(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.)
Hurray, that is great news! Many thanks. I would like the book, please. Best regards from way out west.
By the way, this week’s view looks to be absolutely impossible.
That it is. Though it was about time we had an insanely tough contest, where the proximity rule is crucial.
Let’s start in South America. From last week’s winner, after his victory glow faded:
Oh Chris, what cruel and unjust world would cast me from the joyful attainment of my heart’s desire one week, into my deepest, darkest nadir the next? The horror! The horror!
Just kidding. But honestly, this week’s VFYW has thrown me for a loop. There is so little to grab on to and tease out. From the shallow elevation of what appears to be solar cells, I’m guessing that the locale is somewhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. But that’s a very broad area!
With no good reason, I’m going to go with South America. Throwing a dart, it lands on Manaus, Brazil. As good a guess as any, I guess.
The super-sleuth in Bend goes with North America: “According to my calculations, far too voluminous to include here, there is no obvious, compelling reason why this could not be Mexico.” Even the great Giuseppe is stumped:
So far, I’ve always sent an entry when I was sure I had found the right place — hypotheses non fingo, as a sleuth of old once said. But I’m going to make an exception, since you warned that proximity might be all we get this time. So, based on what I can see, I’d say Mexico, Quintana Roo, somewhere between Tulum and Cancún. I can’t be more specific, unfortunately, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it turns out to be somewhere else entirely.
Here’s our super-sleuth in San Mateo with something entirely different:
Given that you’re offering a (near?)-impossible VFYW this week, I thought I’d experiment with a different approach for a VFYW Reinterpreted:
What do you think?
Love it. Takes me back to the Impressionism of the recent Chatou contest. He also sends this one:
A sleuth in NYC titled his email, “What in God’s name”:
So, I can tell you a few things about this view: (1) the cell tower serves at least two carriers, so we’re not in the middle of nowhere, appearances to the contrary; (2) we’re near the equator; (3) We’re likely to be somewhere that’s more arid than the vegetation suggests, otherwise I just don’t think we’d see the flat parapet roof style; and (4) we could be in the Middle East, where flat parapet-style roofs are more common.
Unfortunately that’s as far as I can go. Dying to hear how other people crack this one!
Team Bellevue titled their email “NOPE” — then merely adding, “Is it strange to feel grateful that our streak ended three weeks ago?”
You’re going to learn a lot about India this week, since the vast majority of sleuths guessed that country. The first is a previous winner, whose grammar is dazed and confused by the view:
Where r the clues? Is that a curry tree?
WAG this time really curious where this is only the super sleuths can get this one
Tamil Nadu, India?
“Your average super-sleuth in NYC” has a more articulate entry:
Wild-ass guess #1
The person who submitted the view for contest #403 in Jaipur continued their journey around the Indian subcontinent and took this view. Here’s my thinking:
Smog — check
One of the 250,000+ Indian cell towers — check
Ashoka trees indigenous to India — check
Ecru-colored house with maroon trim often found in India — check
Yellow bunkeresque balcony also often found in India — check
Windowless concrete building possibly found in India — check.
Where in India? I have no idea.
Wild-ass guess #2
Over three years ago, I correctly guessed that no sleuths would find the contest #263 view in El Naranjito, Dominican Republic. Since then, by my count there have been 14 contests with single-digit correct guesses. This view has the feel of number 15. I’m putting the over / under at 1 1/2 correct guesses. And I’m taking the under, which means either Chini alone or no one will find the view.
From the biologist super-champ in Milwaukee:
Somewhere in India. I feel too disheartened to even try finding a relevant animal :(
:(
Our super-sleuth in Tucson serves up this week’s animal:
My best guess is based solely on the shape of that cell tower. I found one just like it on YouTube — which included several monkeys nearby, most likely langurs:
This puts the monkeys and the cell tower in central or northern India. Of course this means nothing if there are no monkeys in the VFYW picture, and the cell tower in the VFYW doesn’t have to be in central and northern India, as there are supposedly 450,000 cell towers like this in the country. So I’m just grasping at straws, and below is my best guess at the correct photo location — within a 465,000 square-mile hachured area:
Speaking of grasping, I also project two correct entries this week, with a record low turnout of serious entries (unlike mine). Is this payback we hard-working contestants get for several weeks of pretty easy searches? Did you leave the “E” in last week’s contest as a sop because you knew that this week’s would be virtually unsolvable?
