I must admit that before I'd travelled much in Scandinavia, my entire perception of Finland came from Kimi Raikonen, Nokia phones and the Monty Python song, "Finland, the country where I'd quite like to be." However while on holiday in Tallinn we got a cheap ferry ride across the Gulf of Finland to the Finnish capital which we discovered is an untouristed delight to visit.

For one thing you don't share the place with hordes of toursts, it's incredibly relaxed and everyone is very friendly. And it's a beautiful city to boot.

Without a guidebook we got to look around the place without referring to a book every five minutes to work out what things were. Consequently I'm still not 100% sure what everything we saw was, but we did our best to find out.

So here's a small selection of views of Helsinki.