Glacier Point

Half Dome and Yosemite National Park

After visiting Mariposa Grove we were kind of thinking, hey Yosemite is pretty good, the trees are pretty amazing, but we were wondering where the wow factor was.  I mean this place was like the second National Park in the world right, there's gotta be something pretty special for that to have happened right.  And I mean big trees are kind of cool, but second National Park in the world cool?  Hmmm I think not.

But then we went for a drive out to the end of Glacier Pt road and we got our answer.  This was one of the first touristy view points in the Valley, and standing there I can see why.  I don't really need to say much, I think the photos speak for themselves, outstanding!

Dave with half dome

Probably the most famous feature in the National Park is Half-Dome, to climb it you need to get a permit.  Apparently you can do it in a day, it's a 1400m elevation gain, and you have to climb the last 400m holding onto chains.  The whole time we were in the park we never saw anyone on the top  of the rock though, so I'm not sure if the top is actually a fair way back from the edge or what, or maybe our binoculars weren't as strong as we thought they were.

Looking down to Yosemite Valley, we climbed to the top of the escarpment the next day

Three arches at Yosemite Valley

Yet another wonderful view

Best Museum Ever?

Well maybe not, that is a big call after all, but we went to a museum on Saturday that has to be up there as one of the better ones I've visited.  It is rated #24 of #1270 attractions in London on tripadvisor, so surely that's got to count for something, though number one is the Olympic Stadium, so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.  On a side note, really I don't know who reviews things on tripadvisor because come on, a stadium, that's the best London has to offer??

Anyway the museum is housed in the Royal College of Surgeons, the building is still in use, but the museum is across 2 floors in a section of the building.  It is named after John Hunter, the man who started the collection, he came to London in 1748 from a town near Glasgow.  At that time surgeons didn't have to go to university, unlike physicians, which is why surgeons are called Mr/Miss/Mrs/Ms.  It sounded like John Hunter was basically a body snatcher, who used the corpses to study anatomy and various things.  It seemed that he started the museum and had people in one day a week partly so that they would see that he wasn't trying to create some sort of Frankenstein monster.  I'm guessing because the collection is so old it contains things that perhaps couldn't be exhibited/collected nowadays.

They had the skeleton of an "Irish giant", Charles Byrne, who was 2.31m tall.  His express wish was that his skeleton not be displayed after death, and for that reason he wanted to be buried at sea, but John Hunter paid £500 after he died to get his hands on the body.  It's nice to see that the museum is following the British tradition of ignoring the wishes of those people most affected by the exhibits.

What the museum was mainly full of though was just bits of bodies, animal or human.  It was kind of cool to see the affect different diseases had on the bones.  So with rickets you could see the bones were all twisted.  There were also an awful lot of syphilitic bones in there, it looked like syphilis was pretty prevalent back then.  You could see the affect of the lesions on the skull, I guess it's no surprise people went crazy, looking at it's affect on the skull.  The fractures were pretty cool too, you could see where the bone had desperately tried to fuse together, but you're looking at it wondering how painful that must have been to use.

It wasn't just bones though, there was also a lot of jars containing soft tissue too, and I won't get too graphic but there were definitely a number of foetuses, as you would hope for in such a place.

There was also a great section on the history of surgery, how in the past good surgeons could do leg amputations in under a minute, no anaesthetic after all.  Then it moved into the era where people started to realise about germs and keeping wounds clean.  It then moved into another really graphic era around the first world war, where cosmetic surgery really started to get going.  The reason this was the dawn of this branch of surgery is that the soldiers fighting in the wars around that time started to suffer from horrific facial injuries, we're talking no face.  And yes there were 3D pictures.  They need to put those pictures up next to the cool tanks when recruiting kids to the army, because seriously if you were 18 and someone showed you a 3D picture of a guy without a face, and said that could be you, I'm wondering if we would turn into a nation of pacifists overnight.

The final, awesome, part of the museum was that they had a couple of videos on various surgeries.  We got to see heart bypass surgery, it starts and the chest has already been cut open, and you just see the heart beating.  It was unbelievable, the doctor is literally holding this persons beating heart.  I would go back to the museum just to watch the rest of the movies.  There was one on brain surgery that we didn't get to see.

If slightly macabre, but incredibly interesting things are what you like then definitely pay this place a visit, and even better is that it's free.  I love London museums.

Mariposa Grove - or the Land of the Big Trees

A giant redwood

Another thing which was a bit of a must-see whilst we were in San Francisco were the giant Redwoods.  Dave really wanted to see them, I don't know, maybe he feels an affinity to ridiculously tall things.  So after 3 days of the city we were in our hire car and off to Yosemite National Park. It was a bit of a drive there, ended up being 4 hours.  And the highways are completely insane!  The car is definitely king in this land.  The highways were packed the whole way out, and that's 10 lanes of dual carriage-way.  I gotta say these 10 lanes weren't particularly well-maintained either.

It was so nice to get out to Yosemite, beautiful skies every day, unbelievable views, awesome flora and freaky fauna.  What more can you ask for, plus I saw a coyote on the way there.  That was cool, so classically American, standing in a field of yellow grass, with rolling hills behind it.  That was pretty special.

It was Memorial Day weekend, but luckily we got there before the weekend started and left again on the Saturday, so we were definitely travelling in the right direction going there and coming back.  The queue to get in on the Saturday looked painful.

Dave with the National Park "tram"

Dave with a ridiculously big tree

One weird thing was that if you were in the military you got to go in for free, it didn't seem as if that was something particular to Yosemite (perhaps some historical reason), but it seems that case for all National Parks.  I couldn't really figure out why that is, I mean the military and the National Parks Service don't seem like natural bedfellows to me.  Just look at the surroundings once there's been military intervention somewhere, not generally somewhere on the top of the list as a place of great natural beauty.

One thing I didn't appreciate about Yosemite was how high it is, the carpark was at 1700m, then the highest point, Wawona Vista, was at 2075m, which is not all that much lower than My Kosciuszko.  Let's just say the difference in the surroundings was dramatic.  On top of Mt Kosciuszko you are very much in alpine territory, and there's definitely a chill to the air.  Here the sun was beating down, I was in shorts and there were massive pine trees all around me.

Unusual squirrel in the grove

Redwoods amongst normal pines

I would definitely recommend making the trek to the upper part of the park, as a whole Mariposa Grove is a massively popular place to visit, but there are far fewer people who make it to the upper reaches. And they are mainly the people on the tram, who don't venture far from the road.  Though when I say tram I actually mean massive truck.  Only in the US would you find a lorry pulling tourists through the nature.

It felt as if the lower part of the park was full of the blockbuster trees, the ones which had names, and I guess these were the famous trees which people hear about when they are children.  The upper part, didn't have as many named trees, but I actually think it was nicer.  It was cooler for one, and it seemed a bit more lush, less burnt out than the lower down parts.

Away from the "tram" stops there were heaps of redwoods and hardly any people in the upper elevations.  And the redwoods really are red, it's not some slight reddish tinge, but a real glow.  It's hard to describe, or capture in a photo, but they are mixed in with these other, normal, pine trees and they really stood out.  There weren't heaps of them, which made it even better I think, because everywhere you looked you were reminded of the contrast between what had, up to that point, been quite large pine trees, and these monsters.

As a comparison to Kauris, the biggest trees I had seen up to that point, the Kauris have a comparable trunk diameter, but the redwoods are almost twice as tall.  And they sure were tall.

Evidence of fire

Walking through the hole in the tree

There was certainly evidence of how people in the past struggled with the concept of conservationism.  And you wonder if we have got it right now either, just because of what people were doing in the park only fairly recently.  Mariposa Grove became a National Park in 1890 and at the time it seemed like National Parks were early versions of theme parks.  People went round cutting holes in a few of the trees, big enough so that waggons or cars could drive through them.  Obviously this wasn't so good for the trees and eventually they would fall down.

It is a bit different now, most of the trees have fences round them, keeping the hordes of their shallow root systems.  And certainly no more cutting holes in trees.

The giant sequoias need fire in order to grow, they need the lack of competition to get their start when they are seedlings, the adult ones have such thick bark that they are impervious to the fire, whilst the other trees don't really stand a chance.  Once the grove came under federal protection they were finding there weren't many redwood seedlings around any more.  This was because they had stopped the wildfires, and the normal pines were out-competing the little seedlings.  Looking around on our visit though it seems that have either re-started controlled burning, or there was a particularly brutal wildfire through this area recently.

Dave with an over sized pine cone - but not from the redwoods surprisingly

There was an awful lot of wildlife around the park, I guess there are a lot of people to feed off.  There were so many squirrels, but they weren't the normal grey squirrels you get in London.  I kind of thought there was only one type of squirrel in America, but actually there are heaps.  I guess the red squirrel is lucky only one type of squirrel made the trek across the ocean.  Whilst we were in California we actually didn't once see the traditional grey squirrel.  Mostly we saw ground squirrels, like the one in the photo above, but we also saw Douglas fir squirrels and golden-mantled ground squirrels, which looked almost exactly like chipmunks.  They were definitely my favourite.  No bears, maybe that's a fortunate thing, but we saw a bunch of birds, including a goshawk, which was my favourite of the birds, just hovering, looking for chipmunk-type squirrels I guess.

