Category Archives: Travel

Completed Passes

July 11, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

In the Alps, there are lots of very-long tunnels and lots of very-high mountain passes.  Sometimes you get to choose between the two.  Tunnels usually make lousy pictures.  And sometimes you learn a thing or two by taking the high road.

  

The winding road you see in the picture just above is Stelvio Pass — where you leave the Tirol (i.e., Italy’s piece of the Tirolian Alps) and enter Lombardy (the Italian Lakes Region). The picture shows — above those clouds — only the last dozen or so of the 48 switchbacks it takes to get to the top.  You become incredulous that it can just keep going on and on.  Making things a little more interesting, I wound up following a Rolls Royce convertible — circa 1930 — most of the way up the pass.  Its drivers were wearing hooded fur coats and having even more fun than I was, though my Volvo handled the climb better than their 80-year-old Rolls.

In Tirol, they speak German; in Lombardy, they speak Italian like the rest of Italy. The underlying history is that the pass (or, rather, the nearly impassable mountain) was the 19th century border between the Tirol region of Austria-Hungarian Empire (to the east) and the Kingdom of Italy (to the west). It’s easier to defend a border if nobody can realistically cross it anyway. The now-Italian Tirol region was promised (and given) to Italy in exchange for their agreement to fight against the Germans and Austria-Hungarians in World War I, and Stelvio pass was the site of some nasty hillside battles.  The pass persists as a literal ‘language barrier,’ helping to keep the German-speakers to the east separated from the Italian-speakers to the west.

To help assimilate the former Austrians into the Italian way of life, the government gave new parallel Italian-sounding names to all the towns.  Apparently this largely consisted of changing the Ks to Cs, then adding a vowel to the end of every word.  Who knew it really was that easy to translate into Italian?!  Kastelruth is now Castelrotto.  Bruneck is now Brunico (Be sure sure to roll the R).

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A few miles further up the road, after you head north into Switzerland, the Autostrada goes through the ten-mile-long St. Gotthard road tunnel.  It’s cool to know you’re five miles inside a tunnel with a mile or so of granite on top of you, but inside it really just looks like a tunnel.  So this time I opted for the road (less traveled) over the top instead:  a series of three mountain passes took me north and west toward Interlaken.

The first seemed impressive enough, with a nice view back down the valley to the town of Airolo (the picture just above).  The view from the second pass (pictures at the top and bottom of this post) was a little more surreal, with those clouds pouring down into the valley like a waterfall and disappearing as their altitude dropped.  There are no pictures from the third pass — which was essentially inside that waterfall of clouds — I drove those switchbacks with about 50 feet of visibility.  Certainly more exciting than the tunnel.

Operating post-camera-theft, I was (temporarily) working with just one camera and one lens, which was not my favorite ultra-wide angle.  The Stelvio Pass picture with all the switchbacks is a computer ‘stitched’ panarama, made from about five original photos. 

Italy’s Dolomites and the Alpe di Suisi

July 10, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

This is the hike I was taking while someone was back in town bashing in my car window and stealing my passport and my other camera (and lenses).  I’m trying not to think about whether the hike was “worth it.”

The Alpe di Suisi in northeastern Italy is Europe’s largest “high alpine meadow” — which means it’s an enormous mountain-top pasture that doubles as a ski area in the winter.  This time of year, it’s mostly covered in yellow flowers.  Surrounding it are mountains of the Dolomite range — a southern part of the Alps.  You can take a ski lift up to the grassy plateau area, and from there it’s a 3-hour (each way) hike to the top of one of the nearby mountains.  In the U.S., if you hiked that far up mountains you’d be alone up there with nothing but the wind and the Powerbars you’d carried up there yourself.  Here (as in Switzerland, you get to the top and find a restaurant and hotel — without a road in sight and supplied by a miles-long pulley system that raises casket-sized baskets to the top.

It’s a great, beautiful area — these pictures really don’t do it justice.

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There’s a squarish picture in the batch above with the green diagonal hillside on the lower right and rocky mountain walls behind.  The far upper left-hand corner of that picture was the destination of the hike and the site for that restaurant.  There was a lot going on on the Alpe di Suisi:  the Italian military was doing paratrooper practice jumps, for example. 

 

 

 

 

 

Scheisse! Stahlen sie meine Kamera!*

July 9, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

You live and learn.  For example, just a  week or so ago, I didn’t even know there WAS a German-speaking region of Italy (just south of the Austrian border).  But now I’ve had the pleasure of explaining (in English) to a mostly-German-speaking Italian police officer how my American passport and my (Japanese) cameras had been stolen from my Swiss rental car.

