Traveling Maia

"WTF, China?" Volume 2

2012-01-29T20:26:00.001-05:00

This is not the first post I have put, that basically summarizes as, "Wow! Chinese people sure are strange!" but it bears repeating. I suppose it's not TOO surprising that a country as big as Europe, whose biggest city would be the 49th biggest standalone country and also has people living in caves, would have a lot of diversity. In China, if you are one in a million there are 1300 people just like you.*

One of my undergrad college friends was visiting, and we went to Chinatown for the Chinese Year of the Dragon celebration. Bear in mind that Philly's Chinatown is about two by four blocks; as small as an ethnic enclave can be before it is subsumed like a too-small flame. I figured there'd be a few people selling tacky souvenirs, a small-town parade that no one watches because everyone is in it, tourists photographing each other, you know.

Hahahaha NO. The streets were so full of people that you could faint and not fall; we scrambled onto the bumper of a parked cop car to watch the parade of people shouting and drumming, with several multiperson dragon puppets bobbing their owlish faces on long sticks above the crowd. Crowd of Chinese people; we barely needed the height to see over the sea of smooth black hair. In front of each shop dangled long ribbons of what looked like firecrackers because they were, with (why not?) heads of lettuce dangling near them.** Counterbalance? No...turns out dragons eat lettuce. Silly me. These dragons had freely mobile lower jaws that grabbed, shredded and flung the leaves into the air like a vindictive gull, mingling into the dunes of red-paper shreds from the firecrackers that marked their passing. Stand on your toes and you could feel the bangs rattle through your soles; smoke strong enough to taste of yolk and blood. I'd heard that any celebration in China involves enough firecrackers to conquer a small country (but no hard feelings, some countries wouldn't fill a Shenzhen apartment block.) Clearly this is true: all the crowd's babies slept peacefully or watched alertly, unafraid. Oh yeah, just Mommy and Daddy blowing stuff up again. Wake me if something interesting happens.

Once the parade passed, we went shopping. My friend, like myself, is a fairly adventurous eater (I was gnawing a Peking duck head, priced to sell at 4 for a dollar) so we ducked into the fish market and saw:

live eels in a tank
clams, razor and steamer and littleneck
snails of some variety
crabs big enough to take a finger
lots of finfish, both live and iced
a guy quickly and deftly yanking the skin from frogs, in one piece like pajamas
live frogs in a tank
whelks
puppy-sized lobsters, too big to be from Maine.

Every mollusk was clearly and abundantly dead, shells gaping or flesh dangling. The only shellfish that should be dead before it's cooked is scallops, of which there were none. Caveat emptor...We went with some nice, safe-looking sesame buns, though the restaurant had a great deal on "Minced Bean Crud." Maybe I am a coward.

*Take that, Cat Stevens.
**Add that to the list of real-life Mad Libs.

Real-life Mad Libs

2012-01-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

Give me an appliance, a location, and a mishap! (Someone on PITCAIRN had a(n) DISHWASHER that CAUGHT FIRE.)

Give me a profession, a location, and an inherently funny object! (The ART TEACHER brought a(n) HARMONIUM to the YOGA STUDIO.)

Give me a location, an animal, one of the five senses, and an emotionally charged sensation! (My friend from HILO had a(n) ARMADILLO that SMELLED like PATCHOULI.)

Feel free to make your own.

Proof that God Loves Us

2012-01-24T09:28:00.002-05:00

In case you ever doubted it:

He carefully routed a river through every city
And dug out a nice harbor for most of the coastal ones
And, in the tropics, put in a nice reef passage too.

Coffee

When bits of stone crumble from bridges and smash to the sidewalk below, it always happens early on a cold morning so there’s no one there to get hurt.

Making fire by friction is really hard. Parents of boys, be thankful.

But getting smoke is easy. Boys, be thankful.

When it’s icy out, the sun is always low enough to glint off it and warn you

Break a twig off a maple or birch tree during the sap run, and the sugar concentrates at the tip of the sapsicle

Proof that he hates us:

Alcohol speeds the process of sunstroke AND freezing to death, whichever you drank it to escape
So does humidity, and that’s not even fun.
Leaving sea salt on your skin makes you hotter or colder, whichever you don't want

Scrapes always occur in places that are hard to bandage
And blisters, in places that sweat

Toxic mercury salts taste sweet
So does antifreeze, at least according to dogs
And mercury’s fun to play with

Cold-water immersion makes you gasp

If you're dressed suitably for exercise, and hurt yourself, you'll get not only hurt but cold

Behavior patterns specific to one sex, mostly impress members of that same sex: makeup, anorexia, manicures, machismo, mechanical tinkering, sports, gossiping

Pick-two trifectas: Desire/Opportunity/Ability; Cheap/Lightweight/Long-Lasting.

Freedom of Expression

2012-01-23T14:22:00.002-05:00

You know what's even better than freedom of expression? Freedom of "I'm not expressing anything I'm just being me." I thought of this while Rollerblading not wearing a coat, and having strangers inform me that it or I was cold, that I needed a jacket, or ordering me to wear one. Would you inform someone arm in arm with her lover, that he was black? I'm so glad to be past the age when meddlers can make me wear a coat, stay out of the water, control what I do or don't eat...Even better than the freedom to make a statement, is the freedom to not have to justify it.

Addendum: It is not the case that people care and are worried about me and that's why they feel obligated to make ludicrously obvious comments. People in need get ignored. Proof: I was sitting by the trailside, wearing a single skate and struggling to dislodge a pebble that had jammed the other one. No one offered to help, even those whose bikes had clearly visible tool pouches.

Addendum #2: What is referred to as freedom of expression, usually falls into three categories: freedom to make a spectacle of yourself, freedom to live your own life without outside interference, and freedom to hurt others because of your beliefs. Only the first is really "expression"--the other two are mostly about freedom of religion.

Visible Breath

2012-01-17T09:43:00.002-05:00

I finally got an answer to one of the questions of an earlier post: why can you see a whale's breath even if you can't see your own? Their body temperature is the same as ours, and often the local humidity is the same (like the humans are on an open boat.) A grad student running a whalewatch boat gave the answer as being size-related: whale lungs are so much bigger than ours, that even a slight haze is visible. But I was still suspicious; people have made up answers to this question before. (See the comments on the earlier post.) Her answer sounded reasonable, but maybe still wrong.

But now we have proof, at least corroborating evidence. Dogs in Philly range in size from "fuzzy slipper" to "Marmaduke,"and when they gotta go out they gotta go out, even if it's cold. Under certain conditions you can see the breath of big dogs but not little ones. Case closed. I also remember a few times when it's been cold enough to see a bird's breath, but that's pretty unusual and I was also the only person outside to see it.

Note also that breath requires high humidity in order to be visible. It can be really effing cold in the desert and you still can't see your breath, or coldish room temperature in Volcano Village and you can. But in this case, the dogs can be right next to each other and the effect still holds.

Randomly: colder air is dryer. So is it ever so cold that you can't see your breath?

Addendum: Irl in the comments confirms that the answer is no. Also the 300 Club.

Artisanal Cooking

2012-01-16T18:39:00.002-05:00

Drexel's library recently gave away some books, and given my M.O. with books (read quickly, spill stuff on, the bookstore never wants them back) I always need more. So I grabbed several, including one I would never ordinarily have read: Heat, by the entertainingly named Bill Buford. It's about his stints as a journalist learning to cook professionally.

Which got me started thinking, what is it with Americans and learning to cook? BB got started because he had to write a profile of a restaurant chef. The brilliantly named Michael Pollan is a journalist who just happened to settle on plants and food. And the New Yorker magazine can no longer do a whole issue without a story on some arcane food product or other. Artisanal cooking seems to be a topic of minimum energy, like the drain in a bathtub, where journalists come to rest like ping-pong balls after skittering around for a while from topic to topic.

I think the answer hinges on one of Michael Pollan's earlier books: A Place of One's Own, or something like that (I can't be bothered to look it up.) He describes the process of building a small house in his back yard. Again we have intelligent, educated people eager to learn the skills of old-school craftspeople, skills that are as much art as science and that give immediate, concrete results. Working with one's hands, being effortless at making order visibly rise from chaos, is a powerful driving force. See the earlier post on neophilia, which now I think is as much about being willing to be bad at something as it is anything else. Much of what people do in modern culture is about facilitating greater forces rather than applying those forces ourselves: driving a crane, programming a machine, pulling a trigger. And as essential as this is to our lifestyle, it does leave a void. Food is a fairly safe thing to be artisanal about. It's disposable; you don't have to live in it or wear it. It's safe and small-scale: no one ever got crushed under a collapsing soufflé. The materials can be ordered online, and if you do screw up there's always Domino's.

But there's a more sinister side to all this. I said "as much art as science" but with food it's a lot more art and a lot less science. We do things the way we do because this is the way we do it. There are no shortcuts. That way lies tyranny, with fraternity-hazing rituals to make sure you really want to learn before we give up our secrets. Supposedly sushi chefs have to spend their first year doing nothing but make rice; and even if you've been to culinary school it's apparently common to spend your first year in a kitchen just doing prep work. (And start over if you change jobs: it's a ritual, not a skill.) Artisanal skills create a hierarchy: those who have learned the high mysteries and those who have not. It's the equivalent of a union job with a pension and guaranteed raises: make it through this wicket and you can relax. And like a union, the ones who make it to the top are generally the ones who think learning is a chore, seniority is more important than talent, and young whippersnappers should siddown. Trainees should be seen, not heard.

And if you don't know why you do something, you're helpless when things change. There's a scene in Heat where the nonna's tortellini aren't right because American factory eggs are no good; even the science I got from On Food and Cooking tells me that most of the problem she describes is due to the age of the egg. Barnyard eggs are just as runny when they're old, and they get old a lot faster since they're not refrigerated. I bet she could make fine tortellini right here, if she timed it to the natural rhythm of the delivery truck and the sell-by date.

Thinking is hard. Science is hard. Obedience is easy or at least natural. Look at the popularity of Bikram yoga: a series of 26 postures (depending on how you count), none of which are unique, done the same way each time. The series isn't patented and neither is the hot room; only the name is, and its owner collects Rolls-Royces. Even though the series is only a few decades old, it's already spawned its own cultish following. This is the Right Way, all other ways are the Wrong Way, if you get hurt or it doesn't work then you're doing it wrong and you should do it more. Same with American public schools or Transcendental Meditation. TM's such a simple technique it probably is centuries old, but you learn almost exactly the same thing out of any meditation book for a thousandth the price. There's no refuge in scientific medicine: doctors sell some treatments that have been proven not to work and blow off alternative treatments that do. My way or the highway. Do it right or do without, and 'right' is however I learned it.

Notice also that even the harshest bemoaners of the loss of daily-life artistry, don't want it enough to pay what it costs. For the last century or two, you could get a handmade, small-farmed wool sweater for the cost of a week or two of unskilled labor. For two or three weeks' pay, you got custom-made leather boots that could be resoled when they wore out. Still can, but unless you have some special condition (weird feet, farmer friend) you'd probably rather get something good enough and a tenth as expensive. Or spend the big bundle on something much better. Artisan is a nice place to visit, but who wants to live there?

Neophilia*

2012-01-05T15:32:00.001-05:00

Today I learned to iceskate backwards, at a near-empty public rink. I was neither the eldest nor the youngest, and closer to the worst than the best skater, but I think I was the only person past puberty who was trying to learn. This is true for almost everything, not just skating: the market provides kids with art classes, outdoor activities, and of course literacy; but it assumes that postteens have already found all their interests and won't be starting a new one from scratch. Even something as basic as walking. All normal children learn to walk, with or without instruction; adults who've lost the ability (had a stroke, broke a hip) sometimes get so frustrated they give up.

Obviously there's some evolutionary reason for this. Young ravens, like human children, inspect and investigate anything new in their environment; once they grow up they switch from neophilic to neophobic, afraid of a pile of Cheetos if they never saw one before. And of course children don't mind making fools of themselves ("acting childish"). They don't like being poked fun at, but in privacy they're remarkably diligent learners if they see the relevance of the material.

In a global world, where careers don't last a lifetime anymore, it seems like neophilia may become essential again. I wonder what fraction of Google employees would be willing to take a watercolor class if they'd never painted before? I bet more than the average lumpen Joe.

*Not to be confused with necrophilia, pedophilia or pedagogy.

Confused Wildlife

2012-01-01T20:14:00.001-05:00

Today I saw a hawk:

which would be my Facebook profile picture if I could figure out how to get it to work, and a frog:

who, when I threw him off the trail, feebly struggled like a drunk who goes to brush something off his shoulder and it's the floor. Perhaps woken from hibernation by the unseasonable warmth, not realizing winter still lies ahead of us; or perhaps a cousin to these guys.

[CLICK THE LINK]

Mama's On Strike!

2011-12-22T09:18:00.000-05:00

These pictures are several years old, from the kitchen of a hostel in New Zealand. "Mama's On Strike--please wash and put away your own dishes!"

Nettles!

2011-12-21T18:33:00.002-05:00

I didn't even know we had nettles in this country.* I encountered them once years ago on a trip in Poland, was momentarily terrified by being stung by invisible bees, and never thought much about them again. They seemed as British as bracken or chestnuts or caroling. Till I found some growing along the Minuteman Bikeway in eastern Massachusetts when I was here last spring.

I'd read before about the edibility of nettles, but figured they were probably standard potherb; butter-delivery system with useful trace minerals and fiber, distracts you from the fact you have no real food. An excellent addition to a diet of ground corn and molasses, but probably not worth the trouble. Plus it's only pickable during glove season. Like now.

Interestingly enough, this late in the year the nettles basically only grow where they're sheltered from the sky. A summertime hip-high hedge turns, in winter, to a few stragglers cowering under trees and the drooping canes of Japanese knotweed. Except one big patch near what looks like a compost depot: strong rich organic-rot smell, men beeping around in yellow machines, black dunes. Here, there was young sprouting growth as well as tough old canes. I suspect the rotting compost was generating some heat. I stuffed a big freezer Ziploc (always always always carry these!)** took it home and Mom made a trial batch which was so delicious I went and picked a bunch more nettles to make more of this soup.

It was far beyond what you'd expect from the ingredients. There's nothing special in it, except nettles, but the soup is so green it's almost bluish; thick and creamy and with a strong earthy flavor. Earthy like mushrooms, almost an animal flavor, but really resembling nothing but nettle. Go out and pick some nettles and try it, is all I can say.

Oddly enough it might be tough to find nettles. I didn't see any along the CO Canal Towpath. I never have any followers from Britain, but how about the guy in Russia?

Item: A woman saw me picking nettles, asked about them, said, "Oh, I'd be terrified to do that. I mean, what if you get the wrong thing?" I can think of a way to be sure what you're picking is nettles. Not that it would stop a stray leaf from sneaking in, but most nettle clumps are thick enough to exclude competition. Especially this time of year. If it stings, it's nettle.

Big bunches nettle greens, picked with gloves on: they'll sting through a pair of polypro pants given the chance. Get rid of pine needles, twigs et cetera. Bring big pot of water to the boil; dump in the nettles, swish around, keep boiling until stems are totally limp and stingless. Bite one to be sure; this late in the season it took ten minutes. Strain through a colander. Squeeze dry; chop with scissors. Freeze any extra. Cooking them deactivates the sting; it doesn't just transfer it to the cooking water like milkweed bitterness. Both the greens and the broth ("tea") are now safe to eat.

Chop an onion. Cook in a little oil till translucent. Add water or nettle broth throughout cooking as needed for texture or to grease blender. Add a handful raw rice. Cook till rice is done. Whiz mix in blender with nettles (carefully, in small batches) until smooth. Return to pot. Season to taste with bouillon: I used chicken, but probably any kind except fish. Eat with bread or yogurt.

You can also thicken with cornstarch, to get a little creaminess: cornstarch, mixed to a paste with some of the broth, return to pot, boil.

I've also heard that nettle tea is good for hair growth. So I tried some of it in the shower. If my back gets hairy, we'll know why.

*USA
**Also zip-ties and razor blades

Christmas Thoughts

2011-12-16T11:00:00.001-05:00

Interesting stuff:

1) Tent Life in Siberia describes the huts of seminomadic reindeer herders, the Koraks, as being topless cones, like a wooden teepee, with only one hole at the top that served for the passage of smoke, air, light and people. Is this why Santa comes down the chimney? Most frontier cultures have traditions of hospitality: what's wrong with the front door?

2) Relatedly: I have heard, but cannot cite sources, that Lappish shamans used to trip on fly agaric mushrooms in order to see visions. Hence the flying-reindeer legend. (Also heard that the American Eskimos were the only culture that did not deliberately mess with their consciousness, and as soon as consciousness-messing-with drugs became available they joined the club. Whoever said that, clearly has never done a sweatlodge or fast: that'll get you high.)

3) Christmas traditions, like all hallowed traditions, are actually Victorian: specifically Dickensian. In particular the idea of a white Christmas, which most of the UK gets but seldom. However, they did get eight successive ones when Charles Dickens was a lad; enough to set his memory and thus the rest of ours.

Last and Final Stage

2011-12-15T10:39:00.010-05:00

or, Leucine is Good For You

I'm bailing out of the trip early for several reasons, some of which became clear only this morning. I decided to turn back in Cumberland, Maryland because I was basically bored. The canal path doesn't go through many towns, and the ones it does are largely (mostly) hideous Americana interstate strip. I'd forgotten how blighted our landscape is. And where you're not in a town, the terrain doesn't vary much. Pure edge habitat, view over the Potomac River in most places, ducks, geese, woodpeckers so big I took them for grouse; lots of deer. Beautiful ice patterns on the still water of the canal, assorted abandoned engineering projects like locks and dams, canal water so cold a gulp gives an ice-cream headache. But I think I've seen enough of it now. And then this morning I found that the entire tread of my front tire is peeling off; what looked like just cracked rubber is spreading and gaping, waiting for a puncture. In cyclist slang, "You can see the air through it!" So I called Steven and he's coming to get me.

Images from the last couple of days:

Canal ice. Even though the canal looks like self-contained long skinny lakelets and streams, clearly the water does flow through it. You know how sea ice will descend on the tide and the rocks will smash up through it? (Well, it does.) Same thing here, with similar effects around tree trunks and along the edges of the canal, with the ice bent and rumpled along the shore. Maybe the flow is underground here; or maybe just insoak? There doesn't seem to be any of the reverse going on, where water leaches under the ice and heaves it up.
Trees, at least some varieties, really don't mind having their feet wet. They grow ankle-deep in the canal, in some places all the way across. Wonder if 'too wet' means too deep or too long at a time? Maybe the trees have to be dry at least once per year, in the heat of summer.
A canal really is a highway. One that has to be perfectly level: the Canal du Midi in France actually crosses the road on a special bridge. Huge amounts of maintenance to keep water levels at the right height, and the tiniest portage dooms the endeavor. Which is why they so quickly got replaced by railroads, as soon as possible: what was it, availability of cheap steel? European canals were there for centuries; American less than one. Like railroads in New Zealand basically just had a chance to get completed before they were obsolete: I remember one branch line was operational for only seven years. Sped-up industrialization. Like land phone lines had such a brief tenure in Fiji; now everyone who can afford a cell phone has one, and those who don't don't need any phone at all.
Ice skating. Ever since reading about it as a kid (Hans Brinker and, unrelatedly, Marvelous Meg) I've wanted to ice skate on canals and frozen rivers. And of course it doesn't have to be as bitterly cold for a canal to freeze, as a New England kettle pond, which means you have more chance of getting good ice without snow. There are many long stretches of open water in the canal that you could skate along; a local guy I talked to in Cumberland concurs that sometimes the local kids do skate one such section.
Suthunuhs. Even this far north--the river follows the Mason-Dixon line--you get the accent and the random friendliness. I should be ashamed to like the southern accent, but it sounds so nice and homey in spite of I know about the vicious ignorant rednecks. (While the Maine accent, spoken by many nice folks of my acquaintance, sets my teeth on edge. Not fair.)
Cold cold cold! Everything I know about cycle touring no longer applies: how to keep cool, stay in the shade, where to find water, how little clothing you can legally wear. Getting into Hancock in the evening, I thought my front derailleur was broken: curse moan grumble I've had rear-shifter problems in the past but these are new shifters, wtf. In the morning, less tired, I noticed the derailleur was covered with mud; knocked it off, now it works; rinsed it off with my waterbottle and went inside for breakfast. Mistake. It froze solid. Since the motel was at the top of a hill I didn't notice the freeze until I was on the trail; now had to wait for morning coffee to percolate through before I could re-thaw the shifter. Then furiously shift up and down until it dried and re-froze.
Of course, I now blame the hot asphalt of Davis, CA where Leo was riding the bike, for ungluing the tire tread from the fabric. You can't win.

Hancock, MD is one of the few towns along the canal that is a town in any meaningful sense. I stayed there on the way up, and stopped on the way back yesterday. Which brings us to the alternative title: leucine, found in egg whites, is an amino acid that helps muscle growth. I considered taking pictures of the two slices of pie I had for lunch in Hancock yesterday: lemon cream and chocolate cream, each topped with a wobbling berg of slightly weepy, and thus homemade, meringue. Everything in that bakery looked like homemade-only-better.
As is typical of small towns, the bakery wore several hats: it was also a full-service restaurant with counter service. A diner, of the type you only see in expensive nostalgia places or rural backwaters such as Millinocket, Maine where Stephan and I ate before climbing Katahdin. Same kind of place: scuffed countertops, immersion blender for making frappes in a metal cup, architectural pies, bottomless-cup coffee-scented water, maternal proprietary fussing over customers. Middle-aged waitress with some name ending in -lene. One of the staffers had a birthday, and the others brought in a cake and sang to her; it wasn't one of their own baked goods but a Little Debbie. Oh the irony. Insert unfortunate stereotype.
Downhill does make a difference. The total altitude change along the canal is about 200 meters in 185 miles; but I do feel a difference to be going down it. Could just be the occasional bursts of speed at each lock, where the path tilts down sharply. I once even had to brake!
Animals along the trail, like back home, don't register that a bicycle is a human and thus don't notice you until you get close. I mentioned to the guy in Cumberland that someone with a handgun could bag himself a deer from bicycleback, at a range of ten yards, any evening. Or a turkey, if you didn't mind searching a little longer. He gently explained that the canal path counts as a road, and thus no weapons within ten feet of it. Hmm...I wonder if the canal itself also counts? I bet the deer wouldn't run from a skater, either...
Beavers. Gnawed trees, occasional drag marks across the trail. Even a dam built across the canal at one point, with about a foot of water-level difference. That's dedication.

Yesterday was one of the longest touring days I've ever done: 85 miles of unpaved surface. I credit the pie.

Going through the pictures, I remembered to tell this story:

The 22 miles of towpath that centers on Hancock, MD is paralleled by the Western Maryland Rail Trail, which is paved. This is a nice break from bumpity towpath and also faster. However, it dead ends at a state park (Fredericksburg, MD I think) with no clear connection back to the towpath. I backtracked trying to find a place to get back on the path; could see the Potomac River not too far away, knew the canal's on this side of the river; here's a road crossing maybe that goes through, oh crap it doesn't it just loops around. Man, the towpath must be right through there, on top of that berm...behind that house...that house with no cars in front of it or lights in the windows...

Bounced across the lawn, crackled through the leaves, leaped off, grabbed the bike, ran up the hill to the top of the berm...OH CRAP the canal! In some places it's dry, in some others wide enough to turn a canal boat around; here it was fifteenish feet wide. A log had fallen partway across, with a small rock next to it...I tightrope-walked across the snot-slick log, stepped to the rock, quick-splashdipped one foot, stepped to the far side. The bike made a perfect handrail.

So be warned: if you take the WMRT shortcut that parallels the towpath, you may have to leave it early to get back on the path at the end. Start looking for access a few miles before the end.

Addendum #2: I made some factual errors in this and the previous post, which were kindly pointed out to me in the comments. Here is the gist:

1) The Mason-Dixon line is actually the MD / PA border, and farther east the MD / DE border. It marked the dividing line between States where slavery was legal and where it was not. So, the canal only follows that line very loosely. See a map of Mason Dixon and the canal.
2) From Fort Frederick State Park there is a direct access back to the towpath. Turn your back to the fort and head down the road that runs between the fort and the park office / souvenir shop. About 1/2 mile (maybe? the point is, it's not miles and miles and miles) on you come back to the Canal.

*On the Vineyard, apparently they sneak up and smear butter on your face. Thank heaven for November birthdays.

CO Canal Towpath: DC to Hancock

2011-12-12T20:29:00.001-05:00

I'm writing this from the front desk of the Americas Best Value Inn in Hancock, Maryland, so I suppose I should begin by mentioning what wonderful people they are and how great their hotel is. It is. For one thing, they let you have your continental breakfast in the evening. I also have the keyboar on my lap and the screen waaay up there on the desk, so apologize fgor the occasional typo. Like that one.

It is now the end of Day 2 of my bike ride along the CO Canal Towpath, which follows the now-decrepit CO Canal* along the Potomac River from Washington DC into the interior, along various state boundaries to Cumberland, Maryland where it becomes the Great Allegheny Passage almost all the way to Pittsburgh. I spent Night Zero with Stephen, who is basically the only extended-family member I have in that I had no idea how we were related** and who took me in and shared his home and kitchen and cats and then dropped me off at the beginning of the trail in Georgetown.

The Canal appears to be a working canal for about the first four miles; in the summer you can apparently take canal-boat rides, reminiscent of the Canal du Midi in France; then the maintenance stops. About mile 7 is the first point where the towpath crosses the canal, leaving a dry grassy hollow on the upstream side; though there is more flooded parts of the canal than dry it is more of a run in a stocking, or an oxbow, or a long hyphenated vernal pool, than a continuous passage. The towpath, however, is maintained.

There is a lot of wildlife along the trail. Even once I got past some benefit-run or other just outside of DC (I assume it was a benefit; the runners looked miserable and sloggy) there was plenty of traffic. Images:

Some public-health person should look into the health benefits of dog ownership; on colder days most of the humans on the trail, have dogs.

Kingfishers! I didn't trust the first one I saw, but the huge anvil head and iridescent blue is so distinctive that I finally decided that must be what it is, with their irked typewritering and swoopy flight.

And woodpeckers, with big fat red heads and crests

And deer galore, especially at sundown

The towpath often runs on a high berm between the canal and the Potomac, so it was probably the warmest place around: sun from both sides. Apparently sycamore trees don't mind having their feet wet: the far bank of the river was asterisked with them. They have an odd ghostly look, since their extremities are peeled white and axial trunks are dark gray. They even grow in the center of the 'canal' in places.

