Tis the season to be merry, and I decided to wish you Happy Christmas in travel photos from places I visited in the last 12 months!
H
H is for Hamburg, where the cultivated shapes and new developments at Hafencity put me in mind of an architects model. With some fluke Christmas trees too!

A
A is for Amsterdam… and all the red lights, which I’m sure would make Santa happy.

If you could travel in one month of the year forever more, which month would you pick? My first thoughts jumped to April, when I was asked to take part in The Ultimate Year-Round Travel Guide… for the British Airways ‘High Life’ blog. In this collaborative series, twelve top bloggers will each talk about travel for a specific month of the year.

A quick photo for you today from a winter well spent in deep snowy Japan. That’s right! You can snowboard in Japan, and I had a whole ski season of fun in snowboarder’s Mecca and powder heaven Niseko…, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Powder hounds from all over the world come here to experience the very unique style of snowboarding in Niseko.

This is one of the first shots I took in Sicily with a tripod. I’d just arrived to a new WWOOF host near the Sicilian town of Acireale, and Mount Etna greeted me with a grumble, and a very rare view of fresh Magma spilling out of its crater at night. It was early February 2012 and quite a chilly evening, but my new hosts eventually managed to get me back inside… with home-made Pizza…

I have some more pictures of Mount Etna erupting at night, but here I have cropped the same photo twice so you can see the crater and the magma in some detail, and the smoke from the eruption reaching up into the night sky.

I took this photo less than 100 feet away from the smoking crater of active volcano Mount Stromboli in Sicily, after watching it blast liquid rock and clouds of gasses into the air for the afternoon. Smoking.

Copyright Peter Parkorr 2013…