Ñandú

I had a problem. Life gave me a solution. It was a somewhat distressing one, though. You see, I collected all these blog-worthy pictures, but I had no story behind them. Go to some local state park, get back home with a bunch of pictures, repeat. How do I write a post about that without making it appallingly boring and losing half my already thin audience? Internet loyalty goes only so far, after all.

Well, now I’ve got a story to tell. It has absolutely nothing to do with photography or state parks, but so what? My blog, my rules.

The story was provided by the internet itself in the form of a game: wordle. If you know the game please go get a coffee while I explain it to the few who don’t (hi, mom). You have six tries to guess a 5-letter word. In each try you are told which letters from your guess are in the target word, shown green if they are on the correct position, yellow otherwise. And that’s it. It’s become hugely popular because it’s seductive, and because you can play it only once a day, and the target word is the same for everyone each day. Of course, the fewer tries you need to guess the word, the better the feeling, and the holy grail is to guess it on the first try.

I’ve been playing it for more than a year (483 times as of this morning, to be precise), and very early on I stuck to the same starting word, IRATE, because it has five of the six most used letters in English. Until one fateful day, when I decided to free myself from my own chains. Strangely (and ominously) enough I chose STEAL as my break-from-routine starting word. I was feeling proud of myself. Even brave, oh so brave! I got the T, the E and the A yellow. Hmm. Interesting. Feeling that the coolest thing in the world to do next was to try IRATE, because it has those three letters and it doesn’t have an S or an L, I went ahead.

After you hit ENTER, wordle reveals the color of each letter slowly, one by one. The I turned green. The R turned green. When the A turned green my smugness turned into panic. Time slowed down. I knew it at that moment. I had the glory at the tips of my fingers and it slipped, just because I wanted to be cool for one day.

I threw my phone away and began cursing and writhing. I didn’t say anything intelligible, but Kathy, who was sharing breakfast with me, only needed to know two things: that I was playing wordle, which was easy to guess since it’s part of my morning routine, and my starting word, which she knew. With the most diabolical gaze I’ve ever seen in her, she grabbed her phone, opened wordle, and stole the holy grail from me. 

Salt Point State Park

Mendocino

Los Padres National Forest

Robert Louis Stevenson State Park

Home

For those of you in other parts of the world, here’s a summary of the California’s winter that has thankfully just ended: wet. State-of-emergency, record-breaking, get-the-canoe-ready kind of wet. I personally noticed that things were getting extreme when I started hearing the terms “atmospheric river” and “bomb cyclone” more often than “traffic jam” and “vegan burrito”. But, other than destruction and toenail fungus, one thing that massive amounts of rain bring, is the potential for an epic superbloom.

A superbloom is a rare desert botanical phenomenon in California in which an unusually high proportion of wildflowers whose seeds have lain dormant in desert soil germinate and blossom at roughly the same time. There. Thank you, wikipedia. (Hey, at least I’m not using ChatGPT to generate this entire post! It’s tempting, though.)

So, when the time seemed right, we loaded our red wildebeest, weighed anchor, and tacked downwind to visit a handful of deserts in Southern California. And it did pay off! The only problem is that things went so smoothly that I’m afraid this is going to be a dull post. I mean, yeah, we were once surrounded by a sea of sheep, and we were on three wheels a couple of times, one of them through a section of road that looked so bad that a 4×4 Ford F-150 chose to turn around (I know, it was the driver, not the truck who made the decision). But the thing is, we didn’t get stranded, nothing broke, and we were not chased by sea snakes. Even more extraordinary was that the first lady and I didn’t even quarrel. Sorry about that, folks — I’ll try to do better next time.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Anza-Borrego is California’s largest state park. It is big, and it feels big. During what was a high-season weekend we found ourselves in complete solitude every night thanks to its vastness, 500 miles of dirt roads, lenient camping regulations, and those wimpy F-150 trucks.

