Bike Trip Photos: California

For me, the best part of the trip was cycling through the redwoods on July 4th, just north of Orick, CA. There was almost no traffic on this part of the route, and it was even slightly downhill. Here are some pictures of Ryan being dwarfed by the trees:



Soon after the redwoods, we hit the northern part of Highway 1, which was the hardest part of the trip for me. The weather wasn't cooperating, so we had a headwind most of the time. And in addition, this section of the route has lots of small hills, so we were never able to relax at all.



But we eventually reached San Francisco, which was an awesome feeling. (I actually think that was more exciting than reaching Mexico!) Just before crossing the bridge, we saw this depressing sign which told us that we had another 778 miles to go. Fortunately, the sign was talking about the Coastal Trail, and we only had 700 miles left.




After stopping in Berkeley for two days, we headed back out to tackle Big Sur. After completing the northern coast, Big Sur was pretty easy. Here's Ryan at Hurricane Point:



At Pfeiffer Big Sur, we didn't need the tent; we just slept out under the trees. It was pretty awesome.



But the next night, we stayed in the best campsite of the whole trip, at Kirk Creek Campground. Our campground was on the edge of a cliff, right above the ocean. So cool.





Here's Ryan, at the top of the last hill of Big Sur. From here to Mexico, the route was mostly flat, with just one more big hill (the one just north of Gaviota).



If you're a fan of Arrested Development, then you'll understand why we had to stop at a banana stand on Balboa Island, in Newport Beach.




And finally, after 2140 miles, 37 days of cycling, and 4 rest days, we reached Mexico! I was happy just to look at the border, but Ryan felt that he had to go stick his foot (and his bike) across it.

Bike Trip Photos: Oregon

I still haven't posted pictures from most of our bike trip, so I'm going to try to catch up on that. In this post: pictures from Oregon.

Here's an example of one of our campsites, at Sunset Bay State Park. Here I am, dutifully cooking breakfast, while Ryan is off taking photos. Thanks for the help, Ryan! Just kidding, breakfast was always really easy, since it was just oatmeal.




Here's Ryan snacking on some blackberries that he found on the side of the road.



And here are a couple of Ryan's pictures. Even bicycles get tired sometimes!




Here we have Ryan letting out some of his energy on the beach at Harris Beach State Park, our last stop in Oregon:




And finally, I leave you with a selection of pictures of the beautiful Oregon coastline:

Salamanca, Daytime

Okay, time for a photo tour of Salamanca!

First of all, here's the view from the balcony of the apartment where I live. Since it's on the top floor, it has a terraza overlooking the city. From here, it's about a 10-minute walk to the Plaza Mayor, which is the heart of the city, and a 15-minute walk to school.



The walk to school is a pretty nice way to wake up in the morning. This is the main street that we take, with the Universidad Pontificia at the end.




We also pass the Convento de las Ursulas (which rents out some of its building to a popular nightclub called Camelot):



And the Iglesia de la Purisma:




But the most stunning sight in Salamanca is the cathedral. You see it over and over again as you walk around the city. From a garden near the cathedral:



From the Puente Romano:



And from the University of Salamanca:



The cathedral and the university both have amazingly facades, and each one has something hidden in its facade: on the university, it's a frog, and on the cathedral, it's an astronaut. (The frog has been around for a long time, I think, but the astronaut is obviously a recent addition.) Here's part of the cathedral's facade:



And the plaza in front of the university, with its facade:



Another building which shows up time and time again in Salamanca is the Convento de San Esteban:




Salamanca also has tons of fountains and statues sprinkled around the city. Unfortunately they're not usually labeled, so I don't know what they are. The last statue is supposed to be a bull, but I think that someone cut its head off in the past year or so...






And finally, the Plaza Mayor during the day, without the giant pumpkin in the middle:

Bilbao

The only downside to living in Salamanca, I think, is that it's not really a transportation hub. For most destinations, your only option is to take a bus, unless you want to go to Madrid or some other big city first.

So, for instance, I went to Bilbao a couple of weekends ago, which required a 6-hour bus ride each way. It actually wasn't so bad: the buses in Spain are pretty nice, and the bus stopped for 30 minutes in Burgos, so I had a few minutes to check out the cathedral there.