Yep to the first question; nope to the second. From the super-sleuth on the UWS:
Come on, Chris: you’re killing us! I’m thinking India, and I’m reasonably sure we’re not in a Hilton Garden Inn near the airport. But that’s about it. I’m going to say Delhi, because I need to say something. But this is wicked!
Our super-sleuth in Augusta keeps things entertaining as always:
Aaarrgghh! Defeated again. I really do wonder whether I’ll ever be able to solve another “tough” one. It would certainly help if I had more time, but in this case it might not change the outcome, since I was unsure which terms would be best to narrow the search area. For my WAG, I think I’ll go with India, since that’s where I spent the bulk of my time (Google now thinks that I’m looking for apartments in Delhi).
In lieu of fun facts, I can instead offer up some fun follow-up to a couple of previous VFYWs. Netflix recently put out the documentary Raël: The Alien Prophet, all about everyone’s favorite French UFO cult whose headquarters used to be near Montreal. It’s a four-parter, instead of the three-parters typical to this genre, but it did have footage I hadn’t come across before, and it’s hilarious how they still won’t admit the human cloning thing wasn’t real, though they can’t even talk about it with a straight face. Of course, when your religion involves aliens, you probably can’t risk admitting that you made any of it up.
HBO (or MAX, or whatever it is now) also has a three-episode special about cult leader Amy Carlson (whose long, strange journey came to an end near Crestone) called Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. Though actually seeing and hearing the people involved is a plus, I think I prefer reading about cults to watching “infotainment” shows about them, since when they’re so long, you really can’t focus just on them — and then this happens:
From a previous winner:
Good Grief! Who on earth is going to solve this week’s picture? Not a single rabbit hole to go down, as far as I can see, unless the decal blob on the side of the house means something. I hope the CIA is tuned in to recruit whoever solves this week’s view …
But the college try is part of my weekly routine, so in honor of Lady Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, whose autobiography Memoirs of a Highland Lady I’m reading this week, I’m guessing the Cumbala Hill neighborhood in Mumbai. It’s now home to the highest number billionaires in Mumbai, as well as numerous bungalows dating back to the British Raj, so certainly not our solution, but Lady Elizabeth described her residence there in 1827 thus:
The large house of Camballa … stood on a platform in the middle of the descent of a rocky hill, round which swept the sea, with a plain of rice fields, and a tank, a handsome tank, between the foot of it and the Breach Candi road along the beach…. Top of all, and very high it was, the Terraces were covered in as bedrooms, catching all the air that blew and commanding from their latticed balconies such a view as was alone worth almost the voyage from Europe.
From a previous winner:
This is the hardest one I’ve tried, but I think I’ve found it. It’s a town in India called No Fucking Idea.
Heh. The Alaskan globetrotter grabs a globe:
We couldn’t find a letter on the side of a building this week, let alone on the side of hill. This may be one of the harder ones you’ve ever dumped on us.
Mango trees, a lattice cell tower, crumbly cement work, and yellow stucco exteriors with brown trim evokes India for me, but that’s all I’ve got — and it comes from the gut rather than cerebral cortex or Google assistance. For some reason I think we are near a beach, and probably somewhere in the south. If this is a sunrise, with those solar panels and the sat dish facing south, a bluff-top cell tower would probably make this somewhere on the eastern coast — probably near Chennai. But I’ve not been to that side of India, and I want to avoid missing a View of a place I’ve visited.
I looked for a certain hotel near the airport, but India’s one and only Hampton is in Vadodara — but we are definitely not in Gujarat. I’ve done a week in Goa, and this is a plausible View from the area — so let’s make that our official answer.
If we are in Goa, we are probably not in built-up Panaji, but we could be located behind the strip of hotels back from the water along Calangute Beach. Here’s a Chini-esque guess — I think I’ve narrowed it to about a 300-km radius:
If I’ve miraculously landed in the right country and region, here’s an article about the impacts of Goa ecotourism — the usual problems of crowding, over-development, and wildlife threats. More interestingly, it hints that designated parks and funded ecotourism initiatives in India tend to happen in places that political leaders (or their connected relatives) have hotel or other tourism interests. Another reason ecotourism is just like tourism.
