Christmas in Ireland: Mist, Rain, Showers, Wind and Dampness

Spent Christmas in Ireland with family and friends. My sister Val had rented a small cottage in county Kerry, in the south west of the country. My brother Peter flew over to join us, so there was a high concentration of family and lots of accompanying noise and chaos.

The countryside where we were staying was beautiful, but most of the time it was obscured by thick curtains of rain - it rained and rained and rained. Good for catching up on sleep, recovering from jet lag, talking, eating, drinking strong beer in pubs and watching television to all hours of the morning. We got out one day and made it part of the way around the Ring of Kerry to the island of Valencia, the rain intensified in the course of the day and on our return, new waterfalls and streams were thundering down the sides of the hills.

One of the stranger moments of the holiday was a drink in the small town of Killorglin, near to where we were staying. That the drink was not in a pub but in a tapas bar was a sign of how Ireland is becoming more cosmopolitan, even in small towns. But stranger still was the fact that the bar was in a converted church. When I asked about it, I was told that it didn't really matter, because it had been part of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland!

The picture is in Doneraile Park close to Mallow, where we spent the last day before my departure.

Tour de Bronx

Most people, when they hear the words "The Bronx" think of things like high-rise housing projects, crime and urban decay. I know that was something of the image that I had of it. It is the poorest buroughs in New York and one of the poorest areas in the US.

I'd only been to the Bronx twice before today; now, having cycled through it for a 40 mile 'Tour de Bronx' ride, I have a better idea of what it is like. And that is: high-rise housing projects, crime and urban decay *and* a lot of other things: sumptuous mansions overlooking the Hudson and the Jersey Pallisades, Lobster Restaurants and yacht life around City Island, stunning views and an old stone fort at the New York State University Maritime College, suburban living (with picket fences) in the neighbourhoods along Long Island Sound.

The event was free, chaotic and fun; it drew a mixed crowd which included me, Julia Henderson and Yinbel, the IHouse team. It was organized in part by Transportation Alternatives, an organization which pushes for fewer cars in New York. They have a long way to push.

New York (Still) Cares

Last year I painted hopscotch squares on a school yard in Queens; today I pasted category labels onto Harry Potter and Charlotte's Web books with other engineering students at a school with the great name of MS 394 K in the heart of Brooklyn. It was all part of the New York Cares day, was a lot of fun and had me itching to read some of those books.

This is our book-categorizing team, and the school librarian who had a sweet, lilting west-indian accent.

Newtown Creek

Another History of the City of New York tour took us to Newtown Creek, which is the heavily polluted stretch of water between the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, east of Manhattan. The tour was lead by Jack Eichenbaum, a retired Geologist who does tours of Queens. Here is a New York Times article on him.

The section of the walk in Brooklyn was in the Greenpoint neighbourhood, the polish enclave I have blogged about before. The entire waterfront here is fenced off, decaying industry which is really frustrating because of the beautiful views of Manhattan which the it hides. This is what the Empire State Building looks like from there:

Hiking Upstate, Driving Downtown

Long day in which the official driver of the hiking club's trip out to the High Point State Park in New Jersey (me) missed his alarm and awoke half an hour before the group was supposed to be picked up. A hectic taxi ride to midtown Manhattan and even more hectic drive back up to Columbia later, and I picked them up only 15 minutes late. Whew! I enjoyed the driving, and the hiking, through trees all turning red and gold on a beautiful autumn day, was great. This was the first hike on which we didn't see the Manhattan skyline off in the distance. This site of the hike was the highest point in New Jersey, which is about as exciting as the highest point in the Netherlands.

When returning the car in the evening, I had the experience of driving through downtown Manhattan in the middle of the day. The operative word here is pushy: everyone is, and if you aren't, you're lost.

