own spa room with sulphur bath and for an extra £6, I could have a traditional scrub. For £60 an hour, I could have a room with hot and cold baths and two saunas – not a bad deal in itself but split between six people, something to jump on. Anyway, I just had a small room.

The bath is hot and no one ever mentions how much it sploshes over the edge. I watched lots of videos so I knew what to expect but no one ever mentions that if you so much as breathe, the water will pour over the edge and splash so loudly that you half-expect someone to come and see what on earth you’re doing. 15 minutes later, a scrubber person will come in for the traditional scrub. Every room has a tiled slab and they scrub you with a mitt that feels like it’s made out of carpet and then they get a kind of net bag and squeeze it in such a way that it produces mountains of soft bubbles. You get rinsed by having a bucket of hot sulphur water thrown over you and then the scrubber lady takes her 20GEL and departs unceremoniously. Best not to look at what comes off you when you scrub. Anyway, I now have my own scrubbing mitt, so I’ll do that every now and then.

The bath is really hot. They say to cool down in the shower every fifteen minutes but I soon found it had to be every three or four minutes. No one mentioned that reception calls you on the internal phone to tell you when you have 15 minutes left but they do mention how much the baths smell of sulphur. I actually didn’t notice. I half-wonder if that’s because once you’ve spent a certain amount of time in Iceland, you go nose-blind to smelly geothermal water but on the other hand, you can really smell the sulphur in the metro. Liberty Square metro is particularly fragrant. Anyway, it was very hot and when I was finished, I had to run across the river and up the hill and around the corner to get all my cold drinks out of my fridge. You need cold drinks, proper cold ones, for a sulphur bath. I’d like to go again, not to Chreli Abano – not because there’s anything wrong with it but because there’s still at least one sulphur bath I’d like to try out but we’ll see how the rest of the week works out.

Georgia day 3: flying to Georgia

I knew today I wanted to get my walk out of the way while I was still in Cyprus. My flight is 13:40, arriving in Tbilisi 17:30 and I knew by the time I reached Georgia and got in from the airport, I wouldn’t want to go out for half an hour in the cold, whereas I had plenty of time in the morning. So I set my alarm for 8am (highly aware that 8am in Cyprus is 10am in Tbilisi and this time tomorrow I wouldn’t be waking up, I’d be getting on a minibus two metro stops away from home) and went for breakfast. It went better than yesterday. I found the butter so I made two slices of toast and while I waited for the slow but brilliant conveyor toaster I collected up mugs of apple juice, mini croissants, things of jam and a big spoonful of chocolate spread on a plate. I am fed! I am ready to go out for a walk, get a bus and go to Georgia!

I walked. I went back to the prom and walked all the way up to Larnaca beach. It was sunny and I was in a t-shirt but there was a chilly breeze that made me suspect I wouldn’t have had much of a problem with bringing my jumper with me. I got back to the hotel in plenty of time to pack up and then went down the road to the bus stop. I’m irrationally proud of managing to get on the bus – the bus stop sign was only on the other side of the road and although the map said this was the bus stop, I wasn’t certain whether it would actually stop here. I saw it coming. I stepped out past the cars and held out my arm until I saw it indicate and then I boarded!

Airport was easy enough with one snag. I had to check in for my flight at the desk instead of at a machine and then I had to go through the weird passport control with the machines. Got another police receipt. Waited in the queue. Two border guards very slowly checking passports. Then a third arrived and began collecting the receipts and waving people through. I guess everything they need to scan for is on those receipts and someone can sit and process them later? But I wasn’t sure whether that was enough. I have a Cyprus entry stamp. Surely I need a matching exit stamp? Sometimes you can “hope for the best” and take your chances. I tend to believe that’s not the right approach when it comes to borders and passports. I went back and asked “don’t I need a stamp?” He seemed to think I wanted one rather than needed one but stamped without protest and that felt better. Through security and I was sitting at my gate by about 11:20, for a flight scheduled to take off at 13:40. Yes, I could definitely have dithered longer in Larnaca this morning.

I watched the incoming flight online and it arrived about 15m late. Oddly, ten or fifteen minutes later, it still hasn’t arrived at the gate. Boarding was supposed to begin 10 minutes ago and people keep going up to the staff and asking. No, it hasn’t started. No, the plane isn’t here. Boarding will start in about 5 minutes. It’s not looking like an overly full flight at the moment but it has more than its fair share of people who don’t seem to understand how airports work. There’s a woman who’s just sat next to me who can’t figure out how the handle on her case work and there’s a man who dumped his luggage about 45 minutes ago and is walking huge circles of the terminal staring at his phone and passing by every 15 or 20 minutes so I know he’s at least still here somewhere.

The flight was uneventful but very scenic. If you want a fairly short sightseeing flight, I can recommend Larnaca to Tbilisi – two hours of white snowy mountains, ridges and valleys that my inner geologist enjoys but doesn’t have enough training to properly understand.

