EL HIERRO: IT WAS LAVA AT FIRST SIGHT

The lunar landscapes of El Hierro, the smallest of the seven Canary Islands, are dotted with hundreds of extinct volcanoes and fireproof trees. Horizontal rain feeds the high-altitude pine forests, and a fish that comes shooting out of the sea ready-cooked — if a certain waiter is to be believed — feeds the locals and visitors alike. While the waiter may have been exaggerating, there’s no overstating the natural beauty of the Canaries’ ‘Magnificent Seventh’.

HOLEY ISLE: Satellite image shows the massive
gap left when a chunk of El Hierro went AWOL

El Hierro is half the place it used to be, but that’s no criticism. Most of the other half was dislodged by an earthquake 50,000 years ago and slid beneath the waves with one El of a splash. The resulting tsunami, which scientists estimate was 100 metres high, swept across the Atlantic and swamped the eastern seaboards of North and South America. If you saw the 1998 disaster movie, Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Tea Leoni and Elijah Wood, it was that size of a tsunami.

When I was in hot and sunny El Hierro recently, 80 tremors were recorded in one night — this is a lot more than the normal daily dose — though I suspect my snoring contributed to the unusually high count on the seismographs. Exhausted after a long day of trekking through forests and up and down extinct volcanoes, I neither heard nor felt a thing. I’d been so near to extinction myself that I collapsed face-down on my bed, still covered from head to toe in volcanic dust. I wasn’t there when the maid came by the next day, so I didn’t hear her screams when she clapped eyes on what she must have thought was the new Turin Shroud.

FINTASTIC: A tasty peto caught off El Hierro

If you’re fit, scaling El Hierro’s volcanoes is easy-peasy. If you’re not, all that physical stuff is far from being a lava minute, but it doesn’t half work up an appetite. Being an island, seafood rules, and it really is of the freshest and finest quality, and cheap too. As well as the old favourites of merluza (hake) and grilled sardines, squid and octopus, there’s peto, which you won’t find in the Mediterranean. It’s a long, sleek fish —like a pointy-nosed torpedo with fins —and a tough-looking customer you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway, but its flesh is so tender it melts in the mouth. No self-respecting restaurateur would dream of buying frozen peto, so if you see it chalked up on a blackboard, it’s a dead cert — a not-long-dead cert — that it was caught just a few hours before.

That was the case in La Vieja Pangorda (the Fat Old Lady) restaurant in the small port of La Restinga, where I was introduced to this fearsome fish. La Vieja Pangorda is a few metres up a side street just off the waterfront, so it isn’t hard to find — and what a find it turned out to be. A hearty lunch of seafood soup followed by peto with potatoes and salad then ice cream for dessert plus lots of beer and a coffee cost only €22. If you’re planning a visit, hurry up, because it’s probably pricing itself out of business.

SWELL OF A TIME: El Hierro's Atlantic rollers
make the island an ideal destination for surfers

El Hierro is famed for its varied and wonderful landscapes. If your idea of a good time involves hiking, climbing, cycling, surfing, windsurfing, kayaking or scuba diving (I’m exhausted just writing that) you’ll be spoilt for choice. Nobody goes there for sunbathing, which is available in abundance on neighbouring Tenerife, a half-hour island-hopper flight away. Rather, visitors to El Hierro are active — like the underwater fissure a couple of kilometres off La Restinga that erupted in the summer of 2011.

For several weeks the sea bubbled and boiled like a big pot of porridge while the massive crack 900 metres below the waves spewed lava. As the unseen underwater volcanic cone grew, finally stopping 100 metres short of the surface, it sent flames and clouds of smoke billowing from the water. Language teacher and part-time guide Peter Andermann, who’s lived on El Hierro for the past six years, said the fiery explosions were like “sneezes from hell”. The fissuremen — I mean, fishermen — who couldn’t leave port to earn a living weren’t at all happy, but a waiter in La Vieja Pangorda told me the restaurant saved a fortune on gas and electricity when the peto shot out of the sea ready-cooked. Fortunately, the subterranean volcano has gone to sleep, which is good news for Peter and his wife as they’re building a house on the island they call home.

If any submarine skippers at a loose end are reading this, there’s a job waiting to be filled in La Restinga. A few summers ago, the tourism authorities thought it would be a good idea to buy a mini submarine so tourists could have a look at the marine life beneath the waves. It was a hefty investment, but such underwater excursions are a big attraction in other holiday destinations, so the cheque was sent and the vessel delivered. Unfortunately, submarine skippers are few and far between in El Hierro (population 10,000), so until one is found it will continue to sit unlaunched and idle under a tarpaulin on the quayside, thus depriving would-be Jacques Cousteaus of the chance to sing “We all live in a Hierro submarine”.