I enjoyed Bilbao a lot. I went there to see the Museo Guggenheim, but Bilbao is actually a pretty lively city, and there are a number of things to see. I went to the beach one day, spent a day in the museums, and spent another day just wandering around the city's parks.

I stayed in a somewhat... interesting neighborhood in Bilbao. It's clearly an immigrant neighborhood—there are a number of halal butchers there, for instance. And it's a poor neighborhood, with people hanging out on street corners with nothing to do. I even saw someone have his wallet stolen while I was there. But the neighborhood is also filled with a number of hip restaurants, galleries, and stores, since it's right across the river from the city center.

I didn't realize this before, but Bilbao is located in a very beautiful section of Spain. The city center is pretty flat, but it's surrounded by hills, so you catch views like this as you walk around town:



And just one more photo of the museum (the Guggenheim is a lot of fun to photograph, but I won't bore you with all of my photos):



The Guggenheim building is pretty cool, and I enjoyed the permanent Richard Serra installation inside, but the art itself isn't particularly spectacular. The city has another museum, the Museo de Bellas Artes, which has an amazing collection of modern Spanish art. (I think that this museum is now one of my favorite museums, as is the Reina Sofia in Madrid.)

The Museo de Bellas Artes also has an outdoor sculpture collection, which includes two more pieces by Serra, as well as this strange sculpture:



While I was wandering around the city, I ran into a tourist office with a lot of graffiti. But it was the piece at the bottom that really caught my eye. SPQR? Does that mean something else in Spain, or is this really a reference to the Roman republic?



Bilbao also has another neat architectural landmark, a bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava. It looks cool from a distance, but when you get close to it, you realize that it's starting to fall apart, even though it's just 10 years old. I wonder if it's a design flaw, or if the city just isn't taking care of it?






There was actually an story about this in the news today: the city added an extension to the bridge recently, and Calatrava has sued them for violating his copyright. Meanwhile, the city claims that Calatrava's design was flawed, because of problems like those cracked glass tiles.

Then, while wandering around the parks in the city, I ran into this sculpture, which I though was pretty neat. If I remember correctly, it's actually a war memorial for the Spanish civil war.

Pictures from Spain

I'm a little more than a week into my classes here in Salamanca, and everything is going well. Spanish is hard, especially since we're learning things so quickly, but I'm dealing with it. I'm making lots of friends here, too, but the problem is that most of them aren't staying as long as I am, so they'll be leaving in the next few weeks. Oh well, I'll just have to meet some of the new students!

Anyway, time for some pictures from Spain. When I was in Barcelona, I visited many of Gaudí's works, of course, and they're a lot of fun to photograph. My favorite spot was the roof of La Pedrera, which has beautiful chimneys sprouting up everywhere. I was there pretty late in the day, when the sun was low, which meant that the light was perfect for photographs.






I also went to La Sagrada Família; I have to say that I actually liked some of the more recent additions to the building more than the parts that Gaudí designed. For instance, they have some amazing stained-glass windows now:



I took a day trip to Segovia and Ávila this weekend with a bunch of other foreign students. Segovia is really cool because it has an aqueduct that dates from Roman times which towers over part of the city:




And then finally, some pictures of Salamanca. These are all in the Plaza Mayor, which is a great plaza in the heart of the city, about a 5 minute walk from my apartment. When you want to meet up with someone in the city, you almost always agree to meet here, under a clock in the plaza:



At the moment, there's a giant inflatable structure in the middle of the plaza that looks like a pumpkin. It really doesn't fit in with the rest of the city, but it makes for some interesting contrasts in photographs:

Myanmar, Part V

Our last major stop in Myanmar was Inle Lake, which is quite large (about 45 square miles) but relatively shallow (5 feet on average). We spent half a day motoring around the lake, visiting monasteries, local craftsmen, and other sights around the lake.

The first thing you notice about the lake is the traditional boats that people use on them. The boats look ridiculously unstable, and the villagers tend to stand way out on one end while rowing them. There are many fisherman on the lake, but we also saw many boats loaded down, like these:




The villagers collect weeds from the bottom of the lake, then use them to form floating gardens where they grow crops (apparently tomatoes are a popular choice).



