Walking Along the Southern Vosges in France (Satis Shroff)

(c) Art satisshroff 2009: Eguisheim-excellent Alsatian wines & countryside




A WALK ALONG THE SOUTHERN VOSGES IN FRANCE (Satis Shroff)

Frankenthal-Missleheim is an excellent nature reserve in the South Vosges of France. You can go along the Col de la Schlucht, which is a gorge, via Trois-Fours, past Martinswald to Frankenthal and Holneck, where you can see the formation vegetables des cirques glacieres.

However, the first advice to wanderers and trekkers in the Southern Vosges is: don’t use a car, keep your dog on a leash, camping is strictly forbidden and don’t leave the paths. Mountain bikes, horse riding and cross country skiing allowed only on trails more than two metres wide. There were so many trees lying across the trails and you cannot imagine someone skiing along the Col de la Schlucht without bumping on horizontal tree trunks. Or you’d have to be a stunt skiier. And it is a long and intensive walk along the French countryside.

Let me introduce you Ms. Waldtraut Kapp, an elderly matron (nurse) from Freiburg with a penchant for flowers and herbs. It’s always good to refresh my knowledge of Botany with hers. She’s a self-taught botanist and knows a lot about gardening and botanical specimens from the Black Forest and the Vosges. She has inherited a wonderful house with exotic garden from a lady physician with whom she had worked in the past. Frau Kapp is an old fashioned, tradition-conscious lady, and even though she has only a training as a nurse, she has widened her horizon through reading books, travelling and talking with interesting people. Her knowledge of classical German literature would make a student envious, and yet she remains humble and interested in a lot of things.

Frau Kapp has been to Namibia and written a 2000 word article on the botanical pecularities of that country. It is August and there are blue gentian meadows everywhere in the Vosges. A gentian is called an ‘Enzian’ in German, made popular by the pale, blonde bard with goggles named Heino who makes his appearances during folk festivals, mostly in German TV. The meadows along the trails have Alpine anemones, pfeilchen, fever clover or to give it the Irish name: shamrock and rausch berries. It’s a rhapsody of orchids and blue and yellow daffodils which we call Narzissen in German.

As we walk towards the Martinswand you see some French locals doing rock-climbing. Then comes a moor at the Martinswand. A wand has nothing to do with fairies but is just a wall in the German language.

Along the gorge the scenery is beautiful at an elevation of 1139 metres. There are valleys winding between blue misty hills with the veil rising slowly, revealing the Vosges. We come across a clear blue lake with dark fir trees surrounding it like sentries. Now and again you come across waterfalls cascading into pools which are littered with rocks. A serene and majestic countryside. You discern the fresh smell of forest undergrowth, wet decaying leaves as you walk below the tall trees, and are rewarded in the clearing with a magnificent view of the Vosges and the grass is lime green. You notice at least four biotopes: the high moor as you walk, beech forests and rocky cliffs and crags.

There’s the Lac de Forlet some four kilometres from Soultzeren castle, where the traditional Munster cheese is still made. Munster is only nineteen kilometres from Colmar, which has houses like in the mountains with sturdy walls. You can see the farmers called Marcaire, from the word ‘to milk,’ still manufacturing the genuine Munster farmhouse cheese with their hands. The milk is left for a day and the tasty cream is skimmed off. Fresh milk is added to it and this mixture of old and new milk is heated to 35 degrees Centigrade in a big copper pot. Thereafter, it is removed from the heat and an enzyme is added to curdle the mixture. What remains is the ferment which is decanted into a wooden mould. It is left to solidify in the night. A month later you have relish the mature farmhouse cheese from the damp cellar.

The terrain has become slippery, narrow, stony and full of obstacles: trees lying across, small tunnels and rusty, fixed-iron-ladders. You picnic at 1pm in a French trench on the lee side of a hillock. During the World War II there was heavy bloody fighting in these very trenches. anemones and gentians grown now over the grave s of the fallen German and French soldiers. There’s an uncanny peace and serenity about the trenches as you munch your food. There are green grassy meadows here now with larks chirping incessantly where once the whining of bullets from rifles, shells from artillery and mortar made a killing field out of this lovely terrain. The cries of the birds are broken only by the thunder of the French Mirage-jets doing their sorties over the blue Vosges.

