VFYW: A Street Lightbulb Going On

Many sleuths experienced it when discovering the location for contest #386. (Watch out for a lab leak.)

(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.)

A followup on last week’s contest from the super-sleuth in Ann Arbor:

I was among the many who threw in the towel last week. Architecture, and the particular type of windows visible on one of the houses at the port, got me as close as Fiji Islands … but it was clear that the topography did not fit. I randomly checked a few atolls of French Polynesia, which is a real pain on Apple Maps, then I gave up.

But I’m surprised that with all the info related to the Tuamotu Islands, not one of the successful sleuths mentioned the person who has probably done more than any other to bring this region into popular culture and popular memory: Thor Heyerdahl.

Heyerdahl sailed his balsa raft, Kon-Tiki, from Peru to Polynesia with a crew of six, and crashed into a reef at Raroia — not so far from Amanu, after 101 days at sea, on Aug. 7, 1947. He had set out to prove that Polynesia had been settled from South America — a theory much in doubt back then, and by now solidly disproved by more recent research, including archaeological and genetic data. Also, some of the racial undertones of his assumptions are at least embarrassing.

Still, his account of the voyage, Fatu Hiva (first published in 1950), became a world bestseller and surely counts as one of the greatest true adventure stories of all times. I can’t count how many times I have read it as a child. I didn’t care about the anthropological theory, but the tale of these six cool dudes on a raft in the middle of the ocean was gripping and exhilarating every time I read it.

Now, as I went on YouTube, I saw actual footage from the voyage for the first time, and it was like running into old friends after many years:

For the movie nerds (which I’m the opposite of), there is a 1950 documentary about the voyage, and also a 2012 historical drama that was nominated for an Oscar. Here’s the trailer for the latter:

Incidentally, I share my last name with a lot of Norwegians, including the actor who played Heyerdahl in that movie, but there is no Norwegian connection in my family; we’re all strictly German (and southern Germany to boot).

Thanks for a trip down a watery kind of memory lane!

Another quick followup from the sleuth trio in Vancouver, WA:

A team member tried the mixologist’s concoction for French Polynesia. She says, “We had to make our own toasted coconut syrup, and since I doubled the batch, I had to use bottled lime juice. It was tasty, but I’m sure it lacked in comparison to the true recipe. On the other hand, our simple syrup has nothing to sustain a shelf life, so we had just keep making them to use it up. Ha!”

Starting us off with this week’s view, a helpful sleuth writes:

Hey Chris, sorry I failed to submit a top-of-the-column entry last week … happy to provide one this week!

I’m going with my first instinct: Warsaw. Flat landscape, seemingly European. The shape of the “P” on the parking sign seems consistent with those I found online for Poland, though that’s hardly conclusive. I searched a bit for military installations (my best guess for what this is) in or near Warsaw, as well as the tall buildings and stadium, but couldn’t get a match, so I’m probably wrong.

As is the regular sleuth in Annapolis:

Ghent, Belgium? Or somewhere else in the Low Countries? I wish I had more time this week.

So did our UWS super-sleuth:

What, it’s Wednesday already? And almost midnight? I need to get more disciplined. My last-minute guess is Hamburg, Germany — nothing more specific than that.

By the way, that exceptionally large Dusty cartoon this week has me very curious ...

Dusty is exceptionally small in Chini’s view:

Chini is really starting to lean into his clue-giving:

One of the challenging parts of being a lawyer is that sometimes the rest of your life is often on tape delay. Such as this week, when I had to wait nine days before I had the free time to watch a replay of the final stage of the Tour de France. But it was also a bit serendipitous, as it provided me with our last-minute clue for the week: if you want to find the city we’re in, look for the one that just held a massive celebration for their countryman, Jonas, who just won his second Tour de France in a row …

The super-sleuth in Toronto points to the “key” to finding the view’s location for him and many others: