DryStoneGarden

The Hot Springs

I bet no one thought DryStoneGarden would post about pedicures.

But I did get a pedicure of sorts at the hot springs in the Sierra de la Laguna national park near Santiago, a town about 50 miles north of San Jose del Cabo. The hot springs is very low-key, just a circle of rocks in a stream coming out of the hills. Hot water comes up through the sand and seeps out of the cliff in a couple of places, right before an abandoned concrete dam. The pool is not especially hot, though I would still rate it as a hot springs rather than just a warm springs, especially after we dug down into the sand to make the water warmer. But the unique part was that after we’d been in the water a little while, twenty or thirty small fish about 4-6 inches long gathered round and started nibbling at our feet.

It was a bit unnerving at first. Not so much the feeling — which is delicate and sandpapery, a little like being licked by a cat or I suppose a swarm of cats — but rather the thought that these fish were feeding off our bodies. But we got used to it. We joked that it was probably a fancy skin treatment in Asia, but of course it turns out that it is. And it definitely works; afterwards our skin was silky smooth. As a test, we let them feed on one of my knees but not the other, and we could indeed see a noticeable difference afterwards. It wasn’t a huge difference — nobody stared or pointed at my knees when I walked around in shorts — but one knee was distinctly shiny and smooth while the other was rough. I recommend it.

Sierra de la Laguna Granite

Veins

We explored up the gorge a ways; fun boulder-hopping. There was a double band of dark rock running along the creek for something like kilometer before the creek turned. Really beautiful. I hadn’t expected to see such striking granite in southern Baja. I was struck by the similarity between the roots of the wild figs and the veins in the rock. We basically went to the park because we happened to be passing by, but, out of all of Baja, the park is probably the place that we most want to go back to.

Wild Fig

More Veins

The Gorge,

Manos Arriba!

Here are a few photos of our trip to Baja. We just got back, and we’re still catching up on everything. Apparently, there has been a bit of rain while we were gone. Our plants are happy, but no one else seems to have enjoyed it.
I can’t say I missed it. Baja was great, one of the best trips we’ve taken and definitely our best bicycle tour. We travelled about half the peninsula, from San Ignacio to San Jose del Cabo, cycling about 300 miles and busing through the boring section south of Ciudad Constitucion and the busy section near Cabo; the 150 miles of riding along the Sea of Cortez from Santa Rosalia to south of Lareto was perfect in just about every way. And, the sign of a great trip, at the end we felt ready to come back home but also determined to go back to Baja in the future. We spent a lot of time checking out the Baja plants, so I should have some posts about the desert soon.

Volcan las Tres Virgenes

It’s a big desert down there, so some of the small-format photos don’t do it justice. As always, you can see them at a bigger size if you click on them.

Cemetary South of Santa Rosalia

Playa Ligui and Isla Danzante

Roadside Tire Repair

The Plaza at San Jose del Cabo

Playa Escondida, Bahia Concepcion

Taylors Mistake

Here are some more New Zealand watercolors and drawings I scanned from another one of Anita’s notebooks. These are from an earlier trip, travelling without me. A little random, I know, to post landscape studies of New Zealand while I’m traveling in Mexico, but Mexico posts will have to wait until I get home.

Pohutakawa aka New Zealand Christmas Tree

Willow Tree in Queenstown

Cave Rock, Sumner

Akaroa

The Remarkables

Taylor’s Mistake, Cave Rock, and Akaroa are all near Christchurch. The Remarkables are in the south, near Queenstown.

Te Hapu

I mentioned that we didn’t have a camera with us at Te Hapu; it got edited when we were trying to get everything to fit on our bikes. Instead, Anita carried watercolors and painted landscape studies at the places where we spent a significant amount of time.

Te Nikau

The watercolor of Te Nikau, on the west coast further south than Te Hapu, scanned in a little differently than the others; I’m not sure why. We got a bit stuck there, waiting over a week for the rains to let up enough so we could keep cycling. It was a beautiful place to be stuck — lush rainforest, dramatic cliffs, wild beaches — and I loved the excess of greenery everywhere, but all that vegetation needs a lot of rain, so I came to the conclusion that the west coast might be better seen from a car. We had better weather and better cycling in the northern parts of the island, Te Hapu, Upper Moutere, Abel Tasman, and the Marlborough Sound.

