The Mälar Valley in Sweden has some of Europe’s most beautiful scenery, with unspoilt forests, lakes and rivers where you can get away from crowds, traffic and all the other pressures of the modern world. Lake Mälaren is the third biggest lake in Sweden and stretches from the capital, Stockholm to around 150 kilometres to the West. The total population in the Mälar Valley is around 1.5 million.

Have you ever been in the Mälar Valley? I suppose not! For most people outside Sweden, the Mälar Valley is still an undiscovered place – it’s one of Sweden’s best-kept secrets. So read and be inspired and then come to the Mälar Valley and experience the real thing!

History: once this area was the power base for the Swedes, from which wealth and power arose. Where Lake Mälaren flows into salt waters, people built a castle as protection from pirates. Birger Jarl decided that a town should surround the castle. The town that was built was named Stockholm. It later became the capital of Sweden until today. Iron production, boat building and farming were the three most important industries. Each of these technologies thrived in central Sweden due to the availability of the resources they were dependent on. Later, these became contributing factors to the Viking expeditions. Based on the archaeological remains of farmsteads, it is thought that there was a great increase in the population in the Mälar valley during the Viking era.

History’s legacy: the long history of the region naturally contributes to its rich cultural environment. To travel in the Mälar Valley is to travel through Swedish history: castles and manors on the shores of Lake Mälaren, rock carvings from the Bronze Age, rune stones from Viking times, medieval churches with beautiful frescoes and much more. The north of the valley is an old mining area, and the history of metal manufacturing can be studied at old works and mines. The cultural heritage of the region is thus both rich in content, and easily accessible. The region has since the Viking Age been a center for trading and transport.

The Connecting Bond: Lake Mälaren was once the natural way to and from the capital, Stockholm, between different parts of the region and between the region and the rest of the world. It still is for the thousands of leisure boats that pass through the Stockholm lock each year. Today the Mälar Valley is well connected: the national roads are many and excellent and there are two airports in the region, Arlanda, the largest, and Västerås, right in the middle of the Mälar Valley.

The Castles in the Mälar Valley: when you come to the Mälar Valley I strongly recommend you to visit some of the castles around Lake Mälaren. All of them are historically interesting and have their own anecdotes. For example Tidö Castle is a real toy palace with its grand toy museum with collections dating back to the 1700s. Also, a young boy Dohna disappeared in the castle at the end of the 1700s aged only four years old. He was never found, but you can still hear him calling….

18 of the castles and manors around Lake Mälaren are members of an association called Mälarslott, the Mälar Castles and all are accessible by land and sea; some of the castles are also hotels. One of these, Sundbyholm’s Castle is in easy reach, on the seaside right in the middle of the Mälar Valley. Skokloster dates from 1654 and is the largest castle with 77 rooms covering almost 2,139 sq.m. It houses a fantastic collection of art, textiles, furniture, weapons, tools and books. The Skokloster Pageant, a folk festival of Swedish history takes place from July 23-27, 2003. Close to the castle is Skokloster Inn & Hotel, one of the hotels we use.

Other activities: the environs of the Mälar Valley offer a range of outdoor activities: it has Europe’s northernmost beech forest, attractive country walks in the woods and by the water. For those seeking a more structured program of activities, there is plenty to choose from – you can play golf – there are 41 golf courses, hike, ride, fish, canoe, bicycle and more.

Peace and Quiet Travel is family-run business located in the Mälar Valley. We specialise in creating tailor made holidays. We use the kind of hotels that we ourselves would want to stay in for a relaxing and refreshing break. Right now we have a special summer 2003 offer. For more details, see our website http://www.peaceandquiet.co.uk or e-mail us at info@peaceandquiet.co.uk.

Nicaragua was colonised by the Spanish and has the old colonial buildings and cobbled streets to show; it has the oldest cathedral in Central America, and Granada is reputed to be the oldest city on the western hemisphere. Nicaragua has also had more than its share of destruction through earthquakes and revolutions. Managua, the capital was hit particularly hard by the 1972 earthquake which pretty much wiped out what was the centre of town.