Hiker-biker campsites along the river, close enough that you could if you wanted walk the whole canal

But no water. Luckily I don't need much, it being so cold; but of course they shut off the fountains, et cetera, before the first freeze. Remind me to get checked for Giardia when I get back.

Yesterday was Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where I was adopted and mommed by Laurel of the Teahorse Hostel. I didn't know I looked that bad; but she put me up and shared her dinner (brown rice, stir-fry-your-own vegetables, a yellow pepper I ate like an apple, and BEER) and even picked me up at the towpath so I wouldn't have to navigate through the town and uphill. The Teahorse is also a stop on the Appalachian Trail, so I got to read some of her book collection and be amused by their hiker setup. Such as:

*a 'hiker box' of abandoned but useable gear, such as clothes and a hat and a waterbottle that I'm really glad I sniffed before drinking out of: not sure what it was, but neither water nor ethanol. Methanol? Whitegas?

*a catch-and-release lending library, including 'AWOL on the Appalachian Trail'--I was impressed by how familiar it was even after my own dabble into long-haul hiking in the Ozarks. I repeat what I've earlier said about the S-curve of new experiences you get from any pursuit: not much at the beginning, then steadily increasing, then tapering off.

*not only a guest laundry, but also a sign offering loaner clothes for people using it; presumably to spare you of lurking in towel and raincoat while everything you had, washes

*trail food, rather than hotel equipment, for sale

So it's a great hostel, highly recommended and I don't know why not well-known. There's another hostel in town (Laurel says they're closed, but some website was taking bookings for them, showing almost no availability) but Teahorse is apparently only on its own website. So pass this on. Except for the beer: don't want the place overrun by rowdies.

All the towns along the canal are either above it on bluffs or hidden by them, requiring a climb over; this is why the canal seems so remote and doesn't go through many towns. Exept for the train going by (it won the duking match for the right-of-way with the canal company) it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere. Well suited for reading 'Tent Life in Siberia', which I have but have not yet started. Especially on days like today.

It was so cold that my eyes streamed with wind-tears going down the hill from the hostel back to the staircase leading back to the canal. Laurel said it was 23 degrees; my thermometer is on my watch inside my glove so I don't know, but easily believable. The towpath was frosty until 11 AM, and the canal (in the shade) stayed geometrically ice-paneled all day. My water bottle, filled in Harper's Ferry, collected ice spicules that had to be smashed out of the neck with a twig; only by late afternoon did they thaw. The puddles froze from the top down, rather than the bottom up as they will in springtime; treacherous except where a truck has already smashed them.

Yes a truck. Part of the reason the canal wasn't commercially viable was the regular flood damage, which continues today and is regularly fought against by your tax dollars, in the form of guys in Carhartts watching other guys vroom and beep in manly machines. There's a well-signed detour around a washout at Big Something. It took me up onto the bucolic plateau and over some rollercoaster hills, past some black-and-white cows (I should know the breed but I forget) and startlingly furry horses that were too big to be Icelandic, and past some cut cornfields. I considered gleaning some corn before noticing the cobs were nibbled bare. In the six miles I passed one moving truck, two butchered deer carcasses, and one houseful of startlingly tacky Christmas decorations including penguins in hot-air balloons and a deer-drawn Santa sleigh, both suspended between trees and bedecked with currently-not-lit lights. Weird looking, with the grass still so green!

I got back to the towpath and continued to here, once again making it just before sundown. Tasks swell to fill the allotted time. I hope to make it to Frostburg, Maryland tomorrow and get a shuttle ride (I have the guy's number) past the Big Savage Tunnel, which is closed for the winter. So if nothing else we'll have the Day of Evocative Names.

*Duh

**"not"; kin by birth, friend of my aunts

Parmesan

2011-12-08T11:43:00.000-05:00

When Leo was here he bought a couple of big containers of grated Parmesan cheese, which I never would have bought but my immigrant-thrifty-sockmending ancestry would not let it go to waste. So I began coining ways of using it. And discovered:

Add Parmesan cheese to the list of things you can add to food that needs salting, that taste much better than salt. If your soup needs salt, add bouillon instead; if your homemade pasta sauce needs salt, use Parmesan. You don't need much more than if it WERE pure salt, and it's delicious.
Parmesan doesn't melt very well (aged cheese=heavily damaged proteins=doesn't get stringy, tends to scorch before it even gets really soft) but it does toast. Sprinkle it over a hot UNGREASED skillet, like feeding a goldfish; scrape and stir it around until it gets nice and brown and toasty. If you make one big glob (or grease the skillet) it will melt together into kind of a pancake, which is great as a final product but not as an ingredient.
Why has no one thought (or told me) of adulterating omelets? Shake Parmesan, toasted or untoasted, into the egg mix before it hits the pan; the flavor pervades. Plus no need to add salt. And you don't need a lot.
Also French toast can be made savory instead of sweet, by adding grated Parmesan to the dip mix. If well dispersed (i.e. no glumps) it won't burn, though it may toast nicely. This probably would be disastrous with melty cheese like mozzarella. Don't try it. But send pics if you do.

Things I Wish I Had Known

2011-12-08T11:01:00.001-05:00

...Pertaining to city life, graduate school, and assorted Other. In no particular order.

Academics do not answer their email. Maybe I am generalizing. The Drexel academics I have dealt with, do not answer any emailed question that lacks a one-sentence answer. Thus, their not answering your email is not necessarily a veiled no or even, precisely, a blowoff. For instance: I had to take some math courses this term, not-for-credit-just-to-have-taken-it, and really enjoyed one that was complex and cool and accessible. So I wrote to the professor asking if he'd mind my sitting in on any future courses of his, doing the homework and taking the tests but not paying the tuition. Felt kind of guilty asking, since it's the equivalent of "Oh, you pick berries for a living? I love berries! Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom," and when he didn't write back figured he meant no. No. I asked in person (basically just verifying that the email had been delivered) and he said yes of course, with the tone of "You silly person, why would that be a problem? Of course you can." So ask in person.
Core muscles keep you really warm. When walking along the train tracks (such as on the beautiful Skookil Banks Trail which is confusingly spelled Schuylkill) and get cold, and like me you hate to run* then you can get the same effect by tightrope-walking one of the railway rails. Makes a big difference. Don't wear headphones.
Rules as posted are generally the projection of the real rule, into a socially acceptable format. A reasonably well-dressed person (or even I) can sit in a coffeeshop enjoying their wi-fi for free for at least one battery life: a hobo trying to do the same will get tossed out. Even if he is bothersome only because he hasn't bathed since the fountains got shut off. Follow the spirit of a rule, and you can often get away with breaking the letter of it; the reverse makes you a douchebag. It also won't work for long: they usually build in an escape clause containing "...or at the driver's discretion."
Related story, too good not to tell: if you're trying to break into someone's apartment/house, pose as the owner. The neighbors (may) sympathetically help you. My neighbor's boyfriend fetched and held a stepladder for me to squeeze through my own bathroom window (change pants, THEN put keys in pocket; do not mix this up) despite never having met me before. In related news, cultivate your neighbors. In other related news, do yoga. That's a small window.
Trash has a herd instinct: one piece attracts more of its kind. Clothes on the floor actually have sex and reproduce. And meanness: watch any online comment thread that isn't carefully moderated. Insert baobab story from 'The Little Prince'.
Parents tell me if this is wrong: the best playgrounds were not designed as such. I don't know what the Rittenhouse Square kids are going to do when the Duck Girl fountain gets filled with water: it makes a great playpen. Insert musing about planned societies here.

*Last time I ran was on the way to snatch my bike off the highway where it fell off the car's rack. True story.

Smoking Buildings

2011-11-15T10:41:00.001-05:00

This post describes an effect where clouds stream from a mountain peak, evaporating a certain distance from the source so the flag never gets any longer. Here is a picture of what I think is the same effect, in the heart of the city. Photoshop/Lightroom whizzes, I have a higher-res version of the photo if you want to tweak it. (But even this one, move your head around: the flags are pretty clear from the proper angle.)

Cooking with Maia!

2011-11-12T13:14:00.002-05:00

Pierogi (noun) are:

1) a kind of filled potato dumpling made of gnocchi dough

2) a useful way of using up leftovers

3) delicious.

And easy. Now that Leo's here I've been paying more attention to cooking good meals (i.e. not omelets) and he loves dumplings. These are actually pretty easy too. Steps:

Potatoes. I like starchy "baking" potatoes, as opposed to waxy potato-salad varieties: Idahoes are perfect. They peel easier once cooked; I prefer leaving the skin on. Slice, cover with water, boil till done, drain.

Mash when they're still hot, so they dry out as much as possible. Water is your enemy. Mash with a fork, not a spoon, else you get chunks. Fluff as they finish cooling. Add some egg yolks to bind. You could use whole eggs, but yolks make for a richer dough and whites for a better breakfast omelet the next day. Add just enough yolk to bind the potatoes; one per big Idaho was about right. Then add flour (we used whole-wheat) and salt to taste, making a stiff dough.Chill if you have time.

For kopitki (gnocchi) you boil and then fry little sniblets of dough; for pierogi, you fill them. You know. Pat out a palm-sized piece of dough, turning it so it doesn't stick; put a glob of filling in it; fold it over, pinch the edges together. Good fillings...oh anything. Chopped deli meats, leftover meat sauce, ricotta-jam slurry. The stiffer the better; chill the meat first. Put the dumplings on a plate that you sprayed with Pam cooking spray, so they don't stick. Make a few more.

Boil water. When it's boiling ease the dumplings into it; wait till it comes back to the boil, turn the water down to a simmer. When they float they're done. Fish out with a spatula, or a slotted spoon or something; put back on Pammed plate, put plate in fridge to set up the fragile surface. If you must put down more than one layer of pierogi (or any other dumpling) coat them with Pam so they don't glue together like overcooked pasta. They firm as they cool.

Fry. Eat.

Oh, and an afterpoint. These keep in the fridge for several days, though the damp bottom gets kind of goopy; but they turn dark on contact with air and look really strange. But taste fine. I don't know if it's the potatoes or whole-wheat flour (never seen the effect in Poland, where all flour is white) but be forewarned.

Coffee Bar and Caffeinated Statistician

2011-10-23T13:17:00.000-04:00

I am back at the Coffee Bar, which is:

a) mentioned in some previous post here or other;
b) actually at the Warwick, with 'Radisson' in its wi-fi name, and thus functionally equivalent to a Hilton if you're me and have no frequent-user perks;
c) now near my house, ever since I moved;
d) delightful, but if you're a regular follower of this blog you knew that.

But we have some interesting news regarding their book swap. It is an unfortunate fact that anytime you allow swapping without paying close attention to quality, the quality will rapidly down-spiral until no one wants the remainders. (Not quite true, which I'll address later.) Book-swap books are usually trashed or trashy, occasionally both. Proof that people do have taste and would rather, given the choice, trade in Wilbur Smith or John Grisham.

But what this model fails to take into account is that some books are so nontrashy that no one wants them. The Coffee Bar's book swap, when I came in here tennish days ago, exhibited a typical normal distribution of quality along both axes (condition and worthwhileness) with a smaller second peak of perfection. The normal distribution has remained, shifting downward (more raggedy, more rubbishy); the second peak has not moved since I am apparently the only person around who wants to read Captains Courageous, The Warlord of Mars or Dracula.

This brings up an interesting point: I have carefully kept the term trashy undefined. It is not solely "books I do not like," and if need be I could come up with a definition, but I really don't need to because it clearly is a good predictor of which books get taken and what they get replaced with. "Good" books get taken and replaced with "trashy" ones. Tell you what, I'll define "trashy" when you define "beautiful;" or for a really tough one, "sandwich." Proof that taste truly does exist.

There's a loophole, though. Sometimes things get traded in not because they're worthless but because they're worthless to us. This will result in the same race to the bottom, but with no loss of quality.

Examples may help with this. Hermit crabs always trade in a smaller shell for a bigger one: so if you bring a bunch of shells to a shell-scarce island and let the crabs do their thing, eventually you wind up with a handful of teensy shells that no crab wants. Some of the rejects will be trash, of course (broken, funny-shaped) but most of them are fine and just too small. Or parents are a lot more likely to want to trade little clothes for big ones than vice versa (eventually growth slows until the kid is able to wear things out) so a kids-clothing swap would eventually wind up with nothing but onesies.

So what's going on with book swaps? It would be nice if people actually were getting smarter at the rate the swap shelf gets dumber...except take a look at the reject shelf of a library, where they sell off books that don't circulate. These books are sometimes trash, but depressingly often are not.

So this tends to imply that people will take a chance at something more tasteful given the no-risk option, but only if tasteless is unavailable. We like to be stretched. A little. Maybe people would read more mind food if mental candy wasn't available.

And in these days of Facebook and ICanHazCheezburger, good luck with that.

Urban Autumn Easter

2011-10-17T09:26:00.001-04:00

Easter is the holiday I have most consistently skipped in my travels, since it's at the time of year when coastal New England is at its most desolate, and it's not major enough to have spilled over into much of the South Seas. (Where they have baby chickens and flowers year round, and never bunnies.) So I was very glad to get in on the Phaberge event today. The plot was, follow a walking tour around Center City and look at some selected murals (Philly has lots and I don't know why) and at the same time some papier-mache Easter eggs had been painted by local artists and hidden at each mural, so you could look for those too. You know I'm not making this up, because my confabulations are usually a lot more plausible.

But it was great fun. In contrast to previous years I've been spending a lot of time indoors, and not even realizing how much I missed the daytime outdoors because (in contrast to previous previous years, i.e. grade school) classes are challenging and engaging. Today was a glorious fall day, shussing leaves and sharp air with warm sun and a sky that has gotten much more saturated than its summer Wedgwood. I'd originally intended to do a guided walking tour, but the guide freely admitted it's popular among those with canes and wheels so I picked up a map and went to solo it. Show of hands if you're surprised.

Urban egg hunting is weird and fun. You wind up looking at things...well, much the same way as if you were looking for berries but backwards. Rather than looking on and in bushes, especially gardens, you're searching city property only; within five feet of the ground, and only in places where the egg is safe and obviously not trash. This excludes most of the good hiding spots: dumpsters, under cars, public flower planters (often duned with rubbish, which they sieve from the air much like microscopic pollutants), on the ground in general. Doesn't leave much. Like those three-foot-tall vertical pipes that demarcate parking spaces.

Searching for something, anything, changes the way you look at the surrounds. You're forced to relate with stuff on a functional, rather than merely aesthetic, level. Whether a skier trying to map out the difference between a snowbank and a covered tree, or a camper trying to figure which site is bugless but near water, or a trainee mechanic watching a master, or a berrypicker trying to spot next week's perfect picking site, purposeful searching teaches a lot more than passive watching.

Especially if you're searching for something as cool as Phaberge eggs. Many of them showed images cribbed straight from some of Philly's murals; some others were random and beautiful; a few were arty but still interesting and fascinating. One excellent thing about low-budget popular art is that you don't get people investigating the Meaning of Art;* you just get people making cool stuff. Most were brightly colored (with a tendency to blues and greens); one was bright red with a textured swirly surface; one was paint-by-number pencil outlines. Each was hidden somewhere in plain sight--

[WARNING FROM THE STATISTICIAN-IN-TRAINING: The ones I didn't find, are not part of the sample! Think of the WW2 engineers placing armor on the parts of returning bombers that had NOT been hit, assuming that all hits were equally likely but those hit in vital parts did not return]

--but I didn't want to poke through gooey garbage or trowel through rock piles, and I assume the hider shared my biases. So it was just a matter of training my eyes to recognize the trademark shape of a five-inch-long egg, wrapped in a protective bag with a neon label attached with string. I actually got pretty good at it. Expected to see dancing eggs on the insides of my lids that night, a la blackberries, but maybe the shape is too simple.

The website allows you to check in that the eggs were found (each one has its own website, i.e. phaberge.com/1d9) and then, by returning them, get entered into some kind of prize drawing. The eggs will be displayed at some museum, and then auctioned off to benefit some cause or other. So I suppose I should turn mine in.

Or put a stocking over my head and take a self-timer photo with them, holding an eggbeater.

*Imagine if mechanics investigated the Meaning of Cars. Depending on who you went to and how they were feeling, you might get a propeller. Or runners. Or buoyancy tanks. That would be awesome. NASCAR would become interesting.

Philly is Occupied

2011-10-08T16:24:00.004-04:00

I'm sorry. I've left this blog fallow. I've been busy. With schoolwork.

[paroxysm of fist-bumping victory dance like a sultan whose harem gives him no peace]

But even I have managed to notice the ongoing:

Occupy Wall Street movement, which (as near as I can tell--being liberals they believe terms need not be defined) is the result of people's dissatisfaction with the ongoing economic crisis, in particular the government's willingness to subsidize some things (wars, bank bailouts) at the expense of others (personal bailouts, jobs, medical care.) Protesters camp out, sometimes literally, in cities across the country, marching and waving signs in approved protester fashion.
Homelessness and poverty in the city. This is not new, and it's not unique to cities or the economic crisis: it's just that there are a lot more margins in the city, to accommodate marginal people (liberals: feel free to add -alized) and there are just a lot more people in general, living with less privacy and thus less opportunity to hide. But I've always had a habit of talking to people, and it seems like only recently (or only in Philly) are there homeless people who aren't trash. I talked to an articulate, well-spoken, eminently employable young beggar yesterday. This is worrisome. Anything turns to trash if you leave it to the weather and passersby: I watched a locked bicycle decay into a tangle of metal in less than a week.

Occupy Philly is camped out in front of City Hall; they led a march today. I'm not sure how long they plan to be there, maybe just until everyone has gotten bored and wandered off. But in the meantime they've formed a small tent village, many more people without tents and some local residents who come for the day. Plus some dispossessed hoboes, trying to get comfortable on the pavement since the hippies took their beds. But the occupiers seem to be set for a long siege: they distribute food and have a medical station, their own wifi and a radio station and a solar-powered charging station. (But no portajohns have I seen.) There are now almost as many signs as people, and a station with paints and cardboard where you can make your own. I wish I'd had my camera to photograph some of them. They ranged from poignant to whiny, creative and clever and thought-provoking all the way to scary or aggressively weird or "Too Mad To Come Up With A Coherent RAWRRRGH SHIT FUCK" and much creative spelling. Let's say some people were pulled to the protest by social outrage and vision, and others pushed by having nothing better to do and no friends who would talk to them.

One thing they don't have is [nonhuman] trash. Philadelphia's streets are startlingly littered, mostly with blowing paper: restaurants often stick full-page flyers in people's doors, many newspapers are free, and the few trash cans are concealed under dunes of same. And of course hobo camps generate trash. Except this one: with the exception of abandoned signs there are no loose pieces of paper; no cigarette butts (Why do bums smoke so much?), no smell of piss (human or non), no paper plates or food scraps or anything. So at least they're responsible people in that way. Let's see what they do.

Ginkgo Fruit

2011-10-02T21:21:00.002-04:00

Ginkgo trees are kind of the platypus of trees; they're so weird and difficult to classify that the US Constitution requires teachers to mention them any time taxonomy comes up. You can read all about them on Wikipedia, but the relevant information here is:

They're dioecious, meaning each individual is male OR female but not both; and only the females make fruit. Mildly interesting: not many plants are like this. Pot is a notable exception.
Ginkgo fruit is so repulsive that most commercial specimens are grafted, to guarantee that every tree is male. There are probably a hundred ginkgoes along Broad Street, and only one or two have any fruit under them, and only one has more than a few. (Maybe here the grafted scion died, leaving the rootstock to sprout and grow.) The fruits stink of puke and rancid butter, and I've seen no animal eating them. What's more, the flesh contains the same toxic oil as poison ivy. A thoroughly distasteful fruit.
Turns out that though the fruit is foul, the pit is not. Chinese recipes suggest it with chicken or in soup.

Let me add in here a semi-relevant story. We all know that the Chinese eat "everything with wings except an airplane, and everything with legs except a table." Not quite true of course; but they do eat birds' nests, puppy, shark fins, thousand-year-old eggs, and basically everything else that a Westerner would touch only to throw it through an unpopular neighbor's window. But a couple of days ago I discovered something Chinese people don't eat.

Brownies.

Really. I had bought some at a bake sale, offered one to the Chinese student across from me on the bus, and he cautiously poked and examined and sniffed it before risking a nibble. He's from urban Beijing, and had never had a brownie. WTF.

But according to the interwebs, the Chinese love their ginkgo nut. So I had to try it.

Find some ginkgo fruit. For the above-mentioned reasons this may be hard. If there's a female ginkgo tree anywhere near your usual walking route, you know it.
Remember, the flesh is an irritant. Don't touch it. Some websites say to use gloves, but I find a freezer Ziploc works well. Make a "swan's bill" with your fingertips, nuzzle your fingers down into each fallen fruit (THROUGH THE BAG, DUMMY), grab the single large pit. Stepping on the fruits to crush off the flesh, also cracks the seeds. Don't.
Take the seeds home in the bag, rinse them well in a colander. They'll rapidly lose their slime.
Cover with half an inch of water in a frypan, cook and shake until water all gone and shells white.

This is as far as I got. The thin husk is easily toothable, leaving a firm green jellybean that tastes like, well, like food. (Breadfruit, bread, masa harina all "taste like food" too.) Nothing to shout about, but maybe the trees vary; maybe I'm just not making them right. I've heard you can roast and salt ginkgo seeds as a beer snack, and there are lots of soup recipes, all of which use canned nuts. Even the ones published on foraging websites. (Good luck finding a pumpkin recipe that uses fresh pumpkin, rather than canned; also good luck finding a pumpkin that's bred for eating and not display.)

So meh. I'm putting this up because I promised Rebecca I would, but unless she knows a Chinese grandma who's a kitchen whiz it might not be worth the trouble.

Unless I get sick tomorrow; some of the sites warn of toxicity. But now it's been 12 hours and no symptoms of anything, fleegle glooble yarble fgjuyoj siugjhhgdsah1@$%& .p

Inappropriate Music Day

2011-10-02T20:47:00.002-04:00

Today is Sunday, which means that school is not open, so I had time to walk around the city. Philadelphia is rated one of the nation's most walkable cities; given my experience with Boston, Phoenix and Lihue I concur. (The last two are so spread out you'll collapse from exhaust fumes and heatstroke before getting anywhere; the first has the reverse problem, with cars caroming randomly around a network of one-way dead-end streets.)

First stop was a coffee bar called, imaginatively, the Coffee Bar. It has three strikes against it:

a trendy, professional-looking sign and logo
proximity to trendy Rittenhouse Square, which means close proximity to boutiques and banks with nary a hardware store or deli in sight
sharing a building with a Hilton or functional equivalent
menus with no prices.

Okay, that's four, but I didn't see the last one until I went in. And the place turned out to be lovely: bustling and cheery and warm, with a woodstove ambiance though no actual woodstove. Cushy chairs, whirly barstools, free coffee refills (in a beautiful blue glass mug) aaannnd a lending library stocked with classics. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Peter Pan, Dickens, Kipling; books that strike you as hopelessly derivative until you realize that an entire genre is derivative of THEM. The only reason to throw out (or even catch and release) a copy of one of these is that you've read it to bits and need another.*

This brings us to the first inappropriate music. Walking into the bar I heard music that sounded awfully like the "Russian Dance" from the Nutcracker. But that can't be; the Nutcracker is as seasonal as A Christmas Carol, or turkey, or pumpkins. Maybe just all Tchaikovsky sounds like that. (Doubtful)... Until the next piece was "Gloria in Excelsis Deo," aka Angels We Have Heard on High. Definitely a carol. Christmas comes earlier each year.

Caffeinated, I went to yoga class. This particular school of yoga has a tendency to spawn cultish fanaticism among its followers, so I am deliberately not gushing. But go to a class anyway. You'll hate it, but your body will love you.

Yogad, I headed off along the Ben Franklin Parkway to Sunday Freeday** at the Art Museum. But before I got there the road was blocked with a parade. A marching band in re and white, stamping along to the oompah of...

Heigh Ho?

Can't be.

Weird though, what else could it be?

Admittedly the band on Rarotonga did play Dancing Queen during ANZAC Day celebrations when I was there one year. I guess once you know a song, you like to show it off.

Making it a little more surreal was the fact that it was a Polish festival, which means all the Polish people of greater Philly were around and I heard spoken Polish for the only time since 2007. At least the only time that wasn't my 90-year-old grandmother.

The art museum was predictably awesome; the only unpredictable part was watching some multicolored kids practicing breakdancing (or parkour) (or yoga) while waiting in the long Freeday line. Even that turned out to be worth it.

I'm getting tired now, too tired to put anecdotes into words, so I'll have to save the last 'inappropriate music' for another day. No, it wasn't THAT kind of inappropriate. (I love when prudes use 'inappropriate' to mean 'bad' because that implies it would be okay in another setting. If something is bad, it means you should never do it; but if it's inappropriate, just take it outside. Or inside.)

*A seagull, perhaps irked that it was not food, once angrily confettied the beach with the last 5 pages of my copy of Mutiny on the Bounty. Given the ending, perhaps this was good.

**Bars advertise 'Sunday Funday,' but the description usually belies it.

Vulture Sighting!

2011-09-18T21:52:00.000-04:00

While walking up Broad Street today I saw a vulture perched halfway up City Hall, with wings partly open to catch the morning sunlight as they are wont to do. Seemed odd: you seldom see one sunning unless they're locally common, and this would be the first one I saw since Concord. A moment after that...

Yes, he looks to be the right size but only if those human statues are also life size. The bird was actually taller than the human pedestrians milling far below it.

Obviously he's not real, which is a pity because he could paint an entire house with one poop.

Since he is bronze, he's probably an eagle and not a vulture anyway.

Halloween Idea

2011-09-17T14:36:00.000-04:00

I realize it's early for me to be putting this up, but otherwise I wouldn't have time to add to it!*

I will give $50 to anyone who does the following costume (pics or it didn't happen):

A couple weeks before Halloween, slump a scarecrow on your front porch. Make sure it has gloves and boots and a paper-bag head; dress it in your clothes. Then, on Halloween night, put on the scarecrow's clothes and sit where it was, with a bowl of candy in your lap. Jump out at people. $100 if you get punched.

*You do know, right, that it's possible to edit a post after posting it? As far as I know that doesn't show up as a new post; you'd have to happen to scroll past it and notice the difference.

Pre-School

2011-09-16T17:14:00.002-04:00

OKAY! So I have been in Philadelphia for the last less-than-a-week and am just now beginning to corral my impressions into some kind of legible form. Classes haven't even started yet (they start this Monday) and already it feels like forever since I left my parents' place in Concord, and even longer (forevers are not created equal) since leaving Leo in California.

