Finland's Ovi

(HS) Thursday last week was one of the busiest tourism days of the summer in the Finnish capital, with five large cruise vessels sailing into the city’s harbours. About 8,000 passengers got off of their cruise ships for a day visit to Helsinki.

Two ships, both en route from St. Petersburg to Stockholm, stopped at Hernesaari. There were also ships in the South Harbour, Katajanokka, and one even had to use a coal-loading pier in Sompasaari.

Most of the ships left Helsinki at around 6:00 PM, and with regular passenger vessels sailing the Helsinki-Tallinn and Helsinki-Stockholm routes, as well as a few cargo ships, traffic in the waters off Helsinki was somewhat congested.
The largest cruise liners stopped at Hernesaari, where the views this summer are not the best possible. There are piles of rocks and other building material heaped up on the southern tip for the construction of luxury housing in the area.

However, there have been attempts to make the pier area itself look nicer, with souvenir stands, flower boxes, and a proper toilet.

Many of the visitors shuttled between their ships and the sights of the city by bus, although some preferred to brave it on foot, finding their way with city maps.
An American couple were on the first cruise voyage of their lives on the Norwegian Dream cruise liner. “A normal industrial area. Nothing strange about that”, they said about the Hernesaari area.

They said that it was a considerable improvement over the Port of St. Petersburg, which they said looked like a rusty lunar landscape. However, this did not diminish the magnificence of the city itself.

The next stop for the cruise passengers will be Stockholm, where the ships will moor at a pier that is a 45-minute bus ride away from the centre of the city.
Helsinki expects 245 cruise ships to make port calls this summer, with a total of about 270,000 passengers. The number is about the same as last year.

Ships arrive almost on a daily basis, and on some days, like Thursday last week, there will be more than one.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Finland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.