Unlike the formidable Friday foxers, the Monday kind are designed with lone truth sleuths in mind. Roman, my Chief Foxer Setter, assures me the following brainteaser can be solved single-handedly. Crow all you like in the comments section, but please don’t spoil the puzzle for others by sharing solutions or dropping hints.
“Where am I?”
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, Wikipedia, and other tools, work out my location. The answer will appear under next Monday’s solo foxer.
I’m standing on a roundabout looking at a sign that says “Don’t text and drive”. Beyond the sign is a mosque. Vehicles are going round the roundabout in a clockwise direction. I’m in a country that has no red on its flag, no navy, and no hydroelectric power stations. The country’s currency is also its motto, and its main export partner is in the EU. The city I’m in is named after an individual who died in the 20th Century. The nearest international airport is 11 kilometres due north of here. The nearest US embassy is 2 kilometres to the WSW. I share longitude with a town captured by Allied forces in 1940 and a country younger than Greta Thunberg. I’m not in Pont-à-Mousson.
(Last week I was here)
Excellent – took me about ten minutes. The usual faffing about at the end where I knew I had the right place but was spinning around in Street View to find the right sign.
That took me significantly longer than Viscount. Got there though 🙂
Someone asked how to go about solving these, so I thought I’d share the approach that (quickly) got me the answer to Solo Foxer #2 (the answer itself being in the article on this page).
If you haven’t tried it, stop reading, head to //tallyhocorner.com/2021/01/solo-foxer-2/ and give it a go 🙂
The first thing I like to do is narrow down the search range. The clue that we’re at the same latitude as two European cities actually reduces the options tremendously – there aren’t many non-European cities at those latitudes, so we’re probably in Europe, maybe Russia or North America.
However: Russia and North America both have blinking big mountains, and we know we’re in a country with no high altitude terrain. But.. how ‘not high’. A quick search online gives me Zambia’s lowest point, so I now have a figure to compare. Another quick search found a list of every country in the world and its highest and lowest points.
Sorting that list by the highest points, eliminating all the countries with a peak above Zambia’s lowest point already narrows things down a lot. The list helpfully included flags, so armed with that list, the flags by each country and rudimentary geographical knowledge meant I just needed to go down that list until I found a country that was roughly parallel to (or in) Europe and that had a flag with no blue or white in it.
Quick sanity check: Does that country have a female PM. I could’ve also sanity checked for nuclear power stations and airlines, but didn’t use those clues in this case.
Now I have a country, but it may not be the right one. It does however have a coastline, and there’s a stretch of water along it that could be called a strait. Better yet, it’s got commercial docks along one side of it.
So I zoom in on the map to the other side of it, looking for landmarks and interesting buildings. I find an explicit reference to something listed as being 1.5km away, use some common sense to guess in which direction and look there. Immediately I find the lepidopterarium, use some crude distance guesswork based on the map key (although I could’ve been more precise with the online map’s built-in distance measurement tool) and spot a possible candidate.
At this point I drop into streetview and find the broader clues match, and one of the specific clues does but the other doesn’t. A click to move down the road 40m and everything matches expectations.
(As it happens, I ended up around another 4m from Tim, but with everything he’d suggested in sight. Sometimes you need to be within half a metre of his location, especially if he’s expecting you to find a person performing a specific action, as they’ll start it after one photo, be doing it on the next and have finished by the time you get to the next snapshot. On this occasion, I ended up closer to the ‘no stopping’ sign than Tim did.)
Got it – bit harder than the last one though!
I actually found last week’s harder – this week the combination of clues for the country narrows down to one fairly easily, and then there’s reference to something of which there’s only one in the country which gives a fairly small search area for the precise location.
Aye, a bit harder, good show chaps!
One clue did almost all the work for me!