Brienz, Switzerland, August 2018 - Before and after the 2005 disaster, and Al Gore's views

Some years ago I was privileged to attend one of Al Gore’s ‘presentations’ of his film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.  It was a great occasion.  He started with a number of sharp jokes about his failure to become US President in the year of the ‘hanging chad’ election, but then went on to outline his powerful case about climate change with the aid of a multimedia extravaganza with pictures, graphics, video, sound and everything that modern technology could offer at the time. (The film was made in 2006 before virtual and augmented reality came into use).  Part way through the film I was amazed to see footage of a devastating flood in a Swiss village that I know well – Brienz – which had clearly not been reported in the UK press.

I am in Brienz now, on holiday, and today is the 13^th anniversary of that event on 22 August 2005.  On that day a massive rainfall event in the Bernese Oberland created huge surges of water laden with rocks and tree trunks on the two mountain streams that disgorge into Lake Brienz via the village – the Trachtbach and the Glyssibach.  Houses were destroyed, two people were drowned, and the main streets of the village were rendered impassable because of mud.  The volume of water flowing down the streams emptying into Lake Brienz  resulted in the lake level rising; and with high winds whipping up waves, the lake-front promenade was destroyed.  At the other end of the lake Interlaken Ost station – one the major rail interchanges of Switzerland – was flooded up to platform level.

I was briefly in Brienz in the late summer of 2006, by which time the reconstruction of the promenade along the lake was well under way, but I was unaware of why there had been a need for such work.  I was here again in 2015.  But it has been on my current visit that I have been most impressed by the Swiss engineering response to the 2005 events.  The main road bridge over the Trachtbach used to lie low over the stream, and it was the restricted flow under this bridge that caused it to act as a dam with water, rocks and tree trunks flowing over it and into the houses and roads on either side.  The replacement bridge is an ingenious affair sitting on concrete pillars that project 20 metres lake-wards: if a torrent threatens then the whole bridge can be shifted sideways towards the lake, opening up a larger void underneath.  At the same time a 2 metre high concrete barrier has been built on both sides of the Trachtbach gulley to channel the flow. Other major works have been carried out at the bridge crossing the Glyssibach, including similar 2-metre walls, but here a large holding reservoir has also been created upstream to manage the flow.  Properties damaged or destroyed in the 2005 flood have been reconstructed: the Steinbock hotel next to the Trachtbach bridge displays both its original construction date of 1787 and a prominent message celebrating its reconstruction in 2006 ‘after the storm of 22 August 2005’ (my translation).

Concrete 'slider' for the Trachtbach bridge

The Steinbock hotel, rebuilt after the 2005 flood

I first visited Brienz in 1986 and I have come back many times since, staying in at least three of the village’s hotels and also renting chalets.  It is not one of Switzerland’s most renowned holiday destinations but I like it more than any other.  With a population of around 3000, it is not entirely dependent on tourism: it is also the centre of the Swiss wood-carving industry, with a major training school and a number of craftsmen producing the most intricate, and expensive, carvings imaginable of everything from Christmas cribs to traditional chalets, local animals to avant garde abstracts.  In 2016 I told a Maori craftsman in Rotorua in New Zealand that I knew the main village in Switzerland for woodcarving and without hearing more he held up his tools and said ‘We get these from Brienz’.  The village is twinned with the main woodcarving centre in Bulgaria.  Several shops along Brienz’s village street are dedicated to local wooden products. 

But the biggest of these was severely damaged in the 2005 flood, losing all its stock.  I talked yesterday to the woman who now runs the coffee bar that serves the small museum and showroom that has replaced it, with a bank now taking up the largest part of the original building.  She said that after the flood the carvers who had worked in the premises set up workshops in their own homes.  And during the period when the village was recovering the coaches that used to call for tourists to buy carvings and souvenirs stopped coming.  (I suspect that the opening of a new fast road on the other side of the lake may also have contributed to the change in coach routings).  To my respondent, the village now felt a very different place. And I noticed that a couple of erstwhile souvenir shops on the other side of the road are now closed.  It could be argued that the severe storm of 2005 continues to have a negative effect on Brienz.