The Gunks

It may sound like a disease, but the Gunks is not, in fact, something you have (and scratch like crazy) but a place you go to. Preferably with with plenty of climbing gear in beautiful autumn weather and some of the fine climbers from the Columbia Rock Climbing Club, which is the experience I had today.

The Gunks are in Minnewaska State Park in upstate New York, about two hours north of the city.
View Larger Map

They are are series of sheer, 20-30 meter high basalt cliffs which provide excellent, varied climbing. I have a lot of indoor experience, but this was only my third time to climb outside. It was a great experience, but at the end of the day, my hands were stiff and sore - they really had the Gunks.

Kayaking on the Hudson

Finally, finally, finally! On the Hudson today in a sea kayak at the invitation of Adelene, from my kayaking group at Columbia. We went up the Hudson in windy conditions with a group of others to the Mitsuwa Marketplace on the Jersey shore, pretty much opposite IHouse.

Misuwa is a fabulous Japenese complex which has a supermarket (cheap sushi, cheap saki and many other good things) and a food court, complete with the charming plastic example food they use to advertise menus all over Japan.

Stuffed, we returned down the Hudson by holding onto each other's canoes and just letting the current and wind take us back to the boathouse on 59th Street.

All-Night Bike Ride across New York

The History of the City of New York course is showing me things I would never otherwise see in the city. One of these is Times Square, at midnight ... on a bicycle with 200 others. All this was part of the famous All-Night Bike Ride, which sets of from Columbia's campus just before midnight, and goes across the length of Manhattan to Brooklyn and back. I was a volunteer mechanic, which had me pumping a lot of flat tires and adjusting seat heights throughout the night. I got back at about 5am in the morning. One of the more hair-raising parts of the trip was not Times Square, but 5th Avenue which was hectically busy even at 1am in the morning. The photo is of Washington Square, at the tail end of 5th Avenue.

Marek and Maike in New York

Marek and Maike (or M&M), two of my closest friends from Germany, came to visit me on a trip which was way too short for all of us. Here we are in the Rockerfeller Plaza (that is all the gray bits on the edge of the picture)

Back at Columbia: The Beginning of The End

After the warmth and friendliness of San Francisco, it felt strange to be back in New York. Big, loud, noisy and rude were all words which went through my head shortly after I arrived at JFK, late at night, and it took about a week for them to fade.

It was, however, great to come back to International House (tiny cell and all) and have a lot of people enthusiastic about seeing me again. I did try to move out of here this semester, but I couldn't find anything in the time that I was looking, so I am staying put in the tiny cell, and just enjoying the friendly atmosphere.

This is my last Semester at Columbia. It is a special semester because I only have to do 6 credits in it (unlike previous semesters in which I have had to do 12), so I have a lower workload and hopefully a bit more time to enjoy myself. After some difficulty in figuring out what I want to do, I have ended up taking Biometrics (automatically determining categories or identifying people or things) and Programming and Problem Solving, which is a fun course involving a lot of programming groupwork in a creative atmosphere. In addition, I am auditing (i.e. sitting in on) a course on (Environmental) Ethics Values and Justice given by Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, which looks at the ethical issues around environmentalism. I am also taking an amazing undergraduate course on the History of the City of New York which involves a lot of trips to interesting parts of the city. This will be the stuff of many blog posts to come.

Burning Man

I wash the dirt from my feet in the basin of the restroom in a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Reno. Try to flatten my hair. Step out of my dusty desert clothes into the last set of fresh ones I have. Splash water across my face. The basin stains with the pale brown of the desert dust, then washes it down with the small miracle of running water from a tap disappearing into a drain. I step out of the wash room feeling like I'm emerging from an airlock in a space station. I have come from out there, and now I am back in here again.


I spent the last week of my trip at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert, with Tim, Joe, Alison and other people that I had met through Google. It is difficult to describe Burning Man in a paragraph, so I will say only that it was the strongest sense of being in an alternative reality that I've ever had, and if you're curious, I've uploaded photographs onto my Flickr page.

