Soon after Christmas in 2022, we spent 3 days in a delightful wood cabin in the Black Forest We left Kleinbottwar after breakfast and drove 118 km along the A81 towards Loßburg on the high plateau of the Northern Black Forest at an altitude of 600-800 metres. The source of the Kinzig, which crosses the…
We spent ten days over Christmas in Kleinbottwar – a pretty little wine village in the Württemburg region of Germany on the Murr river, around five kilometres northeast of its confluence with the Neckar river. Christmas Festivities started on the 23rd. Hot Glühwein was drunk with sausages in the evening with neighbours. There were heaps of…
Kleinbottwar Kleinbottwar is a small village in the Baden-Württemberg wine region of Germany. It lies halfway between Ludwigsburg and Heilbronn on the Murr river and is an outlying district of the town Steinheim an der Murr. The Summer of 2022 was sunny and hot. In the last week of August, I spent two days at my son’s house…
The hilltop village of Château Chalon on the Premier Plateau with vineyards on the slopes below it is a wine village in the Château-Chalon AOC in Jura, 37 km north of Clairvaux-les-lacs. The AOC, created in 1936, is regarded as the unofficial grand cru for vin jaune of the Jura. The soil is grey marl and there are…
We were up early. The vineyards on the slopes across the road were bathed in sunlight. We had breakfast, said goodbye to Laurence and Charles, and drove south along the tollroad towards Dijon, stopping at a Total for a tank-full of E98 and at an Aire for a picnic lunch. We arrived in Clairvaux-les-lacs in…
After two years of stagnation due to the Pandemic, we are on our first family holiday. Clairvaux-le-Lacs is not an easy place to get to by train. Geneva airport is over an hours drive away and flights this summer are a mess. I decided to drive. “You can’t go to France in a 20 year…
The jaw- dropping Hanging Temple of China is one of the world’s forgotten wonders The Hanging Temple clings to the side of the mountain in apparent defiance of gravity. Its forty odd rooms and a maze of passageways contain seventy eight religious statues and carvings made of copper, iron, terracotta, and stone. The temple…
Buddhism reached China along the Silk Route during the Han Dynasty in the first century AD. The establishment of Buddhism in China is evident in the many scripture-filled caves and structures surviving from this period. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Gansu province, the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang in Henan and the Yungang Grottoes…
The main reason for going to Datong in northern China is to visit its most famous sight – the Yungang Grottoes. The 53 main caves there contain over 51,000 intricate, ancient Buddhist statues. It takes six and a half hours to get to Datong from Beijing by train. Datong is the former western…
Worshipping Heaven instead of a God may seem strange. But in ancient China, the Zhou Dynasty which reigned between 1050-256 BC, initiated a new social order and religious system, centred around a supreme sky god Tiān (天), a “deity who rules Heaven and Earth.” Under this system, Heaven Worship became a state religion and Tian was considered responsible…
Bandi's Blog 