Finally facing my Waterloo East: embracing slow travel on a three-city Swedish adventure

‘Flygskam’ has become quite the buzzword in Sweden over the past few years, and one of the splendid Swedish words you will read throughout this article.  As you may be able to deride from our common Germanic origins, it has to do with flying, more specifically ‘flight shame’, a term which has really caught hold in this socially-minded, nature-oriented country. This has led to a resurgence and reinvestment in the country’s largely publicly-owned rail system, and a shunning of short-haul flights, once the natural choice of transport between the three main cities – Malmö, Gothenburg, and the capital Stockholm.

I am, therefore, here to ride the rails – the ‘Swedish Triangle’, as only I call it – between the aforementioned cities. It is also worth mentioning that you can travel to my starting point – Malmö – by rail if you have the time too, just change at Hamburg. For my trip, however, I am arriving at the reassuringly well-designed Copenhagen Airport and hopping aboard a Malmö train, which runs every 15 minutes into the city centre.

Copenhagen to Malmö – 25 minutes

In no time at all, I am speeding over the Øresund Bridge, the silent supporting actor of the brilliant Scandi-Noir drama The Bridge – a collaboration between the Swedish and Danes, just like the engineering marvel itself.  Completed in 1999, the bridge has completely transformed Malmö, bringing in far more Swedish day trippers, attracting commuters for the (reassuringly) expensive Copenhagen, and negating the need for the once omnipresent passenger ferries. This, along with the industrial decline of this working-class port city, has led Malmö to reinvent itself. I see this immediately in the harbour, which is currently at the same stage as the London Docklands in the 1990s, or Salford Quays in the 2000s – attractive, utopian, shiny, and still requiring some time to bed in.

A short walk away from the rather beautiful Victorian-meets-modern architecture of the central station, my hotel – The Story – overlooks the peninsula, the bridge, and the harbour, and, at 14 floors, is one of the tallest buildings in the city. Industrial with a sense of fun, it has a high-end (in both senses) Japanese restaurant on the 14th floor with panoramic views… it will no doubt be quite the hub as the harbour community builds.