Kenruok-en Gardens and Shirakawa-go Village

The Kenruok-en Garndes (Garden of Six Attributes), is Kanazawa – we have been here before and all I can remember is it was 1) beautiful, 2) stinking hot and humid and 3) there were more tourists here than I would prefer (given I was one of them, I am acutely aware of the irony here). Kenrrok-ej was a strolling garden designed and constructed during the Edo period by teh Manda Clain. It was conceived in the 1620 and continuously mainted since then. Kenroku-en is considered one of the Three Great Gardesn of Japan, noted for its beauty across all seasons. The gardens are pread over nearly 25 acres, and feature a landscape of meandering paths, two large ponds, several tea houses, and one of Japan’s oldest fountains.

It is a site of uncommon beauty and tranquility. It has been open to the public since 1871. I just love this place – I’ve been here in summer, but I think I may have to come back in winter to see it in yet another season. Their cherry blossom area is quite small – so there are many more impressive places to go for cherry blossoms.

This is just some leaves on the pavement that I thought were pretty.

Toyama castle. We went through here last visit, so didn’t go through for a second time. = it’s one of those things you do when you are travelling… decide to visit a place more than once or try to press on and see something new. After leaving Tokoyama we head towards Gifu Prefecture – the views were gorgeous around every turn. High speed photography isn’t my favourite but I did manage to grab some half decent shots of the landscape. And then we came out of an 11km tunnel* and it was snowing again! 😮

*an 11km tunnel whereupon a cheerful conversation ensued as to what we would do if we were forced to evacuate the tunnel due to an accident or disaster… 😐 I haven’t packed for full on snow… but glad I bought my Merrell, gortex hiking boots with me!Oh so cold, but so beautiful.As we left Toyama and head towards Gifu Prefecture, we decided to stop at Shirakawa-go.

Shirakawa-go is one of Japan’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Hmmmm… wonder if there is a Bingo Card for collecting UNESCO sites?!). The cultural area consists of three historic mountain villages over an area of 68 hectares in the remote Shogawa river valley, stretching over the borders of Gifu and Toyama Prefectures. Shirakawa-gō (白川郷, “White River Old-District”) is located in the village of Shirakawa in Gifu… the village is like an open air museum, but people still live and work here, so there are many private homes interspersed amongst the public museum buildings that tourists might come to visit.The thatched roofs are really impressive:

The valley where Shirakawa-go is located is in a mountain region that experiences considerable snowfall every winter. This village is well known for it’s clusters of farmhouses that are all constructed in the traditionally architectural style known as  gasshō-zukuri. These buildings are designed to easily shed snow from their steep thatched roofs.Ω

Interesting info from Wikipedia:

“Even today, there is still a system of joint work called “yui” for re-thatching thatched roofs of gassho-zukuri. The thatch replacement was done every 30 to 40 years, and the labor and expense involved was enormous (simply converting the labor cost to today’s value, it is said that the cost to replace one side of the roof alone would be more than 10 million yen), but it was done without compensation.

The procedure for re-thatching was rough as follows.

・Preparation begins at least three years prior to the work.

・The amount of thatch needed and the number of workers are estimated based on the area of the roof.

・Set a date for the work and go around the village to ask for help with the thatching and when it will be done.

・Cut and store enough thatch for the work in advance (a common “thatch field” is reserved for this purpose).

・Determine the division of roles (i.e., those who collect thatch, those who carry it, those who sort thatch, those who prepare ropes and other tools, etc.).

・The above is exclusively the work of men. The women prepare meals for the workers, snacks for the rest, and gifts to celebrate the completion of the work.

・Rarely are both sides of the roof sprayed at the same time, but only one side is completed in two days.

・It takes 200 to 300 workers daily, and it is spectacular to see more than 100 people climbing on the roof.

In recent years, depopulation, the decline of primary industries, and the aging of the population have made it difficult to maintain ties. On the other hand, the National Trust and volunteers from the general public have begun to gather from various parts of the country and work together to re-thatch the roofs. In Shirakawa-go, the organization that performs the tethering is called “koryaku,” and the scope of the tethering is not limited to re-thatching roofs, but extends to all aspects of daily life, including thatching, rice planting, rice harvesting, weeding, chopping firewood, weddings, funerals, and ceremonial occasions.

That’s nuts!!!This statue depicts a person in a ‘Japanese raincoat’ made out of straws. They were particularly common due to availability of materials, well up until the early 1900s…

There is even a Pokemon based on people wearing these pointed thatched raincoats…

Shirakawa-go is pretty cool – there are still people living and working here, unlike some of the open air museums that are set up with some of these types of buildings just for tourists to visit. The village caters pretty well to visits, though it seems less so at this time of year – less cafes etc open.


Gorgeous area, well worth visiting, even if it wasn’t’ for the historical village.