It's funny how people don't update their impressions, and thus your best source of reliable information is someone who's only been interested in the topic for a short time. Frinstance, a lifelong glasses-wearer of my acquaintance said that she didn't wear contact lenses because of the hassle of boiling them every night; they fixed that problem in, I'm guessing, the mid-eighties. Ditto for breast implants destroying sensitivity and IUDs causing infertility. Likewise, someone who's lived in Philadelphia for a long time is going to be a lot more scared of South Philadelphia, than someone who's done recent research. They've really cleaned the place up, at least figuratively. Kids ride bikes up and down my street; old ladies totter, unescorted, at night; the few people who don't have ground-floor curtains offer a window into what looks like a peaceful row-house working-class existence. Everyone I've talked to has seemed nice enough, on the level, and generally like good neighbors.

This is not to say there's nothing illegal going on. The produce-seller down the block explained that he could offer such good prices because the sweet peppers "fell off the truck." They did look a little weatherbeaten, which is not a bad thing since I was buying by the pound, but how else can you make a profit selling two BIG grocery sacks of peppers for under $10? Also sliced deli meats for $3 a pound, from a guy whose name is (I swear) Bruno but who was speaking Spanish to a customer when I came in.

So I'm quite pleased with the neighborhood and my house. I have two housemates, with whom I seldom interact because of work schedules and about whom I would not blog extensively because they have the Internet too. Suffice to say they are nice. (Only how can you be a music student and not play an instrument? Same way they can be triathletes living in a city I guess. Not that I WANT them to play instruments, being my housemates and all.)

I've been almost constantly amused since getting here, simply because of the huge slice of humanity you see. You got bums, yuppies, hobos, working-class Good Citizens, gorgeous black women with MBAs and names like Sheniqua and voices that carry across six lanes of traffic, a little old Oriental* lady wearing a conical coolie hat, and much much much more.

Start at the beginning of the list. When I was here two months ago (don't think I blogged) I saw a homeless kid with a sign saying "TRAVELING, HUNGRY, PLEASE HELP" or something equally generic. Fuzzy-faced young; he turned out to be 23. Traveling from where? Washington DC. Offered him a dollar for a good story: "I dunno." SO WHY ARE YOU TRAVELING IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN GAINED ANY GOOD STORIES? JUST MAKE ONE UP, OR STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S AND CLAIM IT WAS YOU! OR FIND SOME CREATIVE WAY OF MAKING MONEY, SINCE YOU'RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING ANYWAY! That's a "bum." And I saw him this trip too: he's had plenty of time to walk back to DC.

The hobo was slightly older, bearded, had a similar sign but was from Seattle and had been riding the rails, made some money picking blueberries in Maine but apparently either spent it all or sees no reason to start now. I gave him a dollar: I can respect someone who is homeless by choice.

I'm not used to things being so easy. I found someone selling a bed on Craigslist, called him up, and two guys (his son and some other scrawny youngster) delivered it quick'n'easy, even to my upstairs room. I'm glad I didn't hold out for queen size: even this one fit the stairs snugly. You can get food delivered, on the off chance you didn't fill up at the assorted orientations; I have fast internet (on my spangly new laptop) from my bed; there's a Bikram yoga studio downtown with two practice rooms, often both busy; the website Uwishunu (.com) offers a mind-boggling assortment of fall** events; so does the school. Every moment is filled with something or other; at any time there are several things I could be doing.

Classes start soon and I hope to vanish into them. Think of it as Bikram yoga for the mind. I've met some professors, not all of whom are mine but who nevertheless seem awesome: the class syllabi seem like a bit of a stretch but one I bet I can make. It's actually nice not being the smartest person in the room! College, here I come (back.)

Yikes.

*Am I supposed to guess an ethnicity when I honestly can't tell a Korean from a north Japanese?
**"Autumn" or "drinking"

Multiple Shadows

2011-09-09T21:54:00.001-04:00

Notice that I and my bike cast three distinct shadows. The two to the upper left are much much fainter than the one barely visible to the right, showing just the bike's down tube and a pedal. This is because the brighter ones are cast by the sun, and the dim ones by the sun's reflection off a bank of windows. (Actually two banks, hence the two shadows.) The diagonal lines of fence shadow are also sun-cast; notice how they completely wash out the dim reflection. This proves that that building must be fiercely air-conditioned: the difference between the brightness in the two shadows, stays inside to heat the building. Is reflective glass really THAT expensive? Of course it would make for some really confused plants.

Addendum: Apparently this phenomenon is becoming a problem in California:

I first noticed this phenomenon near sundown, biking along the Canal du Midi in southern France; but once I knew to look for it this sunny Boston day, it was everywhere. Reflections from buildings are cast onto the ground; those from water require a high bank on the other side.

Productive Rainy Day

2011-09-08T15:31:00.001-04:00

Most days when I'm here, visiting my parents in eastern Massachusetts, I do the same bike loop. It's about three hours, along first a dirt path and then a paved bikeway, with a short stretch of road at the beginning and the end that serves the same purpose as the Chitchat Phase of a meeting or the blank leader on a roll of film. The terrain around here is almost as collapsed-custard as the Vineyard, soggily spongy and gently rolling with the occasional spoon-divot of a glacial kettle pond. Flying over the Vineyard when the sun is low, you see water glinting everywhere like through a patch of mangrove. Concord's not that extreme but same idea. Especially now that it's been rainy for the last couple of days.

I credit the long rainy spell for my wildlife-spotting luck today. The land animals have given up waiting for it to get nice, and hunger is driving them from their (increasingly soggy) dens. Whereas the aquatic animals have a greatly expanded territory and are throwing a party. And everyone's hearing is blunted by the constant dripping.

First sighting was a young snapping turtle, You see where the serpentina in its scientific name came from: a very long and mobile neck that strikes snake-fast at prey or in self-defense. And they're the only turtles I know of that actually hiss like a snake, rather than just as a side effect of withdrawing into the shell. I flipped it on its back to see if it was male or female: I'd always heard that only females ever leave the water, to lay eggs, but this isn't egg season. And anyway the bottom shell was dead flat, neither domed nor indented like a sea turtle's.* But I only got to see for a second: it quickly righted itself, rolling its head all the way around as legs and tail stayed tucked. Sea turtles have no such righting reflex, but flutter their flippers like a flopping fish, and thus quickly bounce over if they're not in the bottom of a boat. It's also worthwhile to watch a sea star turn itself over,** if tormenting wildlife is your thing.

Eventually I left the turtle alone and continued. It was the only animal I got to interact with directly; the hummingbird and fox just crossed the trail. Have I really never seen a fox in New England before? Maybe the Vineyard just doesn't have 'em, and their tracks are so catlike it's easy to mistake.

*To accommodate mating, which is also why gluing a radio transmitter to the female's back doesn't work.
**Lie on your back like making a snow angel: you have five limbs including your head. Roll your (human) arms over first, getting a good grip on the ground with your palms; spread your legs and get somewhat of a grip with your kneecaps and the inside of your thighs. Now sloooowly lift your head up and over and flop it down. (You think that's hard? The sea stars can do it from any angle.)

Stereotypes R Us

2011-09-06T19:00:00.002-04:00

Identify the pedestrian...

Looks wrong way and steps out into traffic (visiting from British world)

Looks both ways and steps into traffic anyway (visiting from Third World, of slow traffic)

Lets a motorcycle pass from half a mile away; steps out in front of Prius (blind)

Head hunched, shoulders curled, seasonally inappropriate clothing, possibly conversing with self, ignores world (crazy person)

Head hunched, shoulders curled, collar up, hands in pockets, ignores world (cold)

Head up, well dressed, conversing animatedly with the air (on cell phone, often with earbud)

And the cyclist...

On the road and not the bike path, whippet-thin, fancy racing bike with aero handlebars, carrying nothing but water bottles, full cycling gear including jersey and clip-in shoes (possibly a racer; very rare)

Like the above, but fat (wannabe, or his wife wants him to be: especially common around gift-giving holidays, vacation time and/or New Years)

Tandem with man in front and woman behind (he's an eager cyclist, she got sick of being left behind)

Tandem with woman in front and man behind (very rare; it's probably two women one of whom is seriously horsefaced; or else he's blind.)

Recumbent (back problems or gearhead)

Adult trike (gearhead with money)

(The answers are after each one, in white: highlight to make it visible.)

Burning Rubber?

2011-08-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

Data point #1: Tire fires at the dump are famous for smoldering for decades, being almost impossible to extinguish but also not exhausting their fuel
Data point #2: Punctured bike inner tubes are a little tough to light, but once they get going they burn with a hot and ample smokeless flame. Like kerosene.

How to reconcile the two? Surface-area-to-volume ratio? Perhaps tires (the actual contact surface) are a significantly different compound than tubes, which merely hold air?

Sense of Scale is Shot

2011-08-27T22:13:00.001-04:00

First I saw a woman with a camera, backing steadily across the road trying to photograph a redwood. Then I set up my camera's self-timer and ran to climb on top of a burl on the trunk of another tree, only to notice that said burl was about ten feet off the ground. Redwoods are very very big and I am very very small. And then, while packing, I spotted an ordinary-looking smallish dog; then Leo picked it up to evict it from our room and I realized the dog was smaller than a Newes* bean burrito.

Apparently everything in California is either unbelievably huge or comically tiny.** This is kind of funny because it is a well-known (combination of two) natural law that island lifeforms tend to converge on being rat-sized. Islands had the smallest deer, the tiniest wooly mammoths, and the biggest insects. So California--contrary to the beliefs of early explorers--is the logical antithesis of an island.

*I went to the trouble of Googling the menu from this pub, only to find they no longer have their famous burrito. And they now put capers and remoulade, whatever that is, on their lobster roll. The end of an era. :(

**You have a dirty mind.

Humboldt: Not Just Pot

2011-08-25T21:50:00.003-04:00

We're still in Humboldt County, but it feels like miles and miles (and weeks and weeks) since Mattole. The last week has encompassed:

Mattole
Eureka/Arcata
Patrick's Point
Garberville

Mattole I've blogged about already. Eureka and Arcata are two cities on the coast, where we got hotel rooms so I could go online to tend the fires I've had to build under various administrative buttheads, as part of the graduate-school-starting process. The two towns are sister cities, and like all sisters are completely different: Arcata is full of pretty hippies, the stately funky Hotel Arcata, a walkable downtown, and a combination of useful and fun businesses. Eureka is strip-mall hell with a nearby fake downtown (if it were real, they would sell useful objects such as socks and toilet-bowl cleaner instead of just plastic crap) but useful in that it proved to me that cigarette-smoke sensitivity is not necessarily the sole province of self-righteous holier-than-thous. DM (you know who you are) I apologize for even thinking that of you.

After Eureka we spent a couple of nights at Patrick's Point, north of the city, which is a state park on the incredibly rich California coast. Ocean biodiversity=high dissolved oxygen=cold water, which +warm land=foggity fog fog fog. Makes up a quarter of the area's precipitation, or so I hear; makes for an amazingly wonder-dense place to visit. We saw, without really trying:

rocks dense with mussels, unfortunately soaked with red tide
brown pelicans
cormorants
an osprey (why are there not more? On the Vineyard's beaches you're seldom out of sight of one
turkey vultures gajillion, squatting hideously in trees and waiting for a hiker to make a mistake; or soaring beatifically on the updraft from the cliffs. They are so beautiful when flying and so ugly when landed...kind of like pigs smell so bad when alive, and sizzle so deliciously when dead.
?a bald eagle, or else an osprey-Bigfoot hybrid
sea lions
harbor seals
lots of shorebirds stitching along the shore like little sewing machines; Leo thinks one was a willet
swallows of some variety, building hollow spherical mud nests under cliffs and in unattended buildings, and swooping pukily around around like someone on his first flight lesson

The above list includes sightings from the Barn, where we camped-if-you-can-call-it-that at the north end of the Sinkyone Wilderness, just south of Shelter Cove. At the end of a trailer-proof road stands the remains of an old homestead, including a house (where staffers live and hand out Don't Feed the Bears Or Pester the Elk brochures) and an old but solid barn where you can camp, pending availability, and spread out your sodden tent and tacky sleeping bags to dry. (It hadn't exactly rained at Patrick's Point, but the fog condensing and dripping from the trees left the ground under them wet in the mirror image of a passing shower.)

Drive six more miles along the road past the barn (an estimated half-mile swim) to the trailhead and you can start walking towards the ghost town of Wheeler. This we did; it's a nice day-long trip if you don't hurry. Nothing remains of Wheeler that we could see, except a short stretch of asphalt road and what looks like an industrial cooler, and a few places where the trail was clearly once a dirt road, and some nonnative plants like a vinca and some miniature roses.

Didn't I already blog about the Big Trees of Calaveras County? These are technically not the same species (Sequoiadendron giganteum vs. Sequoia sempervirens) and are famous for different things (most massive, versus tallest, tree) but from all the way down here I can't tell them apart: can't see any needles or cones, which are diagnostic.* Either way you get big BIG trees that cannot be photographed by the amateur, and a cool damp forest floor that has great sight lines because nothing can grow except scattered shamrocks and ferns. Even on a hot sunny day, good luck taking a picture that isn't grainy and blurred.

So google it.

We decided to stay an extra day in Garberville. It has all the essentials (a nonsmoky motel that smells only faintly of curry; good location) but also must set a record for coffee shops and beautiful hippie chicks per capita.** Two of our most favorite things.

You know how there are good hippies and bad hippies? Good ones are idealistic, individual, mellow, clever, affectionate, and driven (possibly by some lunatic cause;) bad ones are loud, druggie, jaded bums. Hawaii has a depressingly large number of the latter; Garberville brims with the former. The streets here jangle with personalized tattoos, long feather-festooned dreadlocks, homemade everything, and musical instruments from jews-harps on up. I wonder if there's a hippie colony a la Kalalau out on the Lost Coast somewhere; or maybe just a lot of small pot farms that accept work trades for tent space.

*If you decide to brush up on plant identification, don't start with conifers. They're too hard. Just like beginning birdwatchers should start with raptors, not warblers. Or willets.

**Even without double-counting the hippie coffee shops, beautiful non-hippie women carrying coffee, and the charming coffee shops full of beautiful hippies.

Finding the Lost Coast

2011-08-18T17:18:00.001-04:00

I'm typing this from our campground at Mattole Beach, south of Arcata; but probably won't get to post it for a couple of days since there is not only no wi-fi signal, but no cell service at all. Would be an interesting statistic to know what fraction of the US land area has wireless coverage, and compare it to other countries like Canada and Angola and Fiji. (Seriously: wireless phones have taken OVER in Fiji. Helps that they needn't compete with landlines.)

So "today" means August 16. We spent a couple of days in Davis with our assorted families: I include the friend that I went to visit as family, even though we share no blood, because we have nothing in common except history and loyalty. The next day I nursed a vague hangover as we drove through the Central Valley's rich fields, up into the mountains, and was feeling much better by the time we got to the redwood tunnels. The roads wind preexisting trees, swerving and clinging to the sharp narrow mountains that forced a long section of the "coastal" highway away from the coast. This Lost Coast is proof of my theory that the best hikes are found by following a big road till it turns medium; following the medium road as it dwindles and toodles and squips its way through terrain that grows around it, until finally the road chokes and dies. Park at the end (or better, hitchhike unless you want your car broken into) and start walking. Extra credit if you pass signs of long-term illegal habitation, like established campsites with signs saying NO CAMPING. Works for Kalalau, works for Fiji's King's Road and the spokes that climb from it towards the interior; and it sure works here. Unspoiled by roads and the things that roads bring (dust, crowds, trash both human and not) the coast is vast and foggy and beautifully moody, rich with pelicans and salmon and blackberries and keening red-billed gulls, echoing with either a dog or a remarkably persistent sea lion. We camped at Shelter Cove last night (for $33 which is why we're now here) among characters and landscape straight out of Steinbeck.

I never before thought of commercial fisherman as being vagrants. All the ones I've known were born within a few miles of where they live and work, and will be buried there if not accidentally at sea. But the guys at the next campsite were there for a few weeks! They had commercial salmon licenses and move the boat up and down the coast to where the fishing is good, living in manly cameraderie in a trailer with each other, presumably eating canned pork and beans and brewing black coffee in the chill mornings. I swear I never understood Steinbeck's writing until I actually went to California. Maybe this is true of all writers; Frisbie's writing glows in Polynesia, but barely sparkles under a northern sky.

We had a fitting Steinbeck breakfast of black coffee and bacon. I hope no one finds out it was instant and turkey. Mattole is only about eighty miles but an all-day drive. These country roads swoop and zag like swallows, arbitraily climbing some mountains and skirting others. Important note: rivers and roads zigzag for opposite reasons. Mountain streams run straight as prairie roads; oxbow lakes and serpentine curves only form in the steepest roads and paths. Either way, expect plenty bridges.

Which is really unfortunate because my bike brakes were in serious need of adjustment. I kid you not. Disc brakes are so reliable and maintenance-free that you can go thousands of miles without needing to know how to do anything to them--which takes you very very far from a shop. And in spite of not gripping very well, they still get hot enough for a second-degree burn. So I was glad when Leo, following me along the same road after buying cash and gas, stopped and saved me.

We passed through Ettersberg, which in spite of its name is not a town, and stopped at Honeydew, which in spite of its name is a very nice town. Their "general store" was much along the lines of the one in Menemsha or Shelter Cove, selling everything a grocery store has but only the priciest variety. Plus a counter crammed with locally-made greeting cards, baked goodies, the kind of jewelry you make at summer camp, and peeling fliers for every event within 50 miles and three months. This being Humboldt County, they were about evenly matched between chakra counselors certified in past-life healing (or something) and General Handyman No Job Too Small/Free Fill/Tractor Parts for Sale. Pot growers are not exactly a diverse lot, but they are starkly bimodal.

We got some delicious road-trip rubbishsnacks and pushed on the final leg to Mattole. Yesterday we happened to pass a salmon fisherman selling his catch by the roadside, and bought some for dinner, proving the theory that local food is often less fresh because, without economics of scale, there's no cold chain or oversight. It was still pretty good though. But there was no fisherman today; Mattole has only a beach to Shelter Cove's harbor.

Glassbow

2011-08-11T21:30:00.002-04:00

Here is a picture of a glassbow, which is (or at least is Walter Lewin's word for) a rainbow cast by glass rather than water. You can see one almost anywhere a white line has recently been painted onto the pavement, but they are seldom bright enough to show in a photo. (Same with water rainbows, for that matter.) Like all rainbows, they form a circle around the shadow of your head that is cast by the light source--in this case the sun. However, the exact size of the circle is different for glassbows than rainbows; nerds may enjoy figuring it out either by measuring the glassbow shown here and assuming I'm 68 inches tall, or simply by knowing the index of refraction of glass. If the former, perhaps you can also figure what kind of glass they used.

Also, I moved around a lot before admitting I couldn't see a double glassbow anywhere. A rainbow this bright would probably also be double. Did I just not see it?

Also: an object illuminated by multiple sources will cast multiple shadows. (Overhead light and desk lamp, for instance; or even sunset and moon, if you pay attention as the full moon rises.) So there should be conditions under which you can see multiple small rainbows, one around each headshadow. Obviously the two light sources have to be similar in brightness, so neither washes out the other; each one also has to be bright enough to cast a visible rainbow. Thus, neither can be the sun.* Maybe two sets of car headlights would do it. But I've never seen this effect in all my years of rainbow-watching. Is there some solid reason it's not possible?

Update: There was a glassbow on the wall of our room this morning, actually not a bow but a round blot where the desert sun shone through the peephole. So if you've ever admired the rainbows thrown by a glass prism or crystal, you've seen a glassbow. But it's much harder to notice the different angle of refraction this way.

*Though one could be the moon; I've never seen a moonbow, but apparently they do exist.

Flatter than a Pancake

2011-08-07T21:26:00.001-04:00

As everyone knows, Kansas is flatter than a pancake. No really, it is, at least if you neglect the earth's curvature. Shrink Kansas down to the size of an IHOP pancake (as opposed to a crepe, and even those have bubbles) and it'd be flatter than a real one.

But that is actually not such a big deal. I started wondering if any state or country would be less flat than a pancake. F'rinstance, if you shrank the Big Island of Hawaii down to the size of a hula hoop, it'd be about as thick as a real one (and that only in the center.*) A foot in diameter, and it would be about as thick as...an IHOP pancake.

So is any country or state actually bumpier than a pancake? It would have to be very small and mountainous. Switzerland? Ethiopia?

*The Big Island is volcanically young enough that it hasn't eroded much: it's almost the same shape below the waterline.

Queries and Lying Scientists

2011-08-03T00:49:00.001-04:00

My best writing doesn't seem to garner any comments, and our recent camping trip has limited Cooking With Maia to "Things You Can Add Boiling Water To To Make Tasty Gruel" and "Ketchup: Not Just A Vegetable Anymore." So here's some science/inflammatory posts to get your broadband flowing.

Every good science text has some experiments you can do at home to prove, or at least demonstrate, the effect you're studying. Swingsets for pendulums, seesaws for levers, cats for static electricity. This is good: science is the study of the world around us, with its goal being simplification and prediction of otherwise complex phenomena. But the problem is, many of these demos DON'T WORK! Obviously whoever wrote the book just copied from some other guy who also didn't do the actual experiment, thus nullifying the whole point of the thing. I have come up with two of these so far, and encourage you to send me some more:

Allegedly demonstrating the strength of an (unpunctured) dome: the books tell you it is impossible to crush an egg in your hand, unless you're wearing a ring or deliberately poke through with a fingertip. It's not. Try it OUTSIDE. There will be egg on the ceiling, at least if you work with your hands. Use a commercial egg, not a barnyard happy-chicken one: those can be used to break a porcelain bowl.
Diffusion being postulated as a reason why people further and further from an opened perfume bottle (or fart) successively report smelling it. Diffusion in a gas is so slow that it is totally drowned out by convection or even bigger movements, like a ventilator or fan.
Blocking out solar glare and seeing stars in the daytime, by looking up a chimney or well. I've never had this work, and I think it was Feynman (or some other experimentalist) who came up with a good explanation why it's impossible. But this is my second Query of the post:

Under what circumstances would it be possible to look up a tube and see the stars? Or even planets. How skinny would the tube need to be? Or, how dry/cold/thin the air? Breathable?

That the human body has 206 bones, and then in the same lesson describing how a newborn's skull is in several pieces ("plates") to enable it to squish during birth; those bones eventually fuse into a single dome. So either newborns have 210 bones, or adults have 200; actually it's even worse than that because of the eight adult bones (per wrist) that are cartilage in newborns, and the six sacral vertebrae that fuse in adults. And that's just the normal humans; extra vertebrae and floating ribs aren't unheard of either.

Lassen Lassitude

2011-08-02T22:42:00.003-04:00

Just returned from several days camping in the Caribou Wilderness, which adjoins Lassen National Forest. I think. I'm pretty sure about the Wilderness, but Lassen may be a National Park, Forest, Refuge, or State any of the above. I don't think it's a Historic Monument.

Anyway. We hiked in just a short bit, less than an hour (but 100 vertical meters: fun with altimeter) to set up camp near one of the Hidden Lakes. The same tent I had on the Vineyard when I was 15, and its zippers betray its age. This would be bad country to get lost in: big pine and spruce trees mostly the same age except where a recent fall has gapped the canopy for babies; lots of fallen trees that same size (even across trails), and everywhere dotted with round-edged undistinguishable water bodies. The soil is ashy, presumably a skin-thin dusting over glacier-gouged rock that cups the tiny lakes without letting them soak in or run off. Almost all the aquatic life has some backup mode of transportation: either it can fly, like mosquitoes; or crawl, like frogs; or both, like ducks. Obviously the lakes do occasionally freeze clear through. We kept the same campsite for a few days (Leo's a faster hiker than me, but I think he hates carrying a pack: shh) and took day hikes north into the Wilderness. Images:

Hummingbirds! Rufous I think, according to Petersen; so fast and jerky that often I heard them before seeing them. They vocalize only when seriously upset, chasing each other at snowball speeds and emitting near-supersonic chirps that, when played back at one-fiftieth speed, probably sound like the MGM lion. Luckily their wings are as loud as a foxtail.
Mosquitoes too. In spite of the dry dusty ground: they must be breeding in the minimarshes of downed logs.
And dragonflies in pairs and occasional triplets, either end-to-end or 69. Right in public too.
Firneedle tea, made from the yellowy-green tips that are this year's growth of grand fir. I tried it when Leo was having his customary evening coffee,so as not to be left out; and found it to be good enough to have again. Faintly limey; and the steeped needles soften to the texture of green beans. In no way can they substitute, except for being delicious; they have a flavor all their own. Very few wild foods can substitute for cultivated ones, and given the amount of labor required they better not, but they are often just as good if not better.
Pinetar gum. Sugar pines are basically enormous white pines with cones the size of an American football (I'm certain the cone my mom told me was a ponderosa, that she probably still has, is one of them) and their sap dribbles and dries and hardens to a crackly gem that, if crunched in one's teeth, comes together into a rubbery gum. This doesn't always work. Get the floss.
Lupines everywhere, thriving as they never did when we tried to grow them back in mainland New England. Apparently they thrive on crappy (in the sense of not crappy) inorganic well-drained soil with lots of sun.
More of the same gartery snakes I saw before; I managed to catch one and he stunk me. I don't blame him.
Assorted lizards that I can't begin to recognize, basking on bleached white logs
Swimming, briefly, in the snowmelt lakelet near our camp. It's much harder to get into cold water if there's nothing to jump off of.
Going uphill, into the Wilderness, the lakes had fish again! The climate can't be that different, but those lakes are less likely to be isolated: a stream, or skunk-cabbage squishpath, often connects them. And that rivulet is probably a torrent in springtime. I wonder if baby trout (fry? smelt?) can swim upstream, and if they'd know to, to recolonize a pond that froze too hard and was now fishless.
But still no turtles. I looked. The Sacramento River had them.
This is probably a record for the longest I've stayed at a place without drinking the water. Leo apparently knew of this propensity of mine, and pump-filtered all our drinking water so I was never out, else I would have. (Giving him a cold was unavoidable; giving him giardia would not be nice.)
An animal wandering through our camp the second night, sounding like a stegosaurus, turned out to be a scared deer.
Ruddy ducks. I did not coin the name (nor, paging through the bird book, did I have the honor of christening the pipit, the smew, or the booby) nor did I even identify them correctly until Leo noted that wood ducks don't dive and these do. At first I thought "Huh, there's been a duck there all that time and I missed it" and then it vanished again. What were they diving for? Trout that hate mealworms, if our fishing was any guide; maybe frogs?