I was nervous about getting through passport control – I’ve checked and double checked and then checked again just in case and I do not need a visa to enter Georgia but I still worry as I approach the desk. I was a bit suspicious about how quiet and empty the airport was. We were not a full flight but I’d been among the last to disembark and yes, there was a sizeable group around the transfer desk but not 3/4 of a plane-load sort of sizeable. A handful of people ahead of me at passport control and then one single person sitting at baggage reclaim. Of course, the world sprang to life out in arrivals. Everyone is either collecting or they want you in their taxi. “Taxi?” “Nope.” “In a few minutes?” “Nope.” “Ok, in maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.” “Nope”. I knew what I was doing. I’d read this in detail. Go to the orange Bank of Georgia kiosk and buy a blue transport ticket. Go to the orange machine that looks like an ATM and add a week’s subscription to it. Could have done with the addendums “the Bank of Georgia kiosk is to the right when exiting, by the door, and they only take cash” and “it’s add a subscription, not top up transport” but other than that it went smoothly. The bus was where I expected it to be and I boarded it by the back door and scanned my new ticket. The drivers want nothing to do with the money aspect of the bus. Good.

Last, I knew I needed to take this bus to Central Station and then take the metro 4 stops south to Avlabari or jump off at Liberty Square and take the metro 1 stop south to Avlabari if I spotted it. I had my map open and watched the little blue dot and the closer we got to the city centre, the more I began to think “I don’t see any way to get from here to Liberty Square without driving through Avlabari”. And it did. So, jump off at Avlabari, don’t get on the metro and walk 300m down the road to the hotel! Could not have been easier! Good bus!

The room is pleasant enough. There’s a building on my street – next to the hotel – that looks like a bomb hit it. It might be semi-demolished and then abandoned but it’s definitely got something of the look of having been hit by a bomb a couple of decades ago. The moment I saw it, I knew my room would overlook it and it does but you kind of have to peer over the high balcony wall and if you look to right or left, you see the lights of Tbilisi. I’m looking forward to seeing this city by daylight – from the highway on the bus, it looks like a city of lights spilling down a narrow valley in a mountain and maybe that’s what it is. Find out tomorrow. It’s a big room with a big shower tiled in interesting patterned/textured tiles and it has a full-size fridge but it also has a huge step up and then back down into the bathroom and I will fall over it and smash my head in during the next week. There’s another big step out to the balcony and the room itself is up a step from the door. I’m a little nervous that there are sofas and a TV right outside my door – I don’t want to listen to people socialising out there! – but on the other hand, I’ve seen nor heard no evidence that there’s anyone else in the building so far. Not that I’ve been here long. I left my luggage and went straight back to Avlabari to figure out the metro on my way to the big shopping centre and the big supermarket at Liberty Square. Familiar Soviet-style metro, complete with brown plastic-looking escalators, a babushka in a glass box at the bottom and an LCD countdown telling you when the next train is coming. Easy peasy. Irrationally glad my travel ticket working on the bus wasn’t just a fluke too.

I bought bread rolls and butter and juice and chocolate and plastic cheese slices for sandwiches and an actual block of cheese to eat with a baguette (had to stop off at the Carrefour City up the road; Goodwill is a pretty good supermarket but by 7.30pm, it was out of fresh bread) and then I came home and ate my body weight in bread and cheese, unpacked so I could be sure everything had made it after taking three days to get here and now… I think I’m going to not do much until bedtime.

Georgia day 2: in Cyprus

It’s been a mixed day. It started with some good apple juice and some good toast, made with a conveyor toaster – but no butter. Dry toast, apple juice, a bowl of cereal and then out to see Larnaca’s famous salt lake, which the guidebook said looks white. It doesn’t. It looks like an ordinary lake. It’s a great sight, with mountains in the distance and Larnaca on its edge and a mosque at the other edge and if you zoom in with your camera, the white speckles you assumed to be seagulls turned out to be actual pink flamingos. But it was hot. It’s January and based on the temperature of the open walls I found while attempting to depart the fourth floor via the stairs instead of the lift, I thought I’d want my hoodie. I did not. I definitely didn’t want my big boots but that’s all I brought with me. I’m expecting Georgia to be cold. I was expecting Cyprus to be warmer but I wasn’t expecting it to be hot. I spent a while admiring the lake but my plan to stroll some of the way round it wasn’t going to happen. Back to the hotel. Maybe spend the afternoon in the pool.

