(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 sleuth writes:
Last week’s contest has convinced us to go to Pittsburgh for our Summer 2025 family vacation. Thanks as always for these great write-ups!
Another followup comes from a previous winner:
I was annoyed with myself last Thursday when I realized I hadn’t submitted anything for McCandless, but in light of the deluge of entries you received, it seems better that I didn’t. (I had the wrong window anyway.) Congratulations to the submitter and especially his wife on the new job!
From the super-chef:
It was great to see the grand opening of the Sleuth Bar. I bought a cocktail smoker to celebrate and will make last week’s cocktail, “The Smoked Maple Fussfungle,” this weekend.
Another sleuth “loved the Tinder for geriatrics, Ember.” Warming my heart right now is the following note from our wine geek in San Francisco:
I believe I first got clued in to the Dish and the VFYW contest not long after the pandemic started in 2020. The first contest I recall reading was from Bhutan — contest #250 in September 2020. Back then, I was mystified and impressed with the ability of the sleuths to track down a window — a single window! — on the face of the planet in god-knows-where. I learned of the mythical Chini, and I thought that I could and should start training to be a VFYW sleuth.
I reread the #250 contest summary after solving this week’s VFYW, and I’m amazed by what has changed in the contest since 2020. In contest #250, there was no Berkeley champ offering up erudite movie connections; no Austin mixologist with magical potions; no Alaskan globetrotter with green ecotourism observations; no super-chef inspired by the local cuisine with mouth-watering meals to try; no CO/NJ champ with fascinating and obscure facts; no biologist from Milwaukee educating us on some aspect of the local fauna; no Indy sleuth with an ear-opening report on the music scene; no Team Bellevue; and no ski-nerd champ tormenting you with his skiing exploits.
In fact, other than a mention of Chini, there were no other notable sleuths mentioned in the write-up. In the course of 160 contests and three-and-a-half years, you have grown an amazing community, Chris. Kudos!
I’m truly verklempt. And that email happened to be the third-to-last one I read among the 89 sent this week, so the morale boost came at the best time, around 3am, after an especially weary week.
On to this week’s view, I’m really starting to love the new feature from the San Mateo super-sleuth — AI impressionism for the VFYW:
Here’s the beginning of an entry from a sleuth who eventually named the location:
This one followed a wandering and uncertain path, the story of which I shall now proceed to inflict on you. My immediate thought, somewhat embarrassingly, was actually the US, because all the cars are big and the license plates look about the right shape. I even briefly wondered about Appalachia. The hills look right, but the more I looked at the picture, the more I saw that the trees don’t — they’re all pine — and the buildings don’t. The yellow one in front could be some knock-off Mexican restaurant, but the others in the background don’t look very Appalachian either — all the little crow’s-nests on top of the roofs, and the different colors they’re painted, and the rows of windows all lined up.
You can see a fuzzy license plate with a red-and-white background, so I was looking for a US state with appropriate plates … until I belatedly realized we seem to be driving on the left here. (I accept that this should have dawned on me sooner.) So I pulled up a list of countries that drive on the left, and was scrolling down at random when I saw that the Indonesian flag is red and white:
It doesn’t look like their standard license plates are colored like the flag, but maybe you can get one that is? And actually, looking again at the yellow building, it doesn't really look Mexican. The rows of arches look more Moorish, so we’re possibly somewhere with Islamic influence, like Indonesia. The intricate painting/tile work would also fit with that. There is a type of pine tree in Indonesia, the Sumatran pine, which is the only pine tree that occurs naturally south of the equator!
I must say, though, wherever this is, it doesn’t look terribly wet, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Indonesia is quite wet.
A previous winner stuck with Indonesia:
I’m guessing this VFYW is somewhere in Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. I looked at the tiles and window architecture and it looks Islamic/Moorish, but the scenery looks tropical. I saw the flag pole toppers that seemed like a crescent moon on its back with a sword tip on top. I googled countries that may use that symbolism, and one result was the long-gone Aceh Sultanate.
Then I clicked around to see where this was located and saw that Banda Aceh had a huge tsunami in 2004 (which I recalled after reading about it but wouldn’t have come up with the name otherwise). I noticed in the photo that there is a line of somewhat bare ground after which the forest becomes thicker. I’ve seen pics of the tsunami aftermath in Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958 and remembered how the tsunami’s scouring of the landscape left a distinct tree line intact at higher altitudes, with bare soil below the tree line:
Our photo seems to have scarring in the lower half, and thicker forest above, looking like tsunami evidence … maybe near Lampuuk Beach? I’m really just guessing! Thank you to the much better sleuths who will figure out the exact window — and thank you, Chris, for keeping this wonderful contest going!
Even those wild goose chases are wonderful. The super-sleuth in Eagle Rock points to a “sweet red herring”:
I predict a bunch of people will be faked out by the flagpoles on the building next door to our view and incorrectly choose that one. The latest Google view is from June 2020, and you can see people renovating the building our window is in. Looks like the did a nice job, too. The flags we’re seeing are newer.
A false flagpole operation, huh? More on that later. Here’s our super-sleuth in Tucson:
Your VFYW photographer tried to hide Buddha behind a tree, but you can’t fool a super-sleuth for long, so you gotta do better than this:
The rest of him:
The super-sleuth in Kingston shoots off a very short email: “I have a guess this week: Somewhere in Africa!” This next sleuth gets the right continent:
I spent three years working for USG in Islamabad, Pakistan. It looks to me like it might be somewhere in the north of Pakistan, Murray, Gilgit, or north. It might also be in India. The upscale cars are throwing me off.
I’m anxious to know the answer!
Chini circles it:
Another sleuth has a gut feeling for “Dehradun, Uttarkand, India”:
I attended the Landour Language School above Dehradun while learning Hindi. It might be obscured by the storm clouds at the top of the image. The walls of the Tibetan Buddhist temple could be any one of three such temples in the city, and the Himalayan foothills are full of Tibetan refugee centers. The winter clothing suggests midway up the Himalayan foothills, but not Mussoorie level. What tells me this might be Dehradun is that the deforestation/reforestation suggests it’s the Garhwal Himalayas, since the foothills further west in the radius around the Dalai Lama’s seat at Dharamsala tend to be more lush. It could be any number of hill stations in the region, or even Nepal on the other side of the mountains, but it is definitely somewhere in the Himalayan foothills.
Another opted for Nepal:
Well, it’s been a while, but I wanted to get this entry sent to you. I need to guess something and I don’t have a clue, but I’m going to guess Nepal. Why? Because any writing is blurred out, and Nepal has a very interesting alphabet and red license plates.
Nepal isn’t the only country in that region with red license plates, and the following sleuth knows it — along with the right country this week:
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