Camping Timeline (Also Applicable to Days At Sea)

Note: Your Mileage May Vary

Throughout: Gossip pettifies steadily

1 day: "Hey, there's a noodle in my tea!"

2-3 days: Begin detailed food-fantasy conversations.

2-5 days: Shrug, drink the noodle along with your tea

1-5 days: Sticks and rocks become acceptable utensils for stirring, spreading, et cetera
1-3 days: All surfaces are acceptable for sitting

1-3 days: Introduce gossip about people no one else knows

4 days +: Toilet events, other than seasick vomiting, become newsworthy
2-8 days: All surfaces become acceptable for sleeping
3 days: Begin drinking the water straight. (Even when I was in Africa: locals who could afford packaged water never drank anything else.)
3-7 days: "Hey, where's my noodle?!"

4 days: Begin food hoarding

5-10 days: Eagerly solicit gossip about people you don't know. Read medicine bottles, instant-noodle instructions, and EPIRB.

10 days: Companions become entirely predictable in food preferences, toilet and sleeping habits, political views, moods, jokes and B.O.

15 days: Companions become either adorable, beneath contempt, or transparent.

End of trip: Find it impossible to imagine life without ever again seeing The Cook, The Crazy Captain, The Polish Couple, The German Drunks, or The Fat Guy. Promise to stay in touch.

Aftermath: Don't.

Leo Has A Blog!!

2011-08-02T21:47:00.001-04:00

Check it out, it's at trippingleo.blogspot.com. The two most recent posts are eminently readable even if you care nothing for either of us: they tell the saga of the S/V Southern Cross for a couple of voyages immediately after I left it in Samoa this May. I'll link those posts directly to his blog some time when I have more time, for the casual stumbleupon reader; but in the meantime check it out. Makes my stories look positively tame. Of course. God dammit.

California Snippets

2011-07-26T20:27:00.001-04:00

I've been visiting Leo in California for the last weekish, or I suppose I should say visiting California with Leo. Before coming to Davis we visited Calaveras County, which is home to:

what I think is Mark Twain's first appearance in print, The Famous Jumping Frog of...
a forest reserve of some of the world's biggest trees, imaginatively named Big Trees
Stanley Forest Reserve, worryingly mottoed "Land of Many Uses"
year-round snow. Unlike along the Icefields Parkway, it is still fairly snowy and not granular or icy or even caked with sand. More like Hawaiian shave ice, than a sno-cone. Thus, not only does it pack easily; but you cannot be charged with manslaughter for throwing it at people.
men with several thousand dollars' worth of rubber clothing and fishing rods, standing testicle-deep in icy water trying to prove they are smarter than fish, without realizing they have already settled the question
big BIG trees. Surprise! They are essentially impossible to photograph: anything you put in for scale, will be invisibly tiny. There's an excellent photograph of a cabin next to a sequoia, in Conifers of California, that is about the only exception until they let us drive and park a bus next to one of them.
Oh: Boston residents. Where did the Science Museum get its giant-sequoia slice? One of the Big Trees was actually felled and slivered for science (!) and at least one slice went to New York. I think Boston's slice is too small to be this same tree (and it has a fire scar, so it's not just from 200 feet above the ground) but I'm not sure.
Aquatic snakes. This is so cool it almost doesn't belong in a bullet point, but so be it. I don't know how Leo knew there would be snakes right at the spot he pulled over by the river, but there were. It was muddy along the banks, with salt-licking swallowtail butterflies on the mudbars, but clear and trouty in midstream. In one of the muddy eddies swam several snakes. At first I couldn't see any ("What am I looking for?" is a bad sign) but once I got my eyes trained I counted five or six little garterish fellows. They lurked in plain sight once you could see them, but usually coiled near a twig or a stem of grass, which they seemed to brace against when striking, snake-quick, at the fishies. Advantages of being a reptile: they stayed completely submerged for several minutes before taking a few demure sips of air, and seemed equally comfortable on the surface or under it. I hear polar bears can belly-crawl across thin ice that won't support a man; maybe these snakes do the same with surface tension.

Now blogging from Davis, in the desert Central Valley that is famed for its agriculture. (It's easier to import water than sunlight.) I'm supposed to be doing college stuff online, but my mail server is throwing a snit fit, so instead you get an update. (Want me to blog more? I need someone to handle the scutwork. Drop me a comment.*)

So anyway. Went for a bike ride along the Sacramento River path today, which is significantly cooled both by the river and by long chunks of treetunnel. (The pavement in Davis is dancingly ouch-ouch hot in the sun: and it's now late enough in the day that the sun has moved around and no patches of night cool survive.) Things I noticed:

Lots and lots of blackberries. This is not news: you get blackberry bushes along road edges everywhere that winter temperatures are between -20 and +50 Fahrenheit. Massachusetts to Makawao and Mangareva. But these HAD BEEN PICKED!! On the Vineyard no one ever picks the roadside berries. The year I caught onto commercial picking was a blackberry off year; but I sold all the blueberries I could pick to the stores for $20 a pound and couldn't keep up. Raspberries too.
Plums. We have an addition to the list of Useless Descriptors: "plum-colored" is often used to mean deep dark purple, but ripe plums come in every color. Including, in this case, sun yellow.
Squirrels, lying so flat in the shade that they looked like roadkills as they pressed the insides of each thigh and armpit to the cool pavement. Only their heads moved as I went by, but if I stopped they scampered.
What I think were mergansers in one of the lakes: like ducks with pointed bills and wine-colored** heads that swept back like a disreputable car-dealer's haircut. I didn't spook any, so I don't know if they had erectile crests like a nuthatch.
A bridge named "Rainbow Bridge," which makes me wonder if we have a closet Richard Bach fan here. (Hint: the "Rainbow Bridge" was also the Bridge Across Forever.)
Strange traffic, including adult tricycles; tandems in every combination of recumbent and real-bike (even on the same machine); trailercycles; tandems pulling trailers, making a hazardously long contraption that was difficult to pass; a very small boy carrying a very large blowup raft on his head; a man in the nearby reservoir standing astraddle the cockpit of a kayak and paddling with a canoe paddle; serious cyclists in jerseys, banking corners until the inside pedal almost scraped; a man so fat he had what looked like tandem wheels on his ultralight racing bike; being passed by someone listening on a cell phone; horse poo, though no horses; a girl standing on what must have been a concealed sandbar, with feet dry in the middle of the lake; a frogfaced black pug dog wheezing on a leash; two hummingbirds (not together, they're violently antisocial and have been known to bodycheck bees away from flowers); a pair of quail; lots and lots of skinny wary turkeys; a deer; inedible fallen figs; Chinese people chattering in Chinese over their sno-cones. I wonder if they were tourists or longtime locals.
And that's all for now. Maybe Yahoo is working now.

*Sadly this only works one way: you cannot make my total blogging go below zero.
**ANOTHER useless descriptor! How do you know I didn't mean white wine?

CHICKEN BACON

2011-07-20T11:24:00.002-04:00

Chicken bacon need not be soylent-dynamited pseudo-healthy meat product. It can also be delicious, thrifty and reasonably healthy, if you play fast and loose with the definition of "bacon." To make it you need:

cooked soggy-skin-on chicken
a microwave
paper towels
(optional, but nice) coffee filters see below

Peel the skin from the chicken. Lay it in a single layer between two layers of the coffee filters, if you have them. This will stop it sticking to the paper towels. Put the towels under it to blot up grease. Make sure the skin is covered with at least one layer of paper, for spatter.

Microwave until done. Depends on the chicken and the microwave: try thirty seconds, then peek. If you're not using coffee filters, peel the chicken skin up once or twice during cooking; else it bonds irreparably to the paper towels. When it's done, it'll be crispy and the paper towels will be soaked with grease. Feed the towels to the cat, the woodstove or the compost. Eat the chickenskin bacon. Yum.

UPDATE: Brown paper grocery bags work just as well as coffee filters and are bigger and cheaper. It's still a good idea to loosen the bacon once or twice, but it's neither essential nor that hard. Plus the bag is almost greasetight, forming puddles the cat can lick up.

First of the Flowerfields

2011-07-04T23:10:00.001-04:00

Writing this from Fernie, whose name is either affectionate for Fernald or descriptive. It is not very ferny, however, so I'm going with Fernald/Ferdinand.
This is the first night for a couple of nights that we've been in a motel as opposed to a cool old hotel. I kind of miss them already. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky to have found even the first two, since they basically don't advertise.

We drove from Calgary into what may not have been the heart of the prairies, but was certainly as close to it as I ever wish to go. I repeat the "Poland, Senior" comparison except that this was the great-great grand daddy of Poland. Fields measured in square miles rather than acres, enormous sprawling houses with trucks and people to match, farm machinery that could not under any circumstances be pulled by a horse. But many of the same crops as in Poland, including bright yellow rapeseed (politically correct name: canola) that carpeted some fields with a blanket of blooms, and volunteered in other ones wherever the microclimate was suitable. I think it likes it a little more damp than wheat does.

So I got a taste of the prairies. I agree with April that "prairie" does sound a lot like "prayer," and as such is therapeutic and restful for a brief time and then your mind is rested and rejuvenated and it's time to return to a life with stimuli, unless you've gone too far to come back. We found that in Drumheller's dinosaur museum, which you can read all about, and then began the hopeless task of trying to find housing for the night. Canadian motels don't have giant marquees advertising prices, which should tip you off to what those usually are, but finally the tourist office (of all places) tipped us back to the Old West.

The Last Chance Saloon has an attached hotel called something like the Rosebud. I forget.* But there's only one in the town of Wayne anyway; there barely even IS a town of Wayne for it to be in. I was born too late to have seen Westerns on TV, but luckily none of my friends were, and this hotel fits the bill. Except for not actually having swinging doors, which in prairie winters I understand. And terrible Canadian taste in alcohol. You're in Canada Now! when people drink Bailey's straight with dinner.

Admittedly that may be because the bar was jammed with old people, who had added to the ambience by parking all their vintage Packards outside. I had seen a few of them on the Icefields Parkway, and now here was the whole rally together: typical vintage-car people, old men dragging along their reluctant wives on what would have been a great adventure had they not forgotten about the weather. At least I had been keeping myself warm pedaling. Drumheller's warmer than the Icefields** but still gets chilly at night, and probably at any time in an open car. So perhaps the Bailey's was just a desperate attempt to either get the feeling back in their hands, or else numb them the rest of the way.

Eventually the bar cleared out and the bartender showed us our room, up a rickety flight of stairs with an obviously homemade shower at the end of the hall. The room had a blinking nonworking alarm clock and a Saturday Evening Post picture of the usual cherubic chubby children, and the window sash wouldn't stay open unless we jammed a jar of instant coffee under it. We loved it. Plus it was about a third of what the other hotels had all agreed to charge,*** so we still got to feel frugal when the next night we had a Grill-Your-Own steak dinner at their sofa-sized indoor grill. I have no idea why this attraction is so popular in Alberta; maybe it has something to do with the law that requires innocent burgers to be vulcanized well past "hockey puck." Perhaps the DIY aspect absolves the business owner.

Next night was a similar place in the tragically misnamed town of Patricia, which is decidedly plebian and thus nice. The guy in Wayne, whose name was not Wayne, turned us on to it; otherwise we'd never have found them. The next morning we got to overhear some neighbors gossiping about an absent neighbor around the breakfast tables, and the hearty waitress made sure none of us ran short of cholesterol.

But the hotel definitely takes somewhat of a back seat to the guided dinosaur-bone hike, which was so cheesy I wound up loving it. The whole shtick: bus to the site, philosophy-major guide clowning around, nine-year-old boys asking questions that I bet even a paleontologist couldn't answer. Males running ahead, asking questions, getting into stuff; females (all ages) dragging and fussing at their sons and husbands. Not me: I was chatting up a pasty Winnipeg kid ("We didn't get much snow last year, only about three feet") and his dinosaur-nut brother. A worthwhile cross-section of Canadians.

Even the extinct ones. It's odd to realize that dinosaurs (all prehistoric animals really, but dinosaurs are cooler: when did you last see a plastic Beast of Baluchistan or trilobite?) lived everywhere but only fossilized in a few places. Like the Badlands. Where we went. Where the bones crisscross and jumble together even more closely than in a frozen orgy. You could never fit as many carcasses in this space, as there were bones. Nearly all Centrosaurus, which to my eye looks like an early version of Triceratops. To me it's almost unbelievable that there are physical remains of a time that long ago. And then I realize everything is that old--some has just been reorganized more than other.

And then we picked up and came here, to the motel in the town of unferny Fernie. Leo the botanist picked me a bunch of different kinds of flower, most in the rose family: rose, dogwood (not the domestic kind but close), saskatoon, rowan, chokecherry and hawthorn. Add to that the ones I saw: daisy (billyuns and billyuns), Indian paintbrush, strawberry (flowers. Fruits only at Jasper, dang it I should've filled up!), escaped canola, and lots and lots of lilac. It's been lilac season for me ever since visiting my folks in mainland Massachusetts at the beginning of June. I should make a movie The Endless Spring, chasing the lilacs around the globe...where do they bloom next? Newfies, I'm lookin at you.

Update: Leo read this post and went, "What, you haven't seen any phlox?" Mea culpa. I have. Also beach pea, vetch, lupine, and violet. Basically it's purple season.

*Ha! "Rosedeer"!
**Duh
***According to the barman, they're all owned by the same family anyway.

Last of the Icefields

2011-06-29T20:20:00.001-04:00

After yesterday's rest day (well, rest except for taking the Lake Louise gondola and seeing some grizzled grizzly bears) I was ready to ride down to Banff. In fact I was so eager to do so that just for fun I pedaled up to the Continental Divide. Actually I had several reasons for this:

I love placenames that contain a descriptor--Dawson City ("What's this?...Oh, a city, my bad") or Port Moresby or even the Ukraine or the Sudan. "Vermilion Pass" has the added advantage of having two accepted spellings.

It was cold and rainy and I needed the hill to warm me up
I wanted to cross the Continental Divide at least once this trip, and wasn't sure if I already had. (Added benefit: I now realize that actually visiting the far side of the Divide is stupid: there's a reason all the glaciers are on that side. It's called a rain shadow.)
I now have peed, indirectly, into two oceans this trip. On a longer trip I could have made it four.

Having ridden to Banff, I continued along the Legacy Trail most of the way to Canmore before I realized that I had left the National Park and thus might have to buy another pass. (You're supposed to pay for each day: I think I wound up actually paying for about half the time I spent in Banff and Jasper Parks. I am not going to point out that the guy who dinged me for two days had a French accent, while the one who smiled and waved me through did not.*) So I played a complicated game of Frogger across the highway, got headed back north towards Banff, luckily didn't get stopped at the checkpoint, then remembered that the Legacy Trail crosses the highway so I had to cross all the way back. That crossing is completely unsigned, unmarked and unhelpful. Too bad I'm not an endangered species.

But I got back to Banff unscathed, got a bike box from the shop, and managed to disassemble and box up my bike as the transport company requires. Is it possible to take the pedals off a bike without gashing yourself at least once?

And you would not believe how much skanky swampy water fits in a bicycle frame. Seriously, if you've been riding in the rain, go take the seat off and flip the bike upside down. Outdoors.

And now I'm killing time in Banff waiting for the bus to pick me up for the airport and Leo. So this'll probably be my last post for a while since I'll have someone better to talk to than this keyboard. I'm sorry. Actually I'm not.

*Oops.

You're in Canada Now, Eh?

2011-06-28T22:32:00.003-04:00

Joke I heard at a coffeeshop, told by one alleged adult to another:
What's red and shakes and flies around by itself? A jellycopter!

Also everyone here seems to be allergic to spices. Canadian chili is basically just Bowl o' Burger with Beans; at the pizza place you have to ask for hot pepper flakes, which they may not have.
Winter is the dominant, normal state of affairs here. This hostel is famous for its skiing, and cross-country ski maps festoon the walls; ads for lift tickets and packages are up year-round. I imagine the skiing is poor now, but it could be done. Hostels advertise, even in the summer, that they have a woodstove.

There's a bit of the extreme-polite-understatement going on too, that I noticed in Newfoundland: "It's not too nice out, eh?" means "Your pee stream will freeze and anchor you to the ground until spring."

And everyone has accents! From every corner of the British Empire, past present and future; except that unlike in Newfoundland, the Scots and Irish accents are actual Scottish and Irish people on vacation. And all the bottom-rung customer service people have Aussie lilts. For the rest of my life, this hostel will be at Like Lawayze. I've heard one Canadian accent so far; he was in the heart of Calgary, hanging out in a convenience store.

I think they're a little self-consciously being Canadia(TM), rather than truly living it like the people in Newfoundland with their Peggotty accents and year-round snow machines. All the food places offer poutine: french fries with gravy and melted cheese. But they have to write a description! Shouldn't everyone know what it is?

Also there are trains everywhere, racketing alongside the road or on the other side of the river or across the road, filling the nights with evocative wails. Poor Canadian Pacific Railway: their abbreviation got coopted and now they have to use "CPRail" instead. The trains carry coal, grain, oil, containers from Maersk and China Shipping...virtually everything except human passengers. What's with that?

Scattershot Update

2011-06-28T12:08:00.004-04:00

Coincidentally, Lake Louise is a short day's ride from Banff, and I did ride here in less than half a day. However, that was close to a week ago; since then I have ridden on to several other places along the Icefields Parkway, diverse in their charms and united in not having internet I could use.

First day out of Banff only got me as far as Lake Louise, in a howling storm of rain and snow. I'd planned to go on further, but didn't because this hostel has a dryer, internet, hot showers and grocery store. Except when the power is out. I was still damp the next day.

Briefly: mountain air is dry. It turned out to be a really long, beautiful day of riding that took me over both peaks of the Parkway, both at about 2,000 meters. That's the same pressure as inside an airplane: care to explain why, when you ship a bike, they still make you let the air out of the tires? Admittedly I did get a flat, but it wasn't a blowout. Steel-belted tires prevent flats only if you have them: otherwise they shed wires that give other people flats.

I continue to be amazed at how much bigger all the animals are. Instead of whitetailed deer eating people's gardens and stopping up traffic, the town of Jasper is plagued by elk that you could drive a Mini Cooper under. Chipmunks are the size of squirrels, squirrels the size of bunnies, woodpeckers the size of crows, crows that are actually ponderous ravens who scrark and waddle like cafeteria ladies. Hopping gracelessly into the air, their great black wings scrape the pavement with a noise like fingernails. I think I saw a mule deer, with its distinctive gait like a bouncing ping-pong ball; I know I've seen at least four black bears. They browse by the roadside, blase to the traffic jams and camera flashes; and I think they're so used to cars that they don't notice a bike until I'm very close.

Can I just take this time to shill for the wilderness hostels? About every 40 km along the Icefields Parkway, there's a wilderness hostel that has bunks, cooking facilities, pit toilets, usually a manager (all but one of which more later) and everything you need for a good night's sleep. If you're tired. The hostel at Beauty Creek backs right up against a braided glacial stream, overlooking the Endless Chain Ridge of mountains. It's run by an Aussie named Jordan, who knows all about the area and also sells the cheapest beer I have found anywhere in Canada. He even loaned me a blanket to take on to Hilda Creek Hostel, up the road.

Also: to those of you who are planning to go to New Zealand for the nature, CANCEL IT RIGHT NOW. In fact, don't go to NZ for anything that can be found elsewhere.* The Canadian Rockies are so much bigger, better accessed, less trafficky, and in general awesomer than the Southern Alps: they have many, many well-maintained multiday hike/ski trails, some with hostels. Plus, Canadians have a long and honorable tradition of dealing with cold weather. Besides, if New Zealand trekking were really so awesome, there wouldn't be so many of them here.

For those of you with maps, here was my itinerary:

Arrive in Calgary, assemble bike. Sleep.
Ride to Banff, including a briefly terrifying stint in city traffic: next time I'm taking the tram to the end of the line. Avail self of free refreshments at Stoney Nakoda Lodge and not-free Banff farmers' market. Sleep.
Ride Banff-Lake Louise; try and fail to blog, laundry, shower. Sleep.
Ride Lake Louise-Hilda Creek Hostel, intending to spend the night, only to find it's open by appointment only. Say bad words. Luckily Hilda's right at the top of a hill. Push on to Columbia Icefield Center, use public phone to confirm opening of next hostel at Beauty Creek. Arrive at Beauty Creek. It is possible to be too tired to sleep. Beer! Sleep.
Ride Beauty Creek-Jasper. Sleep.
Plan to spend the next day touring Jasper town, including its famous scenic tramway, but lots of low cloud. Get keys to Hilda Creek Hostel at Jasper.
Ride to Hilda Creek, including a stop at Beauty Creek Hostel. Chat up pretty Aussie solo cycle tourist who has ridden from Montreal. Extend invite to spend night at Hilda, doubt she'll take me up on it. Ride to Hilda. Sleep.
Pretty Aussie shows up. Go back to sleep.
Spend next morning discussing travel plans, etc and chewing coffee beans. Aussie mentions possible trip to Like Laways, where I now am, so still may see her.

And now here I am, planning to take a semirest day and maybe see Louise's scenic tram. Or climb to the Plain of Six Glaciers. Which has a teahouse.

This is not complete. Maybe I'll complete it. Watch this space.

*And most anything that CAN only be found in New Zealand is vanishingly rare and precious and endangered, usually nocturnal, and lives in cold damp places rife with bugs.

Prairie to Mountain

2011-06-22T19:56:00.001-04:00

When I was doing research for this trip, I figured it would make more sense to take motorized transport from the airport to Banff and ride from there, than to ride all the way from Calgary. Unfortunately I did that research long after having reserved a room in Calgary for the night. So I made the best of it. And am I glad I did.

Calgary lies in a vast plain whose eastern edge reaches...God, I don't even know, do the Appalachians reach that far north? Flying in, you see a neat grid of different greens separated by roads; looks like Poland would look if the farms and houses were 10 times bigger. Biking out of the city reinforces the impression of Poland, Senior: bigger gentle rolling hills, bigger houses, more construction, bigger cars. Only difference is the mountains you can sometimes see from the top of a rise; but they're tiny and distant.

The closer you get, the bigger they get and the wilder the countryside. Fields give way to meadow, subdivisions to forests of pine and what I guess is aspen: like birch that decided to stop being so frivolous and grow straight trunks with horizontal branches. Mountain meadows that must be marshy: not only are they too flat to be totally dry, but also the mosquitoes can chase down a bicycle.

Along one of the less buggy flats, I had my third ever auditory hallucination. My brain gets bored and likes to fill in the blanks: I once "heard" weird moody violin music, like someone had an iPod running in their bag, when the wind blew through the rigging of the Southern Cross. And once when hiking in the Ozarks, the chortling streams sounded enough like the female choir in Ode to Joy that said Ode got stuck in my head. Both times the illusion collapsed when I realized what it was: but I never figured this one out. I kept hearing my cell phone ringing, except it a) is shut off to save battery, and b) doesn't work in Canada anyway. Still have no idea what it was: some high-pitched chirpy bike squeak.

Meanwhile the mountains drew closer, even as the road stayed pretty flat. I started getting nervous about the wall of rock that was drawing closer and closer; how am I going to get through? Or worse, over? I had to keep reminding myself that the highest pass around here is only slightly higher than the Saddle Road. Plus, I realized why they looked familiar: they're on every can of Coors.*

I'm used to cycle touring countries that are designed around muscle-powered transport, which means I was expecting a lot more stops than there were. And of course I had no food with me, because if I did I would have already eaten it. (Psychology.) So I was getting pretty tired when I came to a place whose name I unfortunately forget: a hotel/rec center on a lake. They had free unattended coffee, Tim Horton's hot cocoa mix, ice water for my bottles, free waterproofish road maps of the area, and in general were so attuned to my needs that I considered asking them to take a look at the bike squeak.

I was running pretty low on fuel by the time I got to Canmore, a small town/outdoor mall right at the foot of the mountains. Hard to believe it's only about a thousand feet above Calgary, even though just outside Canmore on the road you can look back over nothing but prairie. I think most of the eastern Rockies is like that, so steep and sudden you can smack into the mountains and break your nose if you're not careful. Albatrosses have been known to fly straight into the sides of ships, sleeping on the wing: now I see how.

Plus the squeak was getting worse, not better; so was the shifting, so I took the bike to the shop and myself to a pizza place whose name I also forget but was something like "Focaccia It!" The pizzerier (as in saucier, who makes sauces; or patissier, who does pastry...no?) not only knew about the headwind but was baffled at my surprise: doesn't everyone know which way the wind blows, even if they're seldom out in it? Well, no.

I still don't know what was causing the squeak, because the guy had an extensive list of things that he'd fixed. What, did the bag handlers stomp on it? Anyway, no harm done. I took off for the last leg, up along the Legacy Trail to Banff.

Imagine if the mountains of Mount Desert Island, instead of having been ground over by glaciers, had instead birthed them and then stood up while the ice flowed around them. Instead of the smooth sinewave cross-section of Maine, the Canadian Rockies are sharp bladed peaks grooved by U-shaped valleys in all sizes from "trickle" to "Bow River," whose valley holds two train lines, the highway and the bike path. Snow still cowers in the higher valleys, and the tops of the biggest banks are grooved with what looks like water drainages. The running streams are thick with debris of all sizes from boulders to dust, making them shine like silver at a distance and thrash like brokebacked snakes as they get to the flat and drop their loads. Look it up: Google Images, Icefields Parkway.

Coming into Banff I was pretty tired and hungry; the pizza and estimated 14 espressos had worn off, and I just hoped to make it to the hostel. Only to spot a farmer's market.

I would have bought anything they were selling: sawdusty Red Deliciouses, unripe peaches so uniformly bruised and rotted as to feel ripe, strawberry-shaped red potatoes. Luckily everything they had looked great, what I could see over the shoulders of the rummaging local chefs in uniform. Good sign. I got cherries and peas and plums, which made both people on staff at the hostel say bad words. They'd forgotten the market.

I repeat about the luck.

*(Hastily) Not that I drink Coors. But I have to walk past it on the way to the whiskey.

d'OH!

2011-06-21T23:14:00.000-04:00

Well, now I know why the trip was so easy at first. Actually it continued to be easy and stressless: since they have found no trace of my laptop at O'Hare airport where I left it charging, I have nothing to worry about. Oh, and my cell phone doesn't work here either. But email does.

Travel Success!

2011-06-21T10:49:00.001-04:00

Writing this from Logan Airport, where I have had a so far suspiciously easy check-in experience. My flight's delayed, but so far not by enough to cause problems: they'll make it up in the air. Says the large individual who handheld me through the bag-check process and smoothly flattened the squawking bag handler who'd apparently read the rule book about how much it's supposed to cost to check a bike.* My ally had not, or perhaps did not care. Perhaps it's a good thing my shirt is too shrunk to zip up.