More snow and more tunnels on the way to Takayama.I’m assumed this said: “Do you need snow chains, stupid?!” But it actually use makes mention of the tunnels ahead. Boring.

And some lovely coloured leaves I found on the ground near our ryokan…

Hiroshima

Mr K and I have Japan Rail Passes for this week because we knew we were going to be heading out of Osaka a fair bit, so you can buy a pass which gives you unlimted travel for a certain duration… which sounds good in theory, but it also means if you want to reserve a seat, you can’t just book it online to your rail pass, you need to go to a ticket office at a Shinkansen station and have someone do it for you in person.  When we were in Tokyo, Mr K wanted to book seats in a reserved carriage for today’s day trip to Hiroshima and the customer service lady said, ‘You’ll be ok you won’t need to book there are plenty of unreserved carriages’, but as we learnt on our transit from Yokohama to Osaka, those handful of unresreved carriages can end up like sardine tins and this little black duck is not even remotely physically capable of standing for a two our rail journey on a bullet train.

So we turn up this morning bright and early and pop in to the ticket office on the off chance there might be some available seating on the trains to Hiroshima to see that the next half a dozen trains between 0900 and 1100 are fully booked except of course the first in first served, first three unreserved carriages. So off we go and line up to get on one of those. 
Only the trains are coming from Tokyo and are well and truly full by the time we get on, and we end up having to jump on and stand in the aisle thinking we should be able to get a seat when people get off in Kobe, about 10 mins down the track…. but what actually happens is that hardly anyone gets off in Kobe and I end up standing on the bullet train for nearly an hour.  I’m standing there in ever increasing pain thinking over and over, ‘I’m so fucked. I’m so fucked. My back. Argh. Shit. Maybe I should just sit on the damned floor, emergency hazards be damned. Breathe, breathe. I’ll just squat for a bit and that’ll relieve the tension on my lower back. Maybe I should try something in Google Translate and see if I can ask someone to offer me a seat. I’m so fucked. I’m so fucked. Breathe, breathe, breathe…’ and so on and so forth. It’s really hard to advocate for yourself in situations like these when you look like you have nothing wrong with you!

One of my biggest problems, when my pain is arcing right up, is my habit of not breathing… It’s like when you kick your toe and you go ‘Shit!’ and then you take a sharp intake of breath and you kinda hold your breath against the pain…  Yep, like that. But for as long as the pain refuses to abate – and it just does not.  Which leads to lightheadedness, perspiration not associated with ambient temperature, dizziness, and eventually fainting and/or nausea.  So I was getting pretty damn desperate by the time people got off in Okiyama and I finally managed to get a seat.  We had a big day ahead and I was feeling totally screwed by the time we got there  🙁

We eventually arrived at our destination.  While Mr K went to the ticket office to try and book us some seats on a train for the return trip in an attempt to avoid this same drama re-occurring on the way, I wandered outside and saw these beautiful and very western European statues – I have no idea what they were celebrating/commemorating, as the plaques nearby were not in English and the Googles have failed me.  Still rather lovely, and Mr K had some moderate success and managed to secure a single seat on the 1722 train back to Osaka in a reserved carriage which immediately removed a huge pile of impending stress!

Our first stop was to Hiroshima Castle…

Originally built on a low lying delta, Hiroshima Castle, was the home of Mōri Terumoto, the daimyō (feudal lord) of Hiroshima region. The castle was constructed in the 1590s, but was destroyed by the atomic bombing that occurred on August 6, 1945. The castel was rebuilt in the 1950s with a complete replica of the original, which now houses a museum of Hiroshima’s history prior to WWII.

Being a low lying area, the moats were not as steep or as impressive as the Osaka castle defences… originally the castle had a three concentric moats, the outer of which had a much higher in water level – it was built such that they could destroy the very outer moat wall easily and flood any enemy camp that might be holding the castle under siege.  Now the two outer moat areas have been filled in and overtaken with urban developments.
The Castle houses an extensive collection of pre-Reformation era displays – swords, armour, household objects and historical items, however, photography is prohibited and there is no English guidebooks, so I can not share most of what we saw inside. Some reconstructed rooms as they would have been in the late 1500s when the Mōri family ruled the castle. The views from the top of the castle are quite impressive – you can imagine how the advantage gained as the countryside was largely flat.

On the Castel grounds is the Hiroshima Gokoku Jinja is a Japanese Shinto Shrine.  Today is a special day – the Emperor of Japan is abdicating in favour of his eldest son and with his abdication begins a new era, and the people are out in a celebratory mood and paying their respects at the various temples located around Japan.

There was an inordinately long line to visit the temple, people were paying their respects or paying homage to crying babies or something? I couldn’t quite figure it out. There seemed to be a lot of grandparents about holding small children who were uncharacteristically for Japanese children… crying very loudly!

