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| The Silja Serenade |
Rising 13 stories high and over 200 meters long, the Silja Serenade is one of the largest cruise-ferries in the world. (Pronounced Seal-ya) Owned and operated by the Estonian shipping company Tallink, it has been in service for more than three decades, which is hard to believe because the ship is and looks surprisingly modern.
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| The Stockholm archipelago |
Our ship took us through the Stockholm archipelago, a group of around 30,000 islands outside Stockholm. Set in the calm waters of the Baltic, the islands are picture postcard perfect. Some are uninhabited, just enough to accommodate a few trees, and some large enough to house entire towns. For the first few hours of the 16 hour journey, we traveled alongside these islands, marveling at their serenity and largely unspoilt ecosystems.
If the sheer beauty of it wasn't enough to astound, the clean waters and the seemingly untouched islands added to it. In such a heavily shipped area with many people living on these islands, I couldn't spot a single piece of waste. Sea gulls, ducks and various other species of birds went about their business, living and thriving in peace.
When finally the last island was in sight, I was sad to see it go by. But the open sea was waiting, in every direction there was nothing but the bluish-black waters of the Baltic. I waited eagerly for my first voyage in the open sea.
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| The sun at 5 in the morning! |
The Baltic is a very special sea, one of the largest bodies of brackish water in the world. (Brackish water is water with salt content somewhere between that of sea water and fresh water.) Throughout the trip, we would see patches of green scum on the sea surface, covering the sea surface around our ship for large distances. After lots of time spent on Google, I would later find out that the Baltic is home to the world's largest dead zone. These are areas devoid of any sea life, deprived of oxygen. The green scum we saw was actually residue left by the algal blooms that were causing the oxygen deprivation. Yick! The Baltic states are now in talks to solve this crisis. One of the proposed methods involve a giant pump to pump oxygen into the sea!
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| The night club on board the ship. |
The ferry is a great way to commute between Stockholm and Helsinki, and have fun at the same time. They are dubbed party ferries on the weekends because of the duty free drinks and the people who can't get enough of it! They're pretty cheap too. Even a first class cabin for the round trip costs less than a 2 night stay in a decent to good New Delhi hotel. The Tallink group and the Viking group are two very popular ferry service providers.
We steamed into the Helsinki harbor the next day. But popular online bloggers advise me to limit my blog posts to less than five hundred words, so that will be a story for another day!
Stay tuned to InsideEurope for more posts about travel in Scandinavia and travel hacks. Did you like the blog? Do you have suggestions or tips? Please give me a shout in the comments section below!
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| The main deck of the ship |
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| The green scum on the sea surface. Signs of a dead zone. |
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| The setting sun. But no night for Scandinavia, only a dusk and dawn! |
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| Try spotting the horizon! |
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| The island is not that small! That's how high the deck is! |
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| Smart and functional cabins! |
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| The Promenade deck of the ship |
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| The ship's route across the Baltic |
(Photo credits to my awesome family!)
