(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)
Our super-sleuth in Providence has a jaunty followup to last week’s contest:
Heyo Chris! I’ve been too snowed under with dealings with work, family and an insurance/house-fire rebuild to give proper attention to a VFYW in awhile. Given that you posted the wall of vulvas, the vulva chocolate, and other mentions of this part of the female anatomy, I must mention that “map of Tassie” is a fairly commonplace coy slang in Australia:
Marvellous song! And I can’t believe this slang wasn’t mentioned by your other sleuths.
The super-chef also follows up — with a familial tie to Tasmania:
Apropos of last week’s post, below is the record of punishment for Harty Henry, the convict ancestor I’ve mentioned before, who was transported to Hobart in 1825 for stealing 24 umbrellas. Fifty lashes for insolence and disobedience of orders!
I have another convict ancestor, John Burkinshaw, who took part in the Yorkshire Rebellion in 1820 and was sentenced to death for treason, which was later commuted to life transportation, also to Hobart, in 1821. His daughter Mary married Harty Henry.
On to this week’s view, even the Berkeley super-champ is flustered:
“Oh God, Chris, what have you done now?!” That was my first thought upon seeing this view. Lately you’ve posted three really hard ones, followed by one really easy one, followed by an only sort-of challenging one, followed by this one — which promised to be REALLY HARD.
There seemed to be absolutely nothing here to hang a search on, other than the obvious fact that we’re in the tropics. But as clues go, “the tropics” covers way too much territory. Then there’s the handful of people standing out on a quay, who look as if they’re waiting for a ride. Is that a clue? A woman who hasn’t yet joined them on the quay is close enough to us that we can see she’s decked out in REI-style merchandise, which almost guarantees she’s an American tourist.
Out beyond the tourists on the quay, we can see what almost has to be the lagoon of a coral atoll, based on the look of the shoreline in the distance — very low, very flat, with gaps to the ocean. Now that’s a clue, and a great starting point, but I don’t want to just start groping about amongst all the atolls of the world hoping to find one with a familiar looking boat landing.
A gut-level guess from this sleuth:
This looks Caribbean to me. Ocho Rios, Jamaica?
Another stab at Jamaica:
Sigh, I have to say Priory, based on the registration of the little boat. I was able to find PY at fishingports (wildmuir.co.uk), which points to Priory (or French Polynesia). But alas, I can’t find that damn telecommunications tower. I even scoured the coast line using this cool map of towers in Jamaica by Phoenix Tower International:
In the end, the boat is probably at another island in the Caribbean, but I have to give up this week. Looking forward to this week’s custom cocktail!
Another sleuth runs through many details:
I am way out of practice after spending six months rarely sleuthing. I’ve turned into one of those sad students who forgot everything during summer break and needs a month or two of remedial instruction.
Potential clues this week:
boat with a number on it
red-and-white tower (possibly a cell phone tower?)
tourist who looks to be American in scale
rainwater recovery system on the building
recently mended balustrade (Hurricane Maria?)
land across the water
and I have no doubt someone will claim to have read the labels on the bottom of the tower. :-p
My dart-at-a-map guess: Mosquito Bay Beach, Vieques, Puerto Rico? I’m hoping this is close, because I’d like to hear about bioluminescence.
I saw that bioluminescent bay on Vieques about a decade ago, on a new-moon night, and it was incredible. This short video captures the brightest bay of its kind in the world:
The Providence super-sleuth “gave up on this week’s contest”:
It’s almost certainly in very south Florida/the Keys or somewhere in the Caribbean, but I just don’t have time to go hunting for that particular line of small, low-barrier islands/mangrove clumps on the horizon. There’s not enough shown of what appears to be a red/white navigation-light (or microwave-tower?) gantry to tell whether the thing is something like an old Coast Guard emplacement or some such. The rock lining the little cove looks to be coral stone, and the place seems pretty rough/shabby/poorish, not glossy (most of Florida is too built-up/slick now).
I’m likely completely wrong, but my wild-ass-guess, based on having been there once 41 years ago, would be Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera, Bahamas.
Another guess nearby:
Abacos, Bahamas? I’m absolutely terrible of the contest, but this view reminded me of a hurricane-battered place I love.
