Monthly Archives: January 2012

January in Finland

By Annika Ruohonen:

It has been snowing since Wednesday. After a dark December we can now enjoy snowy January. I have been roaming the coastline, but since there hasn’t been any direct sunlight, the photos remain quite dark even when shooting during daylight hours.

There is a deer feeder in the forest where I’ve been often lately and today I happened to see three deer running on a slope with snowy trees. It was such a delightful view. I hope to catch some photos of those three some time later. The forest is full of deer marks and it is so enjoyable to follow them. You can see how they’ve been running around enjoying the snow. The snow is about knee-deep at the moment, so with good gear walking in it is not a problem at all. I didn’t bring my snowshoes today but I still managed to walk in places where there weren’t any snowmobile tracks. It is a good work-out though, not to mention the snow-clearing job that was waiting for me in my home yard. Continue reading →

Close to the border, the Franco-German Garden

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Saarbrücken straddles the river Saar up against the German-French border, and this part of the world has been much disputed by those two great European powers as the Saarland passed back and forth depending on the movements of history. After the Second World War there was much discussion about what to do with this little wedge of territory, and it was only at the end of the 1950s that a decision was finally made and Saarland became the 10th state of the Federal Republic of Germany.

To mark the occasion, and in the spirit of friendship between the two nations, the Franco-German garden was built, a stone’s throw from the border. The park occupies two valleys; one named in memory of the victims of the infamous Battle of the Spichern Heights in Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the other for the mill built by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages. Continue reading →

Between the Baltic and the Bodden

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The walk took us along a narrow, sandy path that followed the top of the dyke. It was not so high, perhaps half a metre above the road and the gates to the cottages on one side, and the field of reeds that stretched out into the Bodden – the inland sea – to the other. Somewhere, beyond the cottages and the fields and dunes was the Baltic Sea, but we were taking the long way around.

The peninsula, curving around like a crooked arm to create the Bodden, goes by the trip-off-the-tongue name of “Fischland-Darß-Zingst”. Each of the three territories along the peninsula’s length are tiny, but they each are marked at different points along the road and at one point there was even an international border between two of them, back when the German lands were a patchwork of kingdoms, principalities and duchies, and the Swedes came across the sea to claim some portion of this flat and melancholic landscape all for themselves. Continue reading →

A song for the road

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This morning I am taking a train to the Saarland, that little corner of Germany tucked in between France and Luxembourg. After that we move on to Paris for a few days and, who knows, we might pass the route I took on a rickety old bus during sixth form college between Leyland and Florence. That was a long journey, sitting two rows from the back and drinking vodka mixed with warm, flat orangeade with the cool kids from foundation art… Some of us studying History had somehow tagged a ride on this little tour to Tuscany, and whilst the Art students spent their days wandering from one gallery to the next, the rest of us were pretty much free to explore the streets of Florence and see what kind of mischief we could get up to.

We were pretty well behaved. This song was part of my soundtrack of that coach journey, and I can distinctly remember sitting on the bus at the Swiss border as rain hammered against the window listening to Glory Box, knowing that we were about to travel through some of the most spectacular scenery in Europe and that we would see absolutely none of it because it was the middle of the night. This is a theme of my travels, as I also managed to take a night bus from Dubrovnik to Trieste along the legendary Jadranska Magistrala – the Dalmatian coastal road – a journey that I now know to be one of the truly great road trips anywhere in the world. I have travelled it since, but the first time I did it I was sitting bolt upright in an uncomfortable seat, only darkness beyond the window, watching Rocky I, II, III and IV dubbed into Croatian as the night passed agonisingly slowly.

New posts might be a bit sporadic whilst I am away, but I will see what I can do – Paul.

Llanberis slate quarries – A photographic essay

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Chris Hughes has often passed by the Dinorwig quarries across the lake from Llanberis and has photographed them from afar. For this photographic essay he got inside, to reflect on the miners, the climbers and the wildlife that have staked a claim to this corner of North Wales:

In the late 1960s we visited the slate quarries of Tilberthwaite in the Lake District, usually on wet days when we had been rained off climbing on the ‘better’ crags. Later we set up long abseils in the Cathedral quarry to impress the PE students we took there as part of their outdoor activities course. But it wasn’t the activity that was remembered, it was the incredible grandeur of the rock architecture, the wonderful effects of light and shade created within these deep pits and the quiet and stillness where once there had been the noise, constant movement, and the general mayhem of the hard and dangerous job of quarrying slate.