So having checked the bike for only the cost of a regular bag (which I'd have to check anyway, given that it always has a knife in it) I tried to get on the airport wi-fi with the hopeful defeatism of an aromatic hobo trying to crash a wedding reception. Long odds, but still worth checking to be sure it's not working: always a chance. After showing me a short advertising video, or tried to (perks of not having a Flash-capable netbook) they let me on.

The trip the trip oh yes the trip. I'm off to the Canadian Rockies to bike the Icefields Parkway, advertised by Wally and Barbara Smith (no relation) as being one of the most beautiful rides they've ever done. Feel free to Google pictures since I never blog them. Or, if the hostels have public computers (vibrating bike + laptop = troublesome small plastic laptop parts) you can read all about it here. Stay tuned.

*When I am so old that my bones and soft tissue have all switched places, I will tell my grandchildren about the good old days of aviation. You could carry on a knife, pedal your bike right up to the check-in counter, and choose from a vast array of free meals. Of course they won't believe me.

Acadia

2011-06-14T19:50:00.000-04:00

Acadia National Park, in Maine, is indeed a park. Not a wilderness, natural reserve, or even area of boondocks: think "walk in the park." It's a small space designed to create the illusion of wilderness for as many people as possible. It's very well done: in the small peninsula of Mount Desert Island, we encountered all the totemic wildlife species of Maine except moose and bear.

Because of the glaciation, the island is deeply scored in a north-south direction, with granite-skulled mountains (its name originated from the French "Island of Bald Mountains") separating deep valleys. In many places there is no topsoil at all, so even the tiniest scoops hold water. With frogs. There is a frog living on top of Champlain Mountain.

Where else do falcons live below frogs? There are two peregrine pairs nesting on the east face of Champlain, along the famed Precipice Trail, which is closed for the occasion. I say nesting although they do not actually nest, but only scrape on a narrow rock ledge, which you can see through the rangers' spotting scopes. Enhh, gives the rangers something to do in between turning back hikers. Who knows, maybe someone will chance the trail from the top and get scalped by an irate bird; be a shame to miss it.

We took two boat tours of the waters around Mount Desert Island and the neighboring Cranberry Isles, which ever since a mosquito-motivated swamp-drainage program are comically misnamed. Add them to the list with the Pacific Ocean and Greenland. On those tours we saw:

So many eagles we were almost blase, rather than sprinting en masse to the rail. This was only the second (third, and fourth) times I have seen bald eagles flying rather than just perched like decoys. It's humbling to see them as regular birds, with a distinctive wingbeat and other identifying marks, rather than as an icon of patriotism and/or Endangered Species Act. Then it's kind of humiliating to hear their call, which is not the triumphantly chilling scream of a red-tailed hawk, but a high-pitched cheep, cheep. Something about a Hotel California.
Seals: both gray and harbor seals, which are all true seals rather than eared seals like sea lions. (The third family in the seal group is walruses.) True seals can't touch their front flippers together, and are inertly sausagey on land with disproportionately mobile rear flippers. They can wring their hands or make a snowball, but must hitch clumsily overland before slipping into the water and squipping off like a stepped-on bar of soap. Many of them jumped in at our approach--not scared, just coming to get a closer look. Apparently the Acadia Princess boat has been doing that tour for 27 years, significantly longer than most seals live. They're used to it. Some moms brought their babies out to take a peek too.*
Ironbound Island, which is almost cliff-ringed and thus the name. It's been in the family so long the original deed says, "Ironbound Island, Massachusetts." Not sure when Maine seceded from Mass, but a long time ago. Apparently Ironbound has been known to support animals like moose and bears in its intact forest. I find this suspect, if only because it's a very long swim in very cold water to get there. Plus moose prefer swamp.
Another island, privately owned, upon which bears are regularly reported by kayakers. The owner has three black Newfoundland dogs.

When not on tours, we mostly split up to hike (both of us) and bike (me) the park. The Park Loop Road passes most of the island's sights, including Thunder Hole which when I went there was more of a gurgling gulch. Stories abound of tourists getting Too Close and Not Following Advice when All Of A Sudden Out Of Nowhere A Great Big ...and only here do we diverge from standard campfire-story plot. I suppose you could fall in there by accident, get knocked in by a wave, but the walkway is fenced in and the crowds mostly stay on it. Me, I didn't fall in; I went in.
As I was peeling down to my underwear, a passing boat slowed sharply. Most fun things, and most dangerous things, are against the rules even in Maine; so I wondered if I was about to get a ticket. But I knew if I backed off now I'd never go in, so I jumped. As I was coming up and swimming for the rocks they had turned and were steaming straight in; oh oh, I'm in trouble! Pause for undignified struggle on slickery seaweed, unintentionally mooning them--then they started hauling a lobster trap.

I did not get a ticket. But I was photographed by several random strangers. When they perfect a face-recognition algorithm, Google should have a "search for this face" function.

Most nights we'd drive up Cadillac Mountain (named for the same guy who later made more money in Detroit) to watch the sunset. And the people, who I always find entertaining: jostling and pushing, intently photographing the sun and clouds and each other, often paying closer attention to the camera than the scene itself. Oldies with white socks (anyone whose socks you can see is a loser, whether they have high short pants or sandals or shorts), parents with babies and sprinting/sulking older kids, convivial groups of men and couples. Groups of women never do anything fun, with possible X-rated exceptions; they mostly get together to gossip, drink white zin and eat. I took a group photo for a startlingly chummy group of male cyclists, who Mom thinks were gay.

The weather was perfect too: sunny and hot mornings tempered by the cool ocean, clouding in for spectacular sunsets and occasional blustery nighttime storms. Or so Mom says, and the puddles confirm it, but I could have slept on the floor of a foundry. I was beat.

*Seals, I mean. Mom was the third-youngest person on the boat, after me and the guide.

Acadia and Update

2011-06-10T22:50:00.001-04:00

In Acadia National Park,near where I went to college; having a great time and too tired to tell you about it now except this teaser:

UPDATE TO MARINE LIFE QUERY: You could see a human's breath in Hawaiian temperatures, if there were as much of it as a whale's. And indeed you can see whales' breath a lot better in cold air than warm. I asked the tour guide, Kaitlyn, on the Acadia Nature Cruise we took.

Non-Solar Math

2011-06-04T00:21:00.000-04:00

Anise/licorice liqueur is popular among elderly Frenchmen. Apparently Mexicans too, because we got a (small) flask of it for under $2. But unlike the stuff you get in France (or Mangareva, or America) this doesn't get milky when you add water. Why? And while we're at it, why does real pastis do that?

Solar Math

2011-06-03T20:35:00.001-04:00

Since I get such good results with quiz posts, here's another one:

Sunlight is strongest when it's overhead, since it passes through the least air possible. However, it only strikes a small area of your body* and thus isn't actually that hot. When the sun is low,the light is more filtered and weaker; but it hits a bigger area of your body. At which angle of the sun do you maximize UV exposure? How about visible light?

Do not be confused by the higher temperatures late in the day. You can get just as sunburned at 6 AM as PM, if the sun's highest at noon.

*If you're wearing a big hat, possibly none.

I am so impressed with Mexico!

2011-06-03T15:34:00.002-04:00

Frinstance:

Complimentary coffee at the hotel? Yeah, no big deal. Wifi? Nice, but ditto. Breakfast? Ooh. Try tequila. Two shots per night, served with a dish of salt and limes.
The food is delicious: street tacos, tamales, homemade mole sauce and salsa and guacamole; peaches and mangoes at the grocery store for about a dollar per kilo. Climate helps; Cuba has this climate too. Yay capitalism!
This whole trip we have seen a total of three plastic bottles littered, and almost nothing else. The tour captain stopped to pick up a floating fertilizer sack; before we left the lunch beach he carefully checked for rubbish. And not just dead litter: we have seen no obviously unloved animals or children either. Yes this is the richest part of Mexico: and usually people use newfound wealth to buy trash.
We took a day trip to Isla Espiritu Santo.Not only did they actually mean all day, but they've preserved a heavily used archipelago and all the life in it while still siphoning off money by the barrel. Impressions:

Los Islotes off north end of island: sea lion colony with pelicans and a few boobies. Swam with sea lions, photographed them underwater. They seem to sleep in huddled groups at the surface, often with a random fin poking through; occasionally one lifts its head to breathe. They have beautiful sad eyes, like unfrightened deer. A sea lion is basically a three-legged animal, with the two tail flippers moving together: they can tripod off the ground, hitch along in a smooth serpentine wiggle or climb up most rocks that you could. They move with the grace of a longtime crippled human driving a stick shift one-handed or crutching his way up a ladder.

Frigatebird colony in mangroves on manmade breakwater. La Paz once had oyster farms just offshore, and apparently the breakwater was built to create a shallow pearling lagoon. Should look it up: the guide spoke Spanish. Frigates are black birds with a creepy broken-umbrella wingbeat, almost like someone swimming butterfly across the sky. Like an osprey but more so. According to the guide they have neither oily feathers nor webbed feet, which would seem to make them not very good at being seabirds, but they compensate by being excellent thieves. They harass other birds, including each other, to make them drop or puke their catch. Well named: a frigate was a common kind of pirate ship, and indeed I've heard them being called pirate birds. And yes, they do occasionally fish for themselves, but so did human pirates.

Frigatebird swoops low, ducks his head to chopstick something from sea surface. Carries it briefly and then drops it. My immediate thought:
It must not have been food
Maybe it was plastic?
That's good, at least he's smart enough to spit it out rather than swallow it the way albatrosses do.

Turned out it was food, but not very appetizing since it had puffed up as hard as a tire. Are all pufferfish poisonous? We picked it out of the water, gingerly handed it around; it was comically helpless, like a cactus-spiked tennis ball with a mouth instead of a valve and long-suffering eyes. The tiny tail was limp and soft as wet kleenex. When we tossed it overboard,it bobbed in our wake as buoyant as a cork. We knew Mother Nature was a party girl, but now she also appears to be a prankster.

How else do you explain pelicans? It's basically a huge beak with a body built around it, like a human baby consists of brain + digestive system + rudimentary limb buds. Pelicans fly into the water at top speed headfirst, do a complete somersault around their neck, and settle on the surface to squeegee the water out of their bills. They must have an amazing tongue. Next to them even boobies look normal, in spite of having no forehead like Staffordshire bulldogs.

On our tour was a solemn little Indian who looked like Geronimo would have if Geronimo had been a three-year-old girl in a frilly bathing suit. She had long straight black hair, a snub nose, and wide aware eyes even when standing elbow-deep in the lagoon. Her parents were splashing around, most of us were snorkeling, the guide was preparing lunch,and the girl seemed content to stand and watch all that was going on. This made her grandmother so nervous that she decided to teach her how toddlers are supposed to behave, complete with splashing, shouting and pointing out a gull to chase. The toddler watched politely; you could hear her thinking “Adults are weird. I have a lot to learn. Better keep quiet and watch.”

The granite here is pink like in Maine, with wind sculpting that smooths without rounding: the currents and eddies occasionally etch out hollows like Superman's fingerprints or even all the way through. I've never seen anything like it. The sand is usually pink too, sometimes with a sharp line dividing it from the white of atoll-style crushed shells and coral. That white sand is super-fine and intrusively gritty: it stays suspended in the water to make a distinctive opaque green known as aquamarine.

Aquamarine is a term only slightly more useful than sky-colored (at least the sea is usually some combination of blue-gray-green, while the sky can be any color except chestnut brown) and on a par with dog-sized. Why even use it? And why does everyone know what it means?

La Paz

2011-06-01T19:37:00.001-04:00

Sign in front of a realty office:

LA PAZ: 475 YEARS WITHOUT A GOLF COURSE. IT'S WORTH THE WAIT.

Why stop there? 6.5 billion years without a golf course. Admittedly that's a guess, while the 475-year figure is based on the personal memories of golf patrons.*

Anyway. Clearly we're no longer in Cabo Pulmo; but this is the first place I've found whose wireless recognizes my laptop where the post was saved to. I need a new netbook.

*Or possibly the city's founding. Shut up.

Long-overdue Cabo Pulmo Update

2011-06-01T19:29:00.001-04:00

What does Los Cabos have in common with contraception and atomic weapons?

If you refer to Los Cabos ("The Capes"), The Pill or The Bomb it's still obvious which one of the many you mean.

One of the (other) Capes of southern Baja is Cabo Pulmo (Cape Lung? Cape of Lazy Black Stevedores?) which is actually well-named because it is so well-equipped for diving. And snorkeling, which in much of the world is referred to as diving. A marine preserve encompasses "the only coral reef on the West Coast" and, I suspect, provides a breeding ground and haven for the sportfish that lure old people and occasionally vice versa. But not only fish: plenty of life above-ground as well. I'm not sure how much of this is just my having spent a lot of time on islands, and how much is because we're staying in an oasis of trucked-in water that attracts every bird within wingshot.

At this point Leo would be interjecting the amazing size and variety of fish to be found on the world's most slapdash, threadbare reef. There's more coral on a Papeete* anchor chain. But nowhere in the (eastern) Pacific will you find such big fish that are so unfussed by the presence of people. They avoid you only as pedestrians might a mellow elephant.

The sea lions, not even. They swim right up and check you out; they swim around and under and even (if you dive) over you, with the sinuous grace of a ribbon of blood. On land they look clumsy (picture a guy stuck in his sleeping bag, bellowing ill-tempered barks at others in similar predicament) but the moment you see them swimming it's hard to believe they can move on land at all. You mean that sack has bones? It's jarring to hear them surface and breathe, proving they're real animals. Of course; they're too strange to be mythical.

For more whiplash: our trip was led by a Polish girl with a ski-jump nose and other body parts, who speaks fluent English and Spanish and who knows what else. I did not know Polish people (especially women) got around so much; they seemed almost as fearful as Americans.

Live and learn. I still get a bit of a jolt encountering a foreigner who is fluent in a language that I know poorly, like an Ivoirian speaking French.* You get no credit for languages I don't know at all; sorry, Fijians.

Cabo Pulmo is also unique in its large population of big mellow dogs. One of said dogs showed up on the beach today and requested, in very clear body language, that we throw some rocks. This comes naturally to me, but he brought them back. The same ones, even wave-tumbled; he sniffed them right out. And got upset and whimpery when one turned out to be too big; had not Leo taken pity and thrown a smaller one the dog'd probably still be there, patiently gnawing it. I was wondering why so many beach rocks are the same tennis-ball size...

*Do you know where that is? Did you look it up? If you have an even number of yesses, you suck. Odd number, you're probably cool or at least interesting. Interested in the world around you, which is usually the same thing.

Impressions from Cabo

2011-05-25T00:41:00.001-04:00

We're now in Cabo san Lucas, at the southern tip of Baja California, which is technically Mexico but barely. Not that I've ever been to Mexico except one night in Cancun one time (long story). But Cabo has:

English (Engrish, sometimes) menus
street taco sellers speaking English
clean streets
custom-built, as opposed to jury-rigged, dogs
a Humane Society
Korean cars
joggers

and thus isn't how I usually picture Mexico. But I still get to practice Spanish: mine is still better than almost everyone's English. I'm actually getting a lot better a lot faster, since people can tell me what a word means if I don't know. Such as:

Sign saying NO PISAR AL CESPED. Cesped, lawn, I get it. But pisar means "to step"! As in "piso mojado" (wet floor) or "1 Piso" (first floor.) Why, what were you thinking?

Mountain Fruit

2011-05-09T23:30:00.001-04:00

What do rose, pine, and mountain have in common with love?

They're all kinds of apple.

Actually none of them have anything to do with apples in the sense of Malus domesticus; but early European explorers seem to have been afflicted with a tragic lack of imagination in the field of botany. Perhaps their nerve deserted them after coming up with unicorns, mermaids and phlogiston. But not only did they treat all fruits as subtle variants of apple (and all landscapes as Britain-in-training, much improved by familiar animals like rabbits**) they also reused a lot of words that already refer to completely different fruits. Like "pawpaw" for papaya.* The pawpaw is a legitimate fruit, albeit a southern one I've never tried. I hear it's fuzzy.

Anyway. I got started thinking about this when I saw, and had to stop for, some roseapples earlier today. In addition to the naming flap, they are noteworthy for tasting exactly the way roses smell. Roseapples have almost no smell; roses have almost no taste; some genius chemist should isolate the flavor compound of roseapples to make rose cookies. They're delicious. To me they taste of Pitcairn, since they've made invasive pests of themselves there as well as here. But how can you not love a fruit named Syzygium jambos?

Mountain apples are completely forgettable (though they're pretty): crunchy slightly sweet water, like Asian pear/cucumber hybrids. They grow happily at sea level. Pineapples you know of course: and a love apple is a tomato.

?!?

*Which word is also Cuban Spanish for a completely different pink thing.

**Yes, that was the reason. Perhaps not as stupid as introducing mongooses to kill rats across the Pacific (one is nocturnal, the other is not; they never met) but far sillier.

Marine Life Queries

2011-05-07T11:32:00.001-04:00

When a whale spouts, what is it that you see? The apparently respectable Marine Life Center says you're seeing the whale's breath in the cold air; here in Hawaii that is not the case. But (I seem to recall) you see only the first big VOOF exhale when they surface, not the quiet breathing as they cruise. (Wind's right, you can hear them breathing even if you can't see 'em.)
Limpets, aka 'opihi, are a delicious relative of the snail. They're salty and chewy, can be indefinitely intook without satiety: perfect beer snack. Perhaps that is why they are the single nonhuman, nondomestic animal responsible for the most deaths in Hawaii: each year someone gets swept away while picking limpets from surfy rocks. Most mollusk shells are spirals, which allows growth while remaining the same shape; you can see this in snails and even clams, but limpets are to all appearances symmetrical cones with the open end stuck to a rock, small gap to feed or no gap when startled. But even they spiral as they suck down. Which brings me to my question: Wave a hand over them and you see water begin to glaze from under the shell as they prepare for attack. They can see you! But how? Are those eyes on the ends of their horns? (They have horns like a snail: more like stalks.) They can see you even if their whole body is sheltered under the shell with nothing poking out.

Mauna Kea

2011-05-01T15:32:00.001-04:00

No idea when I'll get to post this; though we're back at the Wild Ginger Inn we can't get wireless from the room, except while sitting on the john,and a) I'm too tired to sit and b) Leo is not. So 'today' means April 30.

Leo and I planned to climb Mauna Kea together, while we still have the car, but turned out he had to wait for a phone call but was still willing to drive me to the trailhead. Wah.

You can't climb Mauna Kea in a day; maybe in two, like I did Loa last year, but it would be a challenge. At least you can get water high up the slopes of Mauna Kea; forLoa you must carry it all either from sea level, Waimea (2500 feet), Pohakuloa Military Area (6600 feet, but they're not supposed to give you any) or Mauna Kea State Rec Area (6600 feet, not guaranteed potable.) So in that respect I guess Kea is easier.

The summit trail starts from the visitor center at 9200 feet, which has:

a parking lot
information
helpful if ridiculously optimistic volunteers (see the Kahinahina post)
scary signs, brochures and a sign-in sheet for hikers
free empty water bottles and a fountain
overpriced instant coffee and underpriced cocoa.

Leo dropped me there, I availed myself of all but the last amenity (they were closed) and set off up the trail. The summit road is unpaved for a 4-mile stretch in the middle of its 14 miles, presumably to strike a balance between repelling tourists and protecting the telescopes from dust.

I had forgotten how hard it is to hike at altitude! Or exert yourself in general; biking is no easier. I barely notice going from sea level to 80% pressure* on the Saddle, but much below (above) that and things get tough. I set a pace appropriate for window-shopping, and my pulse held steady at 150. (Last year, sleeping on Mauna Loa at 10,00 feet, my pulse was 85—twice normal—as I curled down to sleep.)

I'm going to stop describing landscapes as lunar or moonscape; the term is as overused as quaint in New England. There were flies here even when no green growth was visible. They still live on something. The terrain is totally different from Mauna Loa's cementy black pahoehoe: this was almost pure red cinder, both sliding underfoot and in cones like under a flour sifter. There's another Sliding Sands here, to match the one on Maui, and it does match.

Will someone please tell me the difference between a pond and a lake? I've heard several, and by all logic Lake Waiau should be a pond. If it's graced with a name at all: back home we got driveway puddles bigger than that. Apparently Waiau is never dry: it's fed by permafrost. (Yes! In Hawaii!)

Also signs of glaciation: there's an old Hawaiian quarry, Keanakakoi, whose stone is so atypical of the area that it looks dumped there. Apparently the volcano tried to erupt under a glacier, supercooling the lava to create a fine-grained stone that was highly prized for tools. Prized enough to have a colony of people living near the quarry, with all their food brought in from outside—and of course, being Polynesian, no tradition of leather, so leaves and feather capes had to suffice. It freezes up there most nights, and often snows; sometimes as much as three feet at once. Needless to say, the quarry colony was abandoned when iron tools became available; to this day no one lives at the summits. (I think the highest towns in Hawaii are at about 4,000 feet; I know of no house on the Big Island that's even above the Saddle.) The astronomers don't live up there full-time; they take turns, and are working on automating the telescopes.

If it weren't for the telescopes you wouldn't be able to tell where the true summit is, without climbing up several candidate cinder cones and squinting at the horizon. We need an alternate descriptor for the summitlandscape, with its bulbous domes—either white, to reflect visible light, or shiny, for infrared--that look like they belong on a moon colony. They look weird enough from far below (either a dead pixel in the camera, or light shining from a dewdrop) but up close look more awkward and scale-modely, The Future Circa 1983. You expect to see little interracial people in drab jumpsuits zipping around in hovercars.

But there are cars, albeit mostly rental jeeps, so I jumped onto the retaining wall to follow the highway to the true summit. (Was this clever? Or was I altitude stupid? It sure shoots to shit your math skills. I spent half an hour trying to convert feet to meters, with a thousand feet making up one kilometer.)

There's supposed to be a free tour of the telescopes every Saturday and Sunday at 1 PM, but apparently they don't let you participate if you're in a 2WD vehicle. Or it's sometimes phrased as, if you're not in a 4WD vehicle. So I may or may not have been let in had I not met up with a tech who was up there to refill one of the scopes with liquid nitrogen, and showed me around with the same glowing pride of any mechanic showing off someone else's harem of gear. Following a conversation I am not making up:

(Car slows next to me, I make the gesture which can mean you're crazy or take a videotape depending on location, but in this case meant open the window.)

ME: Which telescope are they going to be doing the tour of?

DRIVER: The Keck.

ME: ....

DRIVER: That one there, just past...Are you walking?

ME: Yes.

DRIVER: Why?

ME: ....

ME (recovering): Are you driving? Why?

Luckily he was amused rather than huffy, saving me from having to leap back over the retaining wall, and I got a free tour that included most of the interesting facts in this post. All water has to be trucked up to the summit: apparently each toilet flush costs $3 per gallon. But they have Poland Spring, both hot and cold, and cocoa. So I got my cocoa after all.

*At the altitudes where humans live, air pressure drops off linearly with altitude, one millibar for every 10 meters. (1,000 millibars is sealevel average.) So if the pressure is 800 millibars, you're 200 short of sea level or 2,000 meters up. This works at least as high as Mauna Kea summit, but eventually breaks down: jets don't fly in hard vacuum.

Two Problems

2011-04-28T17:31:00.003-04:00

(If these don't prompt some comments, nothing will! I know you're out there, Gentle Readers...)

1) Green Sand Cafe, near South Point and another possible (though unadvertised) Southernmost Restaurant in the USA, has meatballs for $2.50. Or you can add a meatball to any order for a buck. So if you come in and order six meatballs and nothing else, how much does it cost?

I phrased this wrong: they offer A meatball for $2.50, or add it to something for a buck. So is six meatballs $2.50 for the first plus $1 for each following one? I thought so, but the cashier gave me That Look.

2) I had become sadly disillusioned with Da Kine Bike Shop. Good-hearted people, providing excellent warranty service on the parts they should have installed right the first time. If they weren't free I'd take my business* elsewhere. So I got kind of nervous when, coming down off the Saddle, the bike started to shake.

Perfect riding conditions: tailwind, slight downhill, dead straight road. So I was screaming along as fast as I've ever gone on this bike. Judder-judder-judder-judder...uh oh, what now? Well, there's the military base up ahead, I'll stop and get more water and check then. Found nothing wrong.

When I got going again it was worse. Even the weight of a reflector can make the wheel shake a bit at high speeds; but both wheels looked calm enough, and this shake was so bad I was beginning to have trouble steering. I stopped and checked the quick-releases: neither wheel was fixin' to fall off. Headset wasn't loose. So what the hell.

The answer is below; to see it, copy-paste into something that lets you change the font to a legible one.

The waterbottle, newly filled, was amplifying some otherwise harmless vibration. Waves stood in it, like in a coffee cup aboard a diesel ship. And because the waterbottle cage was partly snapped, the bottle was free to jitterbug. I fixed the holder and the shaking stopped.

*Business in the sense of 'none of yours,' not in the sense of businessman.

South Point

2011-04-27T01:24:00.000-04:00

The day in South Point has gotten me in touch with my inner ten-year-old boy. To wit:

We're staying in a self-contained, ah, building that from the outside looks like a normal house split like a chicken, and from the inside feels like a treehouse. We sleep on a ledge just below the sloping tin roof, up a rickety green-painted aluminum ladder. No plumbing, so it feels campingish especially if it's chilly (we are at 1,000 feet after all) and the stars are bright and close. If they're not, the slightest mizzle of rain sounds like a torrent on the tin.
After the rising sun chased us from the treehouse, we drove to South Point, the southernmost point in the US. (Key West would be the southernmost point in the contiguous US, except being an island it's not contiguous.) In spite of being a windy desert, South Point was a Hawaiian settlement long before Captain Cook. You can see why: look at all the fishermen.
The fish are worth a gander, but getting to them is quite the adventure. Three fire-escape ladders, tied end to end, hang down the cliff almost to the water. Not deep enough to jump down when we were there--tide was low. What kind of pathetic ex-islander am I not to have noticed which way it was going?
Once we were down (Leo in snorkel gear, I in goggles: hard to swim fast if you can't breathe through your nose) we swam back under the overhanging face towards the blowhole.
At high tide, if a big wave hits the cliff face it must go VOOSH out the hole in the top; but now it was tranquilly sloshing. Leo's been here before and jumped into the blowhole, to swim out, but we agreed that today it wasn't deep enough. Maybe tomorrow. This is where simple daredeviltry becomes adventure.
Over our heads, the pockets in the cliff face were alive with noddies. They fussed at us with a bitchy natter as we swam close; when we climbed up to the ledges they flew off with their energetic, bouncy wing-gait. I saw no eggs or young. Maybe that's just a roost and not a rookery? Or this year's clutch hasn't been laid yet.
We grew bored with bothering the birds and went on to bothering the fish. Most of the big ones are farther offshore (not that I mind! Gamefish are predators) but there was still a big school of needlefish. And a seething school of something--trevallies?--that you could dent a boat on. They schooled so thickly I thought they were gathered around a rock, but they gradually drifted enough I could see it was just fish all the way through. Why do they do that?
I flagged and shouted at a fisherman on the clifftop, pointing at the huge school, but he made clueless gestures. The fish can live another day.
Remember I blogged about the bakery in Na'alehu that markets itself as being the southernmost in the US? (It must be in Fodor's or some other old-fart guidebook, judging by the clientele.) Well, you talk about false advertising: there's another bakery across the road!