The queue to spend 30 seconds or some at the temple was inordinately long. Then I saw this sign and realised it was actually something to do with crying babies… but it didn’t make a whole lot more sense. Eventually I found some information in English that read:

“Crying Sumo – The rule of it is the baby win who cry first.
Baby is a treasure for them family, local and country.  As the proverb goes say “A crying baby usually prospers”.  According to medical science, crying is important efficacious for baby.  It develops them cardiopulmonary function, they grow up in good health.  Tradition says that baby’s energetic crying voice lay a ghost since ancient times, baby’s crying voice exorcise evil spirits and incur good luck.  It’s the religious services what exorcising evil spirits and incur good luck for baby’s healthy growing by divine protection.”

So now, I’m thinking all those parents and grandparents were going around pinching these babies to make them cry!

Nearby was the Carp Temple which wasn’t as busy as the main shrine.
Here is where you can find the famous statue of a Carp Swimming up a Waterfall. Hiroshima castle is also often called Carp Castle.  The statue symbolises the following types of good luck:
Success with a difficult challenge
Achieving a goal
Good luck and success in business.

These two Carp Swimming Up in Harmony symbolise these kinds of good luck:
Family well being
Happy marriage
Fulfilment in love

So you should ‘please make a wish and touch this statue’.  All of which seems a bit whimsical and nonsensical but far more benign compared to other world religions. Votive plaques where visitors have written out their wishes for the future after visiting the shrine. Close by is one of four known ‘atomic trees’, this one a pussy willow that survived the atomic blast in 1945.  It is located 740m from the epicentre of the blast.  It is quite remarkable that any trees remained given the buildings were completely flattened. The castle complex directly after the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6th, 1945… image (in a rather circuitous route) via the United States National Archives via japanairraids.org
The outer keeps.
After we left the Castle complex we stopped momentarily at the Hiroshima Museum of Art, and were contemplating going in, but it turns out this museum was full of European artworks, so we merely stopped for a cup of Elderflower soda and some sake cake before moving on.

The Orizuru tower.  Which is dedicated to those who lost their lives in WWII. Outwardly it is quite a spectacular building – this lovely crane design houses a growing art installation… visitors can go up to the top floor (for a fee) and create or buy a paper crane and drop it into the glass void so that it floats down and joins the thousands of other cranes left by other visitors.  Located directly across the road from the Hiroshima Peace Dome it, unfortunately, feels more like a tourist trap than a monument or place of dedication to the horrific loss of human life that occurred here.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial was originally the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, and now commonly is more commonly known as the Genbaku Dome or the Atomic Bomb Dome.  It is part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. The ruin of the hall is a standing reminder to visitors of the people who were killed here in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima which precipitated the end of WWII. Over 70,000 people are reported to have been killed immediately and an another estimated 70,000 suffered fatal injuries from the radiation fallout.
This small monument beside an ordinary apartment building marks the epicentre of the blast.  The bomb was detonated 600m above the ground and the ensuing blast saw temperatures of 3000-4000C at ground level. The Hiroshima bombing on 6th August 1945 which killed 70,000 did not see Japan immediately surrender their position in the war, causing the US forces to drop more atomic bombs in Nagasaki (where the Mitsubishi shipbuilding yards were located) on 9th August 1945 which killed up to an estimated 246,000 people, at which point Japan capitulated.
Two aerial photos of atomic bomb mushroom clouds, over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) in 1945.

Further into the Peace Park is the Children’s Monument for peace. It was built to commemorate a little girl named Sadako Sasaki and the thousands of unknown child victims of the atomic bombing. Sadako Sasaki, was a young girl who was exposed to radiation at the time of the atomic bomb at age 2, and died from leukaemia at age 12.
Children from all over Japan engage in making origami peace cranes and sending them to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  It is a mission/endeavour designed to remind people of the necessity for peace and to commemorate the loss of life in WWII. Further down into the Peace Park is an eternal flame… not very visible in this image.

The long mall leads onto the Hiroshima Atomic Bombing museum – unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the main buildings that house the museum displays are closed and undergoing earthquake preparedness reconstruction, so the many visitors that were in the park today were lined up to see half the collection and the line stretched for night on half a kilometer.  We decided we would very likely be coming back to Hiroshima one day and would like to see the collection in full.

