Rock Climbing in Yosemite

In New York I've had a difficult time finding a decent climbing gym which is affordable to a student. In San Francisco, I've been back at climbing with a vengeance, at a great gym around the corner from where I live. But the ultimate goal of the climbing sessions was always to get outdoors and go going climbing in Yosemite.

Yosemite is world-famous for its scenery but also, among climbers, for the awesome rock climbing opportunities there. In fact, the American route ranking system was developed in Yosemite. The central Yosemite valley is hot (and crowded!) at this time of year, so a better alternative is the higher Tuolumne Valley, just to the North.


I went to Yosemite with Nikhil, a fellow intern at Google. He is from Delhi and is doing a PhD in computer vision at the University of California San Diego. He is working within Google's image search project. We met on the hike to Sykes Hot Springs last month, and found we had a lot in common - interest in photography, the outdoors, travel, and computers.

We did a crack-climbing course with the Yosemite Mountaineering School on Saturday, learning skills like finger, fist and foot jamming (which is sometimes just as painful as it sounds!) In addition to the crack climbing, at the end of the day we did some climbing on faces which had no cracks - or anything else, for that matter. You get hand and foot holds on tiny ledges, about 1mm wide, which form when plates of rock erode off. It makes you feel like a human fly.



The campsite at Tuolumne is huge (300+ campsites) and surprisingly poorly equipped. It has no electricity, no hot water, no showers and no real place to wash dishes. It was also full to capacity. We were lucky enough to get a camping site for the first night, but on Saturday we ended up squatting on the campsite of a dutch girl, her American friend and an Italian couple - which resulted in some great conversation.

On Sunday, Nihil and I did an 18 km hike along the Yosemite Creek which leads to the place where the creek drops hundreds of meters into the valley. As we reached this spot, I closed my eyes and Nihil lead me to the edge of the cliff. When I opened my eyes, this was the view I got:



It was a awe-inspiring moment ...

Mark McNally in San Francisco

Mark, old computer-science-student-in-arms from Wits, came to San Francisco this weekend for an interview with Google. He lives in Chicago with his wife Ina and their child. It was great to see him, and visit some of the the things in San Fransisco together that I'd missed out on. This was in one of the historic trams which travel parts of the network here.

Shake, Rattle and Shake

Early Friday morning an earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale shook the Bay Area, and shook me out of sleep. Suddenly I was aware that I was in the ground floor of a less than solid looking wooden building which was juddering a little around me, not the kind of sensation you want at 4 o'clock on a dark morning.

It passed with narry a broken window in the city. The big one is still to come.

Marinless in Marin

For more than 10 years now, I've been the proud owner of a Marin Bear Valley mountain bike. It was the first expensive thing that I bought when I graduated and I've had it on a lot of trips - in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland and New York.

I never knew what the name meant before coming to California. But today I went on a bike tour of the Marin Headlands, just north of the Golden Gate, and beautiful mountain bike territory. And the bike? In storage in New York. I made the decision not to bring it here because of the hassle. You might say I am kicking myself about this decision now, but that would be wrong: I am riding around on the bicycle equivalent of an old white Datsun over a lot of the hills and trails that I should have had the Marin on. And that hurts a lot more than kicking!


The headlands offer winding road going up and crazy brake singeing drops down to the shore again and then huff huff huff back up to postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Its not the first time I've been on the bridge, but this time I took the opportunity to take some photos.

Night Kayaking

My flatmate Laurie works part time at a sea kayaking outfit in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate bridge. For anyone who knows Cape Town, this is the equivalent of Hout Bay. I went along on a night kayaking trip on the bay with her and her friend Sarah and a group of paying customers. They didn't go far, and at first I thought it would be rather lame, but then the sun went down, all the lights on the bridges came on and the stars came out - its was a dark night and both Jupiter and Venus were brilliant in a starry sky. Then Sarah discovered the sky wasn't the only thing that was all sparkly - the water was filled with bioluminescence, which you could see clearly when you moved your hand fast through the water, like tiny agitated sparks.

Sarah and Laurie and I went for a beer afterwards in Sausalito, and then Lauries got a ride back and I didn't - not that I minded, in fact, because after a tequilla to keep me warm I had the surreal experience of riding back over the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight in the mist.

Bike to Work Day

Googlers have their share of eccentric habits. One group which lives in San Francisco regularly bicycles the 60 odd kilometers to work once or more per week. On Friday, having my own share of eccentric habits, I joined them with Laurie and Cathie. The ride took about 3.5 hours, and was less strenuous but less pretty than I expected - I was hoping the route would take us along the San Francisco Bay, but we were mostly inland. The breakfast at Google, which is amazing anyway, did taste even more amazing at the end of a 60km bike ride, though.

