'Taking the waters'

(Pic 1: The Tiber river in Rome, Pic2: The Seine river in Paris from the Eiffel tower)

I have some affinity for and rivers and waterbodies and we ran into much of interest in this area in Europe. The three big cities Rome, Seine and London are all on large rivers which is a nice thing. (BTW -- In Paris we drove through the Pont de l'Alma which is the tunnel under the Seine where Princess Di was driving when the crash happened). The banks are always nicely maintained so that its great to have a run or a walk along them. I talked about the Docklands area of London in a previous post, this area is an imaginative reuse of the old shipping wharf area of the Thames river in London. It seems the banks of the Seine are listed as a World Heritage site. I spent a happy afternoon walking along the banks, but didn't think it quite qualified. I'm sure there is more cool stuff there that I missed.


One of the most fascinating thing was the rivers in Switzerland. For one thing they were so many of them. The country is fortunate, they'll never have a water problem like us. And the rivers were so .. well behaved. They were all neat and well-mannered, the river paths were dead-straight, and the banks were nice and clean and well-maintained with hardly any moss or yucky substance. Much more interesting though was the color of the water, which was a remarkable strange shade of green. Everywhere it was quite the same. It was fascinating. In an interesting contrast, when we crossed the border from Switzerland to France, we almost immediately ran into a river and the color was completely different and as astonishing, this time it was dark grey almost black. I have a theory, that this is a glaciated region, so the land must have lots of loose rock and rubble and that is what gives the river the grey colour.


In one place we stayed in Switzerland (Thun), a river ran through the town, and the hotel was on the riverbank and it made for a gorgeous site (see pic). Switzerland also has a lot of lakes. One of the towns we visited is called Interlaken which means 'between lakes' in German. The town is between the lakes Thunersee and Brienzersee ('see' in German means lake). The picture below is of one of the lakes.






Another nice river episode was the Rhine falls near Zurich. The Rhine (not to be confused with the Rhone :-), another major European river) is a major European river. Rhine Falls on the Rhine river, is the only respectable waterfall that they have in Europe, our guide said, and they are very proud of it, though it hardly compares to something like Niagara. Its quite a nice little waterfalls.

I'll blog later about the canals of Venice :-)