Blog posts about Thun at Permanent Tourist

Dark clouds over Thun’s Panorama shopping centre

One of the phrases which comes down from generation to generation in Britain, which is used when seeing dark, stormy clouds in the distance. Quick online research shows that the phrase dates back to the 19th century at least, but there appears to be no clear indication of its initial origin.

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We spent the Christmas and New Year period travelling to Scotland and back by road again.

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I’m certainly no stranger to long-exposure photography. But during the few years that we’ve lived in a flat with a balcony and an unobstructed view of the night sky, I’ve come to realize that I’d never photographed the Milky Way properly. The first time that I can even remember seeing the Milky Way at all was […]

The shore of Lake Thun at Gwatt is a great place to photograph the sunrise and the sunset.

A thousand-year-old castle on the lake shore near Thun, with wonderful gardens, terrific views, and a hideously ugly restaurant.

I just came across a short film I made in January and posted to YouTube at the time. Filmed with my X100 and edited quickly in iMovie, it shows the publicly accessible lake-shore nature reserve at Gwatt, some fifteen minutes’ drive from home.

Creating long exposure photographs with movement and blur leads to great images. But if you want a pin-sharp photo, you’ll need to be patient.

The Swiss aren’t generally as keen on nature reserves as the British. Despite the stupidly beautiful countryside, there are comparatively few places like RSPB reserves (over 200 in the U.K.) and the National Trust (who is the U.K.’s largest individual land owner). We’re lucky enough to live near two of the small Swiss reserves at Lake Thun: […]

The Swiss are reknowned for their efficiency and I’m used to the smoothness of dealing with officialdom here. The extent of the efficiency surprised me a little this morning, though, when for the first time since I’ve lived here, I had to take my car to the testing centre. The “Amtliche Fahrzeugprüfung” is akin to […]

The rain clouds lift and show what beauty they have strewn across the higher mountains in our region.

Lake Thun (German: Thunersee) is an Alpine lake in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. It takes its name from the city of Thun, on its north western shore. The lake is fed by water from Lake Brienz to the south east, which lies 6 metres higher than Lake Thun, and various streams in the Oberland, […]

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We were in Thun this past weekend, with a couple of friends from Zürich who’d come down for a day of “strobism” (the art of non-studio-based photography using portable flash units for illumination). As well as locations in Spiez and Gwatt, we sneaked into the dilapidated Selve area in Thun, where old factories, once converted […]

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Along the lake shore path at Gwatt are homes perfect for twitchers: this area is separated from the Thunersee by large reed beds full of nesting birds.