There is obviously much, much more to the history of Hiroshima and the devastation this city experienced.  I think we all have an obligation to know and understand how these things impacted on their contemporary populations – if for no other reason than to stop the incessant posing for smiling selfies in these solemn places of commemoration.  I have seen it at Gallipoli, the Jewish memorial in Berlin and even at Auschwitz… people are ignorant, and I don’t understand how they can repeatedly pose, fixing their hair or makeup, with their best pouty winky faces, at a site where 70,000 people were killed in an atrocious act of war.  :'(

It was nearly 1600 now and we only just realised we hadn’t had anything to eat since 0700, so we head back to Shin-Hiroshima and went looking for something to eat.  One thing we noticed almost as soon as we got to Hiroshima was that okonomiyaki was king here!  There were more okonomiyaki restaurants than you could possibly count.  Some of which were mysteriously empty…?  And some of which had queues out the door.  We chose one with a short queue, but which had a substantial queue by the time we left.
Shrimp and calamari Hiroshima style (soba noodles added) okonomiyaki.  Very tasty and very filling.  I couldn’t finish it, which no doubt pleased Mr K enormously. While waiting in line at the 7/11 to buy some sake for the train ride, I saw this… Jump onto xe.com and check out the exchange rate, and weep a little.  These are shitty convenience store at the train station prices too!  We pay so much tax on alcohol in Australia. Also at the shopping centre near the train station – Hokkaido style cheese tarts with a local hint of Hiroshima lemony goodness!  A special treat that I felt was well deserved after standing on the train this morning and walking over 12.5kms today on hard concrete pathways.
Then it was back onto the Shinkansen to head back to Osaka.  We needed have worried about reserving me a seat, as it happens the trains heading back the other way were all largely empty, but I was eternally grateful that I had been carrying the knowledge around all day that I would not be tortured for hours by being forced to stand on the train ride back to Osaka.

When we got back to Osaka we went looking for the Hanshin Tigers merchandise store so Mr K could find himself a baseball cap from one of Japan’s premier baseball teams, and I found myself walking through a wine tasting wonderland.  There were hundreds of people in here with so much wine from all over the world to try.  People were working hard to shove wine at us, and I was so disappointed that there was not a single bottle of sake in sight!

A couple of the vendors were asking me if I wanted to try any wines, but they rapidly gave up after hearing I was Australian… I have a feeling the event was designed for promotion, education and sales of international wines, and they probably assumed that flogging wine to travelling Australians might be a waste of time and effort. We eventually got back to our Hotel Samurai at about 9pm…?  Ever such a long day and I was in soooo much pain.  Thank you past me for the suite I booked came that complete with hot tub!  So far, each evening has ended in a soak with sake.  Tomorrow is another day – and likely one that won’t have an early start!

Wolfsschanze – Hitler’s Bunker

Today we were leaving Riga and doing a very Australian road trip in Eastern Europe… that is to say, we were covering about 750kms. Which is not so unusual if you’re in Australia, but is like, long-haul-trucker-crossing-at-least-three-countries, distance if you’re in Europe.  We left Riga around 06:30 and it was pitch black and freezing cold and the streets were eerily quiet.

When the sun finally rise the landscape was beautiful.  Getting off the highway is both a blessing and a curse though. The scenery dramatically improves in what appears to be a direct correlation with how drastically the road conditions deteriorate.  Can’t have beautiful scenery and good roads it seems.  🙂  My high-speed landscape photography hasn’t improved any – but I do insist on doing it!

I think I blinked and missed the Latvia border… Oh, well. Goodbye Lithuania and welcome to Poland! Here, have a disused border building, some indecipherable signage and an immediately discernible downgrade in road quality.   Thankfully, we got to keep the pretty landscapes.

To break up our trip we had decided we would stop just after midday at the Wolf’s Lair. In German known as the ‘Wolfsschanze’.  Basically, this was Hitler’s primary military headquarters on the Eastern Front for nearly three years of World War II.

The drive into the complex is skirted by dense forest, far from major roads and urban areas. Much of the forest surrounding the compound was heavily peppered in landmines during the war, as a defence against ground attacks.  Would have been so pretty and yet so dangerous…Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair complex is enormous – at roughly 6.5 kmit was built by June 1941 to house the nearly 2,000 people who would come to live and work in the compound.  Among the workers were twenty women who were Hitler’s official food tasters, like Margot Wölk. Margot was from a German family, born and raised in Berlin, married a man named Karl who was in the Germany army and she didn’t know if he was dead or alive. She ended up fleeing to Eastern Prussia when their home in Berlin was bombed and basically had no one to look out for her and found herself rounded up by the local mayor for duty as a food taster to Adolf Hitler?! Her story is remarkable if you read a bit further into it.  Hitler’s intelligence sources were informing him that the British were planning an assassination attempt by food poisoning which fed Hitler’s perfectly just fear that people were trying to assassinate him, hence the food tasting team.

(Wilczy Szaniec – Polish for Wolf’s Lair) RSD Command Centre – Reichssicherheitsdienst, a Nazi SS security command post that was responsible for all aspects of security for the complex.
Security was arranged in three concentric circles around the compound:

Security Zone 3 is the first zone encountered when entering the complex. It was the heavily fortified outer security zone which surrounded the two inner areas. It was defended by landmines I already mentioned and by the Führer Begleit Brigade (FBB), a special armoured security unit from Wehrmacht which was used to man multiple guard houses, watchtowers, and entry and exit checkpoints at the three entrance points.