Abacos reminds me of a sailing trip I took there during college with my two best friends, one of whom grew up in south Florida, so he’s a great sailor. But a faulty mast-stay snapped during high winds and the whole mast fell on the deck — then suddenly lurched into the side of my head. I was stunned, but okay. During the rescue, though, my buddy’s finger got bashed between the sailboat and the dinghy, chopping part of it off, so he had to be rushed to a clinic. Fun trip otherwise!
A few photos from the ill-fated Paloma:
The first two photos show where the mast used to be, before it sank to the bottom of the shallow channel
Back to the sleuthing, someone guesses “Havana, Cuba.” Yet another island:
The view feels Caribbean, and I thought I’d be able to find that red & white antenna. But no luck. I’ve come to a probably unwarranted conclusion that we’re looking at a divi-divi tree. So maybe we’re on one of the ABC Islands: Aruba, Bonaire, or Curacao.I’m going with Aruba, maybe the south coast, since those trees point southwest. (Unless I’m a world away and it’s Sri Lanka!)
I once won a trip to Aruba on a radio contest in the early ‘90s. It was a difficult time in my life, and I really needed something good to happen. So whether this is Aruba or not, thanks for bringing up nice memories!
The wine geek in San Francisco jumps over to the US:
Not enough time to try to figure out this one, so I am just going with my best WAG: Key West. I spent time trying to find the dock that people are standing on in the background but struck out left and right. I look forward to reading about the solution and, if it indeed is Key West, the entries from the super chef and the cocktalian!
Another sleuth goes farther west:
Lazy guesser here! I looked at the lights on the poles of the malecon and googled “flat lights” and “solar lights” and found a kind-of match at Isla Mujeres, Mexico along their beach walkway. It wasn’t bingo as a match, but I want to participate despite having a weekend-booked job. Thanks for tolerating me!
All entries appreciated. We can’t all be Chini:
He adds:
Well, I’d like to come up with a clue for the readers out there, but I gotta be honest, I’m drawing a blank. I got bupkis for ya! When you’re dealing with an island that has a total population of 166 souls, clues just aren’t easy to come by …
From Team Bellevue:
Normally for us, the VFYW starts off as a Monday/lunchtime activity. While some contests get solved in that window of time, others drag out into the evening and further lunches on Tue/Wed. When we looked at this week’s photo — WOW, that looks challenging — we decided to get ourselves a head start: Emergency Friday VFYW lunch, Activate!
Our initial read:
Tropical, feels vaguely Pacific
Big red-and-white antenna/tower — no obvious tells, but intriguing
Backpack woman taking a photo: this is a tourist destination
Distinctive harbor shape, and perhaps a boat ramp in the middle
Small boats on boat lifts — one with PT or PY prefix. We struggled initially to place this, but as you’ll see later, it helped.
Perhaps most interesting, a low line of land at the horizon — the uniformity of which has us thinking we could be on an atoll.
But there turn out to be LOTS of Atolls, and then it hits us: Oppenheimer was released this week. How clever of you, Chris! This must be Bikini Atoll! Genius!
A nuclear weapon test by the US military at Bikini Atoll in 1946. (Credit: US Defense Department image via Wikimedia Commons)
But we scour Bikini and can’t find our dock … hmmm. A quick search of the area and nothing obvious to go on. Worse, few of the atolls have any street-level imagery to help us try to narrow our search area. We start grasping at straws:
The solar streetlights don’t appear to be helpful; we find manyvendors selling similar lights all over the world.
We try to find ways to locate towers or antennas in a systematic way, but can’t seem to make that pan out.
There appears to be a rain catch barrel on the far right, but again, can’t see enough to make much of it.
We get distracted by the fantastic number of completely insane-luxury resorts we find on atolls, so our search rapidly devolves into “who can find the craziest one!?!” And everyone wins — they all seem crazy!
We exit our emergency Friday session at about where we started. Our best strategy idea is to scroll all the atolls in the world looking for a matching dock. We’re in some trouble.
But they ultimately prevailed with the right answer. The super-sleuth in San Francisco names the right region:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Weekly Dish to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