ROAM-ANTIC: A sunset stroll along the beach

The absence of light pollution — and around 280 cloudless nights a year — attract amateur and professional astronomers from all over the world. El Hierro’s location, and that of the island group in general, in the Atlantic off Western Sahara, means much of the northern hemisphere’s and many of the southern hemisphere’s constellations — including the first signs of the Southern Cross — can be seen year-round. The last time I saw so many stars was during my short-lived soccer career when I rose majestically for an in-swinging corner kick with the sun in my eyes and headed the goalpost instead of the ball. On a good night, the inky sky is a riot of twinkling pin pricks, like something Jackson Pollock in one of his angrier moods might have produced with a black canvas and a bucket of white emulsion. If you want to see shooting stars, this is the place to go.

BRIDGE OF SEIS: Rock spewed from a volcano
forms an arch and, below, the El Golfo coast

Birders flock to El Hierro too — they’ll be jealous to know that I watched as an osprey streaked from on high like a missile to pluck its lunch from the sea. As it made to fly off with a fat fish writhing in its talons, a pair of pesky ravens tried to intervene. They were on a hiding to nothing. With a couple of flaps of its huge wings, the osprey brushed them aside and shot off into the sun. I also saw several kestrels take lizards that had been caught dozily unaware while basking on rocks. One strike was so close to where I stood that I jumped back, but my surprise was nothing compared with the lizard’s.

The involuntary introduction 50 years ago of voracious red ants to El Hierro put paid to the fortunes of most ground-nesting species, but there’s still plenty of birdlife to be seen, including doves, owls, hoopoes, chaffinches and crested tits. The island’s wild canaries won’t be winning any beauty contests with their uninspiring greenish-grey plumage, but if you’re in the vicinity when several of them get together for a sing-song, you’re in for a treat. And a tweet. (The Canaries get their name not from this most mellifluous of songbirds but from the Latin Canariae Insulae, which translates as Island of Dogs; Mauritanian king Juba II is credited with giving the islands their name because they were home to “vast multitudes of dogs of very large size”. Indeed, the island group’s coat of arms depicts a shield supported by two dogs; so the birds are named after the islands rather than the other way around.)

HIGH CHURCH: The hilltop Candelaria Church
at Frontera and, below, the Mirador de la Pena
observation point and restaurant

For watchers of larger wildlife, whales are the biggest draw in more ways than one. What these gentle giants lack in the show-off antics of the dolphins that often accompany them, they more than make up for in gracefulness. If you’re lucky you can spy them from the shore, but if you’re wise you’ll pay a few euro to hop on a boat and see them up close.

With little traffic and no industries pumping smoke and fumes into the atmosphere, the air on El Hierro is as fresh as the peto on the blackboard. It’s thinner up in the 1,000-metre-plus mountains, which makes the views from the observation terraces even more breathtaking. One of the climatic quirks of being so high is that the atmosphere up there in the afternoon is warmer than it is at sea level, so you’re often above the clouds. It’s weird, but it makes for some fabulous photos, which could be passed off as having been taken from a plane. You’ll go home with pictures of rust-red and black lava fields, volcanoes and vast expanses of lush green forests clinging to the slopes.

Even weirder are the fire-resistant Canary Pines, appropriately called Fenix Canarias in Latin, which grow only at altitude. Like the mythical Phoenix that rose from the flames and from which they get their name, they refuse to burn, even in the fiercest of forest fires, so any arsonists seeking their 15 minutes of fame are sparking up the wrong trees. Because of the lack of precipitation, the pines get their water from passing clouds which then drips from the needles and is absorbed by the roots. I thought Peter the guide was joking when he said a drinks firm will soon begin bottling these drips for sale as “Horizontal Rain”, but it’s true.

TRUNK AND DISORDERLY: One of El Hierro's
famous bent-double ancient juniper trees

The towering, tough guy pines are nothing much to look at — they’re really just telegraph poles with their clothes on — but in the west of El Hierro, the remnants of the ancient juniper forest are something to behold. The few feeble-looking trees (sabin juniper), some of them more than 500 years old, are gnarled and bowed, and their wind-lashed and warped trunks are bent double. Their greenery — or, more accurately, brownery — when nudged awake by a breeze sweeps the dry stony soil that surrounds them like a skivvy with a broom, and they suddenly and briefly look alive. The remarkable thing is, they are alive. Sap still runs — well, probably plods, coughing and spluttering — through their sun-bleached boughs.

