Diving, Driving, Hiking and Gambling.

Yosemite National Park

Kate left on Friday for a week long work trip to the UK, so I thought I would make use of the time by updating our poor little blog with some of the stuff that has happened since we last posted in June.

For a start there was my weekend away to Budapest in June for Hamish's bucks party. I went a few days early and had a poke around Vienna, trying as many meat based local specialties as I could find in the time I had. Beautifully classic city, and easily navigated on foot.

The pace picked up when I met the other bucks party attendees at Vienna airport, where we all piled into a minivan and headed to Budapest. It was a fast paced couple of days full of pubs, clubs, restaurants and even a local craft beer festival. There was very little time or reason to sleep, and we all returned to Dubai wearing the darkest sunglasses we could find, each of us nursing a headache worthy of such a good time.

Since then Kate and I went out east for a weekend to Dibba to do some diving, snorkeling and other fun stuff with a group of people we have recently met in Dubai. We stayed aboard a big wooden dhow for the weekend, which was a first for us.

The crew were a great bunch of guys, who made our stay on board as much fun as possible, and didn't mind that we got a bit rowdy now and again.

Anton is one of the guys who organised the weekend, and he made a nice little video of some of the stuff we got up to:
http://vimeo.com/106664720

But then came the big trip to the USA, starting in early September and going for three weeks. We started in LA, where we saw the Santa Monica Pier, the Hollywood Sign and Hollywood Blvd.

Oh, and we OBVIOUSLY went to Disneyland! Mickey says hi.

Los Angeles was nice, but it wasn't as much fun as the drive we did from there up the west coast, heading towards San Fransisco. We took the slower coastal road instead of the highway, just so we could take in the amazing views from the winding roads along the cliffs next to the ocean.

 At one point we were lucky enough to see a pod of whales playing in the sea a couple of hundred meters from the shore, so we pulled over and just watched them as they breached and sprayed all over.

We also stopped at a beach which was covered in seals lying the sun. We have seen seals before, but never in this quantity, in the wild. You can imagine it took us a while to sort through all the photos from that part of the trip!

You should click on this one to enlarge it, so you can have a closer look at all those seals!

Then came San Fran, with more hills than Hong Kong. I don't think there is a level sidewalk in the whole place.

But don't think it wasn't a fun place, because it really, really was. We walked through the Fisherman's Wharf, tried the local clam chowder, rode the trams, drove down Lombard Street, ate late night donuts, and even visited the infamous Alcatraz!

THIS is Lombard Street, the curviest street in the world, per mile.

I'd heard from time to time that the audio tour at Alcatraz is the best one ever, and I can tell you that is not an overstatement. I was gradually guided through the whole complex by the voices of actual former inmates and guards, with eerie background noises framing each story.

It was informative, and built a nice sense of tension, really bringing the whole place back to life in a way that helped me picture how tough it must have been to live there, for inmates, staff and even their families. Absolutely recommended to anyone stopping by San Fran.

We also walked out to the big red bridge one day, but by the time we arrived the whole thing was covered with thick fog, like sheets over furniture, so we couldn't see much at all. Nice walk, at least. The coastline around the bay is just great for (massive) bird watching. I think the seagulls in America have eaten a few too many GMO french fries or something, since they are bigger than your average size 10 chicken, and look like they could easily carry off a small child if they felt like it.

We left San Fransisco in a mini van, since we were traveling with our friends Aaron and Emma from Australia, so the van gave everyone plenty of leg room, and had a boot big enough for all our junk.

Dodge isnt the make of the car, it's instructions for the wildlife.

We needed some room to stretch anyway, considering that we drove all the way southeast through to Yosemite National Park, where we did a few hikes and took in the views from a load of different lookouts along the mountain roads.

That is Half Dome off to the right

It's a beautiful place with some very unique rock formations like The Half Dome, and the facilities inside the park are perfectly equipped to deal with the huge number of tourists passing through. The almighty sequoia trees are a sight to behold as well, which were even bigger than the douglas fir trees we saw in Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island last year.

Back on the road again, and a few hours later we were rolling through Death Valley National Park. What happened to all the trees? The abrupt transformation from the alpine freshness of Yosemite to the stark wasteland of Death Valley was an astonishing. We read up on exactly why Death Valley is just so... dead. Spoiler alert: It's the heat. But the heat is because the desert is below sea level a lot of the time, which means the atmospheric pressure (and therefore the general temperature) is much higher, and when the hot, sticky air rises as it warms, it can't fully escape the valley because like all good valleys, it is surrounded on all sides by mountains. So the air cycles back down and heats back up again, over and over, leaving us feeling like we were breathing through soup.

We stopped off to go for a walk in the blazing sun, which turned out to be less of dumb idea than it sounds, because we made our way out to a mostly dried up lake / salt flat, where the surface of any puddle was coated with a thin salty icing.

More fun to see in real life that I can really get across with words, unfortunately. Obviously the thought of rattlesnakes and scorpions lurking in the long dried grass kept things more exciting along the way, and getting back to our 'hockey-mom' mini van in one piece felt like a victory in itself. It wasn't Happy Valley, after all.

The other place in Death Valley worth a mention is Badwater Basin, the cheerfully named, dried up seabed lurking about 150 'feet' below sea level (who actually uses imperial anymore?).

Walking out over the thick salt crust in the midday sun without another living thing in site (tourists not included) was like being on the surface of The Moon. Or maybe Venus, given the temperature. We felt like we were a world away from Yosemite and all those pine trees.

That ain't sand. It's salt.

There wasn't any reason to stay the night in Death Valley, so we made a bee-line for Las Vegas (baby!). We stopped at a 'gas' station on the outskirts of the city, where we found that the petrol in Nevada is dirt cheap, even for America. In the fifteen minutes we were at the station, Kate managed to turn a dollar into ten using one of the poker machines set up inside. We hoped that it was a sign of things to come...

And I think I'll leave it there for now. Hard to believe this only covers the first ten days or so of our three week trip through the states and Mexico. Tune in next time for our adventures in Vegas, Mexico, Orange County and other places!

Till next time!
//Brendan