No smog

Well its now over a week we are on lockdown here. I’m amazed, there is no longer any smog over Livigno, i know we are in the mountains and the air is cleaner here but there is always a layer of smog over the village, caused by the oil fired boilers in the houses. you can usually see it when you look down at the village, I think most people have turned the heating off because their rental apartments or hotels are all empty, now there are no guests nature is starting to breathe again. It’s much cleaner looking, the snow which fell the other day hasn’t gone brown by the side of the roads because there is no real traffic.

I wonder what the animals think about all this quiet? Usually up in the high mountains there are always skiers, lifts, piste bashers, music from the mountain restaurants etc. Now nothing, just them. I’m amazed by the silence here, no constant noise. The animals must be aware of this. I haven’t seen our hares for a few days, they take it in turn with the foxes, last night there were the foxes out side, we put the veggie leftovers out for the animals, often we have a couple of hares who sit out and eat at night, their long ears always working to protect them from the foxes which live up in the woods just above our ‘tea’ mountain house. Sometimes nearby there are the chamois deer who eat on the bits of grass exposed by the little snow slides. Timid nervous creatures who run at the slightest noise into the woods. Let’s hope that at least the animals are content in this period.

Another strange thing is that I have noticed is that there are hardly any planes going over Livigno, usually we have all the stripes on the sky where they pass over the alps, now I can just see one far far away but no stripe behind it. That has got to be a plus point of all this. Maybe (i know this is not a good thing for someone who works with tourism to say) this is good thing, maybe we should all think about how much we mess the world up jetting here and there. Ok I haven’t flown for years (i dont like it) but i will seriously think about in encouraging people to come by train to us. I wonder if this crisis will change how we view tourism, maybe after it will be less long haul and more travel within Europe, by car or by train? It will be interesting to see what happens. I think that it is going to be hard for hotel and other businesses in the tourism industry to catch up. Will people feel safe travelling after all this? Who knows.