So why do I still like the village so much?  Well, it has almost the same accessibility to great local scenic attractions as Interlaken at the other end of the lake, but is still a village rather than a major urban place. It is the meeting point for lake steamers, the railway from Interlaken to Luzern, buses to various outlying villages and the Swiss Open-Air Museum (consisting of historic farmhouses moved here from all over the country), and the old steam-powered rack railway up the Brienzer Rothorn.  There is a free ‘animal park’, created in the late nineteenth century to provide live models for the woodcarvers to work from.  And there are footpaths in the fields above the village as well as a reconstructed lakeshore promenade bedecked with wood-carvings and children’s amusements.   The tourist clientele has changed somewhat since I first came. Fifteen or so years ago the Hotel Bären in the centre of the village was rebranded as an ‘Ayuvedra’ centre offering Indian therapies and treatments, and it now also has a ‘Ganesha’ shop selling Indian goods.  When I first came to this area in the 1980s I was surprised to see how prevalent Japanese visitors were in some parts of the Bernese Oberland, particularly in Grindelwald where many menus had been translated into their language.  More recently (in May 2015) I blogged about Indian visitors in the area, and they have certainly been encouraged by developments such as those at the Hotel Bären.  So change in Brienz has partly come about through globalising trends in tourist markets and not just through the 2005 disaster.

The village of Brienz from the train to the Brienzer Rothorn

The evidence of climatic change is incontrovertible.  But I’m not sure that Al Gore’s use of the Brienz flood of 2005 as an example is justified as showing something entirely new.  This alpine area is one that has always experienced extreme events and continues to do so.  On 26 December 1999 storm ‘Lothar’ brought down vast numbers of trees in the region - particularly on the slopes above Wilderswil.  In July of the same year a flash flood in the Saxeten Gorge south of Interlaken swept away  and drowned 21 young holidaymakers who had been canyoning there.  But these are not new and unique disasters.  Today, on the wall of the Weisses Kreuz hotel in Brienz, I came across an old plaque commemorating the disaster caused by a previous flooding of the Trachtbach stream – in 1870.  

Vienna, Austria, August 2018 - From backwater to world city

I first came to Vienna in September 1984 as part of a conference that had started in Munich and moved on to the Austrian capital for a second set of papers.  In those Cold War days Austria was still neutral, its independence from international alliances still guaranteed by the four post-war occupying powers – the USSR, the United States, France and the United Kingdom – despite the fact that the Russians had unexpectedly pulled out of the country in 1955 and allowed it to be reunited as a single and independent state. West Germany was, of course, a crucial bastion for the ‘Free World’ against the ‘Communist East’.  To the 25 or so conference participants in Munich were added a further 15 when we got to Vienna – academics from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and so on who were not allowed by their governments to travel to West Germany but for whom Austria was an acceptable academic destination.

Vienna in 1984 was a very strange city.  Its population within the city boundaries was 1.5 millions at the time of the 1981 census, and 2 millions lived within the wider Viennese urban region.  Austria as a whole counted 7.6 million inhabitants, so over a quarter of its population lived in the capital city region.  And that 2 million total had remained static since 1951.  In the other city region of our conference – Munich – the population had more than doubled between 1951 and 1981 from 1.1 millions to 2.3 millions. One of the reasons I was invited to the conference was to translate into English a chapter written by the two organisers, comparing the two cities.

Vienna was a city cut off from its hinterland.  This had been partly so since the dismemberment of the Austro- Hungarian Empire after the First World War.  But isolation was hugely enhanced with the creation of the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in the later 1940s which meant that the eastern regions of Austria formed a bulge of 180 miles into the Iron Curtain.  Vienna lay 25 miles from the edge of Czechoslovakia and 35 miles from Hungary.  Borders were fortified and defended from the eastern side.  The only land routes into Vienna were via the rest of Austria lying well to the west of the city.

