I won’t say too much about the trip other than that the weather co-operated and it was an excellent get-away from reality for a few days. I’ll attach a few pictures of interest on the trip – you may note the theme of animals and nature, which is usually what I try to see when I do travel.
People that have been around the Island should be able to guess four distinct locations in these pictures.
A small story from the travels that I’m currently on…
Picture: Tenson Scott and myself
The Cayman Islands consist of three islands. Grand Cayman is where most of the tourists go, and two smaller islands, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman are about 80 miles northeast of Grand Cayman. Right now I am on Cayman Brac.
On Cayman Brac, on the northeastern side of the island is a rather knowledgable fisherman named Tenson Scott. He is also an accomplished jewelry creator. His speciality is working with Caymanite, a type of rock only found on the Cayman Islands. Caymanite is white, orange and red and when polished and prepared the correct way looks beautiful. When you talk with Tenson, he will have all sorts of stories to discuss, including how he can catch fish (Mackerels) without a hook, simply by being smarter than the fish. His knowledge about making Caymanite jewlery is extensive (including where to get the raw material on the Bluffs of Cayman Brac) and most remarkably is all self-taught. Despite being 70 years of age, Tenson mentioned that one has to keep their minds engaged and keep asking questions to not get stale.
His shop is on the northeastern side of the island, named Nims. It is an innocent looking place and you can easily miss it while visiting Cayman Brac, but certainly one attraction of the place is Tenson.
The other wonderful thing about the “sister islands” is that you have all the wonderful aspects of the beach, but none of the tourists.
I’ll be back by the end of the month.
Putting a long story short, we visited 49N114W and 49N112W. Both points are in Alberta, very close to the Canada-USA border. The first hike was generally more interesting as it involved going up and down some terrain and a bit of off-trail hiking. The picture above shows the Google Earth trace that we attempted to reach the point. The zig-zag just on the northeast side of the river was a best guess, although I believe it is relatively accurate.
Many people do not know that the Canada-USA border (at least for the western half of Canada) is not exactly on the 49 north latitude. In this particular case, the actual border was slightly south of 49 north. That said, it was pretty cool being able to walk across the border into the USA and not be harassed by customs officials. As you can tell by the map, our invasion in the USA was short-lived as we tried to figure the best way to get to the boundary vista. I’ve never visited the state of Montana either, until that day.
I’ll be taking an extra long weekend and will be going camping up in the southwestern part of Alberta. PST free shopping! Actually shopping is the last thing on the itinerary, it will be purely exploration.
Hopefully we’ll be able to do a few border confluence points (looking at 49N114W for the vista view, 49N112W is near an official border crossing and a dry lake). Most of these points along the border have only been explored 5 or 6 years ago and it would be nice to add a few data points to the gallery – the terrain might have changed.
Another quick vacation post.
The Sahara desert is very, very, very hot in the summer two hours after sunrise to an hour before sunset. It is so hot and dry that whenever you breath in, the mucus in your nose dries up instantly and it clogs up your sinuses. It makes for a good air filter since the air is typically sandy.
I found it rather funny that the only establishments open in the towns late at night are the internet cafes. It appears that teenagers all across the world are addicted to it. I think the one way for peace advocates to achieve their goals would be to make sure that the internet is everywhere – if people are too busy chatting with each other on MSN or Skype or whatever, they can’t be doing worse things.
Other than that, still having a good time although unfortunately this holiday is about to end soon.
I’m at an internet cafe in Taghazout, Morocco. I don’t have access to an SD or Compact Flash reader so I can’t post any pictures but rest assured that some will come ahead. Might even try doing a confluence during an inland excursion.
I have been forced to recall most of the French that I learned from Grade 6 to 11. The people here speak French very well – as in they have the “accent” that French speakers have but apparently otherwise it isn’t the best. So it’s difficult to tell whether they’re speaking in Arabic or French but I think I’ve gotten used to that now.
Economically, in terms of purchasing power and that kind of stuff, its as if we’ve returned 40 years in the past, but with the technology of today (Internet and cellular access). For example, a SIM card costs 4 bucks Canadian-equivalent here. The other thing I’ve noticed is that the fresh fruit here tastes a hell of a lot better than in Vancouver – a lot more tasty and sweet. There is excellent access to locally-grown produce here at the local marketplaces and if you like that kind of stuff, there are a lot of base ingredients that you can make things with. It’s a nice place.
A couple more observations – there are police everywhere here. On roundabouts on the streets, there are typically one or two police officers watching the traffic. Apparently the King was around this area recently so that’s when they clean up their act (putting on fresh flags, and cleaning the area, etc.). The other observation is that I saw an ad for 20MBit/s ADSL here – why can’t we get that in Vancouver??