Climbing Mount Shasta

I have become an outdoor-urban-hybrid. I'm sitting sipping a latte in a coffee shop in Shasta City, and the promise of it kept me going most of the day: up the volcano and back down again and enjoy a latte at the end.

There are a string of volcanoes down the Pacific Coast: Rainier (Washington), Mnt Hood, Mnt St Helens, Mnt Jefferson and many more in Oregan and Mnt Shasta in Northern California. Driving down Highway 97 is a parade of one icy cone after the other. This is Mount Hood, rising above Oregan wheat fields.





Since I couldn't climb Rainier, I decided to climb Shasta in the NE corner of California. It is lower, but at over 4300m its not a hill. I camped out last night on the side of the mountain, in a grove of dwarf pine trees next to a spring of glacial water and got up at 3:30 am to do the climb. The Milky Way was so bright it looked like a cloud, and experiencing dawn break across the glaciers was a special experience. Its been a while since I last did this (Mount Kenya) and I had forgotten that going up a volcano is hell: you make a single step up, huffing with the altitude, and the shale mountainside slides down around you. Coming down is like walking on the moon: you make kangaroo leaps and let the shale slide you down.

It was a tougher climb than I anticipated; especially the last summit stretch onto the plug which involved some real climbing, but without ropes and alone on a rock face where you had to check every handhold and foothold wasn't going to crumble away. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it - it was risky - but I'd climbed up too much shale to give up. And sitting up there made it all worthwhile: a panoramic view in all directions and the opportunity to watch lazy clouds coalescing and dispersing in the dizzying volume of air below.

American Radio

This trip has involved a lot of driving - which I've really appreciated - and combined with that I've had the opportunity to sample some of what is broadcast on American radio frequencies. FM here is mostly music, and although there are a lot of stations, its still hard to find something worth listening to. Mixed in with the commercial stations there are many religious broadcasters who play Christian pop and rock or host talk on issues like "The Day of Rest and the American Work Ethic".

AM hosts a lot of talk radio, and it gives an indication of how polarized America is. The recent intelligence report on Iraq was a hot topic two days ago, but the commentators took wildly different spins on it (we are winning militarily and now they are moving the goal posts vs we cannot win because of the political situation in Iraq). On a syndicated show on one of the CBS stations, environmentalists were made scape goats for Hurricane Katrina (they prevented new sluices being put into place), the collapse of the WTC during 9/11 (fire-dampening asbestos stripped) and car accident fatalities (pollution controls make cars lighter). One virulent right-wing show that I kept on getting was that of Sean Hennity who makes a living out of liberal-bashing (and in America liberal is a dirty word). A lot funnier was Doctor Laura who's show (at least the part of it I heard) consists of people phoning in with some kind of heart wrenching story (my daughter was abused by my husband, for example, or I lost the love of my life through my own selfishness) only to get told that they are total morons or they are unintelligible and hurry up, why don't you? It is very entertaining (for a short while).

Mount Rainier

The Mount Rainier National Park is a couple of hundred kilometers south of Seattle. The drive out there ran the gauntlet of some of the ugliest strip malls (worthy of New Jersey) leading rapidly to a gorgeous natural setting. In America, Paradise is easy to get to, and comes with a view point.

I would have liked to climb the mountain, but it requires the kind of experience with crampons and ice picks I don't have, and the organized trips had been booked out months in advance. So I spent a couple of days hiking around the tree zone and back again. Thursday I got up really early and saw a large number of animals, one after the other: coyote, deer, squirrel and beavers.



I hiked a lot through alpine meadows, but I also climbed up above the tree line where the snow bridges were all melting.



I left Mount Rainier really early in the morning (got up before dawn) and got these images in the Reflecting Lake at the base in the morning light.

Cassie and Roy

I'm staying here with Cassie and Roy (whom I know via Vivienne). They've been very hospitable and given me a welcome bit of suburban comfort in the middle of my trip. Both work in the IT industry, so we could exchange a lot of tech talk.








