Tochi's Hut

Upon our return from Secteur Rocher, we took the bus up to Jardin Exotique de Monaco.  The botanical garden was opened in 1933 and features a wide variety of cactuses.  Before I get to the garden itself, one of the most impressive features is the spectacular views of Monaco the garden offers.  You can see a good, almost aerial-like view, of Monaco.  In the following photo, you see Beau Rivage, as well as the chicane and tunnel exit from the Formula 1 course!

Here's a shot of Secteur Rocher, with the Prince’s Palace featured prominently.  We were just standing right on that rock an hour ago watching the race. :)

Jardin Exotique de Monaco is situated on the north-western cliff (what in Monaco isn’t on a hillside), consisting of several levels almost like a giant staircase.  As you progress through the garden, you descend onto lower levels until you reach a cave at the very bottom.

I have never seen so many different cactuses concentrated in one place.  Given the moderate climate of the region, they are not the type of plants I would have expected to find at a botanic garden here.  I guess they are some of the most resilient plants in the world.

The variety of succulents on display was very impressive – ranging from tall and skinny cactuses to the round and fat ones.  The latter totally reminded me of the spinning leevers from Zelda; I had to resist from taking out my great sword and performing a spin attack to slash them. :)

The landscaping of the garden was equally impressive.  A complex interlock of pathways and bridges, there were multiple ways to get to the same spot.  Some of the stairwells appeared to be carved out of the rock face.   Some of the bridges were made of wood, but instead of normal wooden well-sawed planks and beams, the railing was sculpted to be curvy and twisty.  No real pattern, except it looked like how a natural tree root or branch might grow.  Quite the attention to details.

The other highlight of the garden was the observatory cave.  We had to wait a bit for a guide (who only spoke in French) to take us down into the depths of Moria.  The official site claims that the cave features many fine specimen of stalactites, stalagmites, curtains, columns, spaghetti-like helictites.  You can google those terms yourselves to find out what they mean.

I decided to go with my 50mm f/1.8 lens for this cave.  Given the low lighting, I needed as wide aperture as possible.  Unfortunately, I had major difficulty with the narrower DOF.  I still had to bump up the ISO, and sorely missed my 18mm and VR.  There’s only so much room for you to manoeuvre in the narrow pathways within the caverns.

So yeah, they have nice metal railings that were elevated above the cavern floors.  The walk starts of with a bunch of steps down.  Near the entrance, we saw some excavation of animals, which proved that prehistoric humans were using the caves as a base station for their hunting.  More steps leading down; overall, the descent was about 60m.  Too bad not even my HCx could pick up the satellites to track the elevation changes.  It would have been pretty cool to get a 3D mapping of our cavern exploration route.

So yeah, I didn’t really understand what our guide was saying; it took too much effort to try to translate, and after a while, I just decided to shoot photos and enjoy the sights.  BlueOrca translated bits and pieces of the funny parts to us. 

We got to touch some of the stalagmites that were close to the path.  The texture was a glossy, hard (much more than I expected) and very smooth, though if you tap your fingers on it, they do feel a bit brittle.  It’s really amazing that these things are continuing to grow.  My favourites were when some of the columns – they appeared like a stalactite fused with a stalagmite.

After the approximately one hour tour, we returned above ground.  I needed to retrieve my tripod, which had been confiscated earlier. :(  We grabbed some gaufres by a vendor near the bus-stop.  The guy only had two left, so we had to split the waffles.  Nutella. mmmm :)

The bus came and we were off to the Top of Monaco.  Till next time!