A car, or a bike if you have the legs of a Tour de France rider, is a must for making the most of a visit to El Hierro, which is served by daily flights (www.bintercanarias.com) from Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Palma and ferries (www.fredolsen.com) from Tenerife. Book your vehicle — well ahead in the summer — for collection at the port of La Estaca or the airport (www.gomera-individual.com). Accommodation ranges from simple pensiones to rural guesthouses and hotels, including the 4-star parador, so there’s something to suit every pocket. Keep in mind, though, that because so much of your time will be spent out and about exploring, there’s no great need to go above mid-budget B&B. There are 1,500 guest beds on the island, and demand for them at Easter and in summer is great, so again, book well ahead.

END OF THE LINE: Orchilla lighthouse used to
mark the Zero Meridian line of longitude

Close to the 3-star Hotel Balneario Pozo de la Salud where I stayed is the Orchilla lighthouse, which lies in the shadow of a small extinct volcano (they come in all sizes, from hillock to mountain). Until the Americas were discovered, the spit of land on which the lighthouse sits was considered to be the westernmost end of the known world. What lay beyond, if anything, was a mystery, though dragons were often mentioned. In 1634 it was officially set as the Zero Meridian (15 centuries after that old Greek know-all Ptolemy set it unofficially), which it remained for 250 years until that classification passed to Greenwich.

Today you can stand beneath the lighthouse and look west, knowing that a long way over the horizon lies Florida. Before you, visitors to Miami are lying on sunbeds, tucking into hotdogs and being scared witless on the theme park rides. Behind you, visitors to El Hierro are sitting outside La Vieja Pangorda, tucking into a big plate of peto while a maid who was scared witless by a dusty likeness of me on a bedsheet is lying on a counsellor’s couch.

I left an impression on the linen, but the Canary Islands’ Magnificent Seventh left an even bigger impression on me.

FLY

Aer Lingus flies four times a week from Dublin and once a week from Cork to Tenerife, and once a week from Dublin and Cork to Gran Canaria (www.aerlingus.com).

STAY

Hotel Balneario El Pozo de la Salud, Sabinosa (www.elhierrohotels.com).

For further information on attractions and accommodation, see www.elhierro.travel

Dublin-based outdoor adventure specialists Camino Ways organise walking holidays in El Hierro. See www.caminoways.com

POZ FOR THOUGHT: Hotel Balneario Pozo de
la Salud and, below, swimming in the seawater
pool at La Maceta

Read More

SWEDEN: HOLM SWEDE HOLM

In scorching summer or freezing winter, Stockholm casts a spell on visitors. The Swedish capital is home to 870,000 citizens, of whom 92pc said in a recent survey they were happy with their lives. Stroll the historic cobble-stoned streets of the Old Town (Gamla Stan), go island-hopping in the archipelago, eat and drink in the city’s fabulous and friendly restaurants and bars and it’s easy to see why everyone is so content. Stockholm is also home to the Vasa Museum — my favourite man-made visitor attraction in the world — where you can learn the remarkable story of Sweden’s Titanic.

FERRY NICE: Gamla Stan from the shuttle ferry

Thegreat Swedish warship Vasa, which was launched in Stockholm on August 10, 1628, had a brief — a very brief — but eventful maiden voyage. It had gone only 1,300 metres after setting sail when a gust of wind caused the top-heavy vessel to tip over. As tens of thousands of citizens and dignitaries lining the harbour looked on in horrified disbelief, water gushed in through the lee side gun ports, and within an hour of casting off Vasa was 32 metres beneath the Baltic Sea. So too were 50 members of the 100-strong crew.

Among those who drowned, but wasn’t much mourned, was the flog master who, when he wasn’t splicing mainbraces and what have you, was slicing the backs of his errant shipmates with the cat o’ nine tails. The ship’s real cat — a rat-catching champ but a bit of a chump when it came to swimming — perished too, using up all of its nine lives in one soggy go. When Vasa was salvaged 333 years later, the cat’s bones and those of 25 crewmen were found among the mud, sludge and debris.

Thanks to the brackish water and the absence of the teredo worm which can’t survive in the Baltic because of the low salinity but turns up frequently in crosswords, Vasa’s timbers remained well-preserved for more than three centuries. But what would happen when the ship, which sat upright and mostly intact on the seabed, was brought up and exposed to the air that had filled its sails and sent it to a watery grave all those years before? Would it collapse like a souffle? Would it crumble to the touch? Would the whole thing turn to jelly (which could then have been marketed as Vasaline)?

