Mishima Skywalk And The Zip Line With A View Of Mount Fuji

A few views of the Saar and Mosel rivers in Germany, which recently burst their banks due to heavy rain. The lower levels of the multi-lane motorway through Saarbrucken (second picture) were underwater, and the historic towns of Trier (top) and Cochem (below), which I have fond memories of, were flooded too.

Hoping that the communities can recover soon.

The abandoned Arzviller station

The old canal we followed yesterday is flanked by the Zorn river and the Strasbourg to Sarrebourg railway. Trains call at Lutzelbourg and/or Réding, while, half-way in between and opposite lock n°6, sits Arzviller station - actually located on the territory of Saint-Louis - closed. Shockingly, I can't find when it was closed (one source suggests the 1980s, though in my mind it was more recent).

Going from the canal to the station requires dropping down to the level of the Zorn river, crossing it, and going under the railway and road. There is a very dark underpass, but if you look closely and sport the light switch... Club Vosgien, the association which manages hiking trails in the Vosges mountains, literally shines through with this installation!

Given that Arzviller station is closed, and not wanting to tread the same ground twice, I decided to walk from one station to the next, Réding to Lutzelbourg, and I can't recommend the part from Réding to Arzviller: not signposted for hikers, really requiring a map if you're trying to avoid roads... and the only real highlight is the chance to glimpse the twin canal & railway tunnels: boats and trains enter and exit together at the West end (no boats on the day I visited though).

A quick post in response to Ferrari's second consecutive overall win at Le Mans, with a few sights from the manufacturer's home town, Maranello. Everything here is Ferrari: their road car factory with the classic entrance gate (above), the more modern F1 team base, the Fiorano test track, the Scuderia museum, the statues to founder Enzo Ferrari and the Prancing Horse, a park featuring Ferrari's most famous road car models...

Yep, everything is Ferrari here. Except, well, this store front apparently. It's rather gutsy to show off a Lambo badge here, but then again, historically, middle fingers to Ferrari was what Ferrucio Lamborghini was all about!

Golden Week has begun in Japan, and this quick succession of public holidays ends with Children's Day on 5 May. It's for this occasion that the koinobori, or carp streamers, are brought out. Here are some flying over Asuka-gawa in Kashihara during my visit in 2018, with Unebi-yama, at the base of which Kashihara-jingû is located, in the background below.

My part of France is also on school break. With my homework done, it's time to get out and about again for my own Golden Week!

Climbing Toba Hinoyama

The road (and I guess that is the only downside: it is a road all the way) to the top of Hinoyama starts with the welcoming entrance to Jôan-ji temple.

After some 800 m uphill, past a rather large resort hotel, a chance for a break appears: a viewpoint with a camera stand (which may have been the first time I noticed one! very handy for group shots, though I was alone of course), and an art garden called Medaka no Gakkô, or the school of rice fish. Not knowing that at the time (I looked it up for this piece!), I didn't notice the fish, but I did notice the art and the wisteria in full bloom.

Most of the climbing is done at this point, and it's only another 300 m to the entrance to the shrines at the top of Hinoyama. Shrines, plural, and of various sizes, as the modest Hakuryû Inari-jinja sits next to the grander Toba branch of Kotohira-gû.

On the right, at the bottom of the stairs of Kotohira-gû, one finds the donors' board, and an inviting path... to the views shown in the previous post.

MV Bretagne's final crossing

I haven't got my eye on the Channel as much as I used to, so I only found out last weekend that this ship had its final run on the night of 3-4 November.

Bretagne was Brittany Ferries' first purpose-built cruise ferry, launched in Saint Nazaire in February 1989 and entering service in July of that year. At over 150 m in length, appointed with over 350 cabins and a higher level of comfort than other ferries in service at the time, she was designed to be the company's flagship, sailing the longest routes to Spain and Ireland.

As tourism between the UK and continent became more popular, Brittany Ferries' fleet of cruise ferries expanded further in the early 90s, to the point where Bretagne was no longer the company's largest ship by 1993. While Val de Loire took over the Portsmouth-Santander route, Bretagne became a regular on Portsmouth-St Malo, serving her namesake region. So, in the summer of 1994, it was she who carried my family over to new lives in France.

While not my favourite ferry, Bretagne is a particularly important one on a personal level. So it was nice to catch her by chance departing St Malo in July 2019, around her 30th anniversary. Five years later, and she would pass behind the islands off the Corsair City for the final time, bound for Le Havre to await her sale.