Upper Moutere

Abel Tasman

Marlborough Sound

People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study from Steven M. Bumgardner on Vimeo.

“I’ve lived and worked in National Parks for almost 20 years, and as much as I love landscape photography, I also like looking at the human footprint and the human experience in our national parks.” Bumgardner

This showed up on the Daily Dish just before I left town, so folks might have seen this already, but it merits posting anyways, among other reasons because the rock climbing at 2:30 is on the Stately Pleasure Dome in the Tenaya Lake area, which I posted about last fall. Very cool to see a time lapse of climbs I’ve done. Yosemite must be the most photographed valley in the world, but as far as I’m concerned there can never be too much Yosemite photography. I like that this collection focuses on the multitudes of people in the park, a significant part of the Yosemite experience; if you want to enjoy the valley, you have to come to terms with how many other people want to enjoy it, too.

‘You take and put a unicycle into the picture and in a way it turns the world into a playground.’ Kris Holm

Random disclosure: six or seven years ago I used to sometimes play unicycle basketball with some riders here in Berkeley. I only played for about a year before I stopped, but it was a lot of fun, especially at first when I had that ‘wow, basketball on a unicycle’ sense of wonder and ludicrousness.

For those unfamiliar with unicycle basketball, (are you living in a cave?) the rules are the same as regular basketball and you do all the same things — dribble, pass, shoot — the subtle difference being that you do everything while riding a unicycle. It works pretty well, and is not as hard as you might think; if you can play basketball and you can ride a unicycle, you can play unicycle basketball. And, actually, I proved that you can still play even if you are questionable at the unicycle part. I was pretty much a flounder on the unicycle, really, and always the worst rider on the court, but the fact that I had played basketball in high school helped to make up for that. I would fall off immediately after every shot, but falling off didn’t matter if I sometimes got the ball to go in. Other players never fell off and could literally ride circles around me, but might struggle to make a simple lay up. Only one player was good at both basketball and unicycling. Games were chaotic and unicycles would crash and fly all over the place, but the moments of gracefulness and actual basketball were very sweet. Few people walked past a game without stopping to watch for a while.

Watching the video (featuring the world’s first known unicycle basketball helmet-cam, stay with it until the end when they score), you’ll see that uni-basketball is not a gentle game. When I played, there were lots of multiple-unicycle pile-ups, there was always someone bleeding after a game, and one guy broke his wrist a little after I stopped. Personally, I never really wanted to treat the game so competitively; it was just unicycle basketball, after all, so who cares about the score? But, to give the other players credit, some of them stuck with it and kept playing, kept improving, and have now formed into a genuine team, the mighty Berkeley Revolution, with a coach and uniforms and plays and everything. Next week, they are competing at the unicycle basketball world championship at UNICON XV in New Zealand. Rock on.

Apparently, they should be the favorites to win. The defending world champion is (of course) Puerto Rico, though I’m not completely sure about that, so don’t wager any money the next time you are doing uni-basketball trivia. I do know that Puerto Rico has for years been head and shoulders above everyone else, but the press hasn’t always covered the unicycle basketball world as closely as I might like (though the Revolution is generating a buzz these days, with a feature in the East Bay Express and now a segment on the California Report, listen here, a surprise to me when it came on the radio), and so some other team might have pulled off an upset at the last championship without me realizing. Puerto Rico won’t be in New Zealand, so the Berkeley team feels very confident. I’ll update this post with the results when I have them.

– Update —

The Berkeley Revolution came up just short, finishing in second place.

Uni-basketball is just one of the events at the unicon and just one aspect of modern unicycling. Photos and descriptions of various types of riding — Artistic Freestyle, MUni (mountain-unicycling), Street, Track and Field, Unicycle Hockey and Basketball, Road Racing — are on the unicon site. Below the fold, I go a little youtube crazy with videos of the Puerto Rico All Stars, MUni hot shot Kris Holm, street rider Dan Heaton, defending freestyle world champion Matt Sindelar, and legendary Bay Area unicycle superhero Pink Man. (more…)