Great Journey 🇨🇭 Day 470/2
Our romantic icicle-snacking-and-snow-eating winter walk is now turning into an educational trip. That's the way it is with our plans. You can't count on anything either.
In Guttannen we watch a fountain that they forgot to turn off. We think. Until we read up:
The idea is to use the simplest of means to make conical ice cones in the cold winter season and thus store the winter glacier water. It is called an ice stupa and comes, one almost thinks, from India.
In spring, when the ice in the high-altitude Himalayan glaciers is waiting to melt, the stupas provide this temporarily stored water, which is very important for the drought-stricken agriculture in the region.
We seem to have walked past an international research project at the University of Fribourg (CH). And since chance is on special duty today, we even meet someone who really knows his stuff and explains everything to us in detail. We learn a lot about water poverty in Ladakh, the effects of climate change in the Alps and school classes in mountain villages that are far too small.
Besides all the knowledge we gratefully absorb, we watch how the sprayed water turns into glittering crystals, how it makes little rainbows in the winter sun and how the stupa (the stupa?) slowly grows. Whether it will grow up to 30 metres high, as in India, we don't know.
For the moment, we just watch and ask our professional how it all comes together: the University of Fribourg, the Ladakh region and the last passable village of Guttannen. Network, he says. Simply network. Common interests, the common desire for solutions. Sometimes it is so simple after all.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CXnLwN0rtnN/