This tour takes in the “best” of Nicaragua in 10 days. It is not a big country so everything is within easy reach and there is a reasonable bus system. Everyone seems to agree that Ometepe Island is the highlight of Nicaragua, followed by Granada. No one much seems to like Managua, saying it is a bit dodgy. You could do most of this itinerary as day trips from Managua, but the Beetle recommends that you get out of Managua – not such a great place – and stay over in different places.

Day 1: fly into Managua. Managua, the capital of Nicaragua is on the southern shore of Lake Managua. Settle into your hotel/hostel and explore. Managua itself is a bit of a sad city. Despite the new building boom, it is not hard to see that the centre is still astonishingly devastated from the 1972 earthquake, so it a curious place as there is no real centre any more, it is spread all over, wherever funding allows new building. The Intercom hotel is something of a landmark, it is built in the shape of one of the old Mayan pyramids, some consider this as the centre – it was the only building that survived the 1972 earthquake. The lake is brown and has waves and looks like the sea, but it is dirty and not nice. Things to see include the Plaza de la República, the newly renovated cathedral which is now a museum, the Peace Park where you can see the giant lighthouse, and the tank and thousands of guns mummified in spray-on concrete. Near the cathedral is the grave of Carlos Fonseca, the founder of the Sandinistas, the Palcio Nacional, and the new Casa Presedencial. There are several museums, including a Museum of the Revolution. There are some places to swim, in the lagunas that are volcanic crater lakes. People tend not to stay in Managua, they usually head straight out to Granada – note Granada not Leon. There is a good bus network though, so getting around is easy. If you have time, take a morning bus to the Laguna de Xiloá, a crater lake that is a popular swimming spot about 20km north west of Managua and have a swim. Return to Managua.

Day 2: do a day trip to Leon. Take the bus to Leon, north of Managua and not far. Leon allegedly has Central America's oldest cathedral that took over 200 years to rebuild. It has some large paintings of the 12 Stations of the Cross and also houses the tomb of Rubén Darío, the poet. There are monuments to the revolution and Sandanista murals all over Leon. Leon is smaller than Granada and will not take more than a half day to look around, have some lunch and return to Managua. You can wander the streets and admire the colonial churches and the whitewashed adobe buildings with red roofs. There’s plenty of info about the 1978-79 revolution too for those interested in some of Nicaragua’s past. If you find, like the Beetle, that there is not a lot to keep you in Leon, then take the bus back to Managua and then on to Granada.

Day 3: Take a bus from Managua to El Trapiche, 17km southeast of Managua. El Trapiche is a place where large outdoor pools have been formed by near by natural springs. It is quite pretty as there are gardens and restaurants. Have lunch and have a splash. You may meet some tourists here! From here, continue to another 5kms southeast to the Massaya Volcano Nat Park. It is only 23kms south east of Managua and also 20 mins drive from Granada. The volcano is still active and you can see (and smell!) the steam coming out of it. There are some hot springs, the usual sort of volcano stuff. There's also a big market at Massaya where you can buy hammocks etc. When you have had a look around, take the bus to Granada and overnight there.

Day 4: Granada is only around 45kms away from Managua. It lies at the base of the Mombacho volcano and is on Lake Nicaragua so it has a constant cool breeze. Granada has cobbled streets and you will see lots of Spanish style colonial architecture, the cathedral, the Colon Park and Mombacho. It took the Beetle less than a day to visit and explore Granada, although she did not go on the lake. Some say that Granada is the oldest city in the western hemisphere. If you are a bird watcher, there are over 350 volcanic islands in Lake Managua. The islands that people visit are called Las Islets de Nicaragua where you can see nesting cormorants etc. You can go kayaking here if that is your thing.

Day 5: take a trip out onto Lake Nicaragua and visit some of the islands. San Pablo has a small fortress built by the Spaniards to protect against British pirates in the 18th century, Isla Zapatera is a national park and has some old stone statues. Isla del Muerto also has tombs and rock carvings to see.

