A trip to Iceland had been on my mind since a long time, I’m not sure of the exact reasons though. My wild guess is that this country’s name comes just before India whenever I select the country from a drop-down (just kidding). I think the location of this place attracted me to that country and of course its name too. One thing that I heard most about this country is that it is very expensive. That stopped me from planning this trip so far. But this time I wanted to give it a try, to see how much it costs before giving up. Surprisingly, it is not that expensive as we thought, and the costs came out to be almost close to our earlier Greece trip. That’s when we were very excited about this place and did a lot of research about the places there, and then planned for the trip. We booked our flights and Airbnb four months in advance, as we found out that there were limited accommodation options in Iceland. Finally the long wait came to an end.

We started our journey from Delhi to Helsinki in the morning. There were no direct flights to Iceland. So, we decided to stop in Finland for 24 hours and take a flight to Iceland the next day, so that we get to see Helsinki too. We landed in Helsinki in the afternoon after a 7 hours long flight (luckily Finnair had a good collection of movies to keep us entertained). We took a day pass for 14 euros, which was valid for all kinds of public transportation within Helsinki and Vantaa (the airport area). We boarded a train from Vantaa to Helsinki City Center, which looked so cool and gave us the feeling that we were outside the country. The train journey was very quick and smooth and I got reminded of my TGV train experience in Paris, which I boarded 10 years back.

From city center, we had to take a bus to reach our Airbnb flat. The public transportation was too good and it showed the exact timing of bus arrival on the display board.

We quickly dropped our luggage in the flat and headed out to the city center to take a ferry to Suomenlinna island, a World Heritage Site, suggested by our host, before it got dark.

On the way, we found a church, Helsinki Cathedral, which looked so huge and amazing.

 

It took around 20 mins of ferry ride to reach that place. Suomenlinna is a huge sea fortress in the Baltic sea, built in 18th century, to protect Sweden from Russian invasions. It is now developed as a good picnic spot with a lot of colorful restaurants.

It was quite a good walk on the island to reach the fortress and it started getting dark by then, so we just looked at the fortress from outside and returned back to ferry point.

We enjoyed the ferry ride back with a great view of city in lights and the sunset sky.

By the time we came back to the city, the complete look and feel of the city changed. It turned very lively and vibrant. We found a big vintage car show happening on the road with bands playing music along the beach side, many food trucks and a lot of people on the roads.

Apparently, it happened to be a Friday night and I guess it is because of that, not sure if it is like that everyday. We just loved the vibes of the city and felt happy to be just there 🙂

Wow, what a city! 🙂 We reached our flat and took rest for the day for an exciting day tomorrow.