In 1984 the city seemed almost dead after dark.  One night several of us from the conference went out to a heuriger wine house in a village on the outskirts and had to get a taxi back because public transport ceased at 11. On Kärtnerstraße, in some ways the main street of the city, there was only one café open after 9.  Tourists were few in number.  Vienna was a city that had little of the animation of a capital – although its cultural symbols such as the Opera House were being kept going with major state subsidies.  The big popular music hit in Austria that summer was a song attacking Vienna and praising life in the Austrian countryside.

My next visits to Vienna were in 1992 and 1994 – the first for a conference and the second as part of a family holiday.  The city had already been transformed.  Czechoslovakians (this was before the ‘Velvet Divorce’), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and even Russians made up large numbers at the 1992 conference on mass migration in the ‘New Europe’ (as it was then being called).  The Iron Curtain had gone, to be replaced by much freer movement.  Vienna had regained its role as a capital – perhaps the capital – of Central Europe.  The official language of that 1992 conference was supposed to be English – the unifying language for this new world. But I wondered for a while whether we would actually see German supplant English as the new lingua franca: many more of our new colleagues from the former Communist world spoke German at that time than spoke English.  However, that moment passed as schools in the East took up English teaching as the first foreign language.

By 1994 Vienna was back on the tourist map of Europe.  Cafés and bars were open until late; the wide street bearing the name ‘Graben’ was lined with restaurants and tourist shops; Café Central, the premier old-style coffee-house of the city, was being frequented by tourists (although not without disapproving looks from long-standing customers). I particularly recall large groups of Italian visitors, noisily following their guides, who seemed to dominate the new arrivals.

Twenty-four years passed before my current visit to Vienna. Again this has primarily been for work – to meet a colleague to discuss a book proposal.  The population of the urban region has grown once more – to 2.6 millions – after that long period of stagnation.  This actually now amounts to 30 per cent of Austria’s population – but the old feeling that here was a head that was too big for its body has gone.  Vienna is now in some ways back at the centre of its old world – of the cities of Central and Eastern Europe only Warsaw is bigger.  But Vienna has extended its reach much more: it is now a world city (with its United Nations functions and those of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries: OPEC), and it is a world tourist destination.

I have heard languages from all parts of the globe here, and many I can’t place.  Chinese tourists seem to have become the dominant groups – often looking with interest at my colleague who, I joke, seems to be the only Chinese person travelling independently. But there are also many groups of women from the Middle East dressed in chadors or at the least with hijabs.  Café Central has a long queue of what would previously have been seen as inappropriately-dressed tourists waiting outside on a Sunday afternoon.  Kärnterstraße is thronged with people at all hours of day and night.  Much of the area inside the Ringstraße is now given over to a combination of high status retail and everyday tourism.  The museums and palaces are thronged with people, with queuing systems set up.  There seem to be many more horse-drawn vehicles (Fiaker) for sightseeing excursions than twenty years ago, and the smell of horses permeates the streets around the Hofburg.

But beyond the Ringstraße, out towards Heiligenstadt to the north, or in the Landstraße district to the south-east (except around the Hundertwasserhaus which has become a major attraction) the side streets still seem as sleepy as they did in 1984.  Ordinary Vienna is still there: it has just been overlaid with world city functions once again.

On Saturday my colleague and I took a crowded train for the hour’s journey to Bratislava – another city that has been transformed, this time into a capital city.  Like Vienna, the town centre was busy with tourists and leisure activities.  Our train crossed the Morava River, now a site for fishing but once a defended frontier with gun emplacements and barbed wire.  We returned to Vienna from a smaller Bratislava station on the southern side of the Danube – Petržalka – along a line that once constituted the border between Western and Eastern Europe and which was consequently torn up during the period of the Iron Curtain.  Neither my Chinese colleague nor I could have crossed these borders when I first came to Vienna in 1984.  She has benefited from the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping.  We have both also benefited from the end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain in Europe – and so has Vienna.