The article is a good read, but the editors fail to recognize the disconnect between the impacts the author describes and the accompanying gorgeous photos that will just attract more tourists. Probably shouldn’t be expecting something more from Adventure.com; they aren’t paying the bills selling guilt. If you just look at the pictures, everything does seem fine; sign me up for some mangrove paddling among crocodiles, or a tromp through the tropical bird-laden forest (but you can keep the Land Rover ride across the river).
But how about a photo of the masses at the park gate the author describes, or a fleet of tourist boats surrounding a dolphin pod? It’s hard to point your camera at things that are ugly or irritating — and showing congestion or deforestation in a photo takes skill — but you don’t reduce impacts by only enticing us to the next great place (and yes, I recognize my contest submissions in the mirror — mea culpa too).
Ending the article on the hopeful yet platitudinous account of a tourist litter cleanup on the beach is also … fine. It’s perhaps the least we can ask of our ourselves. I just wish the removal of the countless scraps washed up by the latest tide made a real difference. Most marine waste comes from land-based sources, and not just because a small number of people thoughtlessly toss their water bottle or wrapper. The ubiquity of plastic and our obsession with wrapping everything means the stuff is everywhere.
And the visible stuff is perhaps the least of the problem. Micro-plastics are probably a more devastating eco-challenge, including the fibers that wash off our clothes, the dust that comes from the commotion of our cities, and the fragments that peel off our car tires. What’s a dedicated ecotourist supposed to do? Individually, I suppose we can wear our clothes more often between washings, avoid cities, and bike, walk, or take a boat instead of getting into a car or bus. Hell, I do that anyway.
As for policy and collective action — oh, why bother? I realize I’ve just grown more cynical, but I see no sign our politics will be able to tackle this commons tragedy.
This next sleuth notes an unmentioned clue:
Some super-whiz is going to talk about the angle of the satellite dish, or the solar cells, or the guy with cows (or goats) in the background, or some other amazing way of getting the location. But this one has me beat.
Our super-sleuth from Santa Monica writes:
Following the pride of getting my “super” promotion, the fall of two dismal weeks.
This week I’m also stumped: my sense is someone is going to know what those trees are. It could be Africa, I suppose, but the building to the left has ornamentation around the windows that says India:
The stains on the concrete balcony also suggest it rains a lot, so monsoon? It’s very green, and one search came up with the Sundarbans, the Ganges delta. I know of the Sundarbans because my father’s last posting was to Dhaka, about 20 years ago.
The growth data for Dhaka tells me that my experience is now very out-of-date, after an economic miracle, but at the time Dhaka was, by a country mile, the worst place I had ever been. (This is not a contest in which I am searching for a new winner.) It is hard to capture the squalor, but one small detail was that diplomats and people working for NGOs used to go to Calcutta for a weekend away-break, the city being internationally famous for Mother Theresa, and so a byword for extreme poverty rather than resort hotels. But, compared to Dhaka, it was a well-functioning metropolis.
I took many photos of Dhaka, but they tended to romanticize the look. We went on a river cruise, and to get there we drove near the bus station, where the air was so thick with particulate that visibility fell to about 200m on an otherwise sunny day.
We went for another reason: my paternal grandfather was sent to Dhaka in the war but died of smallpox, and my (other) grandmother had never been able too see her grave, so we took her. He died before my father was born, and she had remarried after the war to the man I knew as my grandfather for all intents and purposes. So it came as a surprise to me to see the grave, and see first that he was only 24 when he died. My grandmother’s reaction was, of course, seeing her husband’s grave, and for her he had been very real indeed.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission keeps these sites immaculately tended, but it was attached to the Christian cemetery. The street kids use those 19th century gravestones as cricket stumps, playing that quintessentially English game, laughing and having fun. Something about this juxtaposition moves me hugely. With a family history quite bound up in India, it makes me choke up — but also very happy.
But no window! And what a lot of blah-blah if it turns out to be the wrong country or even continent!
But the “blah-blah” is always the best part! This next sleuth focuses on the foliage in view:
WHAT THE HELL THIS COULD BE ANYWHERE!
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