Driving through Llanberis you could not fail to notice the monstrous heaps of slate waste and vast rock faces of the Dinorwig quarries across the lake. The whole side of the mountain, and a good part of the inside, had been chopped, sliced, split and generally smashed into pieces. Much of it was thrown away, creating the huge heaps and screes of spoil, whilst the good bits were carted off for roofs, walls and garden rockeries, until it all came to a grinding halt as the price of slate made it all financially unviable. Continue reading →

Under Trees – The Germans and the Forest

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I wrote about the connection between the forest and the German imagination in my post on the Grunewald not that long ago, and for those of you in Berlin – or if you will coming here before the end of March – the German Historical Museum has a special exhibition on that very topic. From the website:

In Germany the forest is more than just the sum of the trees. When trees are threatened, Germans go on the warpath. For in our country the forest is not only a cultural landscape formed through forestry and the result of modern recreational activities ranging from GPS-guided hikes to treetop trails. At the same time, the woods and trees possess great symbolic, spiritual and fairytale-like charismatic powers and have always been celebrated in German poetry, art and music. In this way the forest is deeply rooted in the German consciousness – not only when we are meandering under trees.

The exhibition will visualize this special relationship of the Germans to the forest, focusing first on the Romantic Age around 1800, when the forest and the trees first became a matter of scientifically based forest management and at the same time enriched literature, music and the graphic arts as subject and theme. It was above all painting – the core of the exhibition – that shaped patterns of perception that have marked our view of the forest up to the present day.

Under Trees: The Germans and the forest is running until 4^th March 2012. Here’s the link.

Memories of Quilmes, Argentina

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Tom Salmon on a journey through Argentina to the ruins of a fortress city and the history of the Diaguitan people that once called it home:

It’s amazing, and pretty primeval, how your senses can take you back to a place. I got home last night to find frost already settling on the ground, it was a clear and crisp January night in Yorkshire. After putting the kids to bed it was time to eat. Steak, thin chips, salad and malbec wine had been planned in homage to Argentina.

But it was the Quilmes beer that we drank after the meal that really brought the memories flooding back from our six week trip around Argentina in 2006. My highlight from that adventure was the region around the colonial Andean city of Salta, spending the days exploring high altitude deserts and the nights eating tamales, humitas and locro in piazzas around the city. Salta, founded in 1582, was once the most important administrative centre in Argentina and the region was extremely wealthy in the time before Buenos Aires became the capital. Continue reading →

Ghost towns of California, Keeler and Darwin

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A photo diary from Julia Stone:

A handful of people still live in the old mining towns just beyond Death Valley, although in Keeler we only saw crazy cars – apparently still in use – as there were no people around. This was not surprising, due to the time of day and the temperatures, but in Darwin we met Jay. Jay either moved in a few years before or moved into the trailer that is now his home after his house burned down a few years back. It was hard to follow his story. Jay talked a lot… Continue reading →

He got game, and the Spanish hills

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A song for Friday.

You see, it doesn’t matter what a song is about or what they put in a video. A song ties itself up in your head with memories because of when you first hear it, or a particular concert, or a certain trip when it was on heavy rotation. And boy, for three weeks in the summer of 2001 did we hear this song a lot. I travelled to Spain will fellow members of the Grey Sky Appreciation Society Tom and Jasmine Salmon, and our navigator supreme Nev. We had rented a car in Barcelona and were going to aim it north, for the Pyrenees, west, for the Basque coast and the Picos de Europa, and then south, across the dusty plain to Madrid. We had brought piles of CDs , confident that with the new millennium all rental vehicles would be supplied with something to play them on. Unfortunately there was some kind of misunderstanding at the rental agency, and they had to dig a battered and bruised old jalopy out from a garage down a side-alley. It was nice and spacious but only had a tape player.

And we only had one tape. Continue reading →

The last big freeze, Lake Constance

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Three countries share Lake Constance, the communities of Switzerland, Germany and Austria facing each other across the water. Nowadays you can cross the border without formality – don’t tell anyone, but I spent an afternoon in Austrian Bregenz without a single piece of identification having left it behind in Germany – and there are plenty of boats that criss-cross the lake. The owner of our apartment lived in one country, worked in another, and no doubt went on Sunday bike rides in the third. There is another way to make these international journeys, although on average the opportunity strikes only a couple of times a century, if that, and that is when Lake Constance freezes over. Continue reading →