Kenavo, Bretagne!

Nijô-jô

In my experience, Nijô Castle in Kyôto is one of the most unusual in the Japanese castle landscape, in that the main focus of the conservation and tourist attraction is on a palace, the Ni-no-maru Goten, rather than a dungeon (whether reconstructed or original). It is true that, as the Tokugawa shôgun's residence in the Emperor's back yard, it was a focal point of Edo-period politics.

The palace sits behind a grand gate, decorated with lots of gold and colours. And as all noble residences from the Edo period go, there's a vast, carefully crafted garden on the side, complete with tea houses.

But all this is part of the Ni-no-maru, the area around the Hon-maru main keep. Given that the mountains around Kyôto are largely occupied by temples and shrines, there's not much of a height advantage to be gained in the city, to the point where, when the Hon-maru burned down in the 1780s, nothing was rebuilt, it was left bare!

Eerily, the Tokugawa shôgun's Kyôto castle has a similar story to the one in Edo: there was a keep, but it was destroyed during the Edo period and wasn't rebuilt, and both castle grounds were transferred to the Imperial Estate at the start of the Meiji era. It was in the 1880s that the Hon-maru palace was built, in the space the Tokugawas had left vacant.

Catène de Containers

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the founding of the port on the right bank of the Seine estuary, Le Havre went big. They commissioned a sculpture from artist Vincent Ganivet... and he delivered a monument!

Standing at nearly 29 m tall, the arches are made with 36 shipping containers, representing Le Havre's half-millennium as an international trade hub. 21 in one and 15 in the other, they are arranged in a catenary shape which makes the structure self-supporting. There's stuff to satisfy a maths and physics buff in there somewhere... but I'll just concentrate on the fact that it looks cool, especially compared to its industrial and brutalist surroundings.

As a major port in Nazi-occupied France, Le Havre was bombed into oblivion by the Allies, hence most of the town centre's buildings were built at once in the late 1940s-early 1950s. The result is a very rigid, homogeneous, mineral urban environment, to which the Catène adds a welcome dash of colour.

But if nothing else (and we've established there is a lot else), it looks like it'd make a compelling Mario Kart track.

Strasbourg's Christkindelsmärik

One of Europe's oldest Christmas market, and likely the most famous in France, is Strasbourg's. Its existence is attested as far back as 1570, appearing in the years following Protestant Reformation. Today it is a sprawling event, covering all the main squares of the central island of Strasbourg, and it's very busy, especially in the evenings and on weekends.

The traditional Alsatian name of the market is Christkindelsmärik, "the market of baby Jesus", while the city's more recent branding (since the 1990s) proclaims the town as "Capital of Christmas".

Pictures from 2018 - I haven't been to this year's market yet, but I plan to once my workload deflates - I get my annual stock of jams from the local producer's market!

Now that @fredomotophoto is back from Alsace and Germany, I can do a piece on Black Forest clocks without spoiling his trip! The area has a lot of clock-making history, and to this day, typical tourist shops like the one above - TriBär, a play on the town of Triberg and the word Bär which... you can guess, a.k.a the House of 1000 Clocks - are full of cuckoo clocks ticking and going off all the time. It probably gets quite weird working in one of those places...

Triberg is host to the most extreme cuckoo clocks. The world's smallest are housed in the Schwarzwaldmuseum in the town centre. Wall camera on the right for scale.

Further up into the hills, on the edge of Schonach, is the opposite: this is world's first largest cuckoo clock, referenced in this previous post. As it was closed on the day I visited, I don't know much about the history of this clock, but it's housed in a building the size of a small house (gate on the right for scale)... and it isn't the biggest one any more.

The current biggest one is on the other side of Triberg, and located at the base of a big climb on the Schwarzwald Railway Adventure Trail. Gate on the right for scale. The whole building doesn't count as the clock itself (that would be too easy), only the mechanism does, and it is 4.5 m wide, with an 8 m pendulum. It took 5 years to build and its cost is estimated in the millions of euros, so you know what you're in for if you want to beat it. For a small fee, it is possible to visit the interior, but I was a bit pressed for time as I didn't want to miss the next train at the next viewpoint. I just took a break in the shop and caught the 5 o'clock cuckoo before moving on.

Bonus clock from the museum: