Cucumber mentioned we need to fill in some holes in the plot, so I guess I’ll cover Death Valley.
Day 4 of VO: V. Lemon left MGM before anyone else woke up to grab the official Veggies mobile at McCarren. The rest of us eventually got up and everyone was ready by 9am. After two days of Vegas, we decided to take a day trip to Death Valley National Park. Cucumber, PP and M&M’s opted to remain in Vegas to do some shopping.
Death Valley has always been near the top of my list of must-visit National Parks. The Veggies were good sport when I suggested spending a precious day from the trip visiting this park - an act of kindness for which I will be forever grateful. I was a wee bit worried that Death Valley was going to SUCK, especially this being a repeat visit for some. I didn’t want to waste everyone’s day, especially when it takes 2 hours to drive one-way!
Our first stop was a food stop at In-N-Out for some early brunch. Waited outside for 5 minutes, placed 5 orders, found 5 stools and one fooding photo. We continued on towards Death Valley. Catnip spotted a decoy tree along the way. After some driving on some super flat roads, we eventually got to the sign that marked the entrance of DV.
Of course, we needed to stop and grab a group photo with the entrance sign. Made an off-hand comment about climbing on top of the sign, I didn’t expect everyone to take it seriously!! Ironically, this turned out to be the easiest climb of the day. Tomato and Lemon performed in a duet entitled a-catch-that-was-not-a-catch when disembarking from the sign.
We stopped into the visitor centre in Furnace Creek. Catnip found a little stuffed spider, while the store keeper with a funky moustache presented a bigger one! We got some directions on places to visit from the rangers.
First stop was Badwater, a basin in Death Valley that happens to be the lowest point in North America at –282ft. It was interesting, because we saw out in the far distance (there was a sign on the road) pointing to Mt Whitney @ 14,496ft. Mt Whitney is the highest point in continental US, and it’s only 8 miles crow distance from Badwater.
There was a long path out to the salt crust fields, where we took an awesome single file photo. We tossed around a couple chunks of salt thingies, and tasted some of this really salty flakes. I recalibrated my GPSr at this location, because it initially reported that I was at –310ft instead.
We headed up to artist’s drive, a one-way windy road that takes us through some interesting rock formations and giant DIPs in the road. Yam tried to break apart some rocks looking for magical swords that give +5 power and hidden crystals. The low hanging sun casted some super long shadows on us, so we played some shadow YMCA… only we needed a 5 letter word. Settled on SPACE… can’t remember why. Catnip also tried to trix0r us with red/green rocks.
Next stop was Golden Canyon. We took the main trail in; near the trailhead we found a section of washed out asphalt from years past. Further along, we spotted this side trail that had the resemblance of a stairway. Tomato and Yam decided to climb up to get to the rock above, while the rest of us waited below. I had my camera ready to capture their heads sticking out from above the rock, but after a few minutes, they still hadn’t showed up! No replies from our shouts to them either. We had no option but to pursue. The chase was on!
The climb started off not too bad, but the trail deteriorated quite quickly. It was apparent that this trail hasn’t been maintained in a long time, probably due to rock slides in recent years. Soon, we were scampering up some pretty big steps and clinging on any handholds we could find. The last part was particularly tough with loose gravel and very few handholds. Despite the cuts and bruises and teetering on the brink of life and death, we didn’t need too much motivation to continue the climb. The view of the valley was just breathtaking and the vista just got better and better the higher we climbed!
The sun was setting soon; light was fading. We were forced to climb down, which was mainly sliding on my butt for me. It is times like this when I get into the photographer’s age-old delimma. I’m glad I brought my tripod and TochiCam, but they were unprotected (I hadn’t expected a climb like this) and exposed to all that dirt and sand. I also could have really used both my hands being free. :|
The sun was setting by the time we got back to our car. We had to make one last stop at the sand dunes for Yam to collect his bottle of sand. Along the way, we saw some SUV driving on a dirt road leaving a looooooong dust trail. So cool. It was quite dark by the time we got to the sand dunes. Needed some super long exposures and high ISO to get any decent photos. The sand itself was amazing. Never felt sand this fine, it was almost like velvet/water flowing between your fingers.
Afterwards, we made the mad rush back to Vegas. Tomato and I had O to catch tonight. Stopped at a Shell station for potty break, where Catnip found 5 dispensers, while we found 8.
Went to Fremont Street in Old Vegas to check out the super TV roof thingy, and had some cheap buffet at Plaza Hotel and Casino. While eating, we managed to miss the uber light show that came on once an hour, but C’s M filled us in on the details afterwards.
Lemon dropped Tomato and I at Bellagio for O. We caught the fountain showing of Time to Say Goodbye. Can never get tired of watching this fountain. O was quite awesome, but that’s probably the subject of another post (if it ever happens).