Actually, the hotel is quite cool and so is the balcony, mostly because it’s not facing into the sun. I was quite chilly, in fact. So I forgot how hot it is outside and decided to go back out into Larnaca. It was a lot more tolerable. I don’t know if that’s because I headed south and walked along the seafront, cooled by a sea breeze or if the temperature really did drop. I walked along the same prom I did last night, saw the sea sparkling in the sun, saw how shallow it is and how clear and wished I could put my feet in it and walked up until I found Larnaca town. I had a quick visit to the castle, which is mostly interesting in that you can go up on the ramparts and look out at the beach and the sea from up there. Then I went looking for a supermarket. Google Maps and Reddit between them seem to suggest there are only two decent supermarkets in all Larnaca. One is just around the corner from my hotel – but closed on Sundays. The other is Lidl, just out of the north of the town. I’m staying just out of the south of the town. The mini supermarket in the centre of Larnaca didn’t have bread. Fine. I still have Pringles and half a bar of orange Rittersport that I picked up at the airport. I can live off that (I can’t live off that). But there was a Burger King. I shouldn’t go in Burger King when I’m away adventuring but I was hungry. I ordered chips & Sprite and then was punished for going in Burger King by having to wait forever because the drink machine had broken. Orders were piling up, trays were piling up, burgers and chips were put on their trays and then taken away and put on the warming tray because the machine wouldn’t work. The audacity of one customer – when it finally began spitting out liquid, two staff began making the drinks to go with about ten orders, getting them out as quick as possible, and this moron looked at this drink that he’d been waiting at least 20 minutes for, at the staff trying to pour as many drinks as humanly possibly from a malfunctioning machine and went “… I don’t want ice in it”. I think I would have said quite firmly “Today you do”. I was out in a t-shirt because it’s warm but you can spot the tourists, they’re the only ones who think it’s warm. The locals are all in jumpers and most of them with coats or jackets over the top. It was cooler than first thing in the morning, or cooler than it was by the lake maybe, but if I had three layer on, I’d probably die. I have no idea how I”m going to get all my warm clothes to the airport in the morning if I can’t wear them.

Anyway, by the time I’d eaten my chips, there was a big black cloud forming over Larnaca. The sky was still blue over the Med and further down the prom but there was a coolish breeze and I began to feel like I’d better get home because it was going to end up as a race between me and the rain. I won, and I took a few minutes out of the race to make friends with a cat. There are hundreds of cats here and this one stared at me and meowed and then came over and rubbed itself on my legs and then nearly came home with me.

And that’s about all I’ve done today. I’ve planned breakfast, I’ve planned to do my walk in the morning and I’ve planned what bus I need to be at the airport on time. I’ve planned to go to either the Carrefour between the metro and my hotel in Tbilisi or the Spar across the river if I arrive after 8pm and I plan to eat my body weight in bread tomorrow.

Georgia day 1: flying to Cyprus

Here I am in Larnaca, most of the way to Georgia. I got up to Heathrow without any major problems – just when I got to short stay T4, I followed the Parking Meet & Greet lane only for the meet & greet barrier to be closed off, which meant I had to drive through the (ANPR-controlled) drop-off zone and go back round to go into the car park. Dropped off the car, strolled into T4 very happily, looked up at the departure board – and my flight wasn’t on there. It took a good moment for to realise that’s because I’m actually flying from T5 (I’m flying back into T4 at the end of this and I’d rather have the hassle of going between terminals when I’ve got plenty of time on the way than when I just want to get home afterwards). I found the trains – was expecting a Tube train or maybe a special Heathrow shuttle but in fact, I was having my first ride on the Elizabeth Line. That took me up to T1&2 (or is it 2&3?) and then I had to change onto the Heathrow Express (another first) to get to T5.

Security was no problem. Breakfast was. The only place that would do toast was Giraffe and that had a huge queue outside because it’s the first place you come to when you emerge from security. So I got a meal deal and sat at an empty gate for the best part of an hour. The board said my plane would be at the A Gates, which meant I didn’t have to jump on the transit across to one of the other buildings and when it finally came up, I was only sitting two gates away.

The flight was long but uneventful – long for someone who’s never done a flight longer than London to Moscow, anyway. There was a lady in my seat because assistance had plopped her there but actually, she was supposed to be in window seat on the other side. Then the man sitting in the aisle seat was asked if he’d swap so a girlfriend and boyfriend could sit together. He considered it, right up until he discovered he’d be swapping his aisle seat for a middle seat. Nope.

We flew over mountains. I thought I recognised Achensee and Pertisau and Flight Radar 24 says I was correct. I think Ljubljana was the place where the mountains unexpectedly stopped. Well, it happened somewhere, anyway. We also went over Skopje and Sarajevo and out into the Aegean near Thessaloniki. I guessed that one – I could see that the mountains had finally stopped and we were going over the sea. Google Maps obviously didnt work without signal but I could see a blurry part-loaded view of the Greek coast and the islands I could see below me seemed to match one off the coast east of Thessaloniki, with a second weird-shaped island seeming to confirm that. Flight Radar 24 confirmed it for definite. It very suddenly got dark over the Aegean. By the time we landed in Larnaca at just after 6.10pm, I was wishing I’d been able to find time earlier for my daily walk. Passport control was easy – UK passports were allowed in the machines, I scanned my own passport and received a kind of police receipt with my photo on it, which border control glanced at before stamping my passport and sending me on my way.