Whitby, North Yorkshire, May 2018 - From fish to Goths

The following two sentences caught my eye in a recent (18 April 2018) review by James Hall in the Times Literary Supplement:

        

         “We all make our mental maps in which the continents of our own cultural interests expand and contract, surface and sink over the course of our lives. For porcelain lovers, China may loom largest; for film buffs, Hollywood; for mountaineers, the Himalayas; for shoe fetishists, Milan; for whisky drinkers, Scotland; for carpet dealers, Persia; for Goths, Whitby.” [emphasis added by me]

I have known Whitby since I was tiny.  An aunt and her husband lived there with their three sons, my cousins, who were quite close to me in age.  As they grew up they all married local girls and settled in Whitby or nearby.  My uncle had an extended family in the town, and through repeated visits over many summers I knew them well too.  I have been in Whitby in all seasons of the year: at regatta time in the summer when the town pulsed with the rivalry of the two rowing clubs – the Friendship  (of which one of my cousins, to my great pride, was stroke in the winning boat) and the Fisherlads; in September, when the herring boats from every port down the east coast used to moor three deep along the quay; in April, when the seagulls’ cries seem particularly mournful over the quiet streets with the smoke of the coal fires gently descending as the town waits for its first summer visitors; and even between Christmas and 1 January – the dog days of the year when I drove over the moors on a bleak day with a fierce east wind blowing to attend my aunt’s funeral.

My first memories of Whitby are of the prefab bungalow my aunt and her family lived in, having moved back in from Runswick Bay where they had lived during the war as a result of bomb damage in Whitby.  When I was about 6 they moved into a narrow Victorian house close to the garage owned by my uncle and his father.  We spent family holidays there, and later, as a student, I would hitch-hike up from London to sketch or to walk the moors and the cliff paths. Later we brought our own children here, renting a little house on the East Cliff, a few yards from Fortune’s kippering shed where, if my aunt’s name was mentioned, especially large fish were found and sold at the standard price.  I still go back to Whitby from time to time, even though my aunt, uncle and two of my cousins are no longer alive and the third cousin lives ‘out of town’ in Sleights, up river.

What images does Whitby conjure in my mind?  I have already mentioned the herring fleet, and I guess that in the fifties and sixties a significant proportion of the population was dependent, directly or indirectly, on the fishing industry.  That has now dwindled to no more than a dozen boats, several suitable for nothing more than in-shore fishing.  There were a number of garages in and around the town and my uncle, owner of one of them, seemed to make a good existence out of rescuing cars that had failed to get up Lythe Bank or Blue Bank – 1 in 4 hills a little out of town that once caused radiators to boil.  Today that trade has gone – in a modern car I can drive up Lythe Bank in third gear.  A number of those in the extended family worked in shops, but many of these seem now to have become cafés or fish and chip shops (I am always amazed at holidaymakers’ propensities to eat fish and chips at any conceivable time of day – 10 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon, 11 at night).  And today the big supermarkets are there on the edge of town, near the bypass that crosses the Esk Valley on a high bridge and does away with the long queues of traffic there used to be to cross the swing bridge that links the two halves of the town.  Local people now complain about the difficulty of finding anywhere to park in the town because of the throng of visitors in season.

What else does Whitby conjure up to me?  Coach trips arriving from Newcastle, Sunderland and Tees-side; steam trains pulling in to Whitby Town station; me racing round the town with a cousin in regatta week trying to match the number in our programme with a number in a window display and thus win a prize (we never did); donkeys on the beach; the fog horn (known colloquially as the ‘Hawsker Bull’); the 199 steps leading up to the church and the abbey; the bustle of the fish quay in the mornings, with lorries waiting to take the catch away to Tyneside or the West Riding or even further south; the distinctive Whitby accent – a trace of Scandinavian intonation that I later came across when I first went to Denmark; cakes from Botham’s in Skinner Street where a cousin’s wife worked; and the pubs – seemingly dozens of them.  A local resident told me there were more pubs per head in Whitby than anywhere else in England – but I suspect that claim has been made for many places. Oh – and the fashions and taste of the young people: I once came on a geography field trip from London and my fellow sixth formers were amazed that people of our age seemed to be dressed in the styles of five years beforehand, and the juke boxes majored on songs from the same past period. I was used to it from my frequent visits.