Security Zone 2 was the next concentric circle in from the outer zone.  It housed many lesser Reich Ministers such as Fritz Todt, Albert Speer, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. This zone also had quarters for the various other personnel that lived and worked in the Wolf’s Lair, as well as barracks and amenities for the officers of the RSD.

Security Zone 1 was the inner circle or ‘heart’ of the Wolf’s Lair.  It was encircled by steel fencing and guarded by the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSD) SS specialists. Inside this zone was Hitler’s Bunker and ten other camouflaged bunkers. Each bunker was constructed from steel-reinforced concrete that was over 2m thick.  The bunkers in this area were for Hitler’s inner circle – including such infamous bastards as Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann,  Wilhelm Keitel, and others.   Nearly all the bunkers seem to have basement air raid shelters or armament storage underneath them. Inside the bunkers were a maze of corridors, conference rooms, workspaces and shelters.
The Wolf’s Lair has several monuments and memorials that have been created to commemorate the people who were associated with this place in WWII, particularly those who did the difficult work of destroying it and making the surrounding areas safe from landmines. Bunker 6 held a conference room that was the site of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt that was organized by a group of civilians, in cohorts with some acting and retired Wehrmacht officers whose goal was to kill Hitler, end the war, and establish a new Germany government. Staff officer Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was the primary assassin and he carried a briefcase into what was a daily conference meeting. He was supposed to place it a few feet from where Hitler would hold his meeting, but unfortunately, on the day the attempt was to be made, the meeting location was changed to a different building due to refurbishment happening in the Führer’s Bunker *and* it was rescheduled to be earlier than usual – so the attempt was unsuccessful.  The bomb went off as timed, and the interior of the Bunker 6 was destroyed, four people were killed, but Hitler sustained only slight injuries.

Before the bomb detonated, Colonel Stauffenberg and his co-conspirator, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, had already left Wolf’s Lair to return to Berlin.  They managed to pass through several of the security zones and after only a short delay at the RSD guard post just outside Zone 1, they were allowed to leave the site by car.  News arrived in Berlin fairly quickly of the assassination attempt, and of Hitler’s survival.  Poor Colonel Von Stauffenberg, his Lieutenant, and several co-conspirators were arrested and shot that same evening outside the Bendlerblock in Berlin.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring surveying the conference room that was destroyed by the suitcase bomb left by Claus von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944

It struck me at Auschwitz-Birkenau and now again at Wolfsschanze just the sheer size and scope of the military industrial complex that was deployed by the Germans during World War II.  It has been as eye-opening as the first time I went to Gallipoli – I had learned about the ANZACS and the Gallipoli military disaster during my formal education and had continued to study and gain knowledge o this topic throughout my entire life. But until I found myself looking down on ANZAC Cove and looking at the topography that the ANZAC diggers were attempting to overcome, the enormity and impossibility of it all did not really become a tangible and concrete concept in my mind.
Likewise, having grown up in the ’70s and having been taught WWII history and continuing to learn more and more about the Holocaust over the years – the displacement and deportation of millions of people throughout Europe, the slave labour and abuses of the concentration camps, and of course the details of the truly horrific attempt to completely exterminate the European Jewish population in death camps – these things too have been academic concepts in my mind without concrete frame of reference to anchor them to.

Now… having seen the enormity and scale of the just a portion of German military operation during WWII (and this has literally just been a small peek at what the Nazis had put in place), it has completely eclipsed my expectations and I am finding it difficult to verbalise just how monstrously immense the scale of their endeavour was, and the ruthless efficiency with which they appear to have attempted to deploy it.   It’s… shocking. Truly shocking.  I don’t know how something I have known about my entire life can be shocking.  But it is.   Bunker 8 was a Guest Bunker and Air Raid Shelter. This enormous slab of concrete weighing who knows how many tonnes, looks like it is precariously balanced on just a few decaying bricks… It’s not difficult to find a sombre beauty in the decay at Pripyat. Likewise, it is not difficult to find incredible textures, decaying walls and moss-covered walls at Wolf’s Lair that are similarly beautiful in their own way.

Bunker 11: Headquarters of Johann Rattenhuber, who was the Chief of the SS and head of Hitler’s security department.  Also, fun fact – his headquarters doubled as the Post Office.  The bunkers were split wide open by explosives when the Red Army reached Eastern Prussia during the Baltic Offensive of 1944. Hitler left Wolf’s Lair for the last time on 20 November 1944 as the Soviet armies advanced.  The Red Army took the site without firing a shot two days later, on the 22nd of November.  Shortly after, directives were issued to destroy the complex and the demolition took place some months later in January 1945.  Literally tonnes of explosives were used.  Each bunker requiring approximately 8,000 kg of TNT to blast through the reinforced concrete. Given that most of these buildings have large portions still intact, even that amount of explosive was only enough to partially destroy these enormous reinforced bunkers.