Ohia, Kipukas and Roadkill Pheasants

2011-04-22T02:33:00.001-04:00

Today I biked over the Saddle Road, which is a ride I have done before, decided never to do again, and definitely want to do again.

I started on the rainy side, as one should always do when going over a mountain big enough to make its own weather. It wasn't actually raining, but shady and cool; and much more likely to sock in later in the day. The Saddle Road is being resurfaced, which means that a big chunk of it has been scalped and is now the playground of big yellow machinery; but in spite of impressive-looking vrooming and beeping and production of dust, the only change I've noticed since November is the appearance of rain gullies. I don't mind. The New! Improved! Saddle Road will be two lanes in each direction, which means that for now I have my own carless lane that isn't even subject to traffic. Also, one of the guys driving a big yellow machine threw me (threw to me, I'd been warned and was trying to catch) two bottles of water, both of which I fumbled, neither of which broke, neither of which I drank, both of which are now in the freezer so the next time I find a good roadkill I have an ice pack.

The Saddle proper is the stretch of Route 200 above 1500 meters. Actually I just made that up. But the Hilo side of the ascent is:

city
neighborhoods, getting increasingly redneck-chained dog-junked car as you ascend
Japanesey neighborhoods with cypress and stonefruit trees
construction/big ohia trees with ferns around their feet
smaller and smaller ohia trees
and then you're up on the Saddle.

Your first ohia tree is beautiful and exotic, with its dark round leaves that are pale green when young, red or occasional yellow mohawk flowers.* The ohia tree is the first to colonize new lava flows, so you'll see a lot of them. For miles and miles and miles.

But once you pass 1500 meters--I don't know, maybe you happen to pass onto a new lava flow or something, maybe ohia doesn't like frost, but all of a sudden the forest opens up and you can see Mauna Kea to the right complete with telescopes that glint like dewdroplets, and the slightly loa Mauna Loa on the left. The foreground is all lava, either the pahoehoe that looks like a rumpled rug because it kept on flowing after the surface cooled, or the aa that kept on flowing after the surface had set up and shattered it into shards. Trees poke through occasionally, almost all (surprise!) ohia.

First Vocabulary Word of the Day is kipuka. There's no English word for it: it's when a lava flow surrounds and isolates an older section of land, leaving a land island. Depending on size and isolation, they can have their own endemic species; like sea islands, they are also often devoid of predators, whether because they never got there or because you can't have a feral cat colony in a single acre. So they're a Good Thing, and there are several on the Saddle.

My second random water refill was on the Mauna Kea access road, where a bunch of road cyclists training for a triathlon were in the process of discovering that the access road is unpaved just a short distance up. Some had already returned and were waiting for the rest before driving back down to Kona. (?!) Not only did they let me fill my bottles and stomach with water, but gave me several packets of Gu, which is basically concentrated Red Bull. Having had nothing to eat since breakfast except two Coffee Mates* I gladly accepted.

For what it's worth, Gu is awful. The orange is better than the pomegranate-blueberry, but it's still awful. Gloopy like the sauce on bad Chinese food, but less flavor.

The Saddle is a beautiful, almost unearthly ride: you wind among cinder cones with a screaming tailwind. At the time I thought the wind was the trades from Hilo, that had pushed me up the hill.

Then I noticed the line of clouds between Maunas. Turns out that the Big I is big enough to have continental weather patterns: the sun heats up the land during the day, warming the air and making it rise; so the wind blows uphill. Come nightfall, the reverse happens. And of course rising air cools, and thus drops its moisture, so you get clouds.

So having coasted upwind to Pohakuloa Training Area high on the Saddle, I abruptly found myself beating upwind down the hill toward Waimea. (The Waimea ("muddy water") on the Big Island is also known as Kamuela ("Samuel" after some Samuel or another, no one knows for sure) to distinguish it from other Waimeas such as the Canyon on Kauai.) There was a layer of cloud below me, as dense as a lint filter, but luckily it was less than two hundred meters thick and I was soon through. By then I was below the Saddle, into the rich rolling green pastures of Waimea, which are also rich in birds.

Fresh bird roadkill is usually salvageable. Mammal, almost never unless it's a larger animal. I got a turkey a few weeks ago, and a partridge of some variety a couple of days ago, but was a little embarrassed at how little meat the latter had. (A little bigger than a Cornish hen; and since I only kept out the breast, it was kind of pathetically amusing as a meal for two.) Birds always amaze me at how tiny they are under all the feathers. A laundry-basket-size tom turkey actually isn't much bigger than a Purdue roaster; so after stopping for a quail or two I decided not to stop for anything less than a turkey.

Shoulda. I passed probably six chukars. Maybe that was good, since I made it to Waimea just in time to catch the second-last bus back to Hilo, so we consoled ourselves with a chicken from Shop n Save.

*The weird mohawkey flowers are that way because they're pollinated by nuzzling bats. Thank you.

**Many places that sell coffee don't have cream, so you have to BYO or do without. At least one actually requires that you request the creamers at the register AND THEN limits how many you get. And many roadside places have signs restricting ketchup to people buying hotdogs--no ketchup meals or refilling your squeeze bottle. What is wrong with Hawaiians?

Captain Cook Bay

2011-04-18T00:34:00.001-04:00

One of the Top Ten Outdoor Activities to Do in Hawaii is, "Go kayaking in Kealakekua Bay." That is where we are staying, so it would be a shoo-in except that I just spent a day pushing a bike up steep hills and my arms are shot.* Activity didn't seem like a good idea: so instead we opted to snorkel, an activity so inactive that participants occasionally drown without anyone noticing a change in their behavior.

Place of Refuge (theoretically known by its unpronounceable Hawaiian name) is such a popular snorkeling spot that you have to pay for parking. Both of us hate crowding and tourism, but figured we'd give it a look anyway. 40,000 Wisconsonian land seals can't all be wrong. We paid to park, and then I managed to bum a bottle of water (sealed--a swig from a jug would've been fine) from a Hawaiian auntie there with her large extended family of large extended people. Crowds ain't all bad.

We hurried to the water's edge, drawn by the crowd of people all pointing at something. Three turtles were swimming close to the surfy rocks, drifting so casually that for a minute I wondered if they were dead. Then downgraded my diagnosis to injured: they swirled in the water's tugs as passively as plastic bags, with barely a flipperflop. We yanked on our masks and snorkels, kick-shove splashed into the water, and joined them.

You know how seals will haul out to relax on the beach to relax, and then well-meaning tourists haze the poor animal back into the water before they return to their own basking?* Likewise, I quickly realized that the turtles were fine, just relaxed: no need to work hard. Only their beaky heads moved to snack on seaweed, and occasionally a fin would languidly adjust their motion. Never before had I seen turtles so relaxed.

This is because all the turtles I've seen have been in Fiji. Fijians hunt turtle, so the remaining ones are skittish as cats near a Chinese restaurant. Hawaiian turtles are protected, and these ones were so used to people that we were just part of the scenery. They don't like being touched (I didn't do the experiment, but the tourist kids near me did) and squip away like a bar of soap if you try: but their comfort range is about two feet. In Fiji, it's more like 20.

Mine when snorkeling is more like six inches. Leo managed to sneak right up on me and I never noticed until we actually bumped shoulders. We swam together for a bit; later he pointed out some endemic (Hawaii-only) fish that we'd seen. But last night's rain left the water so cold that we got out quick. Snorkeling: the inactivity activity that does not keep you warm.

But the coffee afterwards did. On the hill up to the hotel is a strategically placed coffee mill/fruit farm/funny farm that lets you sample their Kona coffee and baked goodies if you can brave the staring "Feel free to purchase any of our products. They are all for sale" saleslady who also called me "young man." I tried to get Leo's attention for a large rude kiss, but he was distracted by coffee. Such is life.

*Also much of the "dirt" on my legs did not come off in the shower, and now the dark spots hurt to touch. Riding a stationary bike is even harder if you have wheels, lock them like a donkey's legs, and still scree down the gravel. This was before I caught onto running.

*Sometimes the seals win. Their bodies are slow, but their heads are fast as a fish: imagine a choice bite by a 600-pound dog.

Kahinahina

2011-04-17T05:00:00.003-04:00

Today's Enough Adventure for Today was a bike ride around Mauna Kea. I've already done that circuit once on a different road whose name is easy to remember (Mana) while this one is near impossible--Kahinahina. I think this is Hawaiian for silversword (a plant) so I'm going to refer to it as that.

Silversword Trail is also known as being a road. It starts from the visitor center on the Mauna Kea access road, at 9200 feet elevation, and loops around the mountain until rejoining the Saddle Road at 6500 feet. Mana Road (which really is a road and not just an ATV-mauled track) has a similar altitude change, which makes it a noticeable downhill even though it's longer. So this should be fun.

Fun, yes. Easy, no. Maybe a much stronger cyclist could have done it, or a much better mountain biker; but I talked to a guy on a dirt (motor) bike that turned back before the really bad stretch.

Images:

If you've ever been into Haleakala crater on Maui, this was like that but higher. (The Saddle Road is about level with the crater floor; I was several thousand feet above.) Same black and red cinders, same scrubby vegetation (lots of bright pink berries on Christmassy trees) same eery silent moonscape. And silverswords!
The silversword is a plant that is found only at high elevation in Hawaii. Most people associate it only with Maui, but it grows here too. Looks like a frosted pineapple top, clustering like snowballs around the feet of cinder cones. The usual island tragedy: they reproduce and grow at a rate just above replacement. I think this population was planted, rather than surviving as Maui's did: easier to stretch a goatproof fence across the Kaupo Gap into Haleakala, than to ring the whole mountain of Mauna Kea.
Almost no trash: trash follows cars. Only the occasional shard of headlight glass or mirror.
Air is matter and thus it has volume. My tube of sunblock went SPLORT when I opened it,saving me the trouble of spreading it around. And the waterbottle I emptied during the ride, loudly crumpled as we drove back to sea level.
Long slog. Not much fun,especially after the cinder yields to scrub and fog. Plus it was getting later and later and it became clear that the guy at the visitor center had had no idea what he was talking about when he described the road. I was averaging three miles an hour. That's not even a bike ride, it's a hike where you push, rather than carrying, your bag.
It was impossible to ride down some of the hills; quicker to run alongside the bike. This was fun: my own personal handrail!
The dirt biker told me that after 4 miles of bad road, it would be downhill all the way. After about six bad miles, the road turned down and descended for two ear-pops, and then turned up again.
My map showed a cutoff to the right, and sure enough there it was. Silversword Trail is named R-1; this was R-9. Yep: the map shows that I can follow this down the hill to Mana Road, which is an easy downhill to the highway. I took it.
This same map shows roads whose bridges are decades gone. Does this guy do his research in bars? Apparently.
R-9 went through a locked gate, festooned with scary no-trespassing Parker Ranch signs. (Later I talked to some truck-bound hunters, who said that R-9 doesn't go anywhere, so obviously he doesn't do research in bars.) Nice to have a vehicle you can lift. I scrambled after it and went on.
The road only drops about 200 meters between the visitor center and mile-marker 22. Actually it drops about 2 miles: and then climbs all but the last 200 meters.
So I had two vertical kilometers to lose. It was fun.
And the sun was setting, so the bright green of pasture was doubly so. I saw no animals or people till rejoining Mana Road at the end: all the houses I saw were, upon closer inspection, rain catchments. The road was a doubletrack of jeep-trampled grass, slightly muddy but lovely soft on my jackhammered hands. (Braking down hills so steep I occasionally lept out of the way of an exuberant two-wheeled somersault.) At every intersection I arbitrarily took the bigger road...
which dead-ended at a fence.
Whose sign said "Puu Pueo 1." That must be the name of a pasture. Pannier comes off, bike goes over the gate, I crawl under it, reassemble, ride through the pasture to the sign I saw from Mana Road.
Which was an easy, if judderingly washboarded, ride to the main road. I just made it under the sundeadline: the moon was brighter than the streetlights. Wasn't for that trespass, I'd have needed that moon.
Tonight in the grocery store, one guy asked if I'd gotten in a fight and another one correctly guessed I'd been hiking.
My hair didn't need washing, but the cuts on my hands did, so now my hair is all fluffy.

Glass in the Fernforest

2011-04-11T04:22:00.001-04:00

We're in a bit of a holding pattern here in Hilo at the moment, since both Leo and I are awaiting various life-changing phone calls. (Actually, hopefully mine is and his is not. Figure it out.) So we've been filling our time with:

political/sociological/scientific arguments
absurd amounts of time on Wikipedia, related to above
lunatic-watching, fruitful in a place where it's always warm out and rent is cheap

and of course

me taking long bike rides while Leo does the above, and possibly also does other guy stuff I don't want to know about. Today's ride was up to the glassblowing studio in Volcano.

Volcano is a town, not only a geological attraction. It has a lot of artists, due to some combination of:

Boston-horrible weather, though more rain and less cold (warm enough to be icy raw, see a few posts ago)
natural beauty, related to above
cheap rent, related to above
proximity to other artists, also related to above
proximity to tourists, who unlike your artist friends will spend $4000 on a table that you can't get wet

Sounds like the Vineyard. Another place I like. But anyway, today's weather in Volcano was shall we say suitable for watching glassblowers at work. I found the studio by its hot-glass smell (can't describe it, unless you have a kiln: go heat up some glass and take a sniff) and settled in to watch.

Minerals in Hawaii are weird. The Na Pali Coast of Kauai consists of the most waveringly delicate petals of rock that would, if smaller, get licked to shreds by passersby. Lava rock is sharded and foamy: some of it floats, some is spun into natural fiberglass, and some sharp cindry Grapenuts sneak into your shoes. Lava tubes snake under and through the landscape, and just offshore the limestone is alive. And to top it all off, in the studio the most fragile and brittle of manmade materials (so much so it would probably never be approved for building, if it came to market today) makes malleable goop that sags and sets up like the buttercrunch I use on gingerbread houses. Hard to believe it's so hot: it looks so harmless and putty, until you see the pastry-style wooden paddle start to smoke where it touches the glass.

What makes things even stranger is that the color of the glass depends entirely on its temperature. A glob of clear glass that glows like limoncello, turns dull orange when it's rolled back and forth on a metal table. Dip it in a bowl of bright-orange shards, which stick like nuts to a sundae: they keep their color only until the heat soaks into them, and almost vanish after a trip into the furnace. Run water over the long metal blowpipe, and darkness spreads through the center of the glass blob on the pipe's far end; stick it back in the furnace and it brightens again. That vase, once it cools, is clear with swirls of orange and black and red; but I never saw it as anything other than a living infrared-camera photo. Very cool.

People Are Nice, Bus Drivers Suck

2011-04-01T01:08:00.004-04:00

Today I biked most of the way from Waimea ("Kamuela", Hawaiian for Samuel, to distinguish from Oahu's Waimea) to Hilo. 'Most of the way' although it's not far, for two reasons:

1) Headwind

2) Sidetracks

And since I did this whole ride and more last trip in a day, I should add

3) Morning unavoidable delay

stemming from not being alone. Those of you who either are male, or date males, understand.

Anyway. The major time-munching sidetrack was a result of noticing that the heavily travelled highway is paralleled, at least on my map, by a minor road that should (right?) be much less traffic and much more cool random roadside stuff. Having travelled the main highway, I can state that it is fairly limited in cool stuff, consisting mostly of Donna's Cookies and Tex Drive In. So I thought the coastal road might be fun.

It sure started out fun, what with the 340-meter descent (I love my altimeter watch) down to a typical barking-dogs-and-mangoes small town. Random passerby gave me directions to the coastal road, which I set out along. Yeah, I had to throw the bike over a gate to start; but I've done that before hiking from Kihei to Ulupalakua on Maui. The trip where I got badly scared by barking deer.

Except Ulupalakua had only two locked gates. I have no idea how many this has, because I gave up and turned around after throwing the bike over three in less than a mile. And climbed all the way back to the main highway. Dammit.

Items:

I asked Donna's Cookies for a dollar's worth, figuring mathematically that 6 cookies for $5.95=$1.00 each, maybe they feel sorry for me and give me two. Instead they gave me a big Skippy jar of broken cookies-and really good cookies too, even if weird mixed flavors. Make a note for other penniless passersthrough. I considered dropping them off at the hostel labeled 'free', but might draw back a bleeding stump from starving hostellers.

Got tired, picked a spot to pull over and wait for the bus, it actually swerved into the oncoming lane to avoid me as I flagged it. [Bad word] you, state employees who get off on Prince Kuhio's Birthday. Must have been in a hurry to make up the half-hour it was late.

Pedaled on, saw a truck pulled over, stopped to ask a ride, got one. (For some reason it seems safer to ask a lift from someone I can see before they stop. Maybe just because most bad people aren't alone.) Strapped the bike between the cab and the fuel tank on the back, using my dead-inner-tube bungee cords. The cab was probably ten feet above the roadbed, almost like swoop-flying along the narrow road. Driver offered to teach me to drive truck if I ever want to learn, and I may take him up on it if he calls me back. My cell phone's dead; all the moves may have cost us a charger. Of course I have no intention of staying here long enough to actually work for him. Enhh; good skill to have.

Oh, and Item: West Hawaii News just covered a story of a missing person who was last seen on the way to her boyfriend's house, and had no reason to run away. Since I don't date abusers, no longer attend a school where 'special ed' means 'too special for the rules,' and am now old enough for police to listen to me, I figure I'm pretty well protected from human harm. Hitchhiking is much safer than any of those.

Update: The woman has now been found dead, and her boyfriend admits an "altercation" the night she disappeared. Had she vanished while hitchhiking, this would be national news. Moms, teach your daughters to date safe. And don't bring your boyfriend home.

Kona to Volcano and Back

2011-03-30T22:34:00.003-04:00

I'm writing this from atop the Manago Hotel in the town of Captain Cook, just south of the tourist town of Kona. We've been here two nights, after a brief trip to the town of Volcano. From which I did not blog. Here are some accumulated notes:

· Day one: Kona to Volcano (almost) in one day. This took me around the south point of the island, which is relatively cheap and thus has a lot of unimaginative placenames such as South Point and Ocean View.

· Well-named: uninterrupted water views in spite of 600-meter elevation.

· Kona Garden Estates is not so well-named: individual houses in a sea of a'a, a kind of lava named for what you say when walking on it. Any "gardens" in Kona Garden Estates consist of "Here! Look! A plant!" lovingly tucked and tended into what's basically broken crockery. You'd have better luck gardening a junkyard.

· Dogs and all. The front page of the Kahuku Advertiser was devoted to their feral-dog problem; a young woman at the nearby farmers' market buttonholed me with a free puppy. I think I found the problem.

· Na'alehu is capitalizing on being the Southernmost Town in the U.S: they have a Southernmost Post Office, Church Parish and Bakery. The bakery people are not very nice. And their doughnuts suck. Maybe I should have taken the puppy.

· Going north again I found some roadside macadamias. They are small and spherical and are not harmed by being run over. A piece of asphalt works, but hit the nut off-center and I bet you could break a car window.

· Big Island coffee is world famous: artisanal small-batch made-in-USA know your farmer trendy, thick and dark as used motor oil. Used to be known as 'Kona' coffee until the Ka'u district got in on it; now all the local gas stations serve Ka'u only. More local than thou! Farms give out free samples—in styrofoam cups with powdered nondairy creamer. Like slurping Chateau Latour from the bottle.

· Chewing a mac nut while sipping the coffee gives a tolerable creaminess.

· Getting towards Volcano, it gets damp and mizzly just as the lava flows get younger, so the jungle actually thins even as the visibility stays the same. It looks more like a desert as you go into the rain.

· I wound up hitching the last 10 miles because it was getting dark. A nice cabbie named Joe, on his way home from a call, was happy to tell me his life story in exchange for a lift right up to the hostel door, by which point it was raining. It nearly always rains in Volcano, even if it's dry half a kilometer below.

· Day Two: Volcano National Park. Rain continued, and at that altitude it gets cold. In Newfoundland a snowflake scratched my cornea. It was a dry sandy irritant but not wet enough to be cold. Snow at that temperature bounces off bare skin. Volcano is warm enough to be cold when it rains, which is usually. Hence the beautiful Japanese landscape of cypress and azalea, the delicious scent of wood smoke everywhere, the ferny lushness that's more like New Zealand or Hobbiton.

· This hostel is the only one in Hawaii I know of that has a daytime lockout. Perhaps that's deliberate, to make you go explore the park. Leo and I regretfully got out of our (warm, warm) bed and out, walked down to the coffee place, then split up for the day. I took the bike around Crater Rim Drive and down Hilina Pali Road a bit, then back.

· The volcano is more active than it was last time, even though the lava flow is now underground. The air is eggy and delicious, and with no cars on Crater Rim Drive there are lots of ohelo berries to pick. They're not very good, in spite of looking like blueberries.

While I was off doing that, Leo walked the Sulfur Banks trail which winds among (surprise!) banks of sulfur. Steam rises from the ground, adding to the Mordor ambience, but he says it's nice and warm. Sometimes you can't even see the warm spot until you're on top of it, but it's downright pleasant in the cold rain.

· Hilina Pali Road is noteworthy mainly because it took me down and out of the rain, then back into it as I went up. Access it from Chain of Craters Road, which is lavishly festooned with black- and raspberries. I also took a self-timer picture which will drive my mom crazy trying to fix, since it is clearly crooked but has no straight trees or horizon.

· Offered to take a picture for a Chinese tourist couple who were gleefully photographing each other in front of some fog; the guy said "Sure!" and snapped a picture of me.

· What do people do with all those pictures? "Here's Ching Chong, standing in front of the bus! Here he is again! Here's a passerby on a bicycle! Here she is again! Here's the bus again!" At least with film there was some limit.

· Try cooking bacon in the microwave sometime: it's so easy! But probably you should use paper towels, rather than coffee filters, which were all we had. You would not believe how much fat bleeds out of bacon. Yes, we had bacon and eggs for dinner. It was cold out.

· Day 3 back almost to Kona, namely the town of Captain Cook. The ride is a lot easier downwind. The trade winds hit Hilo or slightly north, drop their rain, and then stream around and over the island until Kona is in dry still air. Last trip I was all the way to Kona by 4 PM; this trip I was in Captain Cook by three. (And then the hotel wouldn't let me in until Leo showed up with the credit card, so I camped out in the common room with some old friends I found in the used-book store.)

· I never noticed how purple wood smoke is! I spotted a jacaranda tree in full bloom and mistook it for a smoke cloud.

· Mango trees are nominally not fruiting now, but there are a few confused strays along the route. One tree, in Ka'u just this side of the Surlymost Bakery, was also going off in November. So are the roseapples, which taste like roses smell (though the fruits themselves have no smell) and remind me of Pitcairn, which was the last time I had some.

Hey Look! Another Normal Blog Post!

2011-03-25T00:37:00.002-04:00

I say normal not in the sense of normal per se, but only that the normal topic of a blog is food. And indeed, one of my most perennially popular posts does consist of a recipe. So consider this a pander.

Scene: biking along the highway from Waimea towards Kona, where we now are. On the highway was an object: neither a plastic trash bag nor a heap of brush. And too big to be a pheasant. I got closer and spotted a fine specimen of wild turkey.

Wild turkey without the capital letters: you can find food, but you can never find liquor. A capital bird nonetheless, sprawled across the centerline and fluttering prettily in the draft of passing cars. In the next five seconds the following thoughts chased through my head:

Oh how cool, a turkey! I didn't even know they had them out here. And just yesterday Leo was saying how much he likes turkey. I'll stop and get it.
Dammit, I don't carry a knife on this bike!
Oh wait, yes I do.

Slamming to a halt and bouncing the bike off the road, I had time to mentally thank the bike shop for being so pathetic. Any decent shop would have had portable tools for sale, like a folding multiwrench and screwdriver, that I could carry. They'd had an underseat pouch, but nothing to put in it, so I'd had to scrounge around. Luckily one of my birthday presents last year was a folding multitool --with a knife blade.

The turkey was too big to lift all the way off the ground, so it flopped like a collapsed tent as I lift-dragged it off the road and up onto the lava-rock embankment. I bet its wingspan was greater than mine. Jessica, my jeweler friend, buys rooster hides from farms and now I know why. The turkey's feathers were sticky-soft below and shiny at the surface, iridescing even where they were brown: each wing was the size of a large pizza and had primary feathers over a foot long. Totally unsalvageable of course, so I'll just have to remember.

Plucking is hard work even if it's a pre-scalded domestic bird at the right point in the molt cycle. Miss any one of those three and it's hopeless. Skinning is easier: shove the blade through a pinch of skin and yank up. The muscle beneath was soft, no hint of rigor mortis, and blood still oozed a bit from where it had puddled. Connective tissue was blistered with air--from a ruptured lung, it must have been. I worked around the death wound on the bird's back and peeled off its feathery vest enough to cut out the breast muscles. Carving a turkey is much easier if it's cooked.

For curiosity's sake I cut out one drumstick too—both thighs and the other drumstick had been ruined by the car. Wings would have been comic relief only, slightly smaller than an umbrella but still too long to fit on the plate. Less meat and more work than a lobster body. They'd have made epic curry if whacked into shreds with a machete, Fiji style. Not my machete: the bones were translucent and hard enough to splinter lethally if eaten, even cooked first.* Regular confinement chicken bones don't. Proof that exercise prevents osteoporosis.

I might have been more careful with my knife had I realized that hostel kitchens never have good ones, and they usually don't have sharpening stones either. Luckily Leo had been more careful and he let me borrow his. (Fool.) So here comes the normal part of this cooking-blog post.

I'd kept the meat chilled en route with a sack of frozen peas, bought at the first convenience store I came to. It went into the fridge until we were done shopping. The primary issue with any wild meat is that it tends to be tough—even more so since this bird wasn't hung. Hanging a carcass keeps the muscles stretched all the way out while rigor sets in, so they don't contract and toughen. On the Vineyard we'd just hang them until they set up, an hour or two; some people like to hang game birds up to six months. These people do not live in the tropics.

