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.

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.