Borrego Springs Sculptures

Anza-Borrego State Park surrounds the little town of Borrego Springs, outside of which you’ll find more than a hundred of these huge sheet metal sculptures of creatures that appear to have reclaimed the desert. They represent the past and present fauna of the Anza-Borrego habitat, with some artistic license to include a dragon, all by the same artist, Ricardo Breceda.

As the story goes, Breceda’s daughter wanted a dinosaur for her birthday, and Breceda, a Mexican-born with no artistic background, grabbed some sheets of metal and made one for her, just like that, while most of us are incapable of even drawing one in two dimensions. Breceda later met an affluent land owner who commissioned all of the sculptures and provided the land to serve as a gigantic outdoor gallery.

Salton Sea

The Salton Sea, a land-locked saline lake that sits below sea level, is the result of an engineering accident. In 1906 silt blocked a canal that diverted water from the Colorado River to irrigate the Imperial Valley. Engineers built a temporary bypass, but it wasn’t too long until it breached. Floodwaters flowed for two years until the breach was stopped, creating a lake about 15 times the size of Manhattan. In the 1950s the area thrived as a vacation destination, but now the lake is drying and exposing a layer of toxic dust from agricultural runoff. It’s hard to shake a post-apocalyptic feeling while going around the lake.

Bombay Beach, on the eastern shore of Salton Lake, flourished as a resort town counting celebrities such as Frank Sinatra as regulars. The exodus due to health concerns and the stench of massive fish die-offs transformed Bombay Beach into a “living ghost town”, but nowadays the town is experiencing a comeback as a quirky hub for artistic expression.

Joshua Tree National Park

There wasn’t a lot of flowers in Joshua Tree, but the park is a jewel always worth visiting. We were rewarded with a rare day of heavy rainfall.

Granite Mountains at Mojave Desert

Ah, the Mojave! It’s a magical place that brings light to the dark corners of your soul. Just come here to spend a couple of nights, get immersed in its healing power, get lost in a granite alley to absorb its wisdom, listen to its subtle silence, feel the place breathe, admire the resilience of its inhabitants, inhale the beauty of its vastness, swallow its dreamlike alchemy… and you’ll come out a different person.

The sweet dessert: Carrizo Plain National Monument

For all your flowery needs, look no further.

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Mount Diablo, at 3849 feet, might not be the tallest mount in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it is the tallest one you can drive to the summit of, and, more importantly, it has the highest prominence, meaning there aren’t any other tall features around, and thus the view from the top is unobstructed. It is said that you can see parts of 40 of California’s 58 counties.

For a dozen years I had the idea of going to Mount Diablo’s summit on a clear day right after a storm to experience the expansive views with the best visibility, but never came with a concrete plan until now, when everything seemed to line up perfectly: lots of rain in the forecast until Tuesday night, clearing winds the following day, and a blank calendar ahead (the latter, admittedly, not a rare occurrence). So I made a reservation for a site in the campground that’s just two miles before the summit, and, come Wednesday afternoon, off we went.

Finding the park’s gate closed when we arrived to the entrance around 5pm caused an initial shock of severe disappointment. I got off to talk to the ranger who was letting some cars out, and before I could say anything he fired “you are the guy who has the reservation?”. I answered with a hesitant “y-yes”, not wanting the spotlight on me, but it was shining bright as the sun and focused as a laser straight to the only person who thought it was such a good idea to come to the park during a heavy storm that he rushed to make a reservation to secure a spot.

 “Do you like to camp in the snow?”

 “Yes!” I tried to be emphatic because I really wanted that gate open for us, but I’m not sure I succeeded as I answered while still processing the unexpected question and containing myself not to ask how much snow we were talking about. 

“You have 4WD?”. That was a much easier “yes”, as it was based on pure, objective facts.

“Well, I guess you know what you’re doing”, he said and let us in. “You can camp anywhere you want”.

