Booze Cruises — Not Just for Brits

Growing up British in an era before the Channel Tunnel had finally connected us with our not-so-dear neighbour and long-term rival France, and while plane travel remained substantially an expensive luxury rather than a mode of mass transport, ferries figured highly in my childhood.

And, in fact, ferries still figure largely for many Brits today. For, yes, whether by car, by van, or even on foot, one’s neck weighed down with a yoke laden with pallet upon pallet of beer, the choice of ferry routes for cheap booze remains a tempting one.

Obviously, not only the calibre but the price of the booze available in ye average French supermarket hugely outclasses that on offer in Blighty – though around the Anglo-French ferry ports, specialist hypermarkets have sprung up, aisle after aisle of cheese, booze and cured meats catering to the wandering Brit (and wandering Irish, too).

Between the merry sights and sounds of the beered-up visitor hitting the deck after a day or two of excess, the ugly scenes at Customs as Her Majesty’s finest dispute how, precisely, the term “personal use” could be applied to a van creaking at the axles under the weight of Benson & Hedges, and the ugly aspirations on display at the cheese counter of the jumbo Carrefour in Calais, you’d think we Brits had a monotony on horror.

But in fact it’s not just us that does it. Other ferry routes the sensitive might wish to avoid include, perhaps most famously, that which runs between Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia – and, no, it’s not just the British stag nights to avoid (although if you’re sensitive to mankinis you might want to look away).

Due both to low duty, low tax and a weaker economy, booze in Estonia costs a fraction of what it does in Finland, where a pint of domestic beer in an unstarry and basic location will run you around 8 or 9 euros. A return ticket on the ferry, incidentally, costs rather less than the price of the round.

The drinking on board kicks off at 8am, and by pub opening times dance floors, gaming rooms, bars and restaurants are heaving with boozed-up Finns. The drinking continues in Estonia, along with the opportunity to pick up vatloads of cheap booze (much of it Finnish).

A little more duty free shopping on board the boat, for those still able to stand, at least, and the cruise is complete.

The original booze cruises, of course, date back to Prohibition in the United States during the 1920s, when hipsters would pop across from the Florida Keys to firmly non-Prohibition (and, at the time) pre-Communist Cuba.

If you think today’s are missing a certain something, you may, quite possibly, be right.

Thanks to Lars Plougmann for the picture.