Bon voyage and I likely will not be posting until the end of the month.
I’m back from Winnipeg.
Not surprisingly, it was extremely cold. Apparently the day that I arrived the weather turned ten degrees cooler than the previous few days and walking outside the airport and feeling the crisp frigid air creeping up my legs made me realize that Vancouver fashion just isn’t going to cut it there – there’s too much room between the pant legs and the skin for cold air to get through!
While leaving the facility I visited on Wednesday I took the opportunity to climb up some of the miniature stacks of ice that accumulate in parking lots for the fun of it – Winnipeg is as flat as a pancake and if you can climb up three feet you get that much more of a view of the surroundings. Suffice to say in the middle of one of these snow hills my leg crashed through and I got about two feet of my leg filled with ice crystals. This is an experience that one could never get in Vancouver.
It got as cold as -16 with wind chill up to -25 and I didn’t have a chance to explore around, nor did I really want to at night since I probably would have frozen to death before getting anywhere.
On Thursday it was snowing a bit and I suspect this might be the last snow I will see until possibly the late part of this year.
The last note is that I flew there via Air Canada and the jet they used was an Embraer 190 – not only was the distance between my seat and the seat in front of me greater than usual (normally if I slouch a bit my knees contact the pouch in front which I find annoying) but they had video on demand on the backs of the seats in economy class which was really cool. I was about 80% through the James Bond “Dr. No” movie when the plane landed and they cut off the system. That sucked. That said, if you have a choice of getting on a regular Airbus 319 or an Embraer, take the Embraer.
Continuing on from my previous post nearly four months ago, I was in New Mexico late in September. I’ve had this post in the draft state, but will finally wrap it up here! You may wish to refer to the map in the previous post, as it gives the geographical locations of the various stops.
Stop #3 was at Carlsbad Caverns. The caves were gigantic and we signed up for a couple tours and also did the self-guided tour. The hotel we stayed at was in Hobbs, which is an oil town. The (small) cities in New Mexico have a very similar structure – very wide roads leading into the city and a relatively small downtown core. This is in contrast to most small towns in BC, where the geography usually restricts the urban development. When land is cheap (and flat), it makes urban planning rather easy.
There were many points of interest at the caves. We did the Slaughter Canyon Tour and this involved going to a separate entrance about 20 miles south of the main cave. It also involved a small hike up a hill in a creek valley.
Taking pictures inside the caves was somewhat difficult due to the lighting conditions, but I’ll try to post some anyway.
The really cool thing at Carlsbad Caverns was during the evening, there was an outdoor amphitheater that you can sit down and watch bats exit the cave in the evening. It was quite an interesting experience to be surrounded by tens of thousands of bats (small little things) as they emerge from the cave and fly opposite to the sunset. The other amazing thing is that not only could you hear them, but you could smell them! The odor of bats is unmistakable. It was a very nice and unique way to enjoy the sunset.
Just as a side note, after that evening the next destination was Las Cruces (west) and to get there the most efficient route was through El Paso, Texas. The highway between Carlsbad and El Paso (US-180) was very lonely – not a single gas station but the roads were very well maintained. At the state border line was a sign with a “Welcome to Texas”, a Texas flag, “Drive Friendly – The Texas Way” and finally on the bottom “Proud Home of President George W. Bush”. Now if you click on the picture, you will see bullet holes in the sign, which I found infinitely amusing.
The second picture was taken in El Paso at night – as El Paso is a border town (sharing a border with Mexico), there is a structure not too far from the border that displays a huge lone star (since Texas’ motto is the Lone Star State) that can probably be seen by aircraft and everybody on the Mexico side. Some people despise the American (primarily Texan) way of making everything big and grand, but I tend to consider it a culture all in itself.
During the trip, I added three confluence points to my records: 35N105W, 35N106W and 32N104W. 32N104W was probably the more interesting of the three since it was right along the New Mexico-Texas Border and it had only been explored once before. We managed to find a cairn that was setup by the previous explorers. All three were relatively easy to get to. I wanted to do some more confluence points of moderate difficulty, but just ran out of time.
Stop #4 (before we made the trip to El Paso) was in Roswell. Any science fiction fan knows that this is where a UFO crashed in 1947, and you just have to check out the downtown core:
It was always one of my things on life’s “to-do” list to visit this place. Other than the rather thematic downtown core, Roswell is just like any other New Mexico city in the area, just slightly larger (population is about 50,000). It also so happens that I have a friend that lives in the area who works for the oil industry and we explored the International UFO Museum and of course had to dissect an alien body:
The UFO museum was a total riot and I highly suggest that anybody in the Roswell area go visit it if they have a drop of science fiction blood in their veins and a couple hours to read the stories. The previous owners of Storyeum should take a lesson here. They also have a gift shop which I summarily proceeded to raid and buy infinite amounts of alien-related Christmas presents for my brother, including the infamous alien Christmas stocking.