The ultimate meat tenderizer is papaya: it contains an enzyme that digests protein. Unfortunately it tends to make meat mushy on the outside, and it doesn't penetrate beyond the outside. We learned that in Savusavu. With an acid marinade, you don't get that risk. So we've got half of the meat (sliced thin across the grain, except the drumstick which is whole) in buttermilk and the other half in Annie's Lite Gingerly salad dressing, which was free in the hostel fridge. There wasn't enough salad dressing so we stretched it with an acidy, unripe farmers-market mango. Cut the mango cheeks away from the pit and scratch the flesh into goop with a fork: do this to an avocado, add some salsa, and you get instant guacamole with no bowl to wash. Magic.

Tonight's gonna be Turkey In Buttermilk Curry Sauce Night, with ex-frozen peas and thickened with free flour. My past experience with curries is mostly along the lines of a) liking them and b) adding curry powder to omelets, so Leo's gonna be the saucemeister. Onion and garlic and curry powder will be involved, possibly with some free hostel oil. I'll keep you posted.

*Really. I've done the experiment on many dogs, both intentionally and by watching them get into the trash, and can state conclusively that chicken bones don't hurt them at all. Unfortunately. Also, rice doesn't hurt birds: ask any rice farmer.

OK, it's Not Just Hilo

2011-03-23T03:20:00.001-04:00

The Big Island just lives on Stoner Time.* I was thinking this in the town of Kalapana yesterday, waiting a half hour for soup from a restaurant before I gave up and got a hot dog.** Sign does say 'We serve good food,not fast food' but I thought at least the soup would be premade. I'd worked up an appetite biking from Kiloli, along a rough red road reminiscent of Mauna Loa's Summit road but with more guavas.

The road ends in the town of Kalapana, where the island is youngest. Last time I was here, the locals were bitching about how the lava flow was isolating, covering or incinerating their homes. A noni farm actually burned during my trip, though not while I was in town. Life's tough if you have to live here: tourists think it's all quaint and majestic, but really it's no joke. Well, they got their wish. Now there's no flow at all, and the bitching has turned to whining because the region's entire economy revolves around showing off the lava to tourists. Life's tough.

Not that the tourists stopped coming, of course. Most bus tourists aren't in good enough shape to actually go ogle Earth in person rather than by computer. Bad knees, bad hips, fat guts, bad balance keep them from walking to the flow; too seasick for boat tours and too cheap for helichoppers. I wonder if the bus operators even tell them the lava's not flowing. Why even tell the Alzheimer's patient that his wife died? Unlike children, oldies have no need for education.

But back to Stoner Time. I went to the bike shop today to:

Get some valve caps, since I'd noticed neither tire had one
Get skinnier, road-worthier tires put on
Buy a pump in case I get a flat tire
(When they had no pump they were willing to sell) Get some see-oh-two cartridges and adapter to fill the tire with compressed gas
(When they had cartridges but no adapter) Make pneumatic noises
Buy a lock, which Leo figured out how to mount to the frame while the employee dithered between a) brute force savagery and b) surrender-flag-style handwaving.

But I got two valve caps absolutely free, and probably the tires too except they didn't have any. Also lots and lots of helpful advice from the geezer who is employed, full-time, keeping his chair from flying into the stratosphere. Like a compass that always points south, he is incredibly valuable and persuasive.

*Distinguished from Fiji Time by the long spaces that fill the time where nothing happens: Fijians prefer to stuff it with verbal packing popcorn.
**Except I added onions and kraut.

I Love Waikiki

2011-03-21T00:21:00.003-04:00

Add that to the list of things you thought I'd never say. But it's true.Leo and I had a 12-hour layover in Honolulu between our flights FROM Nadi and TO Hilo, and we spent it walking(him) and stumbling (me) around the glitzy, glammering, blammering downtown. Thanks largely to his phlegmatic indestructibility, we managed to:

rent a hostel bunk ($25) so they'd let us leave our bags in their storage room (free) because "we can't let just anyone leave their stuff here."
mail out some souvenirs
not miss our flight to Hilo

and most of all

celebrate our departure from ChristianLand by buying me a pair of shorts that look like I got distracted and wandered out of the house in my underwear.

So it was not a total waste of time. (Nothing is, unless you repeat it.) What's more, ever since we got to Hilo I have been profoundly grateful for the existence of Waikiki. I wouldn't want to live there (or next door to a paper factory, or upstairs of a foundry, or within two blocks of a baby) but I wouldn't want them banned. Waikiki serves to sop up all the people who like the idea of being in Hawaii but don't want to deal with pidgin or saimin or loco mocos or vertiginous splendor. They go to Waikiki, take some pictures of each other, cautiously toe the sand, buy some Chinese souvenirs, and hightail it to notch the next bedpost. Thus the rest of Hawaii is spared their scourge.

Because Hilo is splendid. In spite of (or because of) its near-constant rain, it can afford to have the kind of businesses and people that make a place worth living in. Used-book stores, tiny coffee shops that grow and bake their own, sushi places, a "tavern" that also serves sushi, a bike shop taking up one corner of a cavernous basement (do your test-rides indoors, pursued by a hysterically yapping yarn ball) and two hostels. The one we're staying in is a little more shiny and professional than the one I got last trip, which is more of an echoey old building with resident parrots and an eccentric staff; however, this one has the benefit of not having to hump my bike up a flight of stairs. So you really can't lose.

Leo noticed this first,but he's right: At least half of Hilo's population is either on drugs or should be. Service is glacial, in the sense of unpredictable surges punctuated with stasis. Weird questions are par for the course, and you may see people with the trademark stoner,"Wait a minute, what was I doing?" face. Like a barista who boggles at the milk steamer as though it had sprouted a squid. There actually was a squadron of disabled people working at the Salvation Army (supervised by a drill sergeant) but I think it's mostly situational. Plus, with the Irish weather, intoxicants are inevitable.

Bird Island

2011-03-16T19:00:00.006-04:00

Proof that the Fiji grapevine does work: our boatman on Caqalai mentioned that the island of Nananu-i-Ra, where we planned to go (and halfway around the Fiji archipelago) had a bird rookery on it. Didn't know where on Nananu, but I figured it's a small island and we could find it. When we got to MacDonalds Beach Resort I asked around and nobody knew anything. Wasn't too much of a surprise; I figured the boatman did the typical Fiji thing of lying to make us short-term happy, knowing we'd be someone else's problem by the time we found out. And it's a fairly harmless lie as they go: didn't trick us into going out into a storm or trusting a space case or waiting for a nonexistent bus. So oh well.

Turns out he actually wasn't lying. Papoo, patriarch of Papoo Divers, confirmed that the rookery does exist. Not on the main island of Nananu, but on a little islet far offshore. Of course I wanted to go there. By description it sounded a lot like Uea, an island off Rotuma, which I spent weeks trying to visit with no success. So we booked to go the next day in the dive boat.

Papoo showed up the next day with the dive boat, equipped for a day's expedition in true Tuvalu style: food in the form of sprouted coconuts, fish in the form of spearguns, and GPS/sonar in the form of sons. We roared off.

There was a slight pit stop as we had to cross the narrow sandbar between Dolphin Island and Nananu-i-Cake.* The boys jumped out and walked, pulling the boat;we tourists scrambled to the bow. I tried to get out and walk with them, but couldn't walk through the water fast enough. Now I see why the rugby-ball thighs. The kids were barefoot on coral too.

Junior, the smaller son, sat in the bow to aim us as we threaded through the outer reef towards Bird Island. The island was still below the horizon, but he seemed to know where it was. I ask if an American eight-year-old is that good at any useful thing.

Much later we arrived at the island's outer reef. We couldn't get across it** just yet, so Son #2 was dispatched to jump over the side and swim down to tie an anchoring line to the reef. We all jumped in to snorkel.

Words always fail me in the attempt to describe a healthy coral reef, simply because it is like nothing on land. Far from the polluting shore and the sometimes-destructive fishermen, the coral and fish are weirder than anything that any science-fiction writer ever came up with. The coral colors are mostly pale, occasionally pastel but more often tipped with luminous pinks and blues that look like someone either spilled something toxic or played with Photoshop. Meanwhile the fish are all the colors of fall in New England: saturated blues in all shades, the yellow-orange-red gradient in endless variations, and hardly any green or pale. Only the sharks are drably gray. And there were lots of them too: I saw one white-tip actually burrowing into a hole in the reef, thrashing his tail to traction against the water as he harried a hiding fish. A little remora clung to his cheek. I only saw the one shark, but Leo saw many, and many fishes that he's never seen before. (With me this is no accomplishment.) The reef drops off to probably forty or fifty feet on the sea side, with several swim-throughs that I found. The underside of a reef is creepy: only those mini-branching purple coral fingers, and soft waving sea fans. Everything else needs sun.

Eventually I got tired, went back to the boat, which immediately picked up the other snorkelers and took us across to the island.

If you know Little Beach on Maui, Bird Island looks a little like that: a soft crescent of fine golden sand, bookended with big rocks. Imagine two beaches like that, back to back. You can see sky across the island's waist, which means it should have typical atoll soil of crushed coral and not much else. Except I forgot to mention the birds.

Even from outside the reef you can see that the sky above the island is gnattily clouded with circling birds. Get closer and you can see they're mostly black with white skullcaps--noddies I think--with some frigatebirds and boobies, some blue-billed with red feet and some brown. I see where boobies get their name: they look so dorky in the air. With no forehead between a tiny head and huge bill, and a smooth-pointed tail, they look like symmetrical spindles with wings. The frigatebirds are beautiful in a battish way, with long raggedy forked tails and highly agile, flexible wings that extend straight out and then yank back like a wire M.

The island itself is covered with noddy nests. Every tree elbow or leaf clump holds a listless-looking collection of sea-wrack, festooned with shitsicles and holding one egg or one chick. I saw no twins. The fledglings and babies are cute in the goofy way of all baby birds: tottering upright and balancing with vestigial wings. Some were on the ground: Papoo says the parents still find and feed them there. I hear robins do the same if the baby isn't killed by a cat or dog or lawnmower.

Papoo says the island stinks. To me it doesn't; but it sure does smell. There's no undergrowth under the trees--soil's too rich, I bet--and guano spatters everywhere. Even rocks below the high-tide mark often have three splats in a single square foot. I was glad for my hat. Eventually I figured out that it smells--and I mean no disrespect--exactly like Larsen's Fish Market! Not like rotting fish--that's the Menemsha Fish Market. Fresh fish has an iodine, ocean smell to it; and what is guano but slightly processed fish? Maybe the trees take up the ammonia that birdshit is supposed to smell of.

Leo and I climbed to the top of the island so we could look down on the forest. From there you can see the bigger birds nesting in the treetops, which I guess they have the authority to take away from the terns. The sun up top was viciously hot, so dead overhead that any shade was right in some nest's firing zone. We climbed down and went for lunch.

The Rotumans used to make fun of me for (among many, many other things) eating like a Tuvaluan. Papoo actually is one, one generation removed,and he laid out a magnificent Tuvaluan spread that puts a Rotuman to shame. A gutted mackerel from the reef, cut lengthwise and crosswise into bite-size hunks we chewed off one at a time; the sweet mild meat of the sprouted nuts we'd brought; and three red snappers baked right in the coals. I don't like mackerel, but this wasn't mackerel it was fresh fish. And I love fresh fish. And I got to squat and yank and slurp like a savage, attracting no attention because that's how you're supposed to eat in Tuvalu. No forks of course.

We grownups (I feel so old) took a rest in the shade while the kids went back for more snorkeling. It had only gotten hotter and we were glad for the shade. One of the boys had brought over a baby booby, which I of course had to pick up and play with. Its feathers were as soft and fluffy and sticky as cotton candy or kitten fur: several shed onto my fingers. Each feather is a mini duster, with no central shaft; the wings were beginning to get real feathers and thus looked skinny and almost comically practical against the angelic little bird. He snapped his black bill at us, startling and hurting a bit but not harming. I couldn't believe the size of his craw! He could eat a whole small squid in one bite. And I bear no ill will for being pooped on.

Papoo says that a mother booby can pick out her young by its call, among thousands of others, and there aren't thousands of boobies on the island. (Yet.) So we put it up in a tree, glad the island has no predators to hurt it. This is why I used a pseudonym for the island: the fewer Google-equipped tourists know about it the better.

Sitting with Papoo under the tree, we got to talking. He talks of life on the island as being simple and tranquil, with your needs being immediate and easily fulfilled. "I would like to retire somewhere like this," he says. Same things kai valangis say about Fiji.

*Where cake grows on every tree...No, it's Cake as in Thonkee.

**”...But why could you get across Dolphin Island's reef, after an hour and a half of rising tide?” I don't know. Remember what I said about Fijians lying. They do what they want to do and tell you whatever they think will spare them having to deal with an angry person. Maybe Papoo wanted to fish.

Nananu-i-Ra

2011-03-16T18:58:00.004-04:00

Okay. Now I have had some rest and tea and it's time to tell you all about Nananu-i-Ra.

N-i-R is an island off the north of Viti Levu. It's about halfway between Suva and Nadi along the King's Road, which by the way would have been totally bikeable except we believed the dire predictions of some people in Suva who obviously had never been there. Anyway. Four hours of splendid mountain scenery that actually fit pretty well with To Kill a Mockingbird, which I was reading, except for some of the more tropical foliage. Homemade houses, rickety roadside stands selling garden produce, vendors walking up to us at the stops trying to sell Polynesian chestnut and bananas, giant blocky school buildings whose slogans were earnest if somewhat quaintly phrased. Just after the highway rejoins the coast, we got off the bus and took a cab to the wharf, where a boat picked us up for the resort.

MacDonalds Beach Resort is on the narrow waist of Nananu-i-Ra Island, which is shaped like a fist-squeezed piece of clay. Most of the resorts (a relative term—think cold-water showers and no power at night unless the staff is watching videos) cluster on that same isthmus. The island has no villages, just a small settlement of mostly wealthy locals who have made it. This may explain the service, which was for Fiji excellent: usually Fijian locals have one way of doing things and will not stray from it. Floors must be swept, visitors interviewed, food overcooked and greasy-starchy, all purchases swathed in at least one plastic sack, while maintaining a cheerful patter of obvious statements and delighted, not-necessarily-humor-just happy laughter. The woman running MacDonalds either had been very well trained or knew how to adapt to situations at hand, because she anticipated our wishes in a way you hardly ever get in Fiji. She also makes, from scratch, some of the most delicious pizza I've ever had.

Lonely Planet says it takes four or five hours to walk around the island, but really it's much more. The landward shore of the roughly triangular island is almost all mangrove, which is impenetrable; you have the choice of wading (knee-deep at low tide) or going between the land side of the mangrove forest and the sea side of the real forest. I elected to do the latter, which is easier but claustrophobic. I repeat what I said earlier about mangroves: I know they're a necessary ecosystem, but man they are creepy. Spiderwebs, slimy silt, can't see the horizon, can't see hardly anything except the tunnelpath studded here and there with churned-up dirt where mangrove sprouts are breaking towards the surface.

Each peninsula of Nananu is bare rock, washed clean by wind and tide. So those were nice places to stop and breathe.

Around the island's north shore the protected coves are filled with sand, making wide soft beaches of coarse golden grit. Here the going is much easier. Streams come down from the mountains, running out onto the beach and soaking in; they complete the trip to the sea underground. Some of the river mouths are actually quicksand: all of them you can feel the colder water. At high tide the sea actually breaks through the sand dam, carrying blood-mud goop into the sea; and even on the more exposed side of the island, mangroves grow up into the rivers.

On the north of the island is a holiday campsite that must star in dozens of childhood idylls. A big clearing opens right onto the beach. Obviously it's well-used but scrupulously loved: the only trash was a bottle lid. And a heap of coconut husks, if that counts: to me that's tinder for cooking fires. No fire scars; they must cook below the tideline. There's a rope swing, some oobleck-looking strangler figs climbing luckless kamani trees, a freshwater stream not far off, a reef offshore that has seen better days but still has plenty of fish.

You know, my parents used to pay money to send me to summer camp; we were forbidden knives and matches and I was the only participant who wanted to do anything besides makeup and magazines. Not that I'm jealous.

After five hours of walking, I was back to the isthmus but on the other side of it. Climbed up to the top to estimate distances, and mistook Dolphin Island for part of Nananu because the reef is continuous. So I came back down on our side and called it quits. Until the next day.

Next day I climbed back over to complete the loop. It was a hot noonish day and nobody in sight, so I hiked in my bra. My t-shirt, pulled corner to sleeve, just reached around my waist. Better not let anyone see me, you know those Fijians and their body-shame Christianity...

What I hadn't banked on was the village training to simply not notice things they'd have to be blind and deaf to not have seen. Someone sent over to our room to tell us something will not disturb us if they think we don't want to be disturbed: they simply wait patiently and listen, then when the coast is clear they knock. Very considerate.

In this case, I abruptly came around a corner into full view of two guys drinking kava on the porch. One looked up, met my eyes, said Bula as soon as I did; the other one called me up to sit for a bit so I did. One was Papoo, of Papoo Divers, who took us out the next day; the other was his friend. I honestly thought the friend looked familiar, but then it turned out both guys are Tuvaluan—western Polynesian, just like Rotumans, who he'd reminded me of. Somewhat of an involved story there, much of which we didn't get to hear until the next night when we all had dinner together. Both Papoo and the other guy (and most of his friends) are from the island of Kioa, which was settled by Tuvaluans after the Second World War. Now he runs a dive shop, which is an unusual one in several ways:

The dive shop is right in front of his house, which we got to see: big, glassy and totally modern and well-kept.
So is the dive shop: good equipment that works well, kept locked up against kids and neighbors unless it's actually in use. Service is competent and professional.
Papoo has apparently never left Fiji; somewhere he managed to pick up the skills to run a business.

I can't help but think there's something else going on. But what? Even if he got a huge bank loan to build the place, he still has to keep it up. And he hasn't spent that much time overseas; still has a local's knowledge of the reefs and currents.

And for all the body prudishness of Polynesians, they're usually totally candid about matters of money and race: they see no reason to be ashamed of being ethnically mixed or living off overseas remittances. So I don't think there's any hidden funding source either.

Next day Papoo took us out dive/snorkeling on the island's outer reef. I'm dive certified, but usually can't justify the costs even to myself; and anyway the smell of wetsuit makes me pukey. The reefs around Nananu-i-Ra are mostly pretty degraded: they might be better on the exposed side, away from Viti Levu. But the outer reef is pristine, with coral heads and pinnacles and complex formations that rear from no-bottom blue to just below the surface. Currents scream past and around them, making for excellent drift snorkeling for the lazy. Only thing is, if you're trying to get the boatman's attention, there's no dead coral to stand on! Snake Island reef, off Caqalai, doesn't have this problem.

Leleuvia, Caqalai, Mangroves and Suva

2011-03-10T16:36:00.004-05:00

Now posting from Suva, having come by way of Caqalai yesterday. Normally I scorn daytrips to anywhere, if only because they tend to attract the kind of person who asks directions to the riff. Anything to escape the 4 AM wake-up for the Sea-Road! Plus there wasn't one that day.

The Caqalai boat picked us up at 9 in the morning, and we were on the island by ten. At the time the tide was still pretty high, so we missed out on the side-slewing reef slalom that sometimes is part of the package. Having gotten there I decided it might be fun to swim to Leleuvia Island. Currents between the two islands are strong enough that if you want to swim both ways you have to wait for the tide; our gap-toothed boatman agreed to fetch me from Leleuvia. Put on my goggles, mugged for a photo, and shoved off.

The swim was easy and fun; the galaxies of sea lice sparkled like mica and I barely minded their stings. I was fully dressed for protection from the sun, which also filtered the bugs; unfortunately so did my pitfuzz. Terns twanged overhead, searching and swooping for minnows. They throw their whole selves into fishing: the water actually closes over them, then they emerge flapping and draggled with a minnow. Like ospreys back home, except the fish is in their beaks rather than talons; plus their flight is so spastic I can't tell if they deliberately dog-shake dry the way ospreys do. I've always wanted to see the moment of capture from underwater, and never have. Yesterday was no exception.

This was the first time I've approached a reef dropoff from the sea side. Even if I hadn't seen the waves breaking and the blue of shallow water ahead, I still noticed the change in sea life. Leleuvia's ambassador was a green turtle, who I saw just before the island itself; looked away for a second and now there were two. I took a sharp left and let the current carry me along the wall.

Whoa. Who says the snorkeling in Leleuvia's no good? I only followed the wall for a few hundred feet, not wanting to get carried past the island; but in that time saw two or three good-sized turtles and a black-tipped reef shark, and a sofa-sized wrasse. The latter I wound up chasing almost the whole time I was on the reef, like a train chases a moose too dumb to get off the tracks. I thought he was a Napoleon wrasse at the time, but googling the images I'm not so sure. Doesn't matter: I think all those big wrasses are predators (like the shark) which means a healthy ecosystem. Wow, I thought; this is only a half-hour swim from Caqalai even without fins; should get Leo over here to have a look.

Until I got up over the reef shelf to aim for the island. The coral there is so sparse I can't explain all the fish: though it was mostly dead and silty the occasional coral shrub teemed with fish. Damselfish (chocolate-dip, convict, blue-green and yellowtail) whose color depends so strongly on lighting that they look more variable than they are. The same fish may be bright blue or lime green; a yellowtail may be spotted or not. A few parrotfish, anemonefish where there were any anemones, lots of cleaner wrasses. Most of these eat healthy coral, or other fish: again, signs of a healthy reef. Algae-eaters indicate a damaged one. This one sure looked damaged to me, as does Caqalai's; but there's enough live coral to re-seed the damaged parts, and enough fish to minister to the new growth.

For fear of stonefish (Mother Nature's land mine) I swam more than walked across the silty bottom to the sand of the island. My pits burned with every stroke and I resolved to shave; the hairs must have caught and held the sea lice.

Leleuvia looked inhabited but deserted. Clothes drying outside the huts, rake marks in the sand, but I saw and heard nobody. Walked along the path until I got to what looked like a classroom, with fish ID posters on the walls and a shelf of statistics books. (?) Still nobody; everyone was at the far end of the island, near a bar under a circus tent. I asked the bartender to call Caqalai for my pick-up: she, unique among Fijians, answered my question with a response rather than an interview. I sat for a bit in the sun, reading a beat-up David Sedaris book. I occasionally like sad-sack reading just to bask in not being one myself. I was conscious of being stared at, but then in Fiji you always are: they watched me read with the same avidity they'd watch commercials on TV if there was one.

Soon the same boatman arrived and immediately fell into conversation with the bartender. I could tell they were talking about me, but heard none of the catchwords that would enable me to follow the conversation. Eventually he translated: she'd had no idea who I was or where I'd come from or why I wanted to go to Caqalai. Fijians have encyclopedic social memories: they remember you, years later, on the basis of one meeting. So she must have known I didn't belong there. Maybe just figured "Whiteperson magic again! First they ask for more salad and less pasta; then they choose to be alone rather than intensively socialize with strangers; why not also appear from nowhere?" Activity for fun is alien to them, anyway: they're human beings, we're human doings.

Got back to Caqalai over a rapidly falling tide just in time for lunch. Mr. Bitchy the Swede was still there, but otherwise all new people including a much cooler Polish person this time, from Elblag. One of those milkmaid types, Coke-bottle shaped with a galaxy of new freckles: we'd seen her earlier playing volleyball with her Scottish boyfriend and a bunch of Fijians. Polynesian volleyball can be as stompface as their rugby, but this time it was plain that the goal was to play rather than win. The Fijian guys deliberately lobbed the ball to the much-less-able foreigners, trying to keep a volley going, secure in the knowledge that if they played for keeps there'd be nothing left but a pair of ground smears. I like that.

The crossing to Suva was somewhat sketchier than the trip from Levuka, because the tide was low. Our same boatman stood in the stern, the better to see the reefs; he drove with the competent aggressiveness of a longtime islander who knows every inch of road. The Polynesians must have known that the earth is round: living among islands you see it everywhere. More-distant Leleuvia lost its beach behind the earth; a mile later so did Caqalai. Ovalau was munched from the bottom up as Viti Levu's beaches appeared.

I say beaches, but not really. That stretch of Viti Levu is all mangroves and mud. I know mangroves are a Good Thing, because they protect beaches from storms and have their own unique ecosystems. But they're still spooky. I half-expected a dart to thud into our gunwale, or a pair of eyes to glint, a foot apart, from the shadows.

It would have been worth the whole trip just to see the river. I, once again, Had No Idea All This Was Back Here. The forest is a three-dimensional web: tree knees pop from the mud to gasp for air, then grow branches and new trunks that then spawn aerial roots of their own. Foot-long mangrove seeds float upright, with a bulbous bottom that roots wherever it touches down. The forest floor is carpeted with a green haze of new-growth leaves, with more clumps where the reef offshore is highest. Slipways occasionally leave the river, providing access to what must be muddy, buggy villages with no possibility of septic systems; stinkless methane blurks from the riverbed.

Lungs of the river, Mother Nature's seawall, breeding grounds for important wildlife, blah blah, I know, but even the locals don't like to live here. You can see their poverty: handmade wooden boats powered only by poles and triangular sails with collapsible masts for the forest. Even Kadavu, which has virtually no industry, has fiberglass outboards paid for by government or friends. These guys don't buy plastic trash, so they're not just wasting the money. Obviously they can't afford junk food: they're as strapping and healthy as Fijian villagers anywhere, without the dour of citydwellers. They'd hail the boatman, or he them; shouted pleasantries in Fijian, hiccups of delighted laughter all around, we'd all wave, we'd speed on. Happy people.

Waidalice Landing is just some concrete stairs reaching into the river. We handed up our few bags, shook the boatman's mitt-thick mechanic's hand, waved him off, walked the few steps to the road. Almost immediately a minibus picked us up for the trip into Suva.

We're staying at the Novotel, at which you may sneer, but consider that without air-con the closest together you can sleep is holding hands. I rest my case.

Above Ovalau

2011-03-08T23:55:00.004-05:00

I had no IDEA all this stuff was back here.

That's one of the phrases that I occasionally have to ration,* particularly after a trip into the interior of a Fijian island. I thought that the settlements of Ovalau were all coastal (except Lovoni village) and had road access. On Viti Levu, and doubtless other big islands, you can walk for days through villages and farms and not cross a road; but Ovalau's both too prosperous and small for that. Not.