LITTLE AND LARGE: Scale model of Vasa next
to the full-sized real thing in the Vasa Museum

These were some of the possible nightmare scenarios that haunted 38-year-old marine technician and amateur naval archaeologist Anders Franzen (1918-1993). He was the man who located Vasa off the island of Beckholmen on August 25, 1956, after several years of trawling the archives and dragging and sounding the harbour.

“My booty had consisted mainly of rusty iron cookers, ladies’ bicycles, Christmas trees and dead cats,” said Franzen, recounting his frustrating and mostly fruitless search which, unusually, failed to turn up any shopping trolleys. But then, on that fateful summer afternoon, he struck gold. Or rather, oak. You could say his ship had come in.

A couple of days later, Franzen’s friend and fellow Vasa enthusiast, the diver Per Edvin Falting, donned his cumbersome canvas suit, big brass helmet and lead-soled boots and went down to have a look. Reporting back to Franzen on the surface via a crackling intercom, he said: “I can’t see anything, it’s pitch black here.” To which I would have responded: “Then turn your torch on, you fool!” But Franzen, a man of infinite patience, simply nodded and stood by. A few minutes later, Falting was back on the blower with the earth-shattering news. “I can feel something big . . . the side of a ship,” he said. “Here’s one gun port . . . and here’s another. There are two rows. It must be the Vasa.” Typical of the imperturbable Swedes, there wasn’t an exclamation mark in sight.

FRANTASTIC: Marine archaeologist Anders
Franzen who discovered wreck

WATER GUY: Diver Per Edvin Falting

The discovery was reported three weeks later in a far-from-thrilling three-paragraph snippet in the evening paper, Expressen, which read: “An old ship has been found off Beckholmen in the middle of Stockholm. It is probably the warship Vasa, which sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. For five years a private person has been engaged in a search for the ship.”

Franzen was no ordinary private person — he was Sweden’s foremost expert on 16th and 17th century naval warfare. And Vasa was no ordinary warship — it was King Gustavus II’s pride and joy. A behemoth of a boat, it was meant to intimidate the king’s enemies, especially Poland, with whom Sweden was at war over control of the Baltic. But it never got the chance. It was also meant to impress the populace, which it certainly did, though not as planned, and then for only an hour. Since April 24, 1961, when the wreck broke the surface — and didn’t break apart — Vasa has impressed 32 million people, initially in a temporary museum at Wasavarvet and, from 1990, in the custom-built Vasa Museum at Galarvarvet, which is only a couple of hundred metres from where the ship was built and where it sank.

Every time I’m in Stockholm (I usually stay in Gamla Stan), I jump on the ferry to Galarvarvet and spend a couple of hours wandering around in the Vasa Museum (www.vasamuseet.se), which is one of the world’s foremost man-made visitor attractions. The ship hasn’t changed a bit and it hasn’t moved an inch since I first clapped eyes on it, so there’s nothing new to see, but there’s something about it that keeps drawing me back.

MY NEW HOLM: Vasa Museum from the water

I guess it’s the story. Vasa was the biggest, most expensive and most fabulously ornate wooden warship ever built, at a cost of 53,000 Swedish daler. I can’t convert 53,000 daler into modern money, but looking at comparisons, a cow cost five daler in 1628 and a miner’s pay was six daler a month, so Vasa cost the equivalent of 10,600 cows or hiring a miner for 8,833 months, or 736 years, including tea and toilet breaks.

Vasa is Sweden’s Titanic: it was, like the equally ill-fated Belfast-built liner, the greatest and most spectacular vessel of its time and a phenomenal feat of engineering; it was a source of enormous look-what-we-can-do national pride; it was lost in disastrous circumstances and became a national embarrassment (Vasa was seldom if ever mentioned in Swedish histories until those three paragraphs appeared in Expressen, and Belfast people for decades shrugged off the loss of Titanic by saying “it was all right when it left here”); and now, thanks to the Vasa Museum, Gustavus’s dreamboat is the centrepiece of a world-class visitor attraction, as is the case with Titanic Belfast. Oh, and both vessels are available to build as Airfix models. That’s what you call sink-ronicity.

What’s left of the great White Star liner that was lost in April 1912 lies rotting away at the bottom of the North Atlantic, but 95 per cent of Vasa was recovered, preserved and put back together. Viewing it from all angles, you’d think that if it were relaunched and rigged it could resume the voyage that was so surprisingly cut short. But you’d be wrong. From the moment Vasa cast off, it was a catastrophe waiting to happen — and it would be a catastrophe again.

HULL OF A SIGHT: Vasa from the bottom up

Vasa broke every rule of seaworthiness (and physics), and that was no one’s fault but the king’s, for it was he who insisted that an extra gun deck be added. It was an act of supreme folly, like trying to balance a car battery on top of a house of cards. But who was going to argue with the monarch?

