Last year’s canoe trip on Ahja river was a hit so we did it again, but slightly differently. One canoe rental place has invented/introduced canoe rafts – three canoes attached to each other, with a wooden platform on top. It handles like a raft, sturdy, no wobbles. A bit less nimble but still decently steerable.

The big bonuses are that it’s much more social than a bunch of individual canoes – and it is very child- and dog-friendly.

There was eleven of us, and we ended up with one raft of adults and one of kids, with one dog each.

The dogs had to be split up and weren’t entirely happy about it. But two large, playful dogs on a raft getting the zoomies or starting to tussle with each other would have been too chaotic. They longed for each other, though, or perhaps they just wanted their herd to be all in one place.

We were on the same lake and river as last year, but only did half the distance, and in the other direction (upriver). Not that it felt like the direction made much of a difference – mostly we paddled along a lake with no noticeable flow.

At around the halfway point we steered our rafts into a little bay, tied them to each other, and had a lovely picnic. The rafts made it very easy. Dogs and paddles and kids and food everywhere.

The lake turned into a river for the last kilometre or so, and the paddling was more challenging now, with logs, submerged broken branches, sand banks and other obstacles.

I got fewer photos this year since the rafts didn’t exactly allow any darting around to the side to get new angles on things. And with four of us paddling, I couldn’t just stop my part whenever I felt like it, or we’d end up going in circles. Ingrid helped out and took over the camera for a while, too.

The kids and I spent the day in the countryside with my father and his wife. Walked and talked and made sushi.

My father is struggling with a bad back so he couldn’t join us for any of the activities any longer, so here’s us walking with my brother instead. I swear I definitely didn’t line them up this time, it just happened!

This year there’s peas growing in several of the fields closest to their house, which makes for good snacking.

As usual, the trip to Estonia wouldn’t feel complete without a visit to the adventure park at Otepää.


Thanks to Ingrid, I have some photos of me climbing as well.

The last trail is challenging for all of us. Now that Adrian is as tall as the rest of us, we’re on an equal footing.

That trail ends with the so-called Tarzan leap – hold on to a thick rope and leap off a platform to swing across a twenty-metre gap to a net on the other side. After a few attempts it no longer feels scary – as long as I don’t stop to think about it.

Of course we’re all harnessed and clipped into things so there’s no real risk.

The trails all end with zipline rides, which is like the cherry on top.


Finally the two long zipline rides across the valley and back cap off the entire day.

We are sort of running out of hikes on this island. I can understand why many hiking holidays combine half a week on Santorini with half a week on Naxos. I did find one more promising walk near Kamari, though. Not to any place special – just from one village to another.

Small cobbled streets, ordinary small houses, no crowds. Nice.

I made a serious tactical miscalculation, though. The walk was less than 5 km, which is far less than we usually walk, so I thought we could do it there and back again. Start in Kamari, walk to the other village, turn around and walk back home again.

What I didn’t take into account was the heat, firstly, and secondly the altitude gain. The other village was up on a bit of a hill. And climbing a hill in this heat was more than we could do. The first bit was flat, but after 10 or 15 minutes of climbing, and realizing that we still had at least another hour of that ahead of us, we gave up.

At that point we’d reached a small plateau on the hillside with pretty nice views – looked like a local picnic spot – so we felt like we’d walked to some place at least, not just nowhere, and we were all very much OK with turning back, after admiring and photographing the views.

Boat trip to the three smaller islands next to Santorini – Nea Kameni, Palea Kameni and Thirassia.

The trip was arranged by the travel company we travelled with. Buses collected people at various points along the island and disgorged all of us at the harbour, where we were split across three boats based on our preferred language. Our boat and its two sisters were the epitome of a touristy ridiculousness, including fake masts.

Nea Kameni is the island at the middle of the Santorini caldera. It first emerged about two thousand years ago and has grown as ongoing minor eruptions have added more and more lava to it. The newer parts are still pure rock with nothing growing on them yet.

The island is small and the tourists many, so it felt like an outdoor museum of sorts, with marked paths everywhere.

In the middle of the island we could see the main crater of the volcano. It’s still active and there’s steam and smoke coming out of cracks in the rock, over on the other side where the rocks are covered with white deposits of something.

The same yellow tufts of some hardy desert plant that we saw on our hike from Fira to Oia are the first ones to spread here as well.

The second island, Palea Kameni, is so small that the boats don’t even land there. They stop a small distance away to give the tourists a chance to swim to the hot springs next to the island – where the water is rust-coloured.

The third island, Thirassia, is older – a part of the island that existed before the Minoan eruption. Old enough to have some vegetation and human habitation. The boats stopped here for lunch.

The restaurants at the bottom of the path all had very low ratings on Google Maps so we made the trek to the top. It was very, very hot and sweaty, and there was as usual no shade to be found on the way. Even though it wasn’t a long way to walk, we felt near fainting when we got to the top.


The stray cats on this island were all looking very scraggly. We missed Nysse.

The way down felt a lot easier.

On our way back to the port on Santorini we got some nice views of the villages we walked through and past yesterday.

There’s the rock of Skaros with its castle ruins in the middle, that we visited yesterday.

Layers of volcanic rock.

Fira to Oia is the top item on all “walking on Santorini” lists and articles. So that’s what we did today.

Fira is the main town on Santorini, and also shares its name with the island. Santorini used to be called Thera or Thira, which after a while became Fira. Like many other towns on the island, it’s a cluster of small, white buildings clinging on to the cliff top.

A few kilometres from Fira we came to Skaros Rock, which looks like nothing but a strange rock outcropping from the distance, but turns out to hold the ruins of a Venetian fortification.