I know my father-in-law telling me that he was a POW in France on his way back from the devastating and traumatic experiences of Stalingrad and had nothing to eat. A kind French lady had cooked pancakes for him and other German stragglers on their way home to Freiburg. Since he didn’t have anything to put the pancakes in, he stuffed them in his army trousers. He speaks highly of the French people even to this day. A good deed in need is something you’ll never forget as long as you live.

You’ve been zig-zagging down the Col de la Schlucht which is a long journey along the scree strewn path. ‘Bon jour!’ say the other trekkers as they come up the steep gorge abreast of you. You do likewise: ‘Bon jour!’ with a tired smile, in case you’re not out of breath. As you trudge on you notice at least eight rock-climbers crawling like Spiderman on a cliff. You are rewarded with a splendid view of the beech and spruce forest till you reach Frankenthal at a height of 1030m from a height of 1330 m along a steep valley.

In a nearby café you relish coffee with rhubarb cake after the arduous journey. Nearby is an old stone house which is reminiscent of an old mill, where a French duo are making cheese. A small French girl with freckles like Astrid Lindgren’s Pipi Lngstockings, her brother and mother are laughing aloud. The girl has a hopelessly bent aluminium spoon in the hand, the king used during the post-World War days, as a side-product of the aviation industry. She shows it to you and shrugs her small shoulders lightly. You notice that it doesn’t take words to communicate something funny to someone: gestures alone suffice. The rhubarb cake is a bit hard at the base and its been fun eating cakes with spoons. In Germany you always get forks for cakes. Nevertheless, you notice that the Fench are very cultivated. Even in a countryside picnic, eating out in the fresh air, the French bring their own chairs, tables, table-cloths and appropriate cutlery.

We meet Mr. Winterhalter, a thick-set German in his late sixties, with a bandaged hand (carpal syndrom), a gardener with love for flowers and admiration for Frau Waldtraut. There seems to be love in the autumn of their or is it late summer? You’re amused for in Germany we say: you never know where love falls, meaning thereby that you literally ‘fall’ in love.

Mr. Winterhalter says: ‘I was in Russia from the age of 18 till 22 and was wounded four times. I was decorated with the German Iron Cross.’

An old warrior, you think.

He goes on to say with a feigned laugh, ‘I’d have rather done my gardening than go to the Front. But we were forced to enlist.’

Frau Waldtraut is planning to bring along pensioned tourists from Freiburg to the Vosges and is trying to plan the excursion. She times the route including where to make a picnic with her usual German thoroughness. We say adieu to her and Mr. Winterhalter as she spreads out map of the Vosges and begins to ponder over the route.

They bid you farewell and say in unison: ‘Aufwiedersehen!’

You’ve enjoyed the walk back and marched at a brisk pace thanks to the good trekking shoes and remember that it had been fun stepping on stones along the way at the same time taking in the beautiful countryside of the Vosges. You think a walk in the Nature is a wonderful gift that you have made to yourself. You feel tired but elated in the end.

If you’re visiting Feiburg (Germany), Basle (Switzerland) or Colmar (France) you ought to do a bit of wine-tasting at the local vintner’s in Requewihr or Eguisheim. If you prefer German wines then in Freiburg, Endingen, Ihringen to name a few. Eguisheim is known as the Cradle of Viticulture in Alsace. Even if you’re not an expert on wines you can learn and taste the different varieties of the choicest wines in the characteristic long-stemmed glass known as the ‘Alsatian tulip,’ and discover the truth in wine: in vino veritas.

