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, MAPfrappe and other tools, work out my location. The answer will appear under next Monday’s solo foxer.
Today I’m standing next to a right-hand drive Hyundai police car in a parliamentary republic. That republic has a lower fertility rate than Japan and a higher average yearly temperature than Kuwait. Some of the AFVs fielded by its army aren’t imports. The tarmac under my feet is red and the double yellow lines at the side of the road are zigzagged. The nearest building is over 400 metres long and opened in 2017. I’m a stone’s throw from a McDonalds, less than 1.5 miles from a lepidopterarium, and within 3 km of five 18-hole golf courses. I share latitude with one landlocked country and one country with a coast shorter than a marathon course. I’m closer to the equator than I am to a nuclear power station. If you can see a self-propelled cherry picker, some unusual floral bollards, and a row of what look like camelia bushes, you’re probably in the right place. I’m not at ground level and I’m not in Pont-à-Mousson.
(Last week I was here)
Re last week, I thought you were at nearby Capel Celyn (polemic site of a rural Welsh village “drowned” for the benefit of an English city) but as most of the clues (bar drowned village & monument) didn’t stack up I wasn’t sure. Is there also a drowned village in lake Vyrnwy? Maybe i read it wrong…
phlebas and I both went hunting all round Capel Celyn first too – but apparently Llanwddyn was rebuilt at the end of the new lake.
Iesgyrn Dafydd! Really hope they didn’t drown the second (replacement) village too. 😉
I am foxed. Pretty sure I’m in roughly the right place but failing to find the red tarmac, camellia bushes and exciting bollards.
Yup, me too (if you see a nearby bloke wandering around all sweaty and perplexed, wave!).
Three failures in three weeks… I might need to take my handheld defoxotron to the shop and get it tuned.
Did anyone crack this? If Roman is making these solo foxers too foxy I’ll have a word with him.
Last week I guessed the right country but couldn’t find the location anyway.
This week it’s taken me 10-15 minutes. I shall email you with evidence in the form of a photograph taken inside that lepidopterarium.
The past two weeks – last week and the week before – were definitely my fault… I wouldn’t put Roman over the coals for those ones! For this week it’s hard to tell. I’m fairly sure I’m in the right area, but it could be (and often is, unfortunately) that these brain-cogs aren’t turning as smoothly as they used to.
And I’d like to say, Tim, that regardless of the outcome it’s always tremendous fun… so thank you!
I did get this one — unlike last week’s. Even as an anglophile, as an American it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember the, uh, “idiosyncratic” usage you’re all so fond of for the word “country.” 🙂 I don’t know if that ambiguity was intentional or not, but I suspect for many non-Brits that would have thrown them off the scent entirely. (After I finally cottoned on to that, like others I got the right “country” but wrong drowned village.)
I’m hit and miss on these anyway – I don’t often look at them on Monday, and not always after unless I see an obvious or intriguing starting point. Last week’s was ok once discovered there was only one island that fitted, and got over the ‘country’* trick – Phlebas did suggest I might have the right country and the wrong reservoir, but I would have got there myself eventually.
*Not as sneaky as the London one a few weeks ago
For what it’s worth, I (unusually) got this one reasonably quickly.