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.
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