alan little’s weblog

dead tree publishing

26th May 2008 permanent link

My wife says I’ve been posting too many pictures from business trips to India lately. But she’s not here this week so – ha! – more Indian business trip pictures coming soon. Meanwhile however …

I wanted to go for a walk at the weekend. Normally I would go the the Alps, but we had a lot of spring snow this year, and last week was school holidays in Bavaria. Everywhere I wanted to go would have been either still under heaps of snow, or crowded out with people.

I went to the Bavarian Forest instead. I don’t know the area well, so I just picked the biggest blank bit on the map, near the Czech frontier, and headed into it. Turned out I was in a part of the forest where all the big trees were killed a few years back – not, apparently, by acid fog but by an infestation of bark-eating beetles. Interesting experience. Not depressing, exactly; the forest is recovering, there are still plenty of other living things and young trees growing. But eerie.

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