After that, efforts were started to clear each of the Wolf Lair’s security zones of the landmines that had been left behind.  It took over a decade to clear more than 54,000 mines that had been scattered around the complex and in the security zones and wasn’t given the ‘all clear’ until 1955.

Bunker 13 – Hitler’s personal air raid shelter and bunker.

Each day, Hitler would take a walk alone with his dog at 09:00 in the morning before looking at the mail (which came by air or by train). At 12:00 he would have a situation briefing, which was normally held in Wilhelm Keitel’s or Alfred Jodl’s bunkers. These meetings would usually run for about two hours, after which he would have lunch at 14:00 in the dining hall. Witnesses recall that Hitler was a man of routine and habits and he invariably sat in the same chair, always between Alfred Jodl and Otto Dietrich.  Wilhelm Keitel, Martin Bormann, and Hermann Göring’s personal adjutant, General Karl Bodenschatz would sit opposite him.

After lunch, Hitler would work on non-military matters and in the late afternoon, coffee would be served around 17:00 before a second military briefing with Alfred Jodl at 18:00. Dinner each day would start at 19:30 and could last up to two hours (I can’t stop thinking about the twenty women who were ‘kept’ here as his food tasters!), after which they would often watch films in the cinema. Yes, one of these big bunker style buildings was a cinema – I guess they needed somewhere to watch all those Leni Riefenstahl propaganda films (they also had a gambling hall/casino here in one as well).  Hitler would usually retire to his private quarters where he ‘gave monologues’ to his closest acquaintance, including the two female secretaries who travelled with him to the Wolf’s Lair.  Sometimes Hitler and his entourage would listen to gramophone records after dinner – Beethoven, Wagner or other operas – in what sounds like a very civilized and precise way to go about your day… but in among the seemingly orderly lives that these people lived, here, among in these bunkers, decisions were made that effectively signed the death warrants of millions of people across the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe as it was here the ‘Final Solution’ was developed and implemented.

Looking inside what was Bunker 13 from the rear.

Building 12 – Radio and Telex Buildings Bunker 20 – Martin Bormann’s personal air raid shelter for him and his staff. Bormann was Hitler’s personal secretary. Bunker 16 was a building to house generators to provide power for the complex. Hermann Goering’s Bunker:Walking under the ruins of Goering’s destroyed Bunker. It is cold, damp, and there is lots of thick rebar sticking out at all angles.  Over our heads is a massive – just indescribably, massive and heavy – concrete slab over two metres thick.  There are ‘no entrance’ signs everywhere but plenty of evidence that visitors have been walking through these spaces frequently.

The concrete walls were indeed well thicker than 2-5m…  yale for scale. I had read that this place is not so great to visit in the summer – partly because of the crowds (though it apparently only sees 200,000 visitors a year, which is not that many compared to say, the five million plus visitors that see the Sistine Chapel each year), but also because of the foliage.  In summer all the trees are still covered in their leaves, which obscure the size and shapes of the enormous bunkers.  This was quite deliberate, Hitler was paranoid about the likelihood of an air bombing raid so the thick tree cover in the middle of the forest was designed to camouflage the entire complex.  No major air offensive ever occurred here and it could be because the Western Allies were unaware of the Wolf’s Lair location entirely or were just unaware of its strategic importance – they have never disclosed whether they knew about it or not. The Soviet Red Army was certainly unaware of the complex’s location and scale when they discovered it during their advance towards Germany in late 1944.  So anyway, from the leaf litter which is well over 20cm deep everywhere, I can imagine that in summer you would find it hard to make out the size, scale and even proximity of these buildings to each other, in the summertime. Hermann Goering’s House Ventilation shaft. Recreated checkpoint – there were only three entrances to the complex, and each one had a checkpoint at security zone. As we drove away from the Wolf’s Lair and my speed landscape photography attempted and failed to capture the forest, I couldn’t help but think that this area was once full of 54,000 landmines.  Blurred and chaotic seems to work in this instance. The roads became noticeable worse as we were heading through tiny little villages making out way back to the major highways on our way to Gdansk.  We were hurtling along doing an average of 90kmph on some of the shittiest single lane back roads ever – I was literally holding my boobs some of the way, because I didn’t know I was going to need a sports bra to go for a drive in the countryside!  Mind you, the crap conditions of the road doesn’t slow the locals down one bit – they were overtaking us at alarming breakneck speeds. Honestly – we were doing just over 90kmph when this video was taken…

