Stockholm on a shoestring

Time for another retrospective post. Let’s continue my backpacking journey through Europe with Dean Keiller, a sheep farmer from Victoria. This time we’re off to Stockholm in Sweden. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, getting there was half the fun. We caught an overnight train from Bodø in Norway, stopping briefly to change trains in a place called Hell, and on to Stockholm, passing through picturesque tracts of pine forests that stretched for miles.

More than 1,400 kilometres and 24 hours later, we finally arrived in Stockholm mid-evening on Wednesday, 29 August 1990. I made a note in a travel diary that we spent our time on the train sharing a compartment with an Australian woman named Anne and another backpacker from Chicago named Connie.

Dean and I based ourselves at a campground on the outskirts of Stockholm for the next three nights. To make the most of our time, we purchased a three-day tourist pass offering free public transportation, as well as free admission to a range of popular tourist attractions. For the next couple of days, we gave the pass a solid workout.

Our first attraction the following morning was Skansen, an open-air pioneer museum featuring historic buildings and exhibitions that reflect Swedish traditions and everyday life throughout the ages. The complex comprises at least 190 museum buildings, including the iconic Seglora Church (Seglora kyrka), an old wooden church built in 1730. It was abandoned by its parish in the Västergötland lake district when a new church, built of stone, opened in 1903. The original wooden structure was carefully disassembled and relocated to Skansen.

Next on our list was Kaknästornet, the city’s telecommunications tower. It delivered a superb overview of the city. It’s only from an elevated viewpoint that you begin to appreciate why Stockholm is often called the City of Islands. Sweden’s capital is spread across 14 main islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, connected by over 50 bridges, and is surrounded by a vast archipelago of nearly 30,000 islands, islets, and rocks.  

Fun fact: the tower's observation deck was closed to the general public in 2018, in part because security upgrades designed to protect its critical equipment and infrastructure from terrorism or foreign interference proved too expensive. The image above, taken in 2015 and sourced from the web, offers a great sense of the view we enjoyed. It's sad to think this is another travel experience consigned to history by modern terrorism.

We then visited Storkyrkan, Stockholm’s 700-year-old cathedral, to see its famous statue of St George and the Dragon. This impressive statue, depicting the saint on horseback slaying a writhing dragon underfoot, is carved from solid oak. Including its wooden plinth, it’s more than six metres high. Storkyrkan was the first of numerous cathedrals we visited in Europe, and not the most extravagant. However, as my first European cathedral, it’s always been special to me. The image above is the only archival photo I've found so far of our time in Stockholm.

We finished our day with a wander through Gamla Stan, the city’s old town, and a look inside Sweden’s national parliament, which sits on its own little island.  Gamla Stan was quaint enough, but didn't really strike us as anything particularly special. The image that opens this post is Riksgatan Street on the island of Helgeandsholmen. It was taken during my return visit in 2010 and shows the main entrance to the grounds of parliament.

The following day, we visited the new Vasa Museum. This was a truly extraordinary experience. The purpose-built museum had opened just a couple of months earlier. It’s home to the Vasa, a 64-gun wooden warship that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. The top-heavy vessel sailed less than 1.3 km from its Stockholm shipyard before keeling over in full view of cheering locals and foreign dignitaries.  It was salvaged in 1961, although it took another two decades to finally preserve and stabilise the structure. Annoyingly, the museum closed early, so our visit was unexpectedly cut short.  I finally returned to finish my museum tour in 2010. The image above was taken during this second visit.

Earlier in the day, we visited the city’s Toy Museum (and why not, it was included in our three-day tourist pass). I have no recollection of what we saw and did here. According to Wikipedia, it boasts one of the largest model railway dioramas in all of Scandinavia, with at least 190 metres of track. 

However, if my travel diary is any indication, our lunch spot proved more memorable. We ate our homemade filled rolls in the shadow of a statue of Thor fighting the Midgard Serpent, a bronze sculpture in Mariatorget (Maria Square), just south of Gamla Stan. I initially thought it depicted Poseidon. An easy mistake to make if you look at the images above that I’ve sourced from the web. 

Over dinner that night, Dean and I decided we’d seen enough of Stockholm. The following morning, we rose early and caught a train to Copenhagen. However, our journey across Stockholm and the Øresund Strait didn’t go quite as planned. I’ll share more in my next Eurail post.