Cassie and Roy live together with a frisky shoe-chewing husky named Shadow, who was a lot of fun once she got to trust me.

Seattle: Urban Interlude

Seattle is a beautiful city, compact core with a lot of water in all directions (lakes and the Puget Sound). I took a break from the outdoors here for a couple of days, sat in a lot of cafes and drank a lot of coffee, spending time in bookshops or rubbing salt into my own wounds by visiting the University of Washington (they turned down my masters application).

I am a long-time listener (and member) of the Seattle-based radio station KEXP which has a style in music very similar to mine (i.e. eclectic) and a lot of good attitude to boot. It has been great to be able to listen to them on FM radio, and a fun experience to walk around Seattle and recognize things I've heard them mentioning repeatedly on the air: that's where Queen Anne is ... there is the Paramount Theatre ... the High Dive ... Silver Platers ... Easy Street Records. I went to a free in-store concert at Easy Street last night; local band Minus the Bear played and signed copies of their new album Planet of Ice.

Here are some other images: totem pole in the Pioneer Square district, and the Space Needle with a bit of Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project building.

Oregan and Portland

I motored through Oregon in a day, reaching the city of Portland in the evening. The first part of the day was spent hugging the coast, through a series of beautiful bays and small towns which were all demarcated as tsunami danger zones. In the early afternoon, I was seeing little of the ocean and the going was slow, so I headed inland from Reedsport along the banks of the beautiful Umpqua river to the Interstate freeway (for anyone who has never spent time on the US road system: an interstate, other than doing what the name says, is a big freeway with a lot of traffic and higher speed limits).

My overnight in Oregon was a great experience: 20 minutes east of the city of Portland in a suburb with the unlikely name of Troutdale, I stayed at the McMenamins Edgefield. Doesn't sound too amazing, I thought when it was recommended to me. But the hotel really is beautiful, with a strong alternative feel, covered with murals. Its a restored poor farm project (part of Roosevelt's New Deal) which has been renovated with loving attention to detail, and its not just a hotel/hostel but a microbrewery (its own beer, wine and pear brandy) with a whole complex of bars, music stages and wine-tasting cellars. Here's a selection of some of the murals.













I was really tired when I arrived, so although I drove into Portland hoping to see something of it, I ended up just walking around a little and driving back to the hotel to get some sleep. I did go through again the next morning for breakfast, and what little of the city I saw I liked a lot: for one thing it seems to have one of the most extensive tram networks I've seen in America.

Kanaka

Kanaka Rajan, who I know from the Columbia Hiking Club, was supposed to be joining me on this trip. She had to cancel at the last minute, because of a family emergency. Kanaka: if you're reading this, I hope things are going well with you right now, and I'm sorry you couldn't have joined me.

Tree Hugging, Clambering and Cussing

Redwoods towering hundreds of meters above your head give a sense of reverie and awe. Redwoods blown over the hiking trail by storms so you have to clamber over, under and around them give a sense of awe too, and a redwood intimacy I had never expected, but also a lot of frustration: it was painfully slow and difficult to hike a couple of miles through the forest in these conditions. Of course, I had ignored the warning sign.

Here are some images of my hike:

Night in the Forest

I'm taking an on-the-fly planning approach for this trip, with a rough big picture to which I attach details as I go. Most of the time this works really well, but its high season, so inevitably the situation arises which arose to meet me when I arrived in the evening at the Redwood National Park in the North West corner of California: the campsites were all full, and the ranger didn't look like he'd be breaking any rules to squeeze in one more tent. But, he said, you can go back to the hiking trailhead and go a ways down the trail and camp in the wild overnight. I had all the equipment I needed (including a water filter), and I didn't have too many alternatives.