Many people on the lake, in houses on stilts above the water. This is one of the villages that we visited while we were there:





In this village, they weave cloth from silk and from the lotus plant. (I had no idea that you could do that!) Lotus cloth is even more expensive than silk, because it takes an extraordinary amount of time to make---but it doesn't seem as nice as silk to me. Here's one of the villagers boiling silk:



And another one weaving it:



In another village, they make cheroots, which look a lot like cigars. Apparently the villagers make 1 kyat for rolling a single cheroot. It takes about 30 seconds to roll a cheroot, and apparently they make about 1000 kyats per day, which is less than one dollar. It's amazing how little that is; but on the other hand, they seem to have all the basic necessities for life---food, shelter, water, etc. Their lives certainly aren't as easy as our lives in the western world, but I wouldn't say that the villagers are living in poverty.



There's also a very strange monastery on the lake where the monks have trained cats to jump through hoops. It's now a popular tourist attraction. They don't jump horizontally through hoops like you might expect---the trainer holds the hoop directly over a cat's head, and he jumps straight up through it:



And one more picture that I really liked:

Myanmar, Part IV

Before I get back to Myanmar, a digression: How did Dunkin' Donuts become so ubiquitous everywhere in the world but the West Coast? I ran into them all over the place in Bangkok, and they have "Dunkin' Coffee" here in Barcelona. Of course, they don't have any locations in Myanmar; instead, Yangon had "J' Donuts," which was definitely a Dunkin' Donuts ripoff. It seemed to be the cool hangout for kids with money in Yangon.

Other than the lack of international brands, the most obvious difference between Thailand and Myanmar to me was in the vehicles that you'd see on the streets. In Bangkok, for instance, the taxis tend to be fairly new cars. By contrast, here's a couple of pictures of a pickup taxi that we used in Mandalay:




In addition to being a heap of junk that's about to fall apart, this truck has a subtle problem: the driver sits on the right-hand side. It's hard to tell from these photos, but they drive on the right in Myanmar. Practically every vehicle in the country has the same problem. So, for instance, the doors on every bus open out into the middle of the street, instead of onto the sidewalk. Also, most buses have to carry a "co-pilot" to help the driver pass other vehicles.

Why are all the vehicles backwards? It's the government's fault, of course! They used to drive on the left in Myanmar, but then in 1970 the government decreed that everyone would switch, so now they have a bunch of backwards vehicles.

Another factor is that Myanmar gets most of its vehicles from Japan and Thailand, where people drive on the left. Often, they don't even bother repainting the vehicles after importing them---I think that every bus we rode in had Japanese writing all over it, inside and out. Sometimes you could identify exactly where the bus came from---one bus that I saw said "Holiday Inn Narita" on the side.

Okay, on to more sights. This looks like a fairly typical village scene in Myanmar, right?



Well, sure. Except for all the macaques hanging out on the left-hand side... This is the base of Mount Popa, which is a shrine to nats, or animistic spirits. It's about 777 steps to the top of the mountain; along the way, these macaques try every trick they can think of in order to steal food from you. One jumped on the back of one of our group members; another grabbed onto a girl's skirt and wouldn't let go. It's pretty funny, as long as you're not the target!

After Mount Popa, we headed on to Kalaw, where it only took about a 10-minute walk to get out of town and into the countryside:




Then we went on to Pindaya Cave, which houses more than 8000 Buddha images. Whoever designed the cave floor should be fired; they didn't think very hard about the fact that tile is a really bad idea in caves, where it's usually wet and slippery. This picture shows a few of the Buddhas:



The Buddhas get kind of repetitive after a while, but there's a "meditation cave," which was pretty cool. You have to crawl through a small tunnel to get to it, but it is very peaceful. Here's Daina and Kathy in there:



Closing thought for this post: You've got to love it when a government tries to censor the internet; they never realize just how hard it is to plug every hole. Right now in Myanmar, Gmail is blocked, but in a really stupid way. If you go to http://www.gmail.com/, you get an error message. But if you use https instead of http, it works fine! Morons.