There’s a supermarket near my hotel but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get there before it closed so I got enough snacks for the evening at the airport and went looking for the bus. The signs said it was out the far side and there were buses there – the pre-booked shuttle bus, tour buses etc. No sign of an ordinary bus. Literally. No bus, no sign, no bus stop, no timetables, nothing. Undeterred, I looked up what bus I wanted to get and took a screenshot. Then I heard a bus! Up to my right, on a cliff! There was a glass walkway sticking out of the airport and crossing to the top of that cliff, which was apparently where the car park is. So back into the terminal, go upstairs, look for the walkway. Bus! I found the bus! I showed the driver my screenshot so he knew where I wanted to alight and I bought a ticket the old-fashioned way, with cash. 15 minutes later, I was jumping off into the Cypriot night and strolling 300m up the road to my hotel!

I didn’t particularly want to go out in the dark in a strange place on my own for my walk but I also didn’t want to break a streak that’s only three months off hitting four full years. So I strolled down the road towards the beach and discovered a well-lit promenade with just enough people walking on it to feel happy. Lots of fish restaurants, a full moon reflecting perfectly on the water, just cool enough that you want the hoodie but don’t feel the need to take it off, perfectly flat and I was back, 2km and 28 minutes later. Now I could actually look at my room, discover that I have a balcony and that the pool is closed and covered right outside. The photos make it look like it’s on the roof but it’s absolutely not. I have white towels for the shower and blue towels for the pool, which suggests it’s open. Whether it’s a suitable temperature to swim in, considering it’s January, I may find out tomorrow.

Finland: May 31st

I’m at the airport. I’m at my gate. It’s 2:31 and the flight is at 4 so I’m pretty comfortable that I’ve made it in time and I’ve had lunch on the other side of passport control and bought korvpuustia.

I got up, did my packing, returned my bottles to K-Market and used the euro I got for them to buy some more cheese for today’s lunch. It’s not as good as the cheese I had last time.Then I took my luggage to the lockers under the station and went out in Helsinki. I wanted to go down to the harbour, walk around the island and see the icebreakers. They’re very impressive. Finland claims to have built 60% of all the icebreakers in the world and to have designed 80% of them. It was breezy but there was a little bit of park opposite the big ships which was fairly shaded and that was nice for a while. Then I sat outside Allas again. Bit more souvenir shopping, found the big food hall, sat on the sculptural thing and looked at the harbour from that side and then decided it was breezy and chilly and time to find something else to do. I’d considered Seurasaari but Google Maps said it would take about 45 minutes to get there and with only three hours, it didn’t feel worth it. I took the tram back to Lasipalatsi and went in the Forum centre to look at – and not buy – anything Moomin-related, then I went downstairs to McDonalds and had a small chips partly because I fancied some and partly as a reason to drink the entire bottle of Fanta I kind of wished I hadn’t bought last night. Then I reclaimed my luggage, found the I train and came to the airport. I’ve done the rest – security, lunch, korvapuustia, gate.

I’ve made two studies while I’ve been here. The first is of Marimekko. I conclude that the clothes aren’t worn that much, not by people who are out and about in the city centre anyway, but lots and lots of people have the bags. Lots of them are plain black bags with the name all over the strap. Lots of them are more tote bag-shaped, with the name written all over them. I’ve seen a few in the colourful patterns but they’re definintely in the minority.

The second, obviously, is of the language. I’ve not done a lot of speaking Finnish – I’m still not big on speaking at all – and I tend to panic when faced with Finnish, even though I’m quite capable of asking “Anteeksi, puhutteko te englantia?”. But I can pick out words I recognise and occasionally that’s enough to figure out roughly what’s being said. At least, I caught enough words when the plane landed to realise that they were talking about the local time and temperature. I can read a little bit as well. Not books or magazines but signs and the sides of buses and so on. If I was going to say it out loud, I can put together little sentences about what I’m doing. That’s all I really wanted from Finnish, to get to the point where I can see something other than vowels, double letters and umlauts. The Swedish still makes more sense than the Finnish but I’ve been trying to make an effort to ignore the Swedish and pay attention to the Finnish.

Moi moi. Se on ohi. Tee se uudelleen!

Finland: 30th May

I started today with a tiny revelation: the easiest way to get to Lidl for my fresh breakfast bread is to walk down the road and along instead of up the road and along as the bottom end of the road is flat. Then I wanted to cross some more things off my to-do list.

First, Uspensi Cathedral. The 7 tram takes me directly from just up the road to Senate Square and then it’s a short walk across to the cathedral. This one was more what I expected. It’s small, both cathedrals are very small, but it was decorated more or less how I’d expected. Lots of saints, lots of lettering, lots of patterns and colour. Then I walked back up to the nearest tram stop and took the 4 north to the Church in the Rock. I knew it was out of the city centre but I hadn’t realised it’s only three or four stops from the central station. It’s not exactly in a cave, as some places would have you believe. There’s a big dome of rock in the middle of a square with Art Deco apartment blocks on each side and the church has been dug out of that, with a big copper dome over the top held up by concrete supports. Yes, it’s in the rock but effectively – at least as far as the rock is concerned – it’s entirely open at the top.