The view from Wawona Vista - where we saw the goshawk

The meadow near the museum

Up the top of the park there is this lodge, which is now a bit of a museum, this is the final stop of the tram, so the ranger up there sits around waiting for the tram to arrive.  Everyone gets off, and he gives a quick 5 minute spiel about the trees, people pick up a bit of a bark, and handle a pine cone, then it's back on the tram.

They had chosen the location of the lodge well, in perhaps my favourite part of this park, in a grassy meadow, surrounded by massive redwoods.  When there wasn't a tram in, it was really peaceful.

I'll leave you with a few more pictures, mainly of trees, so if you don't like trees, the story ends here.

The Bachelor and the Three Graces - all the truly large trees had special names

Me with old grizzly, the most famous tree in the park, I'm sitting about 20m in front of it, 1800 years old, and the second biggest tree in the park, at 64m tall.

Dave with a regulation redwood - no special name here

The track to the upper section - this middle section had no redwoods - I don't know why 

How red is that tree!

More redwoods standing guard around the museum 

Dave in shorts at 2000m

Redwoods next to normal trees

The cute little museum - hopefully not made from redwood

British Musings

There's been a few funny Britishisms I've noticed in the past couple of weeks.  One is I have discovered a new fruit, a Satsuma, it's an evil mandarin.  It's from Japan, and is meant to be a cross of an orange and a mandarin, but I think somewhere along the way a grapefruit got mixed in there.  Maybe it was masquerading as an orange.  Definitely my biggest fruit disappointment here so far.

Another thing I have struggled with here is finding antiseptic, a weird thing to struggle with here.  But the ubiquity of the Boots pharmacy chain has meant you can basically only find Boots-branded anything in the way of first aid.  I am a massive convert of betadine, it's an iodine based antiseptic, and it's basically the only thing I have ever used.  But I'm shocked to discover nobody sells it over here.  They very rarely even have iodine based products.  The only thing close I could find was an iodine spray, I have never seen antiseptic in a can.  And what is weirder is that it is produced by Savlon, which in the world of antiseptics is my arch-nemesis.  So I've had to cosy up to a product that when I was 5 years old caused an allergic reaction, and pushed my moving date to Australia back until I had recovered.

I always felt a bit uneasy spraying Savlon-based iodine on wounds, so I was pretty happy when I discovered Dettol over here.  It being one of the few brands I recognised, who says advertising isn't useful :).  When I went to get some more in the supermarket I couldn't see it with all the rest of the first aid stuff, which I thought I was a bit weird.  So I asked the pharmacist and he took me to the cleaning products aisle, where I found it sitting next to the toilet cleaner.  So you can appreciate I'm back to feeling a bit uneasy with my choice of germ-fighter.

With our newly purchased TV license I've been getting into more of the BBC iplayer shows.  Gotta say the BBC iplayer is an awesome application.  I'm wondering which came first, BBC or ABC with that little idea?  But it means I've been watching more British comedy, and I have to say I'm noticing a few differences between Australia and here.  They have this show, The Revolution Will Be Televised, which is like the first season of The Chaser, back when no one knew them.  But there's only 2 of them, and they have a much smaller budget.

Obviously with both these shows a lot of the humour is in how the unsuspecting public reacts to them.  That's where the difference is the most noticeable, the British public is awesome! These two strangers come up to them and start saying the most bizarre things, and the public actually engages with them, doesn't just treat them like the lunatics they are behaving like.  I really like that, I feel that the British are much more willing to engage with strangers.  Whilst I like it, and it always amuses me when I see it on the tube, I don't think I'll ever be able to do it with the ease they do here.  But it does make their comedy shows much more amusing.

San Francisco and Alcatraz

The state parliament

We spent a few days in the city whilst we were there.  It is a really pretty city, and I can see the attraction with it, it has great bars and restaurants, and the taxis are soooo cheap! So you never even need to use public transport.  It really is the country of the car over there.

This was my first ever visit to the US, I don't know, I had never really felt the burning desire to visit before.  So I'm glad that this trip came up.  I wasn't sure what to expect, I mean American culture permeates so much of your pop culture references that a lot of the time I literally felt like I was on a movie set.  A lot of their public services really look like they are straight out of Total Recall (the original version of course), their main public transport, the BART, which I think means something like Bay Area Rapid Transport and is their light rail service, literally looked like a mining vehicle from an 80s futuristic movie.  So boxy, and with carpet!  Who puts carpet in public transport?

