Helgoland; Friday, 24 July, 2026

I was one of the first people down for breakfast in the morning, arriving about 10 minutes after service had started and the buffet was still fully stocked. I ate quickly and then headed back up to my room to repack and then checkout before hopping on the U-Bahn round to the ferry terminal at Landungsbrücke. Every time I’ve previously been past Landungsbrücke it’s been very busy – home to multiple museum ships, tourist cruises and the commuter ferries that shuttle along the Elbe, but at 07:30 in the morning all the canal cruise ships were still sleeping in their moorings and only the early commuters were heading to the ferries, along with the hundred or so people heading for landing stage 4 for the catamaran service out to Helgoland.

Whilst the boat wasn’t due to depart until 08:30, baggage had to be dropped off before 08:00 so it could be placed in cages and loaded into the hold, with that process completed we were all invited forward to board so I was in my seat at the rear of the upper deck a few minutes after 8, a seat that would be my home for the next five hours.

The journey should take about 4¼ hours, but that’s dependant on the ferry not hitting traffic on the Elbe, and on this Friday, it was busy out on the river meaning we ended up arriving at the first stop in Brunsbüttel about 10 minutes late and by the time we left the second intermediate stop in Cuxhaven we were about 25 minutes behind schedule. The journey along the Elbe accounts for most of the trip, with it taking three hours to sail down the river from Hamburg, and then just 75 minutes of the catamaran opening up the taps to cover the 40 or so miles from Cuxhaven to the isolated islands out in the North Sea.

The advantage of the delayed arrival was that once I’d got my bag and walked the 125m to my hotel for the weekend my room was already ready and I was able to check-in and drop my bag off, before quickly freshening up and then heading out to grab some lunch in town.

I had a bit of a wander through town before heading back to the hotel as Helgoland is a popular (long) day-trip destination, with many of the hundreds of people who had joined the ferry in Cuxhaven just going for the 3½ hours you get on the island before the ferry returns. Add to that two other services that do the same thing and you can quickly see how the islands population swells and the place gets pretty busy, so I headed back to my room for a little while until after the two catamarans back to the mainland had taken around 1,000 people away and then headed out to explore the island.

The island is very much a place of two parts. The lower section of the island which occupies the southern and eastern sides is at sea level, generally flat and home to most of the shops, museums, restaurants and the multiple harbours. I had a wander around these before grabbing some dinner and then heading to the Oberland or upper town, located on the 50m high almost sheer cliffs that rise up behind the lower town. Thankfully, this being Germany they have been very efficient and built a lift that whisks you from one level to another, cutting out around 200 steps, in a few seconds. Hotel guests even get three free rides included in their stay.

Most of the residential part of the island is located at the southeastern corner of the upper town, and beyond that it’s open land with a very nice 3Km walk, the Klippenrandweg, that takes you around the top of the cliffs to take in the weird, almost completely man shaped landscape.

The islands passed from the Danes to the Brits in 1809 before the British and German Empires swapped land like trading cards in 1890 with the UK taking Zanzibar and Germany getting Helgoland. This would prove to be not the greatest idea as around 50 years later Germany now had a heavily fortified forward island base in the North Sea. After the defeat of the Nazi’s the Brits decided they needed to ensure Helgoland couldn’t be used as a fortress again and so packed the bunkers, U-Boat pens and tunnels that had been dug out of the cliffs with explosives and set off the, at that point, largest ever peace time explosion. Some of the military planners had been hoping the blast would be big enough to remove the island completely, but in the end they just made a very big crater at the southern end of the island, destroyed every building – except the flack tower – and completely reshaped the south of the island. Following that the RAF used the top of the island as a bombing range for a few years adding many more craters to the Oberland, before the island was handed back to Germany in the early 1950s and the islanders returned to completely rebuild Helgoland.

It means as you walk around the Klippenrandweg you can look down into the crater of Operation Big Bang below the cliffs and then further round look at the very undulating landscape of the north island pockmarked with bomb craters. None of that appears to have affected the islands most famous residents – a large Gannet colony that occupies the very northern part of the island, and with no natural predators and a complete disregard for humans allow you to get up very close, smell wise probably too close – these are fish eating birds after all!

I completed the full walk around the top of the island and let the breeze clear my nostrils of the smell of several hundred very fishy birds before walking back down to the lower town and heading back to my hotel.