Right next to the ruins there was a loud sign proclaiming the area to be dangerous and forbidden and off-limits, even while there were paths and stairs leading into them. I’m guessing the paths weren’t up to some safety standard so the local authorities were forced to put up a sign to comply with regulations, but clearly they’d realized that actually trying to keep tourists out would lead to more danger of serious accidents than giving them safe paths to walk on.

The views from here made the crescent shape of the island and its volcanic origin very obvious.

The landscape between Fira and Oia was mostly volcanic semi-desert, occasionally interrupted by tourist accommodation in one shape or another. This island truly has a lot of hotels. Then again, I can’t think of anything else they could do if they didn’t have any tourists, because it’s not like you could grow anything much here.

Tufts of this one plant with yellow flowers seem to be the first ones to take root in the dry volcanic ground.


Today there were no clouds and no real shade anywhere. When we finally spotted a sliver of shade along a small chapel in the middle of nowhere, we could finally take a longer break without feeling like we were melting. When we made ourselves small and pulled our legs in close, we could all fit into the shade.

Ingrid kindly took photos of me today again.


Oia was even more tourist-focused than Fira. Everything was either a hotel, a restaurant, or a tourist shop.

Santorini has a fair number of stray cats, that seem to be tolerated most everywhere. There is one who visits our hotel every morning at breakfast time, whom we already recognize, and we’ve seen others feel at home at cafés and restaurants.

Oia is the town where the most famous photos of Santorini tend to be taken, with its blue-domed white buildings.

Today was the only day of this week for which the weather forecast promised a splash of rain in the morning. It seemed reasonable, looking at the sky, so we hung around at the hotel for a couple of hours before going out. This is our view from the hotel towards our planned walk for the day – that somewhat wooded area on the hills, between the two peaks.

But the rain kept not happening and we kept getting more and more restless, so in the end we just left anyway. Some rain won’t kill us.

The walking took us up, and up, and up some more. First in zigzags along the road, and, after the pass, along paths and stairs.


At the top of the hills, we came to the site of ancient Thera, a Bronze Age town destroyed in the volcanic eruption that destroyed most of Santorini and ended the Minoan civilization. It was amazingly well preserved – paths, walls, pillared halls, carved reliefs still fully visible.



Ingrid kindly took some photos of me. I was there, too! (Holding hard on to my hat because it was very windy up at the top.)



We took a different path down, which gave us a nice view of the road we previously walked to get up the hill.

Halfway down there was a cave with a natural spring.

We’d been wondering before why anyone would build a town at the top of the hill where there is no water, but at that time, pre-volcano, the hill was much taller so the town wasn’t at the top. So perhaps they had similar springs there.

Eric and Adrian went out on a hike on Friday, and Ingrid has long planned to go camping with her friend group this weekend. Not wanting to be left out, I thought I’d do the same and check off the next stage of Sörmlandsleden.

Not even halfway through my drive to the starting point, Ingrid called me, nearly in tears. They had ended up on the wrong bus, and since the right one only goes once every two hours, they’d lose almost all of their planned afternoon out in the forest. As luck would have it, I was only 15 minutes away from the bus stop they’d gotten off, so I turned around and then spent the next hour and a half shuttling them from their bus stop to the Paradiset nature reserve they were aiming for.

By the time I was done playing chauffeur, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I could still have followed my original plan – but here I was, right at the entrance of a beautiful nature reserve, so why not stay right here? The horde of teenagers headed east towards lake Trehörningen; I followed Sörmlandsleden (stage 6) south-west, stopping just short of the other end so I wouldn’t get back to civilization.

This is a beautiful time to be out walking. The greenery is all fresh and young and lush. I’ve never before managed to time any of my hikes to hit the peak of lily of the valley season.


And then in the middle of everything vibrant and beautiful, I come across this devastation. I cannot fathom how clear-cutting can still be allowed – how it can be legal to destroy a landscape like this.

Towards the end of my walk I saw a clump of aquilegias right next to the road. Beautiful colours, larger blossoms than even the ones in my flowerbeds at home. I was surprised to see them in the wild – but another fifty metres on I saw a lilac bush, so I guess there must have been a cottage some time in the past.

It’s wood anemone season, and the woods in Hägerstalund are always flooded with anemones. Ingrid and I went for an anemone walk in the spring sun.

It’s amazing how they carpet the whole ground.

Mårbu to Solheimstulen. Not sure about the distance as I forgot to take notes, maybe 15 km?

After my trips, skiing or other, I always realize that I’ve only taken photos of the main “attraction” and have few or none of the things around it. The huts, the meals, the breaks, the equipment. And I’ve fallen into the same trap this time.

At least I have this one of our room at the Mårbu hut. It’s reasonably typical of what the rooms in the DNT huts look like. Solidly built bunk beds, pine floors, maybe a chair or a small table. Hooks on the wall. Possibly a small stove for heating. Pillow and duvet covered in DNT fabric.

There was no doubt that we were getting closer to civilization today. No more untracked trails – now we had snowmobile tracks to follow. Which can be convenient at times, but they can also be icy and uneven, and more work than they’re worth, so we ski next to them.

As we came further down the mountain, trees appeared and then filled up the valleys. After a while the snowmobile tracks were the only open ground where we could ski. Once your skis get into the snowmobile groove, there’s no way to control your descent, though. As the descent got steeper and steeper, and the tracks deeper and deeper, we had to get off our skis and walk down.

Then we had a few hours’ wait at Solheimstulen hut for a taxi to take us to Geilo. In Geilo we were staying at an actual hotel (that had seen better days but was still pretty grand) and ate dinner on a white tablecloth. Something of a shock after the mountain huts.

The food on this trip was mostly quite uninspired, and they really did not know how to handle vegetables. I think three of our dinners included boiled carrots with absolutely no flavouring. I guess it’s a Norwegian thing. The dinner at Geiterygghytta was a rare exception.