Seeing large pyramids and eating cactus In the end of this trip I spent a few days in Mexico City. Mexico City is a place where you can easily spend a week or more and still not have time to see everything worth seeing. I spent much less time than that so consequently I saw very little. But I did see a few interesting things and I present that here in this entry. I have also in the end thrown in a few additional photos that I for one reason or another thought were interesting enough to publish. I start with [View Full Entry]

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A volcano, a city park and "I see dead people" In this entry I will write about the places I visited in and around Uruapan, those that didn't make it into the previous blog entry, and the places I visited in and around Guanajuato. First I'd like to write about Vulcan Paricutin. Vulcan Paricutin is a volcano, of course, with a rather interesting background. It's a very young volcano. It had its first eruption ever on February 20 1943. The eruption started in the middle of a fertile field. According to legend that particular day when a local farmer was ploughing [View Full Entry]

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Monarch Butterflies en masse The main reason for me to choose Mexico for this years Christmas trip is to visit a place called Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve is a sanctuary in the highlands of Mexico protecting the winter habitat of the Monarch Butterfly. I have for years been thinking about visiting this place and now this year I have the chance to do so. In the summer the Monarch Butterflies live in North and Central America as far north as southern Canada. These butterflies have a very interesting strategy in order to survive the winter - they [View Full Entry]

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Angangueo, Morelia, Patzquaro and Uruapan This year Ake decided to celebrate Christmas and New Year in Mexico. Emma preferred a traditional Christmas with family and relatives so she stayed in Sweden. So if you read the rest of this entry and the following three entries you can follow what I was up to these weeks. I don´t have any great need to celebrate Christmas. But what I do need is to get away from the dark, cold and miserable place that Sweden is at this time of the year. So leaving for two weeks and go to a land where there [View Full Entry]

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Celebrating Roland's 60th birthday We still have one more blog entry to make from this last summer. In August we went to Poland with all of Emma's family to celebrate Roland's, that is Emma's father, 60th birthday. On this trip we were a total of 9 people - Emma and Ake, Emma's parents Inger and Roland, Emma's youngest sister Anna, Emma's other younger sister Ida with her boyfriend Mattias and finally Ida's and Mattias' two daughters Jonna and Julia. We were away for one week and most of the time we spent in a seaside resort named Kolobrzeg in the northwest [View Full Entry]

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Five days in the land of midnight sun and reindeers If you follow this blog you know that I, Ake that is, two or three times a year can take a vacation when Emma has to be home working. As long as I visit places Emma doesn't want to see I am permitted to travel on my own. Emma is not very interested in visiting northern Norway but I have for several years been thinking that a trip up to the land of midnight sun and reindeers could be interesting. So to northern Norway I went on a trip this summer. [View Full Entry]

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A weekend in Riga A few months ago we went to Latvia. We haven't come around to publish a blog entry on that trip until now. But we figure it doesn't matter much if we are a bit late before we publish our travel tales and photos. We spent a total of three days there enjoying some nice spring weather while walking around in Riga old town and a few other places. The old town is a World Heritage and is the major tourist attraction in Riga. Many of Riga's visitors barely venture outside of the city centre and therefore don't [View Full Entry]

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I have touched the Button of Doom We hope you are not getting too tired of us when we publish so many blog entries on Ukraine. We felt we had a lot to say and we had many nice photos we wanted to publish. But along the way perhaps we got a bit carried away because seven blog entries on vacation that lasted only three weeks is almost silly. We have yet something more we would like to write about so we do need a seventh entry. But we promise that this is the last one on Ukraine. At least unless [View Full Entry]

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Ukrainian hotels, a large park, a Swedish history lesson and some other stuff we didn't know where to put it In this entry might look a little bit strange because we have decided to throw in some stuff we didn’t know where else to put it. We still hope you will like it. We can start with Sofiyivsky Park in Uman. It is a large park from the early 19th century. It contains forests, open landscapes, some artificial pools and other things you expect to find in a park. We had heard that the Sofiyivsky Park is one of the great [View Full Entry]

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Devastation can be devastatingly beautiful When we were making plans for our summer holiday this year one of the things that made us choose Ukraine was Chernobyl - the sight of the worst civil nuclear disaster in history. As a tourist destination this is a totally unique experience. In the entire World Chernobyl in Ukraine is the only place where you can enjoy a tour of an area that has been devastated and rendered uninhabitable by nuclear fallout. The word "enjoy" in the previous sentence was not meant as an irony. Chernobyl really is devastated, but it is also devastatingly beautiful. [View Full Entry]

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