Trip 42 — Fasta Åland Walk
Day 1: Port to Mariehamn
Thursday, 20 June 2024
Yesterday: 1045 steps/0.72 km/0.45 mi/8m
Accounting for the time difference, I turned 50 aboard the Silja Serenade, part of the Tallink fleet that circulates among Stockholm, Åland, Finland, and Estonia — the same company that brought me to Tallinn and Helsinki two years ago.
The ship is one of my happy places. It's booked as a passenger ferry but operates more like a cruise line, with a central promenade, several restaurants and bars, a theatre and nightclub, a casino (ties under 20 pay the dealer — bah), a game room, and programs for children and teens. It has a karaoke hour and a spa with hot tubs. There's a duty-free shop the size of those found in airports (where I picked up tinned moose and deer meat to get me through the remote parts of Hiiumaa).
After leaving Stockholm, the ship glides along hundreds of islets for about three and a half hours. The first fragments of Åland appear an hour before Mariehamn. During the six-hour journey, the ship spends not much more than an hour in the open Baltic Sea.
I'd had a somewhat fancy lunch of fine de claire and speciale de claire oysters and poached salmon at Lisa Elmqvist, one of the purveyors at the Östermalms Saluhall in Stockholm. My dinner aboard the Silja Serenade was less serene by intent. From two years ago I remembered a waiting area packed to the gills with ravenous teenagers ready to be unleashed into the Grande Buffet at opening time.
The crowd wasn't as rowdy yesterday, but the enthusiasm was still there, with everyone rushing to tables even though all the seating was reserved. I found the herring before I found my seat, so I made my first plate on the way: about six types including the Swedish version of "herring under the coat," a Russian layered dish with beets and egg, along with sliced lox, peel-'em shrimp, scampi salad, and a crab cake. Then back for a meat-and-cheese plate and a selection of mussels, caviar, and salmon in a cream sauce.
Most of the desserts didn't appeal to me, but I had room for some soft ice cream and M&Ms, and on a whim I stuck two marshmallows into the chocolate fountain. Whatever drips from there has its own supernatural physics. I can twirl the marshmallows on the skewer for minutes over my plate, making sure the chocolate is safely adhering, and bring them slowly and cleanly up to my face — yet the mere act of opening my mouth is interpreted by the chocolate as a hurricane-force gale that sends the sauce cascading down my chin in gushes.
"What the...?" I said after the first marshmallow, vowing to be more careful with the second. "What the...?" I repeated a minute later, grabbing the napkin again.
We pulled into Mariehamn just before midnight; an orange haze hung in the distance, the closest Åland gets to night in late June. Only about ten of us left the ship; the rest, plus a few new passengers, continued on to Helsinki. The ship was already pulling away as I walked up along the harbor. It took less than eight minutes to reach the Hotel Cikada, where I opened the reception door at 11:58 p.m. (and just in time — the Abecedarian Walks Keen Wayfinding and Routing Document doesn't have an entry for how to calculate walks that end after midnight, and at that hour I wasn't about to write one!).
Mariehamn occupies a peninsula about a kilometer wide, and it packs a lot into a small area. The port, the smaller marina, the Cikada, and the four-masted Pommern ship-museum are on the west side; most other points of interest are on the east side. It's a small enough city that most of the places I remembered from "The Island Affair" I found just by wandering, but it's big and pretty enough that I went longer than I expected before things started to look dull.
Near the eastern edge I found the pedestrianized shopping street, a food and crafts market, and the main cultural and art museum, which covers the past 7500 years of island life. Noteworthy among the usual collection of fossils and stone tools were the traditions of seal hunting for lantern oil and of burying people's cremains with a clay paw as an amulet.
Following Viking rule, Sweden controlled Åland from the 13th century, and its first churches were built around that time. The archipelago was attacked by Russia in 1714, and most of the population fled to Sweden. They returned and rebuilt, but Russia attacked again in 1808 and 1809, when it took control of Åland and Finland.
As a disjointed island group between Sweden and Finland, Åland lacked a proper town. Inhabitants of the smaller fringe islands subsisted on what came from the sea; larger land areas such as what's now Fasta Åland had farms and agriculture, along with crofting (tenant farming) as in Shetland. Land administration was done by the church, with clusters of farms grouped loosely into villages.
Russia spent the second quarter of the 19th century building a fortress in Bomarsund, in the extreme east of today's Fasta Åland, only to see it destroyed by British warships and French troops in 1854. It wasn't until 1861 that Åland finally got a town, Mariehamn, named after Tsarina Maria Alexandrovna. Its location was chosen for its deep harbor and proximity to the main shipping routes. It was then a budding metropolis of 35 people, growing to 1000 in 1900 and 11,812 as of last year.
Russia collapsed in 1917; Finland became independent but plunged into civil war. The "Åland Question" was posed to the League of Nations, who declared that Åland would become an autonomous region of Finland. This autonomy became effective on 9 June 1922, and is celebrated in Åland on that date each year.
The one place in "The Island Affair" that I had to look for on the map was the Svarta Katten (Black Cat) cafe; I'd walked right by it but been distracted by the supermarket across the street. I had a light lunch of lox salad followed by the famous Ålandspannkaka: Made with semolina, egg, and cardamom, baked in an oven, and topped with a prune jam, it's more a dessert quiche than a pancake. I share Alicia's son's love of the thing; her husband finds it sickly sweet and wonders how "something between a rice pudding and a French clafoutis, but with a skin as thick as a rhino's, could be considered a delicacy." Perhaps that's one reason they didn't work out.
I sat inside for the salad, in one of the cozy little rooms with an ancient green heating stove in the corner. Then I took the pancake out to the sunny garden, where gulls ransacked any morsels left unattended.
The morning had been cool, but the afternoon was warm enough for short sleeves, with a slight breeze. I headed over to the restaurant that occupies the F.P. von Knorring, a 96-year-old passenger steamer now resident in Mariehamn's east harbor. Alicia and her husband used to come here, and she would have a lonkero, a Finnish cocktail of gin and grapefruit (or sometimes lemon) soda whose name comes from the English "long drink." They had it on draft, and it felt stronger than the advertised 5.5-percent alcohol content.
As the upper deck filled up, I looked out at the hundred or so sailboats and yachts in the marina. Which would be the one used to seduce Alicia? And more importantly, how do I get a ride on one of those? AWKWARD rules allow me to take a boat ride if I don't step onto another island. But maybe I should try in earnest when I'm back in Mariehamn at the end of the month.
Go on to day 2