Eventually, we made our way back to the highway and then had to figure out how to get our car into the centre of Gdansk’s predominantly pedestrianised Old Town where our accommodation, the Aparthotel Neptun, is located. It was a little bit tricksy – you can approach the Old Town from many sides by car, but you can’t drive through the middle of it, so if your stupid GPS sends you to the wrong side and then suggests you drive the 100m to your hotel, right through the middle of people taking an evening stroll down the Long Market, you really need to back out and then fight your way around to try and enter from a different direction.  We only got pulled over by Police, once, so we thought we did okay.We checked in (nice hotel, actually) and then went straight back out again to find some dinner, as lunch was a dodgy service station hotdog many hours and several hundred kilometres ago.  We wandered the Long Market and ended up at a restaurant called the ‘Latający Holender’ where we were met with some of the best food, but worst customer service in Poland… which is saying something really because between here, Krakow, and Warsaw, I don’t think we have met any hospitality or retail staff who were in any way welcoming, hospitable or even a little bit friendly.  It’s kinda to be expected I guess – end of the tourist season, god knows I’d be over the bloody tourists too… but take heed waitpeople – winter is coming, and then we will see who is missing the tourists, their foreign currencies and their tipping habits!

What was I saying?  Dinner.  Right. It was quite good actually and dining out now we are back in Poland, is cheap, cheap, cheap!  I rarely used to photograph food for my blog, but then I found myself saying, ‘What was that thing we tried in Buenos Aires at that restaurant after we went to the place…?’  So now I am making more of an effort – so I can hunt down recipes back home for things we liked too.

After a bit of pfaffing around with tables, ‘Sit wherever you like’… we then take a seat and then it felt like the server was rolling his eyes at us and a ‘Why are they sitting there?’ type attitude ensued..?!  We then waited for nearly ten minutes for menus … about halfway through what seemed an interminably long wait for a menu I said, ‘I think they are hoping we will give up and leave, but they have underestimated my current mood!’  We then waited again for ages to get drinks… part of this sense of waiting stemmed from watching the servers all gathering not far from our table and seemingly hanging out and chatting with each other instead of filling drink orders and seating customers, etc?!  I dunno, the disdain was coming off them in waves – but hopefully not just in our direction.  😛

I ordered for an appetiser – Tiger prawns cooked in butter, onion, chili, fresh parsley, white wine and served with garlic bread… it was pretty fabulous.and yale ordered the Goulash soup – which was rather more watery and somewhat oilier than he had hoped. So that one was a bit hit and miss.For a main, I ordered the Grilled salmon with roasted potatoes, green asparagus, butter sauce and caviar.  Again, lovely though I usually prefer my salmon slightly more medium.
And yale seemed to commit some sort of unwritten ordering faux pas by having the audacity to order two dishes (he’s a big guy, he gets hungry), of Meat Dumplings, stuffed with beef and pork meat, smoked bacon, onion, arugula, and tomatoes.  And a main dish called, Desk of Polish Sausage, comprising of a selection of Polish sausage served with bread, pickled cucumber, mustard and horseradish. Well didn’t the little man have a ‘Two dinners? How could you? Wait, how will I serve them?’ moment over that.  Like I said, weird service.  Great food. A few happy ciders later and we didn’t much care either way for the server’s attitude anyway.  Dinner was nice, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you like being treated like an inconvenience by the staff.  😛

What a long, long day.  Tomorrow – Gdansk!

Stockholm History Museum, Archipelago tour and the Vasa Musuem

Today was huge! First the Historiska Museet, followed by a jaunt around the Gamla Stan, then an Archipelago Tour and then the Thredbo Conference dinner at the Vasa Museet.  I took so many photos in these places that I have decided to split it up into three posts or I will have to skip over things that I’d like to be able to store and remember.

I started off the day at the Historiska Museet to discover some beautiful Viking age and Medieval artefacts.  The collection is seriously impressive – and I took so many photos (over 250) that I had to create an entirely separate post of these items for my medieval re-enactor friends.  So many artefacts with so much information!  A lot of the Iron Age information was accessible (ie: in English), because Vikings are so popular these days – but unfortunately a lot of the pre-Viking era artefacts were in galleries that only had information in Swedish.  I will do my best to include as much of the English information that I was able to glean on the items in the more comprehensive post, but for here I have inserted just a small selection of cool pics.

The museum itself was founded in 1866 and is a government run agency that covers Swedish archaeology and cultural history from the Mesolithic period to the modern era – thankfully not a lot of that modern era bit. The collections were started based on objects collected by various Swedish monarchs from the late 1800s and have grown from there.

Wealthy farmers and aristocrats alike, had rune stones and petroglyphs (picture stones) made, usually to commemorate dead relatives.  They were made by specialist stone cutters and were painted in strong colours.  Most of the rune stones at this museum have come from Gotland. Brooches and pendants galore! Viking era swords with magnificent pommels (more detailed pictures will be included in the other post).Grave finds from a Birka Princess – brooches, and beads, coat clasp. The Gold Room – a chamber under the museum that houses over 3000 gold and silver artefacts. In the courtyard during the summer, re-enactors set up tents, cook, do blacksmithing, weave, and display the Viking lifestyle.

