Day 5, The Day We Went Back to 1628!

What a night! At one point I was channelling Aaron Ralston (google him!) and was contemplating cutting my left arm off with the bread knife! kayaking DOMS at it’s worst. Didn’t get to sleep with it till gone 2am.

We had wanted to make an early start today to get to the Vasa museum, as we knew that the queues could be bad, but that didn’t happen as planned. After a breakfast of soya yogurt, granola, frozen raspberries, cacao nibs, and nuts we were ready to go.

We still made it out pretty early for us, and headed onto Sodermalm to the Hornstull metro line. When we were there we bought a one day travel card. What a bloody bargain! This enabled us to travel on all buses, trams, metro’s, trains and some commuter ferries for 24 hours for 25 pounds for the 2 of us! The metro was clean and bright, and incredibly easy to use. A couple of stops and we were at Slussen, ready to walk the few minutes to the commuter ferry to Djurgardan island to get to the museums. Again, a really easy fuss free journey.

We got to the Vasa museum, after heading through a car park with a load of construction work going on. We confidently followed a young girl; who turned into a portakabin, and not the Vasa museum. We turned round to find loads of people following us, like lemmings, so we had to hold our heads up high, pretend we knew what we were doing, and perform a swift u turn and march confidently back the way we had come, avoiding any eye contact! Cue the Benny Hill sound track! We eventually got to the museum and headed straight in, only pausing for a few minutes to get tickets inside. Now I had never heard of the Vasa museum, until advised to go there by our friend Rich Waterman. Wow, what an experience. We both loved it there, and stayed for far longer than we expected.

The Vasa was a warship that set sail from Stockholm on her maiden voyage on 10th August 1628. She sailed no further than about 1300m then promptly sank in the harbour. The wreck was salvaged in 1961 after 333 years under the sea, and the reconstructed vessel, the world’s biggest “jigsaw puzzle” is now 98% original and is on display here. The museum is temperature, humidity and light controlled to avoid any further degeneration, and proved just perfect for menopausal women. I’m thinking of moving in!

It is an awesome sight…..absolutely huge! Amazing to see the work that had gone into it, with none of today’s machinery and tools available, just skill and craftsmanship. The Vasa wasn’t just a warship, it was built to display the wealth and power of the Swedish King, Gustav 11 Adolph, so it was adorned with amazing carvings, all with symbolic meanings and painted in bright colours.

The ship sank because of poor design, it was just too narrow and tall, with not enough weight in the ballast. It only took a gust of wind to cause her to list over, then water entered the gun ports and she sank within seconds. About 30 people were killed, two of them women. Some of the preserved skeletons are on display at the museum. They were fascinating! Experts have managed to recreate the faces of some of them, and tell a lot about them, and how they lived at the time.

The sheer scale of the ship is incredible.

We were glad to leave when we did, as it was getting really busy, and when we got outside, the queues were crazy. Then, off to the next museum.......