Day 6 and 7: From Granada take the bus to San Jorge, near Rivas it’s about 4 hours by bus and take the ferry out to visit Ometepe Island, the largest freshwater island in the world (complete with fresh water sharks!) Ometepe is the highlight for most people visiting Nicaragua. Once there, you can lie around on the beaches or if you are feeling slightly more energetic, you can climb up Volcano Maderas. Take the bus from San Jorge to San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast.

Day 8, 9,10: laze on the beach at San Juan del Sur. Day 10 take the bus back up to Managua to fly back home.

Alternative: there is a five-hour boat trip down the Río Escondido to Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast. Most travellers reckon that this is not worth it and the Beetle has not seen many good reports about Bluefields….but, the Corn Islands in the Caribbean just off Bluefields are worth the trip. To get there, the best way is to fly from Managua – around $100 return. Little Corn Island in particular gets some rave reviews for sunning and swimming.

The Santorini Ferry or as it is lovingly called Mama Tanzania, is one of those amazing things that can only be found in Tanzania. This boat is an experience in itself. The Santorini ferry is a 1960’s Greek cruiser and is run by a Greek Crew. It is in good nick for its age and is certainly the most upper-class thing ever to hit Mtwara.

The boat takes roughly 18 hours crossing time. You leave Mtwara lunchtime on Friday and are in Dar-es-Salaam by the morning. On return you leave Tuesday lunchtime and arrive Mtwara Wednesday morning. There are five classes, A-F ranging from class A at 40,500 Tsh to class F at 11,500 Tsh. Class A, B and C all have cabins although only class A has an en-suite bathroom! If you are in the top three classes you have use of the two restaurants one which serves Swahili food which will set you back about 2000 Tsh and is self-service canteen style and another which serves European food and is waiter service. This cost me about 8,000 Tsh but I did have three courses and a salad, what can I say Mikindani makes you hungry! And a good bowl of mushroom soup followed by spaghetti bolognaise followed by fruit salad was a well-deserved treat, I thought! Volunteers must be warned, local eating habits do not apply here and attacking food hyena style is not advised, believe me, I know! When a man wearing a T-shirt saying “ABIBAS”(ADIDAS) looks at you in disbelief you are really put in your place.

Despite this you are made to feel quite comfortable in the top three classes on this mystery boat. The bar is well equipped with two satellite TV’s and and a DJ, as I suppose you could call him – the man who bangs out tunes for the entire journey. This is needed, as the majority of passengers use this room just to keep their bags in, this is a style adopted by our very own Emmanuel who managed to make it the whole 18 hours propped up at the bar so I was told by the stewardess ladies on board who all remember Mr Casanova very well! This is a lively place, not for the faint hearted. If you suffer seasickness or hate rap avoid this bar like the plague. I seemed to know a lot of people and like anywhere in Tanzania everyone is related somehow!

Class D and E are made up of rows of armchair seats inside with a small counter to by snacks and drinks. All classes A- E are air-conditioned. Class F is a plastic seat outside that runs down the hallways of both sides of the boat. On the top deck there are benches covered by a canopy. In rough weather these seats can be a bit difficult and on the top deck is very windy and the coldest I’ve ever been outside in Tanzania. If you want to cool down, clear your head and get a wonderful view of the stars then this is the place to be. All in all I would recommend using the Santorini as a reliable way to travel from Dar-es-Salaam to Mtwara. Especially for future volunteers, it is a cheaper alternative to flying and the 1960s décor is bound to keep you amused!

Update: our friends at Trade Aid tell us that the Santorini has been pulled from this route. We do not yet know if this is permanent or not.

For more information about Trade Aid, volunteers and their work, please visit their website www.mikindani.com

We had easyJet (which spawned low cost imitators including Ryanair) and now easyCruise is coming our way in 2004. Not many people know that the low cost pile ‘em high and give them crap so called low cost airlines was started by the serial entrepreneurial Stelios Haji-Ioannou. Now, Stelios, as he likes to be known, is looking at a low cost cruise business. Don’t forget that he comes from a shipping background before making his name creating the UK’s extremely successful first no-frills airline.