Point Reyes National Seashore

Another fabulous contact with California's natural beauty was a day trip to a place with the unlikely name of the Point Reyes National Seashore, north-west of San Francisco in Marin County. This was a second concact with Highway 1 which hugged the cost to the park, almost as beautiful as in the Big Sur. We hiked for about three hours through fragrant grasslands above steep cliffs, hawks hovering constantly overhead, past herds of Tule Elk, which have been brought back from the verge of extinction (at the end of the 19th century, there were just 10 animals left).

Of Redwoods, Hot Springs and Hiking Dogs

Last week I was thinking about how fast my time in California is coming to an end, and how I needed to take advantage of the remaining weekends - and then a trip to the Big Sur fell from nowhere into my lap. Or rather, beneath my hiking boots, because it ended up being a hike up to the hot springs of Sykes.














The Big Sur is a stretch of beautiful coast and forest about 200 km South West of San Francisco, where the legendary Highway 1 hugs the coast in a series of curves and bridges and mist comes curling up from the water. Its really beautiful, a bit like the Garden Route in South Africa. There are a couple of state parks there and a lot of intact nature in and around them.


I went with a group of other interns from Google, which meant there were people from all over the world: Eugene and Mary, immigrants from Belrussia, Jia from Beijing, Tim from Canada, Mangesh and Nikhil from India, Mario from Mexico and Grant, our token American. Its your standard Google mix (or your standard postgrad mix at the universities here, which amounts to pretty much the same thing). The group was very mixed in hiking experience too, but there ended up being no problems.




We hiked for 16 km along a steep gorge, dotted with giant redwood trees and bisected with mountain streams, camping at Sykes in a campsite which was as beautiful as it was rudimentary: spread out along a babbling river, just a couple of drop toilets (in full view of some of the tents, nogal) and the hot springs: a series of pools just above the river water where you could ease blistered feet and sore shoulders in hot water, slumber for an hour and then jump into the clear river to cool down.

(Photo: Nikhil Rasiwasia)

America is a dog nation, Google is a dog company (lots of people bring dogs to work) and this was a dog hike: lots of people had brought their dogs with them, and some of the dogs were sporting dog paniers carrying their own food into the hike.


(Photo: Jia Deng)

The redwood trees seem to go up forever, huge tranks of gnarled bark giving a cathedral-like affect of vaults and detailed domes of foliage.

Pride Weekend

The first weekend in July in San Francisco was the Gay Pride weekend, which is a huge party here. Parts of the city become street festivals, and on Sunday the parade along Market Street in the heart of the city is the highlight. I burnt the candle at both ends, going out late at night but getting up at 5:30 am to help out with the Google float, which was a take on Star Trek featuring George Takei a.k.a. Mr Sulu from the original Star Trek TV series. It was a huge amount of fun. After the parade I met up with a group of friends in the Civic Gardens and drank flavoured vodka to the antics of the awesome SFCheer cheerleader troupe - how's that for a gay combination - and the weekend wound up dancing Salsa at El Rio, one of my favourite bars here in the Mission.

Bevey of Teachers

I am living in San Franciscco's Mission district, in a wooden house (many of the houses here are made of wood) which has a small back garden.

My flatmates are all teachers. Stefanie and Alicia both work in middle schools in San Francisco. Stefanie's school is in West Oakland, which is one of the worst neighbourhoods in the Bay Area.
Her students are in the age group of 13-14. The stories she told in the evening after I came home from a comfy day in the office were startling: students threatening the principle, others accused of rape or involved in drug dealing. She has a hard job, but an inspirational positivism about her work, and the ability to do it with a passion. Despite this, and being voted the teacher with the best sense of humour in the school, four of her car windows were smashed on the last day of term. And that still didn't get her down.












Both Stefanie and Alicia are away at the moment, enjoying the summer break (Stefanie is in Costa Rica). Laurie and Kathie are friends of theirs who have came to San Francisco after working for years on Santa Catalina Island close to Los Angeles in an outdoors center there. Both are passionate cyclists and love the outdoors, and like Stefanie and Alicia before them, they are a lot of fun to live with. They are starting a teaching program in San Francisco at the end of July. The photo above left is of Jacob (Laurie's boyfriend), Kathie and Laurie (and a bottle of tequila); on the right is Kathie at Point Reyes.