I'd rent a stand-up paddle board or a boat, or go for a swim at the island of Långholmens. In summer, the sun slips away only fleetingly and there's little inclination to turn in. In Nobel's will, he set up a fund for laureates - in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, (more recently) economics and ironically, peace.īut at this time of year, what I really want to do right now is stay up all night - wandering the Swedish capital's cobbled streets, the deserted courtyards and squares.
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Some say he changed from business entrepreneur to philanthropist after his brother died and a sloppy journalist mistakenly wrote Alfred's obituary, calling him a war profiteer. It was Nobel's explosive factories that made him his fortune and allowed him to start an endowment fund. The Nobel Museum, on the north side of Stortorget square, recounts the history of this international prize, as well as the life of dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel. The Vasa is enormous and glorious, rising out of the gloom.Īnother museum I love is on Galma Stan, the island of the Old Town. The maritime museum maintains artificial conditions - including near-darkness - in an effort to preserve the vessel.
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The ship was only salvaged about 50 years ago, raised up out of the mud and found to be almost entirely intact. But with so many cannons it was top heavy and moments into its maiden voyage, it capsized and sank. With 64 cannons and 300 men, it was to be the star of Sweden's navy. When the Vasa set sail in 1628, it may have been the world's most powerful warship. However, I like to start in the dark at the Vasa Museum. This is where I want to be right now: in locked gaze with the biggest fish in the sea, like staring into the depths of the ocean. With ancestors that have been on this planet for 60 million years, there is wisdom and memory in those eyes. Mouth agape as it feeds, we catch each other's eye. It swims back and forth, almost as if to flaunt its size, up to 14 metres long and weighing perhaps 12 tonnes. Yet I eventually begin to make out beneath me, rising up from the depths, those distinctive white freckles on that dark curved back. The guide - a metre or two above my eyeline - frantically points me in seemingly every direction except the one I am going in. Once in the sea, oddly perhaps, whale sharks can be hard to locate because the water is so thick with plankton. I'd sling on a mask and snorkel and slowly lower myself in, so as not to frighten these extraordinarily large creatures. A sudden triangle of fin breaks the surface, a tip of tail.
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I'd like to spot one first, but he probably does. I'd head out from the jetty of Isla Holbox with one of the fishermen-turned-guides, motoring out into the ocean, scanning the water. When whale sharks feed, they move slowly which means it is easy to swim alongside. But none of that is why I come here.Īt this time of year, the sea becomes murky with plankton, and huge numbers of whale sharks - the world's largest fish - migrate here to feed on these teeny-tiny organisms. It's only a couple hours from Cancún and Cozumel but encapsulates everything those towns are not: low-key, low-rise and low in tourist numbers.
Where the warm currents of the Gulf of Mexico meet the Caribbean Sea there is a tropical island I love off the Yucatán Peninsula.