The shipwrights reluctantly followed Gustavus’s recipe for disaster to the letter, knowing — but fearing to say anything to the contrary — that every nail they hammered was likely to be a nail in someone’s coffin. As Vasa neared completion, Admiral Klas Fleming oversaw a stability test at the quayside. Thirty men ran back and forward across the deck three times and had to stop, otherwise the ship, which was rolling dangerously, would have capsized. Yet Fleming allowed construction to proceed. Like the shipwrights, he knew Vasa was fatally flawed, but for fear of incurring the royal wrath he said nothing. The ship’s fate — and that of many on board — was sealed.

The Vasa wreck — 1,080 tonnes of saturated oak — was sealed in the temporary museum where preservation work on a scale never before attempted was begun to prevent the wood shrinking and splitting. A pioneering process of spraying with polyethylene glycol (PEG) — a penetrative waxy substance more commonly used in lipstick — continued around-the-clock for two years until every drop of water had been displaced. Basically, what visitors to the Vasa Museum are looking at is an awful lot of bone-dry wood coated with wax — enough to make millions of boxes of matches.

QUAY MOMENT: Vasa is finally secured to pier

It’s a striking thought, but not one that would have crossed the mind of pipe-smoking Anders Franzen as he stood beside King Carl Gustaf on June 15, 1990, and gazed on the magnificent vessel that was recovered thanks to his dedication and dogged determination. Gustavus II was in Prussia when the ship was launched and quickly sank, but Carl Gustaf was in Stockholm 362 years later to officiate at the Vasa Museum’s inauguration. It was, much to Franzen’s relief, a traditional ribbon-cutting ceremony (he said later he had feared the king would smash a bottle of bubbly over Vasa’s bow).

It took five years of underwater excavations and preparation to attach the thick steel cables beneath Vasa’s hull that would eventually support it as it was raised slowly and in stages. Various crackpot ideas had been put forward as to how best it could be lifted from the seabed, but the craziest suggested pumping out all the water and filling the wreck with ping pong balls that would make it float to the surface, much like holding a rubber duck under the water in a bath and then letting go. Seeing the ship shooting out of the Baltic like a missile fired from a submarine would have been almost as spectacular as watching it sink, but I’ll content myself with seeing it sitting serenely at rest in the Vasa Museum — its fabulous holm Swede holm.

BOW WOW: The ornate prow and bow of Vasa

FLY

SAS Scandinavian Airlines flies from Dublin to Stockholm Arlanda Airport from €84 one-way (25pc child discount). The fare includes free 23-kilo baggage allowance, free online check-in, free newspapers, coffee and tea in economy class and Eurobonus points. See www.flysas.ie or, for flights from Britain, www.flysas.com

CONNECT

Frequent Arlanda Express trains (www.arlandaexpress.com) connect Arlanda Airport with Stockholm Central Station (20-minute journey). Express coaches connect Arlanda with the Cityterminalen and leave every 10 to 15 minutes (www.flygbussarna.se). Or travel in a six- or eight-seater mini-cab with other passengers and share the fare, with hotel drop-offs and pick-ups (www.supershuttle.se). The standard taxi fare (you can pay by credit card) between Arlanda and the city centre should be around SEK 500/€60.

STAY

Hotel Rica Gamla Stan, Lilla Nygatan 25, Gamla Stan. I’ve stayed in several great hotels in the Old Town, but this one, very close toGamla Stan subwaystation, is my favourite. No in-house bar, but there’s that all-important free wifi which everyhotel should offer its guests. Double rooms cost from SEK 1,600/€188 per night including breakfast for two people (www.rica.se).

Hotel Victory, Lilla Nygatan 5, Gamla Stan. More a museum with guest rooms than a hotel. Founder and owner Gunnar Bengtsson has for decades been collecting maritime memorabilia, especially items connected with Admiral Lord Nelson, and everything’s on display here. If you want fascinating history and first-class hospitality under one roof, you’re on to a winner with the Victory. Free wifi. Double/twin rooms from SEK 1,690/€200 (www.thecollectorshotels.se).

Scandic Malmen, Gotgatan 49-51, Sodermalm. Slap bang in the middle of Stockholm’s trendiest district, the Malmen is one of the city’s trendiest hotels, with a brilliant restaurant, cocktail bar and nightclub. If the Rica Gamla Stan is full, this is my automatic second choice. Free wifi. Double/twin rooms from SEK 1,350/€160 (www.scandichotels.com).

Radisson Blu Royal Viking Hotel, Vasagatan 1, next to Central Station. Free wifi. Double/twin rooms from SEK 1,170/€138.50 (www.radissonblu.com).