He has plans to charge around £30 or US $50 per night on Mediterranean and Caribbean cruises. Prices will be berth-only, with extra charges for meals and drinks – sound familiar? (The Beetle rather cynically wonders if you have pre-allocated cabins or is survival of the fittest as to who can get there first?!) Passengers can choose where they join and leave the ship subject to availability. Summer cruises will take place in the Mediterranean and in the winter months in the Caribbean.

He hopes to attract a younger clientele, backpackers and even young families for whom previously, the notion of cruising has been prohibitively expensive.

If anyone can take on the big cruisers such as Carnival-Princess, RCL and Star Cruises, he can. The company is currently looking for smaller passenger ships and says that operations may start at Easter 2004. The easyCruise concept will be bookable on-line with early booking discounts available. Watch this space!

After staying overnight in San Pedro, in Northern Chile, we were off again, hot footing it down the highway bound for Santiago. But on the way we discovered that Chile has the most marvellous loos (washrooms), as I’ve said earlier, every service station welcomes one with hot water, toilet paper, toilet attendants who seem to take a pride in keeping their domain clean … And our group pigged out on ice cream, chocolate, crisps and other fattening snacks from the Esso shop! Then we discovered La Serena, a seaside resort in Chile with the most marvellous shops. I am ashamed to say we revelled in the cleanliness, the sheer European look of the place and again lots of money was spent on clothes and food and stocking up on film and even one of our members bought a tent in order to free himself from a two-man tent which wasn’t really big enough for him and his companion!

And so on to Santiago, a place we could have done with staying in a little longer but unfortunately, time was short. We arrived in the late afternoon, stayed just two nights and were away very early on the second morning, having acquired two new people and reacquired one of our members who was supposed to leave us in Santiago and join another truck as we had three new people supposedly joining us, but at the last minute, the third new person had slipped a disc and was unable to come so our departing member was suddenly rejoining us, much to our pleasure as we have all bonded now and were sorry enough to see two of our group depart at the end of their respective trips, one to return to Scotland and the other to Australia.

And so I am now in Pucón and here we stay for three days. There is a volcano to climb, horse riding to be done, rafting and trekking, etc, but at the moment all yours truly is doing is catching up on e-mails and chilling out. There is a lovely lake to go and sit beside or wander around and for the time being I am going to do my own thing and try and get some time to myself – all this togetherness tends to pall after a while and it is nice to say – “Cheerio,” to the people taking packed lunches off to their various day long activities and to as it were, mentally close the door on them and take my shoes off, put my feet up and relax!

From Pucón we went on to Bariloche, which is a small but interesting little town and I would have liked to stay there longer than the one night but it wasn’t to be. We camped outside of Bariloche for just the one night (I hate these one nighters, all that trouble of putting the tent up for 12 hours and then taking it down again) but that’s life on the road! From Bariloche we went to a place called Perito Moreno where again we spent the one night and then on to our next port of call, a place called El Chalten. We stayed here for three nights when members of our group went rafting (two fell out into the river and got quite a fright) and others went glacier walking leaving the camp site at 0500 in the morning and not getting back until 2100. They said they had a good time and although quite a frightening and challenging one as well as the weather was none too good up high and they were all very sore from muscles that were overstrained.

My friend Judith and I went on a long, long trek that was meant to last 8 hours but in fact stretched out to 12 hours as we took a different path on the way back and discovered it was a very circuitous route. Needless to say we were exhausted by the finish as we had left at 0820 and got back at 2045! Luckily the group had got a barbecue going and we arrived just at serving up time! And we beat the glacier walkers who clocked in just 15 minutes later. But the first part of our trek was fantastic. We were walking to view some glaciers rather than walk them and for the whole of our walk, the full 8 hours, on the outward and return journey, we were seeing those beautiful snow clad peaks with their blue glaciers shimmering in the sunshine and could not resist taking picture after picture after picture of virtually the same scene but seen from different aspects. I dare say we will both throw away most of them but we were enthralled. And when we eventually arrived at the foot of the glacier (still out of sight) we had to cross a fast flowing river coming down from the glacier and there were only two logs straddling each other with no handholds.