Two of the seals at Pier 39

Dave with Alcatraz in the background

We even got a counterfeit coin out of the ticket vending machine.  I've never seen a counterfeit coin before, in fact I've never seen counterfeit money before, and they certainly hadn't tried to make it look like a quarter. But obviously it was the right dimensions to fool the vending machine.  Too bad we only used the BART once, so we couldn't offload it.  But once we arrived in San Francisco proper we realised how cheap the taxis were. No more public transport for us!

Pier 39 with the seals as far from the humans as they could get

One of the cells used by an escapee, never caught

The one thing that did get to me was the incredible disparity in wealth there.  A lot of people say that San Francisco is particularly bad, and that say New York has hardly any homeless, but there were so many of them.  It was fairly overwhelming for me.  London really doesn't seem to have that many, and Sydney wasn't so bad either.  But literally every 10 metres or so there would be another homeless person.  And a lot of them looked really freaking crazy.  They should be in a hospital or something, getting medical attention, not living on the streets!

We were in the city for 3 days, and during that time, a homeless person nearly punched us, another abused us, and we saw one pissing in the street.  This was from a tourist bus, so it's not like we were in a rough area of town, on a main street, at maybe 1pm, a guy just peeing away.  And it wasn't a little pee, we were there for a traffic light rotation, and he was still going when we pulled off.  But then if you don't have any public toilets, people have needs after all.

One thing that did surprise me was there were no Big Issue sellers, I mean if a place needs a Hand Up, it felt like it was San Francisco.  We have a Big Issue seller in Hampstead, his patch is outside the local Tesco, and the other night he was standing there having a beer with someone who had just done their shopping.  A bit different from the homeless in San Francisco, who seemed to either be completely crazy or have completely lost their humanity.

The view of Alcatraz

The prisoners got to listen to radio, by plugging into these two holes

And yet next to the streets with all the homeless there would be de Beers, and Prada, and Gucci.  It's like there's a Lord of the Flies undercurrent going on, but the normal people are oblivious to it.  We're driving home one night (in a taxi of course) and people are fighting over what they pull out of bins.  It's like they had lost all veneer of civilisation and were just animals.  Freaking scary! Especially as in the Walmarts you can buy massive knives, we didn't see any guns, well a BB-gun, but does that really count if people are carrying enormous gutting knives?  I guess there is at least that, no guns in the Walmart, at least the one we visited, a lot of ammo, but no actual handguns.

It's a real juxtaposition, because

The fog really rolling in

we ate at some really nice restaurants, and visited some great bars.  Apparently they don't have the problem with alcohol which is such an issue in Australia.  And every restaurant also has a great bar, with all the spirits you could want. It was a real different feeling to both London and Australia.  I can imagine you could have a great night out in San Francisco (if you manage to avoid the scary homeless people).

The exercise yard at Alcatraz

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't go during the full-on election round.  They were just gearing up for their conventions at the time, so the money hadn't fully unleashed.  I think the estimates are something like $5 billion to be spent on advertising during the campaign.  But then I think they are getting much better at targeting the money to the swing states, and I imagine California doesn't really classify as a swinging state.  So even if we were there now, I imagine we wouldn't be experiencing the full-on Super PAC onslaught.

I'm really glad I did finally get there, and I'm actually really keen to check out New York now, hopefully there really are fewer homeless people there.  But enough about the really weird society over there, and it is a really weird society.  It seems that people don't seem to realise they can't all be the 1%-ers.

View of the Bay Bridge and the city

One of the main things we did there was get out to Alcatraz.  And I would recommend it, it was quite good, unfortunately we were in a bit of a rush that day, so I would take your time if you can.  Plan for at least 3.5 hours, then you can relax.  And get the earliest ferry you can, and book online ahead.  We did, and if we hadn't there was no way we were going.  This place sells out weeks in advance.  You get an audio guide with the ticket, and it really is pretty good.  It takes you through a bit of the history, and the escape attempts.  When you are on the island you wonder why there weren't more attempts, I mean it really is not far to the mainland, an hour or so of swimming and you would be there.  But then you forget about the beauty of the Gulf Stream, they don't have that on the West Coast, the water is 15 degrees or something.  You wouldn't last that long in water that cold.

Whilst we were there we got to see the fog roll in, and it really does roll in.  San Francisco has the most amazing localised weather.