I took the tram back to town for a little souvenir shopping, mostly for postcards and stickers for my scrapbook although I also invested in a sauna cover of my very own. Then I walked down Esplanade and stopped in the park for an ice cream. When I’d eaten that, I continued down towards the harbour where there were boats doing sightseeing tours. Well, that was on my list so I got on the first one, a city tour leaving at 1.30. The inside was pretty much full but there were only two or three people sitting outside on the top deck and the ladies who were selling tickets assured us that the clouds were disappearing and they had blankets. I claimed a blanket before I’d even picked a seat and was glad I had it. It was chilly on the water, even before we set off, and we hadn’t left the harbour area before it started to rain. Well, I’d say “‘drizzle”‘ but the few raindrops were the big heavy kind. Not enough for those of us on deck to take cover but enough for us to pull the blankets over our heads. By the time we’d made our way out past Sirpalesaari and seen Loyly in the distance, the rain had stopped and we could feel the warm sun again. We went past Suomenlinna, under the new bridge and past Laajasalo and Kulosaari and then did a big circle around Mustikkamaa, the leafy island where most of the embassies live, past Korkeasaari and round to Katajanokka. From Korkeasaari yesterday I’d seen a fleet of large ferries moored off Katajanokka and wondered about them. Now I discovered they’re actually Finland’s icebreakers, who don’t have a lot to do this time of year. As we headed back into the harbour, a freezing wind came up. I wished I had another blanket. Ten more blankets. Funny how the temperature skyrockets when you’re back on dry land.

I walked home (I hadn’t measured any walking today and needed my 2km) to finish off my bread and butter, dump my shopping and pick up my jacket ready for that trip to Suomenlinna I keep saying I’ll do. This was helped immensely by the walk back from the harbour only being 1.9km. I needed to go out to do my extra mileage! So at last I made it to Suomenlinna for a proper late afternoon/evening there, without the worry about the wind warning or the giant threatening cloud. I sketched the swimming bay, ate a korvapuusti I bought yesterday, panicked that the Tallinn/Stockholm ferry was going to plough into the island at speed, finally found the King’s Gate, discovered that Strava didn’t record my walk around the island properly and finally got the 8.40 ferry back. Then it’s five or ten minutes up the road to the tram stop, ten minutes for the tram to arrive and it delivered me to the top of the road.

Tomorrow I need to be on the airport train by about 1pm so I’m going to leave my luggage at the station again and decide what to do later.

Finland: 29th May

Breakfast this morning was (slightly stale) baguette left over from last night before going up the road to get the tram to the station where I had to find the 16 bus out to Korkeasaari, which is the island with a zoo on it. First Helsinki bus, discovery that my cardboard five-day ticket has some secret electronics inside it as it makes the ticket reader ping when I hold it against it, and twenty minutes through some very cobbled streets and some open roads only to discover, as I crossed the bridge to Korkeasaari, that the cathedrals are just a couple of hundred metres away. There’s a new bridge being built and I later found a sign explaining all the works: in 2027, they’re planning to open a new light railway which will run along the bottom of this island, connecting it directly to the city centre. I’m not entirely certain why this light railway means Korkeasaari is getting its own tram stop but whatever, it’s going to get easier to get there.

I was expecting something more like an Alpine wildpark, a semi-open place where mostly native animals roamed and the shores of the island were always visible. And there were bits of shore, mostly roped off because of nesting barnacle geese, but it felt a lot like a normal zoo. There was a tiger and three camels and some wallabies (these come under the title kengurut in Finnish) and monkeys and moose-like things and yak-like things and everything you’d expect in a zoo except elephants and giraffes. It’s a labyrinth and between the rocks, the enclosures and the trees, it’s mostly very easy to forget you’re on an island rather than just in a zoo on land as normal.

I didn’t take the bus all the way back to the city centre. I hopped off after about four stops and got the metro back instead. Not because there was any particular reason to, just because it was a method of transport I haven’t used yet. It turned out to be a good idea – I spied some empty seats from the platform and when I went to sit on them, I discovered that some of them were empty because there was an enormous black and tan dog asleep under them. He looked up when a small poodly thing boarded and had a good sniff but stayed down and stayed quiet and when it was out of sight and he’d sniffed enough, he went back to sleep.

Back at the station, I got in a bit of a tangle about finding a tram down to Senatintori, Senate Square. It would have been quicker and easier to walk. Trams leaving from the central station, I think, take a bend around the shopping centre to get to Aleksanterinkatu and so go in the opposite direction to the one I expect. I got there eventually. This is really Helsinki’s main square and it seems the done thing is to sit on the steps up to the cathedral. So I did. It was a warm day (I went out in shorts!) but it’s breezy and apparently the steps are immune to breeze. It’s the warmest place in Helsinki to sit and the stone is warm from the sun as well.

I wanted to go into the cathedrals. The white one is Helsinki’s main Protestant/Lutheran church. It’s a big white confection with corners and domes and gold and it is utterly underwhelming inside. Even St Paul’s isn’t as bare and boring. Oh yes, you can see the inside of the five domes but they’re all sponged in pale blue with no decoration at all. Uspenski Cathedrall, the big red Orthodox one, is closed on Mondays and still apparently the place to have your Helsinki photoshoot. As I walked around it in the hope of figuring out which door is in use, I spied the shop/pier on Korkeasaari through the buildings behind the cathedral. I compared the distance to the distance back to the main station. If you could walk on water, it’s not more than a mile away. Easily walking distance. But you have to go around the edge of the bay and you have to walk through a giant construction site and so taking a bus right out of the city is still the best way to get there.

