Tour de Bornholm

Bornholm, described as a Danish Martha’s Vineyard, is a six hour ferry from Copenhagen and is home to absolutely beautiful scenery. While I slept very little during the overnight ride, when we arrived in Bornholm on Saturday morning at 6 am, the sun was rising and the island was beautiful. Our group of 98 students essentially took over the hostel in the coastal town of Gudhjem. I bunked with a bunch of St. Lawrence students which was really fun as we bonded over our successful attempt of making the most out of our bike trip to Bornholm.

We decided, after eating an enormous breakfast, that we were going to do the “Killer Tour” on the first day while we were ‘fresh’ and then do the shorter cultural tour the second day.

Our first day, covering around 70 kilometers of Bornholm’s south-eastern coast, was long and jam packed. We generally had good weather, with only a small section of light drizzle in the middle of the day, and managed to avoid getting lost despite the fact that I was leading the group of very trusting students with a virtually useless map. The day was packed with a trip to the second largest town, Svaneke, which had some awesome glass-blowing studios and a fun farmers market.
We moved on to a neighboring town Nexoo and then moved further down the coast to Dueodde, the sandy beaches. We followed the coast the entire time passing by beautiful inlets, windmills, bright houses and cute towns.

We reached Dueodde around 1pm which was good because this was our furthest, or halfway point, but for some reason, that wasn’t heartening for most of the group to hear … Regardless we continued on to Aakirkeby, where we were saved by soft-ices and candy, and then worked our way through Almindingen, a forest where we searched for Rytterknaegten, the lookout tower. Although we had to ask directions from a scantily clad runner in the woods, and then walk our bikes up a steep hill to an anti-climatic tower, it was still a beautiful view from the top.


We finished off the day by plummeting down the hills and stopping at a beautiful round church as we wearily worked our way back to the hostel.

The second day was equally as ambitious, although much more conservative in distance, covering roughly 40 kilometers.
This was the cultural tour and included stops at the cliffs called Helligdomsklipperne (I don’t even know how to say that,) a narrow cave called the Sorte Ovn, and Denmark’s depressingly small highest waterfall. We then traveled to the northernmost tip of the island to visit Hammeren, a steep rocky area, turns out they were NOT kidding about the steep climb, and then
Hammershus, the largest medieval ruined fortress in northern Europe. We visited all these sights on the way out then spent the next hour looking for somewhere to find smoked herring because we were desperate to try it and our blood sugar was reaching critically low levels. After asking at a few restaurants, we gave up- settling for the best hamburgers and ice cream cones that we have ever eaten.

All in all we definitely made the most of our trip, topping it off with a swim in the freezing cold Baltic Sea before showering up, crashing on the floor of the ferry and running to class at 8:30 on Monday morning.

I think this trip was one of the best things I have done in Denmark. Now that I’m back, I think I really needed it; I needed a little break. There was something so refreshing about being a tourist and just traveling around with friends. It gets exhausting trying to assimilate in and adjust to a culture, even if it is one you like. Going to Bornholm was a great way to just enjoy my time there, see the sights, and leave to go back to the real world at the end of the weekend…including a paper and a presentation the next day.