It was about 7pm by the time I set off, and I got to a gravel bank on the Redwood Creek after about an hour. As the sun set, the forest came alive with sounds: something (ducks?) was plopping in the water in front of the tent the whole night, other things were rustling in the undergrowth and sometime in the night, some kind of insect scrabbled repeatedly to try and get into the tent. This might all sound a little like the Blaire Witch, but spending the night in a forest by rushing water with incredible stars overhead made me really glad the campsite was full.

Eureka, California

There is a remix from Mylo with an overlay text which goes

Well this is all about my problems to get out of drugs,
cause I had enough of that,
I've had the college,
I've had the earing the money,
and the material trip,
I just decided I was going to find a new way of life
And so i took off on my bycicle,
Peddling up to highway one,
and found myself one day in Eureka California.

Today I understand this text a little better: Eureka, one of the larger towns in Northern California, has a bohemian core of beautiful, multicoloured Victorian-era wood buildings in an ugly suburban shell. I didn't spend a lot of time there, but long enough to see these funky murals:

Touring Culture

Cyclists are a frequent sight on Highway One. Beautiful beaches, plentiful campsites and a winding coastal road might sound like ideal cycling conditions, but I'm not sure I'd do this (and I'm an avid cyclist). The roads are hectic with car traffic, and the cyclists have to share them with the motorists. Share the Road is the admonishing sign you see all the time here. But its pushed to extremes, because not only do you share the road, you also share the freeway (cycle lane is on the right) and share the insanely narrow iron bridges with a blinking light system which is supposed to warn thundering oncoming traffic of a cyclist on the bridge. Yikes.

The hectic traffic is not just cars, but hulking white "Recreational Vehicles" and even more hulking mobile homes: huge boxy buses and typically towing a 4x4 but housing just a couple or a family. Its an alien camping culture for me.

Mendocino

There is nothing in Northern California, said a friend (from Southern California). Just one giant marijuana plantation. Northern California is vast, and - at least when you've been living on the East Coast of the US - a little empty. I drove through any number of small towns with a sign on the outskirts saying something like Boonville Pop. 440. So far I haven't seen any marijuana.












Mendocino (Pop 824), where I spent last night, is typically small but its striking: a lot of old Victorian-era wooden buildings and distinctive wooden water towers, some of which have been incorporated into the buildings around them as extra space. It is perched on top of spectacular headlands with flocks of screaming birds and bays which surge with orange kelp. All this picturesqueness has inevitably made Mendocino the setting for a number of movies and TV shows (East of Eden, Karate Kid III, Murder She Wrote).

Highway One

When I was a kid spending the holidays at the coast in Port Alfred, I used to fall asleep dreaming of the rolling motion of the waves. Now I am falling asleep dreaming of the side-to-side motion I've been doing all day as I wind my way up the Pacific Coast on Highway 1, the old coastline road which hugs the Northern Californian coast. You get breathtaking views of the Pacific as it changes, as though the scenery were seen through a kaleidescope and the same landscape gets filtered by a new colour at every shake: blue, then silver, then grey; cool fog follows sunny yellow and on and on through countless hairpin bend and hills and moments that you're really, really glad your concentration didn't just lapse.











I met some divers at the Salt Point State Park who were collecting abalone - I'd only seen the huge shells before (they sold them for ashtrays in South Africa), here is what they look like freshly hauled up from the sea before they are ashtrays:












The diver that caught them told me the details of the cooking process: pry, hammer ,cut, hammer, boil ... and then they don't taste of much apart from what you cook them with. You may as well eat tofu, even if you can't dive for it. Salt Point was beautiful, with a lot of strange rock formations.



Eagles are a constant sight on the coast ... they hover along the cliff line on updrafts, looking for prey, then swoop up and back and repeat.






Nikhil taught me a smart trick: if you dismount the lens off your camera and reverse it, it functions as a macro lens. Here is me playing around (the plant is about 1cm wide). The whole area is flush with flowers and berries.