What else was on my to-do list? The big wheel. That’s just down by the sea. I’d go and see if I could get on. No reason why not – it was going round and with no one on board. Surely SkyWheel couldn’t say “too busy, come back in 45 minutes”? They didn’t. They gave me a ticket – an actual ticket, not a receipt! – and sent me round to the queue, which was the two groups who’d been in front of me at the ticket office. We had our photos taken and I must remember to download my photos, and then I boarded from gate 4.

I had no idea how many times we were going to go round. It seemed to go pretty quickly and I was glad, and not surprised when we went a second time. Not surprised at the third. I was surprised when we went round a fourth time, though. Obviously I had a cabin to myself so I could hop from side to side depending on what I wanted to see. Views over the bay and out to Suomenlinna. Eye-level views of Uspenski. Birds-eye view of Allas Sea Pool. I saw the hot tub down below and finally found the sauna cabin four or five in front of me. I think I’ve had enough sauna but if I was here with a few more people and it was worth the money, I’d definitely go for the sauna/hot tub/SkyWheel package.

By now I was hungry and tired. I wanted some food and I wanted to swap my shorts for trousers so I could go over to Suomenlinna for the evening again. I took the tram up to Stockmann and did a little shopping – ok, I did a little wandering around feeing that this place is too big and too expensive and is full of things I don’t particularly want to buy anyway, but eventually I found the big gourmet supermarket hiding on the minus second floor and stocked up on bread, drink and korvapuustia and came home.

I knew what would happen. I ate my bread, I charged my phone, I changed into my trousers and then I lay down on the bed to wait for the bread to settle down and here I still am. I am never getting up at 2am for a flight again. It just isn’t worth it.

What are tomorrow’s plans? Well, I still have plenty on my to-do list. Uspenski and the Church in the Rock are the main things to cross off. I might go over to Seurasaari but I’ve been there before and with limited time left, I might find another island, or go to that beach, or find another sauna. Can I be bothered with another sauna? Carrying wet swimming things around just to sit in a small room that’s too hot? I know and appreciate that it’s a Finnish tradition but I really prefer the Icelandic tradition of sitting in warm water. That’s virtually unknown here. I wish the nice pool up the road was open because that would be the perfect last-evening thing to do. Maybe I’ll go back to Suomenlinna tomorrow night.

Finland: 28th May

I was quite chuffed last night that I went to bed early thanks to the time difference. It didn’t occur to me until this morning that it worked the other way round in the mornings – when I woke up at just gone 9, that’s 7 in time I’m used to. Going back to sleep wasn’t an option: I had a booking at Loyly at 11:15 and I had to have breafast, get ready and figure out how to get there. I didn’t have much in for breakfast. I had a cup of apple juice while I was getting dressed and I thought I’d walk to the supermarket and get some more ciabatta. It’s a bit of a pain but it’s like living on a campsite, where you walk to the shop and get your fresh bread in the morning. I made it all the way downstairs before I realised it’s Sunday at which point my phone informed me that the K-Market wasn’t open until 10am today. No fresh bread for breakfast. I made do with TUC biscuits and a couple of pieces of chocolate. It’s not breakfast but tomorrow I can fetch my fresh bread for breakfast from the Lidl I’ve discovered literally two streets down the road. If you use the self-service, you have to scan your receipt to open the gate to leave, which is a novelty.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. After my imperfect breakfast, I gathered what I needed, put suncream on my face and walked three streets down the road to the 6 tram which would take me within a four-minute walk of Loyly. Four minutes for a snail, perhaps. I had a better idea after Allas about the Finnish feelings about time so I knew that at 10.45, I’d better entertain myself enjoying the view and the sun on the shore instead of trying to get into the building just yet. Blue sky, sunshine and warmth is such a novelty here for me! From my chosen rock, I could see the sauna side of Loyly’s deck and the famed Baltic swimming spot. It might have been warm and sunny but it was breezy and I suspected there wouldn’t be many swimmers today, not with the sea as rough as that.

Most of the building is actually a restaurant and cafe. The sauna occupies only about a third of it. As yesterday, there are maybe thirty lockers and just enough space for half a dozen people to change at once. On the other side are the showers and the then beyond that is the sauna area. Both saunas – both public saunas, anyway – are massive six-foot metal boxes. You lever the lid off with a foam-insulated handle two feet long and then use a massive ladle to tip water in and again, you feel the temperature shoot up the second the water hits the stones inside.

The second sauna is visible inside, in that you can see the corner squared off where it must be but the door is actually outside. This is the smoke sauna. It didn’t feel any different except that it’s dark – the main sauna has a glass wall and a big glass door but the only glass in this is a single window upstairs on one side. Your eyes so adjust but you can see every single newcomer struggle to figure out where there are seats. The other clue that this is the smoke sauna is that you can occasionally see people with patches of soot on them.

