Category: 2017-2020 Rhineland
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UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LAST WINE WALK
A year ago today I became unemployed. It was a great day. A fantastic day, in fact. My dearest German friends, the Schnells and Linkes, drove many hours from Tauberbischofsheim and Illerbachen to help Padma and me mark the day … and for the more sombre task of helping us pack up our household for shipping to Australia. When our friends arrived at our home in Oberwinter they felt they made a wrong turn and ended up in Bavaria instead of Rheinland-Pfalz as I greeted them in my Oktoberfest garb, which…
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ALL BY OURSELVES.
I finally got that long-awaited gin and tonic. Or rather three gin and tonics. The Qatar Airways flight attendant keep bringing them to me. Maybe he sensed the cloud of stress above me, the mild stench of anxiety surrounding me or the furrows of worry on my face. With each G&T all of those emotions were replaced with just one: relief. We are on our way home to Australia. After three months of living in limbo with the constant fear of not getting home as the Australian Government played with our…
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A WANDER IN THE MOSELLE
In 14 days from now Padma, Joseph and I are hoping to be sipping some gin and tonics on our flight home to Perth. We’re still not confident we’ll be on that flight, but to date we haven’t been bumped again. Australian politicians are proving to be inept at doing anything to get home 30,000+ Aussies scattered around the world. They talk about us and do a few things for the optics, but by and large tens of thousands of Aussies remain stranded overseas. Padma and I try to maintain our…
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THE CASTLE AT JUNCTION 36
Castello di Mesocco Padma and I were heading north on the A13, minding our own business and in no particular hurry to get anywhere. It was one of those unreliable Alpine mornings — the cloud that had filled the valley overnight was lifting off the forest in slow white ropes, thinning as it climbed, so that the mountains kept revealing themselves and then thinking better of it. We rounded a bend and got a Wow! moment. There, on a wooded hilltop hard against the motorway, was a castle. Not a picture-postcard…
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ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER VALLEY
Ticino is a canton of valleys. They come down out of the Lepontine Alps towards Lake Maggiore like the fingers of a spread hand – Bavona, Maggia, Verzasca, Leventina – each one within an hour of the next, and each one, somehow, its own small country. The day before, our friend Hans had driven us up the Bavona: a valley of stone, of hamlets wedged in behind boulders the size of houses, and a hundred metres of white water falling at Foroglio. On our second day in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton…
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THE SHUTTERED TERRE
The shutters were closed. Not broken, not hanging off their hinges, not weathered to bare grey — closed, and lately painted, and latched from the inside by somebody who had gone away and meant to come back. Padma, Hans and I walked through three villages in one long cloudy day and I do not think we saw more than a dozen people. Wood was stacked under the eaves. Geraniums were still in the window boxes. Everything was in order and nobody was home. I took it for abandonment. It isn’t, or…
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TWO STONES FROM ONE VALLEY
Padma and I have seen a lot of churches in Europe. Spectacular, yes – vaulted, gilded, hushed – but after a while they blur into one another. So when our Swiss host Hans suggested we visit a church, this one up a side valley in Ticino, we didn’t exactly leap for the car keys. Then we came around the bend at Mogno. At 7.15 on the morning of 25 April 1986, an avalanche came off the mountain above this alpine hamlet and took out a dozen houses and the parish church,…
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THE VALLEY BEFORE THE DROP
There’s a particular kind of friend who, when you turn up in his country, doesn’t ask what you’d like to see. He has already decided. I have known Hans Striker since 1981, when I met him on a train in Mexico. He was a medical student then, working his way through an extended holiday of the kind medical students used to be able to take. He’s a vascular specialist in Locarno now, and has lived at the top end of Lake Maggiore long enough to have walked most of what is…
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ON THE TRAIL OF MARTIN LUTHER
Padma and I look at a different kind of map these days when planning our travel destinations. Instead of maps with tourist attractions we look at the map showing the incidence of COVID. And after studying the map we could tell that the former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt had very low rates of COVID infections. So we packed the car and embarked on a roadtrip. But we did have a mission in mind. We wanted to explore the old stomping grounds of arguably the most famous German –…
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