Luckily, there was a man who had attempted to cross with other women and he was standing astride the logs in the centre of the stream and another man was assisting us from the bank so we managed somehow to straddle the logs in a prone position and inch our way across with help! Judith went first and so I had to follow but my heart was in my mouth the whole time and I didn’t dare think of what might happen if I slipped or the man helping me lost his hand hold on me! But I got over and it was a great achievement. Then after a walk up a gentle slope we came to a real hard climb with lots of loose shale and small boulders with hardly any hand holds and only the occasional prickly bush to grab hold of and immediately let go of and so often it was a case of scrabbling on hands and knees to get up to the top. But finally we managed to get to the first summit, so to speak only to find a downward slope leading to another upward slope, but we were determined to carry on and it was well worth it as when we did get to the foot of the actual glacier it was the most beautiful sight we had seen in a long time as there was a brilliant blue lake and these fantastic glaciers cascading down the mountain. We sat and ate our lunch there and just marvelled at the scenery and of course took heaps more photos. But we were the only two to do this particular walk because the members of our group had gone to see a completely different more popular glacier in the opposite direction to us.

If you’d like to contact Iris, whether to wish her luck with her trip or to ask questions about her itinerary and places visited, I am sure she would like to hear from you. She can be contacted on: irisej2002@yahoo.co.uk

U. S. Soldiers Home, Washington: during a century of travel (well 78 years!) both in and out of service I have travelled to over 150 countries (I count both North and South Dakota as countries) and for some reason have jotted signs and happenings that I thought funny at the time (and now wonder why). So here is the perfect opportunity to share some of my anecdotes.

The Brazilian experience: Be sure to get an immigration entry stamp in your passport before you leave. A tourist behind me interrupted the immigration official with a question and the immigration official did not give me a proper stamp in my passport. When I got to hotel I looked to see what their entry stamp looked like compared to mine. It didn’t look good. I was not upset but went to airline office and I thought they could straighten it out: the airline manifest would show I had arrived. They got excited. They made me go to Security way across town and said I had to go to a Notary Republic to get my statement notarised, etc etc. I wasted one full day trying to get this straightened out. When I got to security I explained to a man in the hallway what had happened. I waited awhile and was called into office. Behind desk was the man in the hallway I had explained what happened to. He smiled and entered that I had entered. I was going to go overland to Manaus in Northern Brazil and only discovered then that I did not have entry stamp. I suspect I might have been sent back to Security in Rio. I learn by my mistakes. When I did get on plane I was given a demi tasse of coffee in a coffee cup that I thought would be a good souvenir. I asked if I could keep it. The Stewardess said just a minute and brought back a cartoon of demi tasse cups. They must have heard about me! I said, “thanks but one is enough. Would you refill it?”

I read where some Mexicans tried crossing illegally into the States across the border from Mexico in a novel way. Border Patrols saw a truck go by with a portable toilet in the back. When they opened the door of the toilet there were seventeen Mexicans. They had paid $500 each to be in that toilet and there was no toilet paper.

One wag says when US customs ask you if you are carrying guns, drugs, psychotropic substances or any items harmful to the National Constitution, he always wonders what kind of person answers yes to a question like that.

When we got tired of filling our forms to enter different communist countries and got tired of all the red tape one wag suggested that on the form where it asked the reason for our visit that we put “penance”

At one border crossing someone was supposed to meet us at the border – but no one showed. It was a public holiday. The toilet on our bus had broken down and the lady in charge of the toilet at border would not let up in unless we gave her something like three cents in their money. None of us had any of their money yet and she would not take any American money. What do you do? Push her aside? Create an international incident? Suddenly I remembered that I had gotten a small amount of their money before coming and I treated everyone to a “toilet.”

Next month, Mac discusses: Thailand. If you would like to contact Mac, he can be e-mailed on: macsan400@yahoo.com