Helsinki, Finland – T & G Travels

Day 3 Saturday 16th August 2025 - Helsinki, Finland

We had a reasonable night’s sleep, but both awoke before 6.30 alarm we had set. Breakfasts are included every day on the trip, the buffet spread here for breakfast was superb ! We had bircher and fresh fruit and yoghurt, in fact there was so much to choose from we had to restrain ourselves from selecting too much.

We packed, checked out and left our suitcases at the hotel before being led on a 3 hour bus tour hosted by Rebecca, a local resident of over 20 years, but from the UK originally. She was excellent and easy to understand. We found out that Helsinki is the second most northern capital city in the world, it has a temperature range of -30 in the winter to +30 in the summer, and it experiences long periods of darkness hours in the winter and long periods of light hours in the summer. It had been under Russian rule prior to becoming a republic and the guide wasn't hiding the fact that most Finns had no desire to go back to being controlled by the Russians. Apparently, Finland lost 10% of their land to the Russians before declaring their independence. Russia likes to increase its land holding - sound familiar ?

Some more facts on Helsinki :

Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers in the world

They claim to have the cleanest drinking water in the world

They have been surveyed as being the happiest country in the world for 8 consecutive years

The National Library of Finland, commonly known as Oodi, is architecturally stunning and completely energy sustainable

Finland gained independence in 1917, and has lost 10% of its country land mass to Russia. The entire Russian / Finland border is now closed (over 1300 kilometres) and while Russia was Finland's biggest trading partner, they support Ukraine in the current conflict.

The tour around the capital city took in many historical places and buildings, including the Olympic Stadium that was built and used for the 1952 Summer Olympic Games. Helsinki remains the smallest capital city to host a summer Olympic games. We took in parks, the train station, the library and cathedrals on the 3 hour tour.

Following the tour we were left to explore more in our free time and be back to our hotel for bus collection at 3 pm, to be dropped off at the ferry terminal for our 4.15 ferry crossing to Tallinn in Estonia.

The ferry was quite large and was almost like a floating department store the retail shopping component was huge. We had fun with 3 other couples on the crossing so time went quickly and it was a smooth sea all the way, arriving at 6.30 pm and got to our hotel at 7.00 pm.

After checking in Tania and I headed into the old town centre to have a look, It cold and had started to rain, but we did make it into the town square to find a traditional Estonian restaurant where we had cabbage soup and some deep fried rye bread with our garlic. It was outdoor seating, covered but we need blankets to keep us warm.