Napa Valley

The Golden Gate bridge sans fog

We were in San Francisco for a week, just at the end of summer.  And I managed to actually get burnt.  Finally some sun in this hemisphere!  One thing I really wanted to do was visit Napa Valley whilst I was there.  I don't know, maybe it was the movie Sideways, talking up Californian wines, but I had always wanted to go if I had the chance.  Luckily we have a friend who is a San Franciscan local and he offered to drive us out there, which was very kind of him, especially given the slightly scary 10 lane super-highways they have in that country.

Looking back across the bay to the city

Life doesn't get much better than this, Champagne without a cloud in the sky!

It was a perfect day, really if you are in San Francisco and you have the chance, don't pass it up.  The wines were really good.  We went a bit crazy at a few of the wineries we visited, this cost us when we tried to check in on the return journey.  A tip I've learned, always fly with a spare, empty bag, just in case.  Apparently the baggage staff don't like lifting 30 odd kilograms in one go.

I didn't appreciate how dry California would be, at some points during the day it felt like I could have been back in country NSW, apart from the fact that Hunter Valley wines are horrible.

The dry, dry Californian country side, the vineyards were so contrasting

The wineries are really well set up there, beautiful locations, and most of them seem to serve food as well.  They are almost wine bars, more than cellar doors, a lot more effort has gone into the appearance than is normally the case say in Australia.  Though a consequence of that is that you have to pay for all the tastings, but then the tastings are actually more like full glasses of wine, rather than the little pipette squeeze you can sometimes get.  Just a suggestion, don't drive there, unless you have a very kind friend who is willing to forgo the pleasures.

The view from one of the cellar doors - could almost be Gundagai

We even got to see a bit of the Indy Car race, one of the wineries had a view overlooking the hill where the race was held.  So you were far enough away not to really hear the car engines, but you could watch them race if you wanted to.  Indy Car seems like a fair idea for a race, they all have to race in exactly the same car, so it must be more down to the driver you would think than say Formula One might be.  In fact it seems so fair, it's a wonder Australia didn't come up with the idea.  I mean just look at AFL right?

Hanging in Snowdonia

Harlech castle was the plains spread out below

After the epic drive we had finally made it to north Wales, and I have to say, whilst I really like Pembrokeshire, I think I definitely have to explore this area a bit more.  It feels a lot more wild up in the north, well as wild as the UK can ever really get, which means you are maybe 40 minutes drive between tea houses, as opposed to 30 minutes elsewhere.

It's up in the north that the castles really ramp up in frequency and size, I guess because of the wildness the original inhabitants could put up more of a fight against the English than the southerners.  It's here that Edward I built some of the most famous castles, Caernarfon, Harlech, Beaumaris.

Caernarfon Castle on a rainy day

A tower on top of another tower

We stopped off at Harlech castle, didn't go inside.  It's in a great spot though, on a rocky outcrop above the massive plain stretching out below.  Apparently when the castle was built the sea actually reached the rock upon which it sat, the sea has certainly receded a lot in the intervening 800 years.

The castle that we went inside was Caernarfon, it was here that Edward II was born, and he was the first English Prince of Wales.  Since that time, 1301, this title has been held by the British monarch's eldest son.  Caernarfon was the grandest of the castles built by Edward, there were a lot of modern (for the time) ideas used in the construction.  The walls were like the walls of Constantinople, with bands of coloured rocks, and the arrow slits were actually 3 slits in one, in that 3 archers could fire through each slit at different angles.  It really looked quite impenetrable from the outside.  But inside it was never really finished.  I guess the Welsh eventually kind of gave up the fight, particularly when the Tudors claimed the throne, being partially Welsh themselves.

I think the weather in Pembrokeshire is definitely better than up north.  When we visited the castle it was absolutely bucketing down, and when we drove through Snowdonia the winds were almost gale force.  I can kind of understand how people die up there, if the weather changed and you weren't prepared than you could be in a spot of bother.  I haven't got a good feel as to how extensive the park is though, it didn't feel particularly huge, but perhaps it is possible to head off into the wilderness and not see or hear a car for a while.

The peaceful coast of north Wales

The colours were amazing there, up north I mean.  Driving back from Harlech in the dusk we had to pull over in a little town, just to watch the sun setting

I'm not sure where next in Wales, we haven't yet visited the Brecon Beacons, which is a mountain range just north of Cardiff, so maybe there next summer.  And perhaps another trip to Snowdonia, just to get out into the mountains and see how wild it really is.