HOLM COOKING: Meatballs with potatoes

EAT

B.A.R., Blasieholmsgatan 4A, behind Grand Hotel. No restaurant in Stockholm loses as many menus as this one — customers keep ‘accidentally’ walking out with them under their coats. While such pilfering can’t be condoned, it’s understandable — anyone who has dinner in B.A.R. wants to show their friends back home what they’ve missed. If any restaurant in the world is going to convert vegetarians, it’s this one. Choose from meat, fish and shellfish specialities (select your own lobster from the tank), ask for a bib and get tucked in. My favourite restaurant in all of Scandinavia, it’s a wee bit pricey but worth every penny, so make dinner in B.A.R. your big final night splash-out experience (www.restaurangbar.se).

Kvarnen, Tjarhovsgatan 4, Sodermalm. Busy restaurant by day, laid-back bar by night. Kvarnen’s name will be familiar to Stieg Larsson fans — it’s mentioned in the Millennium books as one of the hangouts of Lisbeth ‘Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ Salander and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. They have excellent taste. Kvarnen is full of character and characters, and THE place to go for a lunch of Swedish meatballs (www.kvarnen.com).

Nytorget Urban Deli, Nytorget 4, Sodermalm. Every city should have a place like this. NUD, as it’s known to the locals, is a mix of grocery store, food hall and restaurant/bar where you can buy everything you need for a picnic or sit and enjoy a wine or a coffee while tucking into a freshly-prepared sandwich, salad or pastry. Located in the heart of Sodermalm’s ultra-cool SOFO district, NUD is something of a tourist attraction in itself (www.urbandeli.org).

Herman’s, Fjallgatan 23B, Sodermalm. International vegetarian buffet with a big veranda (heated in winter) offering views over Gamla Stan that are as tasty as the food. Superb organic dishes and the chance to photograph spectacular sunsets over the Old Town. A message on the website expresses the wish that customers might “walk in peas”. I’m guessing they mean “peace”, though it might be a veggie in-joke (www.hermans.se).

FREEZE A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW: A barman

mixes cocktails in the Ice Bar, Nordic Sea Hotel

DRINK

Wirstroms, Stora Nygatan 13, Gamla Stan. Managed by Dubliner Ian ‘Everton’ Taylor. Hosts live music and quiz nights, serves great snacks (the best Irish stew in town) and shows all the big sports events on TV. It’s also the headquarters of the Stockholm branch of the Oxford United Supporters Club, who’s a very nice guy (www.wirstromspub.se).

The Liffey, Stora Nygatan 40-42, Gamla Stan. Live music and quiz nights, extensive menu, friendly, chatty staff and customers and loads of ales on draught. This is a great place for solo visitors looking for a bit of company. Easy to find and difficult to leave (www.theliffey.se).

Stampen, Stora Nygatan 5, Gamla Stan. Live music venue and pub that opened in 1968 in what had been for decades a pawn shop. Instead of gutting the place, owner and jazz enthusiast Sten Holmqvist  simply hung the unredeemed merchandise from the ceiling or on the walls and opened for business. There’s live music every night from Monday to Saturday from 8pm and a Saturday blues jam from 2 to 6pm. All tastes catered for, from jazz through trad, swing, blues, rhythm ’n’ blues, rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly (www.stampen.se).

The Ice Bar, Vasaplan 4 (entrance in lobby of Nordic Sea Hotel, close to Central Station). Not only the coolest bar in Stockholm, it’s the coldest at a constant minus 5C, with all the furniture and fittings, even down to the glasses, made of ice from the Torne river in Swedish Lapland. Vodka and other spirits are the drinks of choice here (mainly because they don’t freeze) with mango and other fruit juice mixers. Pop in, pull on an insulated hooded cape and gloves and have a quick cocktail. Actually, a quick cocktail is all you’ll have time for as visits are limited to 40 minutes — any longer and you’d be courting pneumonia. Great fun, and perfect for quirky photos. Book your session online for SEK 180, or just turn up and pay SEK 195, which includes a cocktail of your choice from the menu (www.nordicseahotel.se).

  

MIRROR ON THE HALL: Stockholm

City Hall reflected in the harbour

SEE and DO

Kungliga Slottet (Royal Palace): The official residence of King Carl Gustav, though his actual residence is Drottningholm Palace, which is accessible by boat during the summer. The 18th century Royal Palace, built in the Italian baroque style on the site of the old Three Crowns Castle which burned down in 1697, is in Gamla Stan and is one of the world’s biggest inhabited palaces, with more than 600 rooms. The daily changing of the guard, sometimes on horseback, is well worth seeing (www.royalcourt.se).