A Cross-Country Ski Tour (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

A CROSS-COUNTRY SKI TOUR (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

It was a chilly Sunday morning in February when Stefan, his wife Barbara, and I, decided to do a bit of cross-country skiing in the Feldberg area, which happens to be the highest peak in Baden-Württemberg (south-west Germany).

We’d received a call 8am from Frau Heinz (Stefan’s mother) who had made a rendezvous near the kiosk in Feldberg. After a short drive from Freiburg up the Vale of Hell, past the Hirschsprung, where the stag in stone was visible, we were in the skiing area.
The Hirschsprung reminded me of the Chovar Gorge in the vicinity of Kathmandu, where according to legend, Manjushri cut through a gorge to let out the water from Kathmandu Valley, which was then a lake.

Here, there were definitely more alpine than cross-country skiiers. Stefan’s parents had decided to do a bit of trekking or ‘wandern’ as the Germans are wont to call it, and they’d also volunteered to take along their grand-daughter Amanda. After the usual ‘Ski Heil!’ and ‘Aufwiedersehen’ salutes, we went our ways.

We had to duck under the many lifts that seemed to traverse the whole mountain, and there were alpine-skiers whizzing past you from every direction. I thought we had definitely chosen the wrong place to do cross-country.

However, after a short distance we left the fast-skiers behind and were rewarded with a sight of the Alps in all their magnificence from a snow-covered summit. It was one of the loveliest sights I’d ever seen since I was in Switzerland a year back. I’d gone to see the Rhone glacier and managed to enter the recesses of the glacier, because the clever Swiss had even cut a tunnel through the massive ice. When it comes to exploiting nature for the sake of tourism, the Swiss are indeed far ahead of the European crowd.

The Black Forest is wonderful in spring and autumn with pine trees, lush meadows, valleys, mountains and tarns. You notice the good up-keeping for which the forest officials are responsible, despite the scare that you hear now and then about a ‘dying Schwarzwald’, mostly due to the heavy emission of carbon monoxide and dioxide by the traffic that threatens to increase all the time. The Germans, as a nation, have become extremely conscious of pollution and are well ahead as far as countermeasures and protests are concerned.

The ‘Bürgerinitiative’ as local protests groups are called, were rather loud in the past in their attempt to prevent the construction of the autobahn B 31, which slices through Freiburg and its east-end Ebnet. More cars (despite catalysators) means bad air, and bad air means a fall in the quality of life in this Schwarzwald metropolis.

Freiburg was the ecological capital of Germany till 1996, and holds among others an annual international ecological film festival. It has introduced an ecological train-bus-tram ticket to get the commuters off their cars with a great degree of success. This idea already existed in Switzerland since many years, and it is catching on in other cities in Germany. The park-and-ride idea is another welcome contribution, whereby you park your car in the suburb of a city, and take the tram or bus into the city-centre.

It is indeed difficult to get most Germans to travel by alternative methods, because the car remains a status-object in Germany, unlike the Swiss who have privatised their railways during the First and Second World Wars and have developed it to profitable excellence. The Swiss don’t mind switching over to their trains, trams (fondly called ‘trämle’) and cable cars, but most Germans still behave as though not travelling by car would be beneath their dignity. I recall a Swabian lady near Rottweil, who told me in her loud Swabian voice, ‘If you live in this area and don’t possess a car, then you’re a Depp’ (something of an idiot). That also brings me to the tale of two young German ladies I know, who went through Europe’s longest Gottard-tunnel, with Eros Ramazotti’s Italian song and music blaring in their Golf Cabrio on their way to Italy, without bothering to use the hood, and came out with blue lips, and had to undergo medical treatment.

In Germany, the car is the pride of the family, and you still see the average German cleaning and polishing it on Saturdays and Sundays, with a dedication, tenderness and thoroughness that would be better reserved for other human spheres. The fear of the increasing umweltverschmutzung, as environmental pollution is called in German, has made the Germans take to the sanfte-tourism (with insight) promoted by Jost Krippendorf et al, though one ought to be sceptical when millions of tourists (trekkers, alpinists and climbers) take to the mountains in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tirol and so forth. These invasions en masse throughout the years have had their effects in devastating the mountain countryside of Europe in general. The ski-tourism takes the bulk of the environ­mental destruction, and the catastrophic results have been evident only too often in the form of landslides, for entire areas are robbed of their vegetation especially trees. Albert­ville, the venue of the Winter Olympics, was another example of the rape of Nature in the name of sport and economy.

