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.

Very Bottom Dollar

I burned rubber, accelerating my fat family sized fuel-guzzling Chrysler away from a wasted half day of frustration. How did an eco-freak end up in this petrothirsting horror and with this much stress? Read on for a sorry tale with a moral at the end, or skip to the next blog post if you have enough frustration in your own life already.

I'm hiring a car for three weeks ... I searched around on the Internet a month ago and thought that I'd found a really good deal. Okay, I'm not going to wait to the end to give the moral, here it is: read the fine print. And here's another while I'm at it: the cheapest deal is not the best deal. Not fresh wisdom, but learned the hard way.

I'd already put off my departure by a day because of preparation, so I arrived early today to pick up the car. Dollar Car Rental had one lone worker who smiled a lot and was very chatty, in a poky office in a hotel which was being rebuilt in San Francisco's tacky tourist heartland, so there was plenty of time in the long queue to go through hammer!hammer!drill!scrape!caterpillar!hammer!hammer!
until my big moment arrived at the top of the queue and I found out they didn't have the compact car I'd ordered but could give me a giant family van, and all this without any insurance - nothing at all, not even 3rd party. How can this me legal? In any case, I'd have to buy insurance for a hefty fee on top, including the 5 days that the car would be parked at Burning Man.

Balk!

I walked out and tried to get another deal on a crummy Internet station which half worked, but it was too late. Everything was gone or more expensive. I went back. I stood in another long queue which had formed since I left. The one attendant smiled and chatted a lot with the other customers. Outside it went
hammer!hammer!drill!scrape!caterpillar!hammer!hammer!
and then I paid (through my teeth) and went outside, to discover how huge the car actually was (it seats 7 people) and that the smiling attendant had forgotten to give me a parking ticket, which the park captain insisted I needed to get out. And there was nothing more that I wanted right at that moment than to get out.

So my lesson: avoid Dollar at all costs in the future, and don't just think about Dollar. Take it from me.

My 15 Minutes of Hippydom and Hipdom

On my last Saturday in San Francisco, in the middle of a hectic phase of preparing to leave, with a lot to do still, I had a glass of wine and as if by magic I ended up with Laurie and Kathie and a huge crowd of their friends who all came to stay that weekend at a concert of the Bicycle Coalition at the Mission Dolores Park, close to where we live.


The fun part was that the concert was powered by bicycles. The guy behind the banner is sitting on a chopper, pedaling a generator. And right after I took this picture, I took over and pedaled on. The band was good, it was a lot of fun, and it had a strong hippy flavour. A good way to spend your last Saturday in San Francisco.

Double Dose of Small World

Lorenzo, who I last saw in my Dutch class in Amsterdam, walked through the door at Google in California the other day. Then I found out that Juergen, who I know from my days at IBM in Hamburg, was living a short bike ride from me in San Francisco. We met up today, had a meal and ended up going to a concert. He's working at the University of California San Francisco.

Hugh Masekela in the Stern Grove

It was strange to see Hugh Masekela for the first time in San Francisco ... I've never had the opportunity in South Africa, where he is so well known. Today he played in a free day time concert in Stern Grove, which is an open air amphitheater in a deep bowl of trees in the western part of San Francisco. It's a beautiful setting, and there was a huge turn out despite cool and drizzly weather - lots of families with children, a large number of African-Americans, young people and old people - a very mixed crowd, and good people-watching.

Hugh Masekela is almost 70, but he's a powerful musician and performer who brought the crowd dancing to their feet. He also made an impassioned plea for people not to become indifferent about what is happening Dafur. I was surprised he didn't mention the situation in Zimbabwe, which is in our backyard.

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.

More Money than Taste, More Taste then Money

My New York neighbour (couple of times removed), Pierre, dropped by last weekend; part of his tour of the US. He's heading back to Paris to start work there.

It was a lot of fun to hang out with Pierre, and it was also reason to carry on my San Francisco tradition of alcoholic weekends by going with him, Stefanie and her friend Colette to the wine region north of San Francisco - the Napa and Sonoma valleys. San Francisco reminds me in many ways of Cape Town, so I went to the wine region expecting Stellenbosch and Paarl - and I got both more and less than I expected. The Napa Valley has a lot of wine, but it has a lot more too: more Harley-Davidsons, more ultra-chic villages, more expensive restaurants. Wow. We ended up in Clos Pegase at the end of the valley. This is a "temple to wine" designed by "renowned Princeton architect Michael Graves"; its got sculptures by Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet. And man, its ugly. The art is all over the place, some of it is really kitsch, the building is an oversized, hulking edifice which radiates discomfort. But the wine was good.

It was also good in the Sonoma Valley, where they let you buy a bottle of wine and bring your own picnic. Sonoma is a lot more relaxed than Napa, and has a homey feeling about it. We spent more time there, ending up the day in the giant square in Sonoma town, where the short-lived Californian Bear Flag Republic was declared in 1846 when it was wrenched from Mexico's power. On this Sunday afternoon, war and power struggles seemed very distant, and the townspeople were dancing to a bluegrass band with a washboard-strumming singer in the square.