Stadshuset (City Hall): This is where every December 10 the Nobel Banquet is held. It’s a glittering occasion in equally glittering surroundings — the Golden Hall is adorned with 18.5 million gold mosaic pieces and is a magnificent must-see. Inaugurated on Midsummer’s Eve 1923, this red brick, super-sized Italian Renaissance palace by the water is one of Stockholm’s most popular visitor attractions (there are fabulous views from the 110-metre tower, summer only). It’s also the city’s administrative centre, with hundreds of people working there, so tours (guided only) can sometimes be cancelled at short notice because of events inside, though that’s a rare occurrence. Individuals can turn up and join one of the regular tours, but groups of more than 10 should book in advance (www.stockholm.se/stadshuset).

Fotografiska: If it was captured on film or digital, it’s on show here. Fotografiska (Stadsgardshammer 22) hosts four large and 20 smaller exhibitions of international contemporary photography each year and is my next favourite Stockholm attraction after the Vasa Museum. There’s a great restaurant that has helped turn Fotografiska into a popular meeting place, and the bar on the top floor is one of the city’s best viewing points. Open until 9pm, so there’s no excuse to miss it (www.fotografiska.eu).

Skansen Open-Air Museum: A 10-minute walk from the Vasa Museum allows you to step back through five centuries of Swedish history in the world’s oldest open-air museum, founded in 1891 and staffed by characters in period dress. Skansen has more than 150 historical dwellings, farm buildings, shops and workshops brought from all over Sweden and reconstructed amid beautiful gardens and woodland. There’s also a zoo that’s home to wild Nordic animals including wolves, lynx, elks, moose, bears and seals; several great restaurants and plenty of snack outlets; plus souvenir shops selling Swedish handicrafts. December is a great time to visit Skansen when the weekend Christmas markets are in full swing (www.skansen.se).

HAVING A BALL: Visitors enjoy a trip
on the Skyview

Skyview: Visitors can travel up the outside of the world’s biggest spherical building, the Ericsson Globe, in 16-person glass gondolas to the top (130 metres/425 feet above sea level). As you might imagine, the views over the city from up there are something special (www.globearenas.se/skyview).

Ostermalmshallen (Ostermalms Food Hall): Stockholm’s buzzing food market, in a building dating from 1888, is a sensory delight, a great place for simply strolling around taking in the sights and sounds and smells. If you want to snap photos full of colour, this is the place to go. It’s open at lunchtime and in the afternoons, and there are plenty of restaurants and cafes serving traditional Swedish fare where you can indulge in some people watching (www.ostermalmshallen.se and www.saluhallen.com).

Nationalmuseum (National Museum of Fine Arts): You could easily spend all day in here admiring and marvelling at the permanent exhibition of 20th and 21st century design. There’s everything from pop art and post-modern furnishings to everyday household and industrial items, all displaying the simplicity and functional beauty that are the trademarks of Swedish craftsmanship. The wider collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures and graphic arts includes works by Hanna Pauli, Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, Renior, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Degas and Gauguin. It’s fabulous. (www.nationalmuseum.se).

HIGH LIFE: Lofty historic apartment buildings
in Gamla Stan

Nobel Museum: Located in the old Stock Exchange in Gamla Stan’s Stortorget Square, here you’ll learn the history of the Nobel Prize, its founder Alfred Nobel (the man who invented dynamite) and the Nobel laureates. Bistro Nobel is a good spot for lunch (www.nobelmuseum.se).

Archipelago Tours: Stockholm is built on 14 islands, and its archipelago is among the world’s most spectacular, making a boat tour a not-to-be-missed opportunity. The Fjaderholmarna group of islands is only 20 minutes from the city centre, so it’s ideal for visitors on short stays. The island of Sandhamn is home to the Royal Swedish Yacht Club plus hotels, an inn and several restaurants and bars so you can make a full day of it or even stay overnight. The charming waterside town of Vaxholm with its wooden houses painted in sorbet shades is postcard-pretty, and the Waxholm Hotel is a favourite with locals and regular visitors alike for lunch or dinner. Details of these and other archipelago tours can be found at www.visitstockholm.com and on ferry operator Stromma Kanalbolaget’s website, www.stroma.se

PAL-FRESCO: Friends enjoying a drink in

a pavement cafe in Gamla Stan

Millennium Tours: Fans of late thriller writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy will struggle to contain their excitement on a guided walking tour in the footsteps of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Details at www.visitstockholm.com and www.stadsmuseum.stockholm.se

SAVE

Buy a Stockholm Card (www.visitstockholm.com) and enjoy free admission to 80 museums (including the Vasa Museum) and attractions. Available for 24, 48, 72 or 120 hours, the card also offers unlimited free travel on the subway, buses, commuter trains and trams plus free sightseeing Royal Canal Tour by boat. There are also discounts on the Stockholm Panorama and Open Top Tours sightseeing buses and on island-hopper boat trips within the harbour and archipelago. Make full use of your card and it will quickly pay for itself.