The trail up Nadelaiovalau (a peak above Ovalau, imaginatively named 'Above Ovalau') runs through a village that is accessible only by staircase. The stairs begin just uphill of Levuka Homestay, which is not a homestay any more than the Royal Hotel is royal, and continue high up along the stream. Paved paths branch and stair off to make a good-sized village, which is inhabited mostly by workers from the PAFCO cannery. I didn't see a single house made from traditional (i.e. damp-preserving) materials, or without power lines: cement, tin, power poles, and every last tin of paint all came in on someone's back. Maybe that's why people with good jobs still elect to grow their own food; and incidentally they have no fatties.

Knox, our guide, directed us through the maze of narrow stairpaths that would be a rabbit warren if they had a roof, and off onto a trampled trail through the brush. Almost instantly we were being grabbed by vines and creepers (turnabout's fair play,) slithering over soapish mud, and generally far from the Beaten Path. Wild ginger crushed under our feet, scenting the air: I've shampooed with it in the past, but only in the bugless rain. Mango trees grow bigger the further up you go: this is not due to altitude, but they get huge and unproductive. None were yielding, which means neither snacks nor gnats. We stopped under one for a rest.

Carved into the elephant-foot bole was the word DRUGS, which I took for a heavy-handed public-service announcement and/or equally klutzy rebellion but turns out to be someone's nickname. Apparently nicknaming is common in Levuka: Knox's birth name is Noa. (He's Nox in the Lonely Planet, which is also the name of my parents' black cat.) Rested, we pushed on to the summit.

The summit is a rocky knob, jungly on one side with a sheer cliff overlooking the town. A low hip blocks your view into Lovoni village, but you can see most of the other Lomaiviti group of islands as well as Vanua Levu. Looking down on a reef reminds me of being in a plane, so seldom have I climbed high on reef-girt islands. Oddly enough the coral always looks brown from above, even though underwater it may be as brightly colored as a heap of plastic trash. Sandbanks are popsicle blue, deep water like new jeans. Nox knew the origins of all the boats we could see: that one's the Wakaya barge, that one's from Naigani, that one's from Moturiki. The first two are mostly tourist resorts, the last one has nine villages, few roads, and as far as I know no income aside from Caqalai. It wraps around the south shore of Ovalau like an epididymis, with neither mountains nor good beaches, and thus gets left mostly alone.

When we were done it was a short scramble down the mountain back to town. Rappel would be better, if we'd had ropes: butt-skiing was easier than walking, especially with all the trippy creepers. At one point I actually fell off the trail into a thicket of shampoo plants, only to find a well-established trail leading me back up to the main one. Obviously I'm not the first one to fall there. Luckily those plants crush underfoot like tulips.

So I'm writing this from the threadbare and deeply unroyal--but friendly and familiar--Royal Hotel as the last sunset pinks Levuka. Tomorrow there's no Patterson Brothers ferry, so we're taking a daytrip to Caqalai and having them let us off where we can catch a bus to Suva. Probably.

*Also, after snorkeling, "That's the [bad word] weirdest thing I've ever seen."

Levuka Gossip Update

2011-03-08T17:24:00.005-05:00

Pending Fiji time*, this will be our last day in Levuka. It's starting to seem like we know everybody, a significant number of them from my last trip. Including one little girl** whose English is limited to shouting, "MAIA!!" and sprinting, giggling, in random directions when I walk past her and her friends. I did my usual small-child-greeting ritual of grabbing her under the arms, going Wheeeee and swinging her high into zero-gravity, causing wild squirts of giggles and echoes of Wheeee from her and the audience even as Leo and I walked away. We may have created a meme. I still have no idea where I originally met her, or even if I did at all.

Met up briefly with Emosi a couple of days ago: he's mentioned in earlier (as in, 2007) blogs as "Mossy." It's long been an idle amusement of mine to ask a randomly selected Fijian if they know Emosi or his wife Suzy; everyone does, and it seems like about half of them are related. I've always thought of him as being from Suva because that's where I first met him, but he's really from Levuka. This is where he met Petero Raumana, the Rotuman who I stayed with on my trips to the island; Petero is also well-known among the music community of Levuka, though he's now retired to Rotuma; something bad happened to one of his legs recently, but gossip has muddied whether he fell off a roof, lost a toe to diabetes, or both. (Roof-climbing and diabetes should protect against each other: ever try to climb a ladder without your toes?)

And a sad pointless story of Ovalau Holiday Resort. Craig and I stayed there briefly last year, where we noted several things:

Really good curries
Oh come on, why did you leave the lobster's shell on when you macheted it for curry? WAFM. ("What A Mess.") Everyone in Fiji does this, and with chicken and fish too. Why why why? Does it just look like more? Chicken treated that way, does taste better...
A big square patch on one of the roofs, which we guessed was due to coconut impact. That motivated a lot of nervous scuttling, especially when the wind blew.
The owner's young son driving a tricked-out pimpmobile with after-market flashing lights on the roof and sides, black foamy amateur window film, and one of those transparent windshield decals applied to the inside so, to a passerby, it was backwards. Ronno, his name, was a rather unworldly but beautiful young man who wanted to become a professional car detailer, in spite of the fact that virtually all Ovalau's vehicles are either cabs or passenger trucks.
The owner's wife was named Lolita and looked it. Okay, it was LAlita.

So it was a rather interesting family scene--dysfunctional enough to be happy, wealthy enough to spawn a trustafarian, worldly enough that the four-year-old girl spoke English, Hindi, Fijian and German.

Then Ronno got married. Part of her dowry was some land on Viti Levu. So she came and lived on Ovalau with her new husband; they built a house and lived happily together and soon got pregnant. Then the land deed fell through.

Days later the dad had a massive heart attack and died.

Then the wife, four months pregnant, hung herself.

I have no idea why. But that sure explains why the Resort is now run by someone else. I can't imagine Ronno running anything more complicated than a weed whacker, beautiful though he is.

And one more loose end to tie up: Ovalau Watersports is no more. They're still there selling postcards and doing bookings, but no longer do any water sports. Nobi and Andrea, the German couple that used to run it (and taught German to Ronno's baby sister) have gone back to Germany to make some money. Even last trip they had pretty well alienated the local Fijians by refusing to give any more air fills to people without dive certifications. This of course pissed off the locals, who dive for sea cucumbers to supplement their income and don't worry about the bends.*** Nobi and Andrea offered them free dive courses, but who wants to waste time doing that when you could be out diving?

We recently spent a couple of days at Bobo's Farm in Rukuruku, not far from where Rachel lives with her grandmother. It's as far from anywhere as you can get on Ovalau, surrounded by acres and acres of scraggly jungle and jouncy road and near-vertical taro fields. Many of the Rukuruku villagers speak little or no English, and only three trucks a week service the town. Yet the house itself is an oasis of modernity, with local hardwoods and glossy appliances and imported dogs carefully trained to be purely decorative, and a drool-worthy bookshelf even before you see the titles. Bobo's wife Karin cooks some of the best food we've had in Fiji, and Bobo speaks four languages even if Fijian only counts as one. Both have lived overseas, traveled more than me probably, run businesses and managed people and chosen to live on Bobo's land at the edge of beyond. Oasis is right; or maybe I should say island. An island like Pitcairn, with no airport or harbor but with faster internet than I had at home.

To complete the weird: Bobo remembered me. I always try to make it to locals night at the Ovalau Club, and once, years ago, he made it too. We talked for hours, I gave him my card, and we never saw each other for four years. And he recognized me right away.

So I won't say I know everyone in Levuka, but I will say most of them know me. Time to go, on to newer and greener pastures. Metaphorically. Suva's not that green, except the gutters.

*Right now means later, a few minutes means two days, later means probably never, no problem means impossible, that's difficult means I refuse. Capische?
**I think. I didn't check.
***Not that they don't get the bends. But they don't worry about it.

The People Show

2011-03-08T00:17:00.003-05:00

One advantage of being bikeless is that now we're spending an evening watching the wildlife on the main street of Levuka. Schools disgorged a few hours ago, temporarily filling the roads (though not as full as after the rugby match) until the students caught the trucks to their respective villages. Now it's fairly quiet, only townies poking and shopping and gossiping in shrieked Fijian. (They always shriek--whether at a nearby friend or across the road--but never ever shout in anger.)

I've been greatly amused by the message T-shirts that clearly came here in giant bales and are worn by almost everyone. Some of the more choice juxtapositions:

(On a totally flat-chested prenubile girl): TELL YOUR BOYFRIEND TO STOP STARING
(On a little boy: pepto-bismol-pink shirt with sparkly lettering): ANGEL
(On a boy): DON'T HATE ME BECAUSE I'M BEAUTIFUL--HATE ME BECAUSE YOUR BOYFRIEND THINKS I AM
(On respectable-looking matrons):

NO MONEY, NO HONEY
ONE BOYFRIEND IS JUST NOT ENOUGH
SEXUAL PREFERENCE: A LOT, PLEASE
LADIES, TAKE A NUMBER
NO BOOZE, NO SEX

(On Fijian): THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE: SAMOANS AND THOSE WHO WANNA BE

They're not totally indiscriminate. Sports shirts support only Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. Some Boston winter, it might be amusing to get some fluffy warm jackets with New York Yankees logos and see how many people were willing to wear them.

Bye Bye Bikes

2011-03-07T22:00:00.002-05:00

Today marked the end of an era, as we sent the bikes off on the weekly PAFCO ferry to Suva. This neatly solves the problem of getting the bikes to Suva when one is dead and the other one badly ailing: Ovalau's roads are not kind, buses mostly don't take bikes, and the humans ferry goes to Natovi Landing and not Suva. Dom will collect them at the other end, collect hopefully in the British and not the dustpan sense.

This ferry doesn't take human passengers: it's a cargo boat carrying shipping containers of fish from the PAFCO cannery that provides Levuka with electricity, jobs, characteristic blammer and aroma. The forklift they use is the biggest I've ever seen and can lift a full shipping container without tipping: it has a smokestack on the back, giant monster tires, and suitably exposed lift machinery in the front. It goes vroom vroom. Also beep beep beep and skreak. Having ridden the live bike from the hotel, I was riding around on the forklift, trying to remember to keep my mouth closed for the flies. My inner three-year-old boy is happy. This is even better than a ride on the firetruck. (Unless they put the ladder up too fast and ripped out some powerlines, or something.)

So now we're bikeless, speeding the natural machine-aging process by only a few days. There's the end of my daily out-and-back rides along the road, my daily checks to see if Luke is wearing his sunglasses,* my practice in slamming on the brakes to rob an eager dog of a chance to chase, my occasional races with excited kids that still seem to occur in streaks: either three groups of kids in a single day elect to give chase, or else none. (Last time that happened I stood-pedaled, broke the chain, said a bad word, and lost the race. Young Emosi got three thrills in one.

*No.

Some Things Never Change

2011-03-01T23:33:00.004-05:00

One could even argue that Fiji's pervasive weirdness (documented last post) is in itself a reassuring constant. Except it's not. (Neither is the heat: today I got caught in rain that would have been cold even were it not blown hard enough to sting through clothing and thud several green coconuts.) Two recent events were refreshingly ordinary, at least to me:

1)About a week ago I asked my friend Kevin (not his name, but same real name as the other Kevin) if he could find us some dog. Note the use of the mass noun rather than count: not a dog, or some dogs. He said sure, he'd look into it, knew some people in a nearby village who often had it. Been in touch occasionally: it seemed to be simmering steadily (so to speak) on his back burner.

At the same time I was spending most evenings biking along the unpaved road south of Levuka, turning back before the hills that would lead to Rukuruku if I felt like walking up most of them. Everyone's out in the evenings, even the albinos that make up a significant (still small) chunk of Levuka's residents. (Without the hot sun, they can go outside rather than staying indoors with the women all day. My theory as to why there's so many.) Anyway, I saw a little albino girl squinting even in the dim light, and knew her parents wouldn't care enough to bring sunglasses. Squinting doesn't bother them. So I brought her a pair the next day, and asked at the village where she was. By the time she was called in from swimming, most of the rest of the village had turned up. Fijian for albino is rea, and his name (he had a pink ponytail holder, c'mon) is LooKay, spelled Luke. My visit was clearly a semimajor event: I hope Luke has the sense to capitalize on it rather than getting teased for looking like a girl.

So today I got flagged down by someone who appeared to actually know me. He didn't know me, but he knew Kevin and he knew of the dog request. No problem, he says: just pick a day. He's also Luke's brother. I wonder how long it would've taken to get in touch with me otherwise...It's a small world, cue the dancing dolls.

2) This is this week's entry for the "If You Didn't Leave Your Brain at Home, Then Where Is It?" competition. Scene: arrival on Caqalai, following a coral-skimming boat ride from Levuka.

TOURIST FROM POLAND: Have you got a raff here?
HELPFUL STAFFER: A what? A raft?
TOURIST: A raff! It says you have a raff here...
STAFFER: We could get you a raft I suppose...What do you want it for?
TOURIST: To look at the coral! A raff! The book says! A raff! A ruff? [Getting upset now and his accent is stronger.]
OTHER STAFFER: Why do you want a raft to look at the coral? You don't need one.
TOURIST (now upset): You don't have a raff?
AMUSED OTHER TOURIST: You mean a reef?

It is impossible to not see coral everywhere as you arrive on Caqalai by boat. Especially at low tide, as we did. Mr. Polack was basically standing in the middle of Times Square and asking directions to New York. But once he found it, he preferred to observe it from behind a book. Admittedly of the three Activities posted on the chalkboard, Snorkeling was only one and Book Swap/Lie on the Beach was two.

Hurricanes, Rotaries and the Sun All Go Backwards

2011-03-01T23:10:00.003-05:00

I promised to tell you all about the eye-candy Fijians, only to find they perfectly fit the theme of today's post. Caqalai had (still has some of) a concrete mystery structure jutting from the beach. It's a little short to be a wharf and in precisely the wrong place for a breakwater, since it dams the sand that should pile up in front of the dining hall while simultaneously focusing the waves onto it. You can see a few after-the-fact concrete seawalls have been attempted, but finally enough got to be enough and they elected to demolish.

But not fun demolition. No dynamite, nor did they have access to the grossly oversized and comically inappropriate pieces of machinery that periodically maul the roads of Ovalau. The most advanced tool was a long iron bar with a chisel point, whacked through the sandy cement that held together the big coral blocks. Once a piece was loose, someone'd wrestle it out further into the water until it was light enough to get a shoulder under, then totter it inland to dump it. (Why not into a nearby boat to drop outside the reef?) And the only hardworking Fijians I ever see are women fussing and brooming. (Not sweeping: they do it outdoors too. You guys, if you sweep all the sand off Caqalai it'll be gone.) The Fijian work ethic is famously laid-back if not sound asleep: the British found it cheaper to import Indian workers, whose descendants do most of the work in Fiji even today. And yet on this tiny island, which wasn't even their home, these taro-fed studmuffins were heaving and hucking huge rocks--just to impress each other? It sure wasn't to impress us; neither foreigners nor local women seem to motivate road crews or shopclerks.

I didn't realize how big the rocks were until the next day when I stood next to one of the workers and realized my head barely reached his shoulder. Arms like American footballs and hand that could touch fingers around a cantaloupe; and he's about average among the work crew. His name, tragically, is Lulu.

Which leads us to the second story for today. Lulu is almost a divemaster, knowledgeable about sealife and diving both from the native and outsider view. Looking at the fish book's page of cowries, he pointed out one and said, "That one's for good luck. They're really rare, every time I dive I look for them. Back in the old days, before Christianity, they used to do big magic with it; but now, it's just luck."

I figured the next thing he'd say would be, "But now we know the one true god is Jesus and we don't bother with that silly superstition anymore." He wouldn't have been the first Fijian to say that, usually hastily and guiltily. But instead he said, "Because that magic is very strong. It can kill you. It's safer, just to carry the shell for good luck."

Everywhere you hear stories of supernatural events, even told by immigrants who've lived here long enough to be proved scamproof. (Like John, the proprietor of Levuka Homestay.) The island of Rotuma, where I spent Christmas a few years ago, has a traditional welcoming ceremony called the momasa. It's believed that until a visitor receives the ceremony they are vulnerable to harm by the spirits who protect the island. I never had it done: my first night I went home with the local doctor to stay with her, and that night the son of the couple I'd planned to stay with got run over and killed. I never thought much about it until I mentioned it to John Fatiaki, whose family I sometimes hung out with and who's both a Catholic and the doctor who allegedly treated Keith Richards when he fell out of the coconut tree. But still a Rotuman at heart: when he found I hadn't been momasa'd he looked as shocked and worried as though I'd never had a tetanus shot or learned to swim.* And regaled me with stories of bad things happening to those left unprotected. Apparently these things work even if you don't believe in them.

*And I'd arrived onboard the Cagi mai Ba.

When It Lives In The Reef And It's Got Big Sharp Teeth

2011-03-01T00:49:00.001-05:00

Just got back from Caqalai Island, which is as much smaller than Ovalau as Ovalau is than Viti Levu. You've seen pictures of it in New Yorker cartoons: a tiny sandspeck that fits in a single photo and you can still see people. Tropical Paradise: palms, sun, coarse coral sand, all meals included, thatched huts to sleep in, friendly locals. You can walk across it in five minutes, or around in an hour. (That exposed reef is superslick! Go slow.) And just offshore is Snake Island, continuing the logarithmic trend in being 1/40 the size of Caqalai.

Snake Island is a limestone mushroom a short walk or a longish swim from Caqalai, depending on the tide. If you swim out you can't climb up it; neither bare feet nor fins can cling to the eroded rock. So we waited for low tide and climbed up, placing our feet carefully among the snarled vines and bread-porous rock. Atop the mushroom is relatively flat: the single coconut tree I remember from a few years ago, now is surrounded by family. (The original must have been planted: waves never reach that high.) White fairy terns dip and zip overhead, their pointy wings tugging at the air with gecko aggressiveness. They have the same wingbeat as ospreys and pelicans, because they fly into the water after their prey. When peeved, they sound like thumb pianos.

A game of warmer-colder led us to the eggs. Speckled and spotted and pointy so they roll in a circle: fairy terns are even worse housekeepers than I am, with no sign of a nest as such. I held an egg to the sun, hoping to see if it was fertile (if it wasn't, that's why I didn't get mobbed; shame, would have been a great picture) but even the tropical noonday sun wouldn't shine through that clam-hard shell. The egg was noticeably heavier than even a barnyard chicken egg the same size; and those can be used in a pinch to break a porcelain bowl. The longer it's been incubating the lighter it'll be, too. I can't believe a baby bird can break that, except for the bevy of twanging evidence overhead.

Swam around Snake Island hoping to see snakes, but did not. Figures: I never see what I went somewhere to see, and seldom even experience the experience I was after. But I did see a white-tipped reef shark, a velvety black nudibranch with which Freud would have a field day (oh yeah? Then why was it so tiny?) and lots and lots of cool fish. In spite of the damage to the coral (crown of thorns starfish meets storm damage) the fish swarmed. Plenty of parrotfish, which hopefully will keep the reef clean of algae until the coral can regrow. Their beaky munching makes reefs sound like Rice Krispies, and sometimes you can even home in on the sound. Plus they're delicious.

I think "Fijian food" and I think "less creative than Newfoundland or Iowa, with coconut milk instead of mayo; something greasy, something fried, something starchy, something meaty ("something died"?) and something sweet. Plain food for fishermen, rugby players, nursing mothers, or failing that the terminally obese. Ota is the outlier: a native fern that is lightly blanched and served as a salad. Deliciously crunchy and filling, I could eat it every meal. And they had it at Sunday's lunch, and they'll have the raw ferns at Thursday's market. I'm going to beg the Royal to let me use their kitchen.

The tropical night was cool and breezy; palm fronds clattered to drown the sound of the generator. We could see six Pleiades for sure: is the lip of the bowl a double one? Then seven. Occasional lightning but the rain never reached us; shooting stars brighter than any real one. Romance in spades.

For a while. From midnight to 3 AM the wind died; I dragged a mattress out into the starnoon to sleep, preferring even the bugs to the heat inside the hut. Vivid strange dreams I can't remember, except that they were; reminded myself of the privacy guaranteed by the inevitable flashlight a prowler would carry. Or even not a prowler but the bitchy Swede next door: luckily the three strokes that blunted his personality left him also near-blind.

Having the mattress outside helped, but not enough. We even brought out the bug net, which didn't protect against the rain. Rain rain, where were you yesterday? Goddamit. Just like the Murphy's Law of Diving: if you take off your fins to be able to climb the ladder, today will be the day they don't bother with the ladder and you have to scramble into the boat barefoot. Luckily I have a strong kick; unluckily I was wearing a belly ring.

Today Leo went scuba diving while I snorkeled from the dive boat. I'm a certified diver but not that into it: the maneuverability of snorkeling feels more real to me. (In spite of the reduced bottom time.) I brought a fish-ID card and learned several new fish types, including the delightfully named chocolate-dip damsel (black, white tail) and saw a beautifully hideous moray eel who, if you're slow on the uptake, is responsible for this post's name. I found a marooned anchor too, but they refused to take the cost of it off our tab.

Caqalai is definitely way better than Maqai, perhaps because they've been there longer. More comfortable with charging for services rendered and not trying to jam you; more in tune with what tourists want, friendly and professional. The food's better, the huts are nicer (and no doubt cost nothing but labor to build.)

Oh: I was going to write about the wharf construction! Maybe tomorrow: I'm out of time. For now leave it that Caqalai could bill itself as a gay destination, just for the eye candy.

Modern Communications

2011-02-25T19:15:00.001-05:00

Levuka's a throwback to the old American West, if the old American West had a coastline and parrots. False-front stores, dusty merchandise on shelves, shade-shaped clumps of people. So it's fitting that the island's main road is very dusty. I'm so glad I don't wear contact lenses anymore! Grit in anything exposed and sticky, even if you're a bicycle. (If it rains, your back gets dirty, rather than your front.)

I am self-healing. The bicycle is not.

Luckily I have a mobile phone.

And my bike mechanic's phone number is tattooed in my brain, for the simple reason I dated him for six years.

Modern telecommunications are weird. The easiest access to any mechanic involved bouncing my voice through a phone, tower, maybe a cable to Viti Levu, at least one satellite dish, and then again backwards. If there even is a local bike mechanic, guaranteed he's not as good and doesn't work evenings. Of course, Craig nominally doesn't either. Hallelujah, puh-RAISE technology! Get a cell phone, and you're never alone. Fiji's country code is Detroit's area code, so he answered a mystery caller from Michigan in preference to whatever he was doing. And gave proper advice, too: a little grease (both spray-on and elbow) has the stuck freewheel wheeling freely again. Magic.

Of course, I still got outrun by a barefoot six-year-old on a gravel road. Has there been some bulletin I missed? "Chase the kaivalangi biker chick!" It seemed like every village I picked up a few of them like seagulls after a trash truck; yesterday and the day before, not a one. Most I quickly left behind, but not this kid. He's got a bright future ahead of him, whether rugby or purse-snatching remains to be seen.

Spiffy Levuka

2011-02-23T16:46:00.005-05:00

Is it legal to look around a place on your second visit and comment on how much it's improved? Expat etiquette calls for a tsk festival on every trip, whether it's because the place is being neglected or because it's going all glitzy and touristic. (Like liberals who fume when a neighborhood starts going south and turning into a ghetto, but campaign against gentrification.) Either way, it's just Not The Same Anymore.

Well, Levuka is pretty much the same as it was last trip. Sleepy little town full of for-Fiji ancient buildings that in many cases predate their owners; used to be the capital of Fiji and thus of the South Seas, lots of whalers settled here. I haven't found any familiar Vineyard names on graves: no Luces, Lamberts or Mayhews. But there is a Coubrough, as in Coubrough Point where we stayed on Taveuni. There's a story there for sure, but what? Stories in the South Seas tend to be more legend than fact; mistakes get enshrined and repeated.

Levuka's got a museum, with an entertainingly random collection titled, "Hey, this should be in a museum!" and some old tools which should NOT be in a museum because thanks to the Chinese you can't get good-quality equipment anywhere else. Go outside, and you can see vintage Singer sewing machines for free. Still in use.

But the few changes I can see have been for the better. Some of this is just luck, admittedly: the reason the fish cannery doesn't stink is wind direction, not actual stinkage. But the supermarket's been revamped, the Bounty rum is cheaper than in Suva (prices on outer islands in general are the same as in cities, though choices are fewer), and the Royal Hotel is in better shape.

The Royal Hotel is Fiji's oldest, and it is famous. Somerset Maugham ("Mom") stayed here, and the service sucked. A travel writer in the 60s stayed here, and the service sucked. Craig and I stayed here a few years ago, and the service sucked. Now, it still takes 45 minutes to get eggs and toast and coffee, but at least now they arrive at the same time. And you get three wire coat hangers, not one; and they've clearly been unraveled at least once to retrieve dropped laundry from the porch roof below.

I'm worried. If this trend continues, the Royal will be a Marriott soon. Keep Levuka Funky!

Rucked Road to Rukuruku

2011-02-22T00:56:00.002-05:00

Today I continued yesterday's trip into the backwoods of Fiji by cycling north along the main road. Craig and I once stayed at Ovalau Holiday Resort, so the road was familiar to that point (a bit spiffier) but just past OHR the road rapidly gets worse.

I said worse, but then much much worse. For the first few km the road hugs the coast on a narrow shelf, staying basically flat thanks to the wave-damping reef. But at Cawaci* the zigzag turns 90 degrees, and the road starts climbing OVER each headland. Why? They're not saving asphalt, there isn't any. Those hills are brutally steep too, and I was soon reduced to pushing the bike. I could have pedal-climbed them if it were raining and cool--just on me, not on the mud road, which would rapidly have turned to snot. As the runnels and gutters show it often does.

I pressed on enough to be sure it wasn't going to smooth out, then stopped to ask for water from some Fijians lunching. Not only did Vika fill my bottle with boiled water ('our tep is bed') but also insisted on feeding me lunch while plying me with questions. Her life is interesting enough, at least from the outside, that I wound up turning the interview back on her. I'm a seasoned interviewee.

Rachel is a (pick one:) beautiful feral nature-girl with a powerful filial love, or neglected ignorant child penned in her village by a lazy grandma. About twelve, boybody, bright straight gaze, dressed in clothes that would need significant repairs to qualify as rags. She was on the way out to catch prawns in the stream with a weighted net: seemed to speak no English, and since she's not in school I'd believe she truly does not. Lives with her dad's mom to take care of Grandma, since Dad is a cop in Levuka and Mom lives in Suva. I'm torn between intense jealousy and intense pity.

But I'll see her again: she comes to town for every Thursday market to sell prawns. For like $16 ($9) per kilo. I wish we had a kitchen here at the hotel.

*I regret to inform you this concludes our Fijian-pronunciation lessons.