In between saunas, you can use the showers or you can sit in the lounge or you can do as most people do, sit outside on the deck. I did that for a while – sunbathing on the edge of the Baltic! – but I was acutely aware that it was sunny and I was lying in the sun and I’d only put suncream on my face. It occurs to me now that I took it with me, so I could have gone back to the lockers and put some on but at the time I was just vaguely aware that I didn’t want to get burnt by deliberately lying out in the sun.

You get two hours, which is plenty for me. When I was dried and dressed, I went to the restaurant. While I was figuring out how to get into the sauna, I’d spied a huge plate of korvapuustia, Finnish cinnamon rolls . Actually, I spied them in the supermarket yesterday but really wasn’t in the mood for trying something new. Now I was. I took my korvapuusti and my Coke and went out onto the deck, only to decide it was too bright to sit in the sun and find a seat in the shade where I could actually see what I was eating. The korvapuusti was tasty. Very sweet, not overly cinnamonny, a very good idea. Just twice the size I could manage. For future reference, I’ll be carrying around one of the little paper bags I brought my bread rolls in just in case I need to transport half a korvapuusti home again. This time I had to put it in my hat.

I’d spotted the Lidl on my way to the tram this morning so I stopped for fresh rolls for lunch and I’ve been writing this so far while eating those. Then I had a little rest – I got up at 2am yesterday! – which became a longer rest and it was getting on for 5 by the time I packed up my stuff and headed out again. I thought I’d go to Suomenlinna. I watched the ferries going backwards and forwards from the pool yesterday so I knew there was plenty of time. Bonus: the ferries are zone A in Helsinki public transport and therefore are free with my 5-day ticket.

Suomenlinna, which is the Castle of Finland, is a former fortress guarding the bay from invading Swedes/Russians, depending on the year. These days it still seems to be home to a naval training place but a lot of it is mixed open air museum and old buildings turned into cafes. If you’re there betwen about 10am and 5pm, there’s somewhere for a drink and a snack approximately every five minutes across the entire chain of islands. Afterwards, next to nothing, although there’s a kiosk on Susisaari that was still open as I was walking back. After 5pm, it’s quieter than during the day – you’ll still have someone walk in on you every time you think you’ve found a spot to take a selfie undetected but it’s not busy. It’s a nice place to amble, especially the last island, whose name I’ve forgotten. I know it’s a lot of military buildings with turf roofs and cannons pointed out to sea but it looks like Hobbiton and there are ponds and geese in the middle. Unfortunately, Helsinki had a wind warning at the time so it was chilly (well done me for bringing that packable jacket!) and there were threatening-looking black clouds. I nearly turned back and ran for home at the sight of those but when I stopped to look, they seemed to be heading away from Suomenlinna and towards Helsinki so I stayed.

An hour and a half after I boarded the boat back, the sky is so clear and blue that I’m half-tempted to go out again. It’s quarter to nine and I want to go to bed early tonight. I made plans for various places to get fresh bread on the way home but there’s a mini supermarket by the quay on Suomenlinna. I got in, got bread and juice (raspberry, pear, strawberry & lemon) and made it back to the quay before the incoming boat had docked, so I’m sitting at my desk with my orange juice and a plate that I’ll wash up tomorrow. I stayed out longest on the boat. I was still there when we docked and everyone else had retreated inside. It was chilly and my hands were cold from holding the camera out but I can survive a cold breeze for 15 minutes. It was a lot warmer back on the mainland. I walked up to Senate Square and took the 7 tram all the way back to the top of the hll again. So that’s three things crossed off my to-do list plus one I didn’t now existed. Zoo Island tomorrow and I’m hopefully going to squeeze in at least the two cathedrals afterwards and maybe finish the day on the big wheel.

Finland: 27th May

2am is a bad time for an alarm to go off, even to go to Finland. I made it to Heathrow with no problems: well, I made it to the edge of the airport with no problems. A mis-reading of the satnav led me to the gates of the staff car park with no easy way to escape. It’s effectively a slipway off the road that runs around the airport so you can’t just turn round and go back to the traffic lights you shouldn’t have turned right at. Obviously I couldn’t go in and straight to the exit because I’m not staff so there were a few panicked minutes of “What do I do???” before I spied the gap in the bollards between the entrance lane and the exit lane and managed to reverse to it without hitting the handful of incoming cars.

Next problem: got through security just before 5am to find my gate wasn’t announced until 6.30. Excellent. That gives me a leisurely hour and a half for breakfast! But at that time in the morning, there was nothing open except Pret, and they don’t do toast. The pink place with the “Instagrammable Lattes” menu opened but they only had pretty toast, not proper toast. Spuntino’s does proper toast. The internet eventually told me it opens at 5.30 but it didn’t actually open its doors until 5.45 and then I had a second lot of toast and I was still desperately trying to catch my waiter for the bill at 6.27 so I was rushing after all.