We all ate at some Mexican restaurant on the north side of the city which was a pretty good way to conclude the evening. Much to my surprise, the food actually digested well and the trip back to Hobbs in the dark was routine.
Stop #5 was in the City of Rocks state park. What’s remarkable about this place is that it’s an outcropping of rocks that was deposited by a volcanic range nearly 30 miles north of the present location. As a result, it looks like Stonehenge times a hundred. The even cooler thing is that they let you climb the rocks and if you were not careful enough you could even kill yourself doing so if you fell off the wrong way.
A crowning achievement of mine is in the realm of photography – while running around the place, I discovered grasshoppers having sex. So you, my loyal readers, can see my debut as an Etymopornographer. I’ve got better pictures than this one, but I’m trying to sell the rights to them to PlayLarvae Magazine.
Climbing around the rocks and just surveying the vast landscape was both fun and spiritually uplifting.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable holiday. I would highly recommend visiting New Mexico for anybody that likes open terrain, unpopulated areas, long road trips and a healthy appreciation of nature. I wouldn’t mind coming back and taking a bunch of friends for an extended camping trip.
The timing was right and the airline ticket prices were right – flights to Phoenix were $130 each way plus taxes (so about $370 round trip… taxes nearly 30% of the cost of the ticket now!). The flight was via Denver airport. How come tickets to Albuquerque were nearly double? I had a whole stack of rental car credits and hotel credits which had to be used by the end of the year, so it was a perfect opportunity to fly out and explore the huge (but sparsely populated) state of New Mexico.
I don’t mind driving long distances and since everything was at least a hundred miles apart, there was quite a bit of driving. Thankfully the drop in oil futures had already been reflected in local gasoline prices!
Anyhow, we sketched an itinerary of things we’d like to do and see and we eventually did the following:
Stop #1 was in the Bisti Badlands, officially known as the Bisti Wildnerness Area. There isn’t a lot of information available about this area on the internet, as it is in a very remote corner of New Mexico, very near the border of the Navajo Indian Reservation. Unfortunately, by the time we got there it was raining quite heavily along with lightening. It was also getting pretty dark. It is also kind of eerie driving down a gravel road without anybody else remotely in sight (if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, you’re pretty much screwed).
The pictures didn’t turn out all that great simply because it was too dark and it was really starting to rain. The first picture gives you an idea of just how remote the area is (keep in mind that I’m driving on this road!):
The second picture gives you somewhat of an idea of what rock formations you can see in this area. Apparently it was a swamp many millions of years ago that dried away as the land rose from the last ice age. You can also see the reflection of some of the rain drops from the camera flash.
As the road was getting decidedly wet from all the rain, we decided to get out of dodge before there was significant flooding – we didn’t want this to be a one-way ticket!
On the drive to Albuquerque, we were treated with a nice rain and lightening show on the road – some of the thunder could be heard as little as two seconds after the flash, which meant that the lightening was less than a kilometer away. Inside the car and driving it is always safe, but if you were outside it would be a hair-raising experience while you waited for the storm to pass. There is absolutely no opportunity for cover at all – the landscape is flat.
One thing that we did catch a video of, however, is lightening! Unfortunately I can’t post a screenshot of it (stupid Windows Media Player doesn’t show it) but what we got a picture of was a barbed wire fence and lightening coming from that to the ground! It’s a rather cool thing to witness – what happens is that the lightening causes the wires to discharge into the ground and you don’t get to see it very often, let alone on film!
Stop #2: The weather the next day in Albuquerque was a lot better and the next thing we did was head back to visit the Petroglyph National Park just west of the city. Looking at petroglyphs has been somewhat of a reoccurring theme in past vacations and the opportunity to see more things scribbled down on rocks (whether by people thousands of years old or 10 years old) couldn’t be missed. The area in Albuquerque around the park has been somewhat developed for nice-looking residential housing, which I find interesting.
Anyhow, here are some pictures of petroglyphs and one of myself on top of the local peak (overlooking a mountain range to the north of the city):
I’ll write more about #3 to #5 in a later post.
I find searching for confluences to be rather addictive. I’m still doing the “low lying fruit”, but I’m planning on some real adventures that require some effort other than getting out of the car for an hour.
35N106W (New Mexico)
35N105W (New Mexico)
32N104W (Texas)
This now means I’ve done confluence points in three US states: Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
I’ve got some more vacation photos coming, but they will wait until later.