But Whitby as a place for Goths?  Never.  It wasn’t until the early 1980s, in my recollection, that Whitby started to recognise and celebrate its role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the place where the creature first arrived from a shipwreck in the harbour, bounding up the 199 steps in the shape of a huge dog.  The Dracula Experience opened on the quayside where previously all the commerce had related to fishing.  Ghost tours were started – with a need to invent ghost stories as well since here, as in most places offering such experiences, there was nothing authentic to offer.  And then progressively, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one caught a glimpse of people dressed completely in black walking through the streets of the town.  I suppose this was the start of the Goth interest. 

Now, twice a year, Whitby hosts a ‘Goth Weekend’ (‘WGW’) – in April and October.  Its history goes back to a first event in 1994.  Whitby was felt to be a place that was accommodating to strange happenings.  And after a little further research, brought on by the quotation from the TLS that I started this blog with, I realise there are intersections between Gothic Whitby and my family.  (Is ‘Gothic’ an appropriate adjective here?  Surely it normally applies to architecture?)  My aunt occasionally helped out in the local pub when there was a rush on – she lived only two doors away and they would send for her.  She never admitted her role to her teetotal mother (my grandmother): she would say she was serving lemonade.  Two of my cousins did oil painting as a hobby – one while he was not on the bridge of the ocean-going ship of which he was the captain.  Some of their paintings hung in the pub where my aunt helped out.  That pub was the Elsinore, where the first Whitby Goth Weekends took place and which is apparently still the centre of the action: my aunt may have served the first revellers – she didn’t die until 1997. My surviving sea-captain cousin is now married to one of the daughters of the landlady of that period.  Just along Silver Street from the pub, the showroom of my uncle’s garage is now ‘The Great Goth’  - a clothing store for the well-dressed Goth (presumably, like Henry Ford’s choice of cars, in any shade as long as it’s black).

Many small fishing ports around the coasts of England have had to reinvent themselves or face decline.  Some have succeeded, others haven’t.  Wikipedia claims that Whitby Goth Weekend contributes £1.1 million to the town’s economy.  I hadn’t previously realised how significant has been Whitby’s reinvention as the capital of ‘Goth-dom’.

Catania, Sicily, Italy, April 2018 - Airport adventures and the real city

I first flew into Catania in early October 1989 en route to speak at a conference of Italian geographers being held in Taormina. There were no direct flights from the UK at the time, so I had flown into Rome and changed onto a very full internal flight down to Sicily. It was dark when we took off from Fiumicino. Soon after reaching cruising altitude the pilot announced, in Italian, that for reasons everyone was aware of we might not be able to land at Catania.  A groan arose from various parts of the plane, but the person sitting next to me had fallen fast asleep so I couldn’t ask him what this was about.  I imagined there might be a strike at Catania Airport.  Thirty minutes later, as we started our descent, the pilot came back on the intercom to say that we would all be delighted to know that we had been cleared for landing.  A general ripple of satisfaction went round the plane, and when we actually landed the round of applause was perhaps louder than usual. (Almost thirty years later, flying into Catania again a couple of nights ago, I was amused to observe that the Italian custom of applauding the return to earth is still in force.)

There was no air bridge to use on that October night in 1989, and crossing the tarmac from the plane to the terminal I quickly realised what the issue had been – Mount Etna was in eruption.  Thin volcanic ash was raining down on us and after even a 100 metre walk in the open air my jacket had a thin film of dust on it.  No doubt the pilot had not wanted to risk the ingestion of large amounts of ash into the plane’s engines if there was a sudden ejection of material from the volcano.

