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.