I snoozed on the plane until Denmark. Followed the west coast up to Skagen, across to Sweden, all across the south of Sweden, across the Gulf of Bothnia, across lots of tiny scattered islands that actually weren’t the coast of Finland and then we were in Finnish airspace and making our descent. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed a desceent quite as much as I noticed that one. It felt like a long, controlled dive. Which it is, but usually it’s fairly gradual and you don’t feel it.

Vantaa is a fairly small airport, at least in comparison to a lot of capital cities. There were 21 passport desks and only four open – two for people with real passports and two for the rest of us so that was a bit of a queue (and then she stamped my passport in the back instead of the front!). Lots of food places, cafes, restaurants, supermarkets etc in arrivals. I got some crisps and chocolate for the journey, since breakfast was fairly early and I’d missed lunch. I found the station, which is down at least four floors in an open-fronted lift that just plummets into the abyss (I did it twice, once because I needed to and once because I wanted to film it) and then went down to the platform. I’d planned to get a five day AB ticket but Vantaa is in zone C and it worked out cheaper to get a five day ABC ticket than my planned ticket plus a separate ticket from and then back to the airport. It’s a nice easy train, much easier than figuring out (or checking in advance…) which bus to get.

I sat in the sun outside the central station to eat my little lunch and then, since my room code wasn’t going to be delivered for another two hours, I left my luggage in a locker and walked down to the harbour. There was Allas Sea Pool, sparkling in the sun. I’d considered bringing my swimming things and spending the afternoon in the pool but in the end, it seemed easier not to pull my suitcase apart on the floor of the luggage room at the station and I hadn’t bothered. I did get a ticket for the Flying Cinema, though, since it’s right there. It’s a bit like FlyOver Iceland – a drone film of spectacular scenery and they swing you around in a big chair and spray you with water to make you feel like you’re up close to waterfalls. It’s not quite as good as FlyOver, though. For one thing, just as you’re starting to feel like you’re zooming across a landscape, it abruptly changes. The movement is sometimes jerky and it really felt like it was struggling up one mountain. And FlyOver lifts you up so your feet are off the ground and you’re sitting above a huge concave screen that fills your entire vision, whereas Flying Cinema leaves your feet on the floor, the screen is the usual big rectangle and you have to wear 3D glasses to feel like you’re in it, which is awkward for those of us with glasses. But it was a good way to fill 15 minutes and I do recommend it.

I checked my phone when I came out and I had my message from the hotel. Room code! So I walked back to the station, retrieved my luggage and walked up to the accommodation, not helped by my phone refusing to use the mobile data. The map that I followed halfway there abruptly decided it wasn’t going to work so that was good. I knew by that point that I had to walk up the top of the hill, turn down that road that I can see from here and it’s a street or two down on the right and I soon came across the street sign so I knew I was in the right place.

Once I was in and could be bothered, I went out for some real food. The tiny supermarket across the road didn’t have anything except too many people so I put the chocolate and the basket back and went to the big one up the road, which is indeed big and laid out bewilderingly. I got everything I needed eventually. Finland is big on “tummaa leipa” which is dark rye bread and anything else is hard to find but there are ciabatta rolls which go nicely with the butter I found. You have to weigh them and print the label for them so thank you to the people I witnessed doing that.

When I’d eaten, I decided to go to Allas for the evening. It was still sunny and warm. I got down there, queued in the shop to be told (at 7pm) that they were full and only had slots for 7.45. Pool closes as 9, which means they lock the door. You have to be out by 8.40, so I’d only get an hour instead of the three hours you usually get. Fine. I went back to the rooftop bar to look at it while I waited. This is full? I have had baths that are more crowded! No one in the sea pool, two people in the kids’ pool and maybe eight people in the geothermal pool. No one sunning themselves on the decking anymore. Unless the saunas were packed like sardines, Allas has a very odd idea of “full”.

I understood a little better when I finally got in. They’re very short on changing space and lockers. That’s definitely something they need to improve because if a dozen, maybe a couple of dozen, people on a sunny Saturday afternoon constitutes “‘so full we’ve closed our ticket office”, that’s a problem. This is a glorious geothermal pool right in the heart of the capital of the country that invented sauna. This place should be heaving! The Blue Lagoon would laugh in their faces.

They could learn a lot from the Blue Lagoon. I didn’t even try the cold sea pool. The kids’ pool was lukewarm, which is cold when you’re on the edge of the Baltic in a swimming costume. The geothermal pool was better but I’d expect heat, not warmth. It was warm enough to drift back and forth as the sun went down but definitely not the “‘geothermal heated pool” I’d expected. The sauna was quite pleasant and definitely warmed me up quickly, after scurrying the entire length of the decking back to it.

I didn’t stay for the full hour. It was about 8.35 by the time I decided the sauna was getting too hot. I got changed, I walked back to Senate Square and took the tram back to the top of the hill above the little tree-filled square opposite my hotel and when I’d hung everything up and eaten some chocolate, I went to bed. It was only about 10.30 when I turned off the light but that’s 8.30 at home and that’s a good thing after getting up at 2am.