That evening I took the last bus from the airport to Taormina, as the only passenger.  The bus toured the streets of central Catania but no one got on at any appointed stop.  Indeed, there was almost no one on the streets at all. The bars and restaurants we passed were all closed, the grey houses were shuttered, and the whole city seemed turned in on itself, the dark tufa houses, built of volcanic lava, giving the place a ghostly air.  I imagined a reason beyond the volcano for the deserted streets.  I had read a few days earlier that Catania’s current homicide rate that year was running higher than that of Palermo: perhaps that was another cause for people to stay in their houses and apartments.

The bus driver and I eventually left Catania to take the autostrada  north, and the sight on our left was spellbinding, with tongues of glowing lava snaking down the side of Etna towards us. I had never seen anything like it, and still haven’t 30 years later.  Overall my arrival in Catania had been one of the most unusual of my life.

Since that 1989 visit to Sicily I have flown in and out of Catania Airport several times, and seen it expand greatly.  But I once witnessed something else untoward there.

It was during one of the periodic crises when the Italian airline Alitalia was believed to be about to go bankrupt and to lay off its staff.  Dismayed though they might be at their plight, there was no excuse for the lackadaisical attitude they were adopting towards their duties that day in September 2004.  I was flying up from Catania to Milan Malpensa where I would change for a flight to London.  I sat in the terminal near the appointed gate and at the next gate passengers were assembling for a flight to Rome Fiumicino.  The two relevant planes stood on the tarmac in front of us.  Boarding was called for both within a few minutes of each other.  But the two queues of passengers needed to cross each other on the tarmac (again no air bridges were being used) to reach the correct plane – the Rome plane stood directly in front of the Milan gate and vice versa.

The Alitalia staff were expressing little interest in their jobs (actually something I have observed with them over many years – even when their airline has not been in deep financial trouble).  And so it was that as my Milan plane taxied out to the runway and the captain came on the intercom to welcome everyone to the flight to Malpensa, two passengers stood up and shouted that they were going to Rome.  No they weren’t – the Rome plane was ahead of us in the queue to take off.  Clearly the crew had not properly checked the boarding passes of everyone getting on, and nor had they tallied the passenger manifest against the  schedule of those who had checked in.  The Rome-bound passengers were told they would have to fly to Milan where someone would help them get back to Rome: I doubt there was much help or sympathy offered despite the ultimate responsibility of the airline staff for not averting their plight.

In a week’s time I will be flying out of Catania once again.  I shall be very careful to get on the right plane.

But it has been on this visit that I have actually got to know the real Catania, and corrected my dark impressions from 1989.  I have stayed in the city for the first time, rather than using the airport as a staging point to get somewhere else in Sicily.  And I have been very impressed.  Catania is a city of style, of self-confidence, of good humour, and of efficiency.  It lives in Etna’s shadow and a lot of its monumental architecture is baroque in style and dates from the city’s rebuilding after an earthquake of 1693 topping a century that had seen disastrous lava flows a few decades earlier.  The suburban apartment blocks on the outskirts are no better or worse than those of dozens of Italian cities, but the villas and blocks to the north along the coast present a vision of wealth and opulence. But what surprised me most about Catania today is that it has clearly become a tourist destination – not just for Italians but for Germans, French, British and many other nationalities.  However, the gardens of the Villa Bellini still belong to local joggers at 8 in the morning, and the market to the east of the Via Etnea is as Sicilian as one could want – as is the fish market in the centre near the Cathedral.  But look up the length of Via Etnea, which bisects the city, and you see the snow-capped summit of Etna with a wisp of smoke attacehd.  I wonder how many residents or visitors to Catania have the sense that the city still lives on borrowed time: the volcano could strike again at any time, or seismicity associated with it could bring another major earthquake.  As in October 1989, ‘for reasons you are all aware of, we may not be able to land at Catania.’