After the Historiska Museet, I was meeting Mr K at the Gamla Stan for a bit of a walking tour.  We ended up doing our own walking tour of the area and wound through the cobbled medieval streets marvelling at the old buildings, as they have been repurposed to be tourist central – lots of cafes, restaurants and souvenir shops selling all things Swedish… well, at the very least, a lot of things made in China that have ‘Sweden’ written all over them!  😉

St George slaying the Dragon statue is a popular trope
Gamla stan is the old town of Stockholm it consists primarily of the island of Stadsholmen. This area of the town dates back to the 13thC and is largely winding medieval alleyways, rough cobbled streets (that I have no idea how ladies in high heels navigate safely), and archaic architecture. The North German style of architecture is very prevalent here and is evident in all the Gamla stan’s construction. With the exception of the square I imagine, that many of these streets rarely see sunlight in winter. This space is the Stortorget which is the large public square in the centre of Gamla Stan.  Surrounding it are rows of old merchants’ houses, including the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building (which now houses the Nobel Museum that I went to the other day). The square was the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath in Nov 1520, where Swedish aristocrats and nobility were massacred by the Danish King, Christian II. The subsequent revolt and civil war led to the dissolution of the Kalmar Union and soon followed the election of King Gustav I – well worth reading up on if you are interested in medieval history. Love the picturesque cobbled streets. Below… ‘authentic’ Swedish souvenirs.  😉  This is a little cafe down a quiet side street, where we stopped for a quick bite to eat. On our way out of the Gamla Stan, we stumbled over a boiled sweets store.  I always love watching the sugar workers make these.  The shop has an aroma that entices you in from half way up the street, and contains wall to wall candy to take home.

After we left the Gamla stan we had to hightail it by the subway to the Nybrogaten harbour to re-join the conference delegates to do a tour of the Stockholm Archipelago.  As soon as we alighted the canal boat, we were welcomed to the Baltic Sea.  Which very probably means very little, but sounded very cool to someone who lives closest to the Coral and Tasman Seas. 🙂  This fortification marked the old entrance to the city of Stockholm, the flag that flies over the tower is raised in times of peace and has been raised every day for the last 203 years. 

Formerly called the ‘Dunboyne’ (1888–1915) and then, the ‘G.D Kennedy’ (1915-23), but now the ‘af Chapman’, is a full-rigged steel ship that moored on the shore of the small island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm.  It was a military ship, a training ship, a barracks ship – and now it serves as a floating youth hostel.   The oldest Clock Tower in the Gamla Stan beside the Royal Palace as seen from the canal. Wealthy merchants and nobles fought for land to build their homes along the canal front as premiere real estate as early as the 1500s. Many Swedes (like Norwegians) take the annual holidays in July.  They tend not to travel far from home and like to go to their family holiday homes in the archipelagos.  One in six Stockholmers owns a boat primarily for use during the summer – all of which are lifted out of the water at the end of August for the coming winter. These beautiful oxblood coloured buildings are very typical of this area, and the home range from mansion sized to cosy cottages. The large naval base located near the entrance to Stockholm’s CBD. The Tivoli fun park… that is one of those chair swing things, about 100′ off the ground.  Not sure how fond I’d be of that plan!   The Vasa Museet, where we are headed for our conference dinner tonight.  The Museum was built to cleverly show the size of the ship – when it sank, it went down in only 33m of water, leaving the main masts still present marking the spot.  At the time, the shipbuilders fairly swiftly cut the masts for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was it sank in a busy waterway and they were a hazard, but also to remove the visual symbol of this huge seafaring failure.  The museum designers Marianne Dahlbäck and Göran Månsson incorporated this fact into their architectural design showing on the outside of the museum just how much of the masts would have been visible after the Vasa sank.

After our canal tour, we went back to our hotel to get cleaned up for the Conference dinner back at the Vasa.  I have made two trips to the Vasa now and learned so much about the ship, that it too will be in a separate post so as not to clutter this day with a million photos.

The Vasa Museet is an amazing facility to have a dinner – I was sitting looking towards the ship throughout the function and could not believe I was 1) sipping champagne staring at a 300-year-old ship that had sunk, been excavated, resurrected, restored and placed in this amazing museum… and 2) doing so while surrounded by people who wanted to talk about transport policy, disruptive technologies in the transport sector, demand responsive transport, bus contracts and taxi innovation.  DO THEY NOT SEE THE ENORMOUSLY IMPRESSIVE WARSHIP LOOMING OVER THEM?   😀  Sigh… I guess not everyone is as interested in history as I am.  

I have included some photos of the ship here – but will add a whole pile of history and detail in a future post.   The impressa of the Vasa family… Our tables for the reception. The function went over very well.  Speeches were made, organizers were thanked, the next Thredbo was announced to be in Singapore in two years time.  Overall, it was an amazing evening, and future conference organizers will be hard pressed to top it.