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THANK YOU FOR THE AWARD

HAND THE WINNER IS: Travel Extra editor
and awards night MC Eoghan Corry, me,
and sponsor Paul Hackett of ClickandGo.com

I was honoured to receive the Travel Extra Online Travel Journalist of the Year Award 2013 in Dublin last week.

Thank you to the judges, to Travel Extra, ClickandGo.ie who sponsored the online category and the award organisers, John Butterly and Limelight Communications. The awards evening was again sponsored by the Spanish Tourist Board — muchisimas gracias como siempre!

It was a great night with friends, fellow travel writers and travel industry colleagues in Bewleys Hotel, Ballsbridge. Warmest congratulations, of course, to the other winners.

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TRAVEL BLOG PASSES THE 100,000 VISITORS MARK



 I sat there with my phone camera, waiting for the 100,000 to come up. I managed to photograph 99,999 and 100,001 but missed the magic number! No matter, I'm pleased to have reached this milestone on my travel blog. Thanks to all the visitors.

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Chow Mein Means Stir-Fried Noodles

This is not chow mein

These days it seems like I only blog when I have something to rant about. If I keep it up, this might just merge with my other blog. But nothing raises my ire about Chinese restaurants as much as serving "chow mein" without noodles.

More... Recovering from a wicked bout of the flu, I was anxiously awaiting my first meal in three days. At some point after the nausea was gone, I was just trying to see how long I could go without eating. Once I finally regained my appetite, I ordered Chinese.

Growing up on the West Coast, ordering "chow mein" meant only the slightest bit of ambiguity. You're either getting the thick, soft noodle, or the crispy, thin noodle. The thin, crispy noodle is also known as Hong Kong style chow mein. Out here on the East Coast, through whatever asinine etymological perversion, apparently chow mein can mean no noodles at all. Instead, what I got was a glob of brown sauce and mixed-in bits and pieces, known in Chinese as 雜碎. Yes, this was chop-suey.

This is not the first time I've seen this monstrosity in Chinese kitchens. And to add insult to injury, I even found this order slip in the take-out bag.



The restaurant had even written on there "large pork fried noodles." Well technically they wrote "large meat fried face" but the Chinese word for face (面) is a homonym for the word noodle (麵) and was probably substituted for kitchen short-hand. Either that, or they realized the sick joke they were playing on the unsuspecting customers.

Having lived in New York for several years now, I've known that East Coast chow mein is actually called "lo mein." I just thought that this restaurant, which billed itself as authentic, wouldn't stand for this sort of linguistic atrocity.

^

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Macarons vs. Macaroons

Macaroon (above left) ≠ macaron (above right)

Normally I am not one to harp on my dining companions pronunciations of foreign foods. I say "bru'sket-ta" when eating at an osteria, but "brushetta" when eating at Applebees. For the most part, pronunciation is just a pretentious aspect of gastronomic culture that aggravates me the same way food fetishism does. However, I do make an exception when it comes to the popular pastries macarons because the mispronunciation or misidentification of these almond flour cookies as macaroons results in a completely different product.

More... I won't go into the rise of the popularity of macarons in this country. Suffice it to say, if someone's talking animatedly about a cookie, she's probably talking about a macaron. I don't think anyone gets excited about macaroons. Macarons are made with almond flour and powdered sugar and usually have a sandwiched filling of ganache or buttercream. Macaroons are more like small cakes or meringue cookies, typically coconut flavored in America.

Macarons are sexy and expensive, partly because of hype, partly because of the difficulty in preparation. Macaroons are what your grandmother buys in bulk at Costco (not to be confused with madeleines, which are sponge cakes). We've just been exposed to macaroons for so long, we're more familiar with them and I would guess that is why many people mistake the two. However, the proper pronunciation of macaron is something like "maka-ron" with a fancy French guttural r. Overexaggerate the pronunciation if you must, but don't feel like you're putting on airs because you don't want to sound too pompous. Otherwise, you might end up with the wrong pastry, a disaster of far greater proportions than the harm to your ego. Besides, you're idolizing a cookie; might as well jump in feet first and go full Francophile.


Photo credits: Jessica and Keven Law via Flickr ^

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