DV and that Golden Canyon climb was definitely a highlight for me on this trip. Thanks again to all the Veggies for such a fun outing.
Vincent Lam. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. Random House, 2005.
I remember my anatomy group… We had a communication problem. Men are odd about penises. They don’t want to talk about them but they secretly believe them to be very important, perhaps sacred. So we got to the penis on our cadaver, and the men wanted to skip it. ‘We’ll look at the book,’ they said. ‘No way,’ I said, ‘we need to see the inside of the penis.’ Corpus spongiosum, all that jazz. Besides, the poor guy’s body was lying there. A big man, powerful, and it would have been a shame just to let it go to waste. What did we do? We talked. We talked like professionals, and I saw that it was this one guy’s turn to dissect, and there was no way that this man was going to cut up a penis. So I said, ‘What if I do it?’ and I did it, and I think we all understood the issue better.
>_<
About halfway through the novel. A very fun, light-hearted, most insightful read so far.
Bears and Bulls come and go. I bet many of us are seeing our RRSP’s or 401k’s withering. These two songs have been circulating in recent weeks (Canto w/ subtitles): 放得太遲 by 東加豆 (原曲: 古巨基-愛得太遲 [For the Leo fans out there]) and 熊日 by 東加豆 (原曲: 李克勤-紅日). In a sad way, they capture the emotions of many players in HK financial markets these days.
I guess everything IS a document for another time.
Upon our return from Secteur Rocher, we took the bus up to Jardin Exotique de Monaco. The botanical garden was opened in 1933 and features a wide variety of cactuses. Before I get to the garden itself, one of the most impressive features is the spectacular views of Monaco the garden offers. You can see a good, almost aerial-like view, of Monaco. In the following photo, you see Beau Rivage, as well as the chicane and tunnel exit from the Formula 1 course!
Here's a shot of Secteur Rocher, with the Prince’s Palace featured prominently. We were just standing right on that rock an hour ago watching the race. :)
Jardin Exotique de Monaco is situated on the north-western cliff (what in Monaco isn’t on a hillside), consisting of several levels almost like a giant staircase. As you progress through the garden, you descend onto lower levels until you reach a cave at the very bottom.
I have never seen so many different cactuses concentrated in one place. Given the moderate climate of the region, they are not the type of plants I would have expected to find at a botanic garden here. I guess they are some of the most resilient plants in the world.
The variety of succulents on display was very impressive – ranging from tall and skinny cactuses to the round and fat ones. The latter totally reminded me of the spinning leevers from Zelda; I had to resist from taking out my great sword and performing a spin attack to slash them. :)
The landscaping of the garden was equally impressive. A complex interlock of pathways and bridges, there were multiple ways to get to the same spot. Some of the stairwells appeared to be carved out of the rock face. Some of the bridges were made of wood, but instead of normal wooden well-sawed planks and beams, the railing was sculpted to be curvy and twisty. No real pattern, except it looked like how a natural tree root or branch might grow. Quite the attention to details.
The other highlight of the garden was the observatory cave. We had to wait a bit for a guide (who only spoke in French) to take us down into the depths of Moria. The official site claims that the cave features many fine specimen of stalactites, stalagmites, curtains, columns, spaghetti-like helictites. You can google those terms yourselves to find out what they mean.
I decided to go with my 50mm f/1.8 lens for this cave. Given the low lighting, I needed as wide aperture as possible. Unfortunately, I had major difficulty with the narrower DOF. I still had to bump up the ISO, and sorely missed my 18mm and VR. There’s only so much room for you to manoeuvre in the narrow pathways within the caverns.
So yeah, they have nice metal railings that were elevated above the cavern floors. The walk starts of with a bunch of steps down. Near the entrance, we saw some excavation of animals, which proved that prehistoric humans were using the caves as a base station for their hunting. More steps leading down; overall, the descent was about 60m. Too bad not even my HCx could pick up the satellites to track the elevation changes. It would have been pretty cool to get a 3D mapping of our cavern exploration route.
So yeah, I didn’t really understand what our guide was saying; it took too much effort to try to translate, and after a while, I just decided to shoot photos and enjoy the sights. BlueOrca translated bits and pieces of the funny parts to us.
We got to touch some of the stalagmites that were close to the path. The texture was a glossy, hard (much more than I expected) and very smooth, though if you tap your fingers on it, they do feel a bit brittle. It’s really amazing that these things are continuing to grow. My favourites were when some of the columns – they appeared like a stalactite fused with a stalagmite.
After the approximately one hour tour, we returned above ground. I needed to retrieve my tripod, which had been confiscated earlier. :( We grabbed some gaufres by a vendor near the bus-stop. The guy only had two left, so we had to split the waffles. Nutella. mmmm :)
The bus came and we were off to the Top of Monaco. Till next time!