‘It’s wonderful here,’ said Barbara with a jump like a ski-acrobat, pointing with one of her ski-sticks to the distant clouds. She seemed to be eternally fascinated by clouds. I remembered the time we’d visited the Basle art exhibition and the three of us had taken turns in pointing out and describing landscape paintings. Her descriptions of the cloud formations had been so precise and poetic.

Despite the increasing pollution in the valleys, the air up at Feldberg was refreshing and wonderful. The snowy landscape and the blue sky, with remarkably few clouds, was a marvellous sight, in comparison to the misty atmosphere in the city below. You could really breathe up here and not think about pseudo-krupp or other respiratory diseases. It seemed as though the world was intact here. I thought about the time we’d visited a Black Forest farmer’s family after dusk, and the fact that I’d seen myriads of flies on the Schwarzwälder bacons that hung from the ceiling of the Bauernhof at Munstertal. It was something unusual in Germany’s otherwise sterile and clean houses. At that moment I’d thought, it was just like in Nepal. It reminded me of a journey to a Tamang shaman’s thatched house and the dinner they’d eaten , seated on mats on the floor, as is the custom in Nepal, with their right hands, accompanied by scores of Musa domestica, as flies are called, flying sorties everywhere in the household, oblivious of the humans.

I was glad that I was in the company of two jolly, ecological-conscious and cosmo­politan Germans, which is saying quite a lot. The younger post-war generation of Germans are well-travelled, suave and chic and think about the consequences of air, water and soil pollution and also rightists, who have been getting more organised since the eighties and are getting louder, due to Germany’s liberal fundamental laws and complacent politicians. They are even represented in the German Bundestag, which means that the rightist lobby is growing due also to the high rate of joblessness and German companies moving out to cheap-labour countries.
Stefan has developed a liking for Nepal and its mountains, where he went on two treks: the Annapurna and Everest, and has ‘wonderful memories of his walks in the Nepalese countryside’ which he refreshes by arranging transparency-slide shows on the beauty, development and destruction of Nepal. Stefan is a tall blue-eyed, sensitive intellectual and shares Bruce Chatwin’s love of travel and adventure at Patagonia, and would like to travel around the world, and write about it rather than work in Basel as a professional social worker me­diating in drug, criminal and family matters of his affluent, but otherwise weird Swiss clients.

Those who took part in the 1968 protests in Germany against the American war in Viet­nam are part of the establishment or responsible members of the Greens, Green Peace and the BUND, which is a pan-German ecological organisation.

It is encouraging that there are genuine protests against the Umweltverschmutzung (ecological pollution) in the European continent. The French, especially the people living in Alsace, are becoming increasingly aware of the ecological damage caused by the chemical and atomic industry, in comparison to their compatriots in other parts of France. Umweltverschmutzung and Waldsterben (dying forests) were unknown to most French people in the 80’s, and they even thought it was an idea imported from Germany, till the radioactive clouds of Chernobyl swept through Europe. Even then, the French departments made themselves rather conspicuous through their nonchalant official advice to the worried French public, eager to know about the effects of radioactivity on humans, animals and crops.

Due to Freiburg’s triangular location, the developments in the French and Swiss border-towns are quickly passed on, and the people of this triangle called the Regiodreieck, bounded by Alsace, Switzerland, the Black Forest, the Vosges and the Alps, show solidarity and take part in festivals, exhibitions, political and economic demonstrations and also joint-ventures.

Our ski-tour over, we went to our home and warmed ourselves with rum-tea, creamy Black Forest torte sprinkled with Schwarzwälder schnaps, and coffee.