 

First, I’d like to say that the Dolomites of northeastern Italy are a lovely place, full of rich history and beautiful scenery, and that the people of that region were all extremely friendly and helpful.  Except for the couple of  #%$@* assholes who broke the window out of my rental car while I was hiking and stole a camera bag holding one of my two primary cameras and four of my best lenses.  Two small consolations:  I had one camera and lens with me when the break-in happened, and the Volvo station wagon I’d rented did just fine crossing the Alps with a cardboard-and-duct-tape rear window and a back seat full of glass.

The ensuing days, of course, have included a few hours at the U.S. embassy in Bern for a new passport, an expensive trip to a Swiss camera store to bring my photography back to up to speed, and a couple of hours at the Zurich airport awkwardly swapping my rental car for a ‘fresh’ one with no broken windows.  Fortunately, I had double-backed-up all but the last round of pictures (and stored the backup elsewhere), so I didn’t lose many pictures.  Of course I had all the pictures from the hike itself, too.  Adding insult to injury, however, my pictures (an upcoming post) from the hike weren’t really all that good.

The shots on this page are not from the Dolomites.  They were taken somewhere along the road (in Austria, I believe) between the Ludwig castles (a prior post) and the Alpe di Suisi region (the next post).  The shots from this lovely spot (these taken on the camera that was not stolen) were the only ones that that survived from that drive.  I’d like to suggest that there were other, true masterpieces that I lost, but for better worse I don’t think that’s true.

 * I do not speak German, but I believe the title phrase above (“Stahlen sie meine kamera”) means “They stole my camera.”  The introductory exclamation (“Scheisse”) is an expletive, which I deem entirely appropriate under the circumstances.

 

 

 

Kings of Bavaria

July 8, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

Americans like me probably know Bavaria best as the “B” in BMW. Its biggest single tourist attraction is a legacy from an arguably-crazy nineteenth-century king.

The border between Germany and Austria is where the rolling hills and forests of the German state of Bavaria run into the northern edge of the Alps. A big tourist destination here is a set of castles built in the 1800s by the then-King of Bavaria, Ludwig II. The most famous castle (the big grey one above) is Schloss Neuschwanstein – built in the 1800s in a medieval style more befitting the 1200s. It is supposedly the model for the “Sleeping Beauty” castle that’s the centerpiece of Disneyland.

Legend has it that Ludwig was crazy. His eccentricity surely reinforced that idea. Besides castle-building, he was apparently obsessed with the 18th Century French monarchy and meticulously modeled himself and some of his palaces after that — notwithstanding the conspicuously unhappy ending the French monarchy had just faced. He also had a weird obsession with the famous German opera composer, Richard Wagner.  Some of his letters suggested that he was building these castles in hopes that Wagner would come to visit and stay with him there. Some of the rooms were modeled after scenes from Wagner operas.

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Ludwig spent so much on his crazy castles he essentially bankrupted himself and lost power. He was dethroned based on his alleged insanity at age 41, and “mysteriously” found dead in a lake a few days later.

Ludwig lived in an era when Europe’s centuries of rule by monarchs were about to come to end no matter what he did. He had no heirs except his genuinely crazy brother Otto, so he spent everything he had on castles.  Building the castles has given him a legacy much more famous than any sensible king would have had.  To this day, millions of people come to southern Bavaria from all over the world to see those crazy castles – and to talk about the nutty King who was foolish enough to build them.  I think “crazy” King Ludwig got the last laugh.

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My friend (formerly one of my Gibbs & Bruns law partners) Jeff Kubin met me in Zurich and joined me on a few days of my European adventure — mostly through the German, Austrian, Italian and Swiss Alps. Ludwig’s Bavaria was our first, touristy stop before heading south and west.  That’s Jeff K in a picture below. I loaned him a camera and subjected him to photography lessons. The other shots below are his. Not bad!

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A Longish London Layover

June 29, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

With just a day and a half of jet-lagged layover in London on the way to points further east, I don’t have many stories to tell.  It was my first visit to England, so I mostly hit the most touristy of spots, timing my outdoor excursions between episodes of drizzly rain.

 

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Despite the supposedly-shared language, London can seem just as foreign at times as any other major European City.  Unlike the rest of the world, when the Brits speak English, they didn’t learn it from American television and music, so their accents are often harder to understand than the English you’ll hear in much more exotic-sounding destinations.  A few times I would have sworn I was in a Monty Python sketch.  My favorite amusement:  My hotel room had a set of bathroom scales, which clearly displayed my weight as about 10.5 stone.

 

 

 

 You probably recognize Big Ben — it’s the clocktower at the House of Parliament.  My hotel was very close to it — thus all the pictures.  The place (just above) with the flowers, all the British flags, and of course the Beaver-hatted guards is Buckingham Palace.  The high-up views are from the Tower Bridge and from St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The big Ferris Wheel is called the London eye.  The church you see pictured from the outside is Westminster Abbey.  The statuesque fellow riding horseback wielding a sword is Richard the Lionhearted.  I didn’t know the happy Asian couple strolling around the Tower Bridge in their wedding wear.