The small city of Sait-Ursanne was named after an Irish monk, Ursicinus who had to leave his country that did not really respect free speech in the seventh century. He ended up in the now Swiss part of the Jura mountains and this past Saturday I went there with Dad for a cultural-architectural-photo shoot visit. If there were any tourists, they were few, all German speaking and very discrete. This medieval city, situated in the river Doubs valley, is presently being thoroughly renovated so many streets were torn up in preparation for the tourist season. I was particularly interested in visiting a local weaver to learn if she would be prepared to teach me the basis of this art form. Follow us on a tour of the old parts of the town and experience the beauty of the medieval architecture. In the title photo you can see Urcinus rest in his hermit cave 190 steps above the imposing church and monastery buildings.

On the road to Sait-Ursanne we made a stop at the Friedrich Dürrenmatt museum above the city of Neuchâtel but that we will tell you all about in a future post. Stay tuned till then!!

The skies were light blue without a single cloud and it was close to noon when I drove up through the Hérmence valley towards the village of Vex. A couple of kilometres further south I turned left and drove down the winding and narrow road towards the tiny hot spring of Combioula. The snow had moved out and been replaced by the first spring flowers including a lonely wild strawberry leaf. The little river running through the hot spring was only half full of water, too cold to test.

I had brought a tripod to preserve the moment of taking my first outdoor bath for the season. It was 15 degrees in the air and around 30 in the spring water. The camera self timer gave me 12 seconds from leaving the safe shore to greet you in a relaxed manner sitting on the sand in the little spring pool. Only the birds could observe what a nude old white guy looks like. Enjoy!!

The weather forecast for the afternoon was awful with a severe storm predicted to roll in from the west. On the northern side of the Wallis valley is the posh resort of Crans-Montana and a little before arriving there you pass the village of Lens where a new private museum for contemporary art was inaugurated in 2018. That looked like an excellent Saturday afternoon project. The museums in Switzerland were allowed to reopen on March 1st and The Opale Foundation museum in Lens features an exhibit of Aboriginal art that really blew me off. Traditional and contemporary sculptures and paintings were mixed and parallels drawn to pieces of contemporary arts from other parts of the world. If you download the application "Smartify" on Apple store you can scan the paintings and sculptures that I present you below and read about them and the artists. The entrance to the museum is very discrete and you have to park almost a kilometre away and walk downhill to reach the venue, but it was all worth the effort of walking back uphill to my car in beating rain and storm winds.

The museum has its western facade constructed all in glass, facing a pond. The black skies of the late afternoon predicted what was to come. Stay tuned for more adventures!!

I started my Sunday hike along the Areuse river. The trees close to water are almost completely covered in green moss and have troll-like shapes giving rise to lots of fantasies. The weather was sunny and cool like often in the beginning of March. The water level in the river had dropped further since a week and there were only a few hikers out.

It was time to move on so after a quick lunch in my camper van I drove south to the southeastern shores of the Neuchâtel lake where you can find the largest wet-land nature reserve in Switzerland with some 500 varieties of plants and over 10000 animal and insect species. They were still all asleep. I had hoped to be able to shoot some of the wintering water birds that assemble in large quantities in the shallow waters on this side of the lake. However, they were almost all gone, looking for other feeding grounds. A beaver had recently chewed on a big pine-tree close to the water. The nude trees produced great contrasts with the light blue water of the lake.

Just west of the city of Estavayer-le-Lac there is a beautiful view over the wetland, still in its winter colours. I finished my day just below my view point on one of the small sandy shores with a lone swan. This Sunday there was nobody who disturbed the peace. Stay tuned for more from spring in Switzerland