We drove to the campground only to find the access closed with traffic cones, but with the entitlement of the freedom just bestowed upon us by the authority, we temporarily removed one cone and drove in. Relieved to see just inches and not feet of snow, we picked what looked like the best site, only to realize that it was exactly the one we had reserved.

We slept cozy and warm, and woke up at dawn to a bit of fresh snow and a wonderful, clear but very cold morning. We intended to drive the remaining two miles to the summit to prepare breakfast at the top, but the road was closed (in a much more unassailable manner than with mere cones), so we parked at a vista point and enjoyed breakfast in the van with the expectedly amazing view. We could see ourselves almost surrounded by a semi-circle of water, from the South San Francisco Bay to the Sacramento Delta. We could see the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean, and even the Farallon Islands.

At around 8am a ranger approached us to ask what the heck we were doing there, but his tone softened when we told him another ranger allowed us to stay overnight. He then informed us we were trapped because the road down was closed due to ice, but we had no hurry and would happily wait for the ice to thaw.

A couple hours later the road clearly reopened because cars started coming in hordes. Until then we had had the entirety of Mount Diablo State Park to ourselves. We hiked to the summit and when we came back it was pure chaos, with a long line of cars waiting on the road for a parking space, and other cars parked wherever they could. It was the middle of the week but it was a splendid sunny day after a long week of bad weather, and Mount Diablo offered the closest snow to several million people who very rarely have it in their backyard.

The only missing thing from this post about the spectacular views from Mount Diablo’s summit is, well, views from Mount Diablo’s summit. You see, the ranger wasn’t entirely correct when he assumed we knew what we were doing, because I slipped on the icy asphalt. My elbow and my camera got the worst part against the pavement, and remained non-functional for a little while. Both have recovered by themselves, of which I’m grateful, but puzzled — I had never heard of a self-healing camera.

Thou shalt not spend more than eight years without visiting the holy land that witnessed thy birth. Not sure if that’s one of the commandments, but if it is, I was about to become a sinner (notwithstanding extenuating circumstances in the form of a global pandemic). So, I went ahead and bought us about six tons of CO₂ worth of airline tickets (sorry, Earth).

Now, since there’s a very nice country between California and Chile where
my childhood friend and his lovely Brazilian wife happen to live, we made a stop in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. (I know, I know, Brazil is not exactly on the way, but it’s not in the opposite direction either, okay?).

Brazil: Minas Gerais and Bahia

Sensibly, we were all tempted to drive to the beach to escape dull Brasilia. Problem was, Brasilia is pretty much in the geographical center of the fifth largest country in the world. In other words, fricking far from the ocean. Fortunately, my friend, who’s as smart as he is crazy, anticipated that there would be some doubts about the practicality of such endeavor, and had the foresight of proving that it was doable… by doing it. Singlehandedly. So, just a couple of weeks earlier he took his car and drove 18 hours non-stop to Ilhéus, Bahia, spent a few days at the beach, and drove back.

Since he could do it by himself, we thought, if it’s four of us who can drive, then why not add a 6-hour southward detour in order to go to Ouro Preto, a colonial town I’ve always wanted to visit. And why go to the closest beach when we could drive 50 more miles (80 km) on a horrendous dirt road to go to a secluded one. And since at that point we were only four hours from Trancoso, which called me back ever since I came in the eighties, then why not go there as well. And why not add a 6-hour northward detour on the way back for a stop at the Chapada Diamantina, always listed among the top national parks to visit in Brazil. Yeah, why not.

Chapada Diamantina

The good, the bad and the ugly of Brazil

The good: its joyful, affectionate people. The immense variety of exotic fruits. The comida à quilo: it’s like a buffet meal, except that your plate is weighed at the end of the line and you pay for what you put on your plate. I like the system.

The bad: sugar in your coffee! You have to specifically request no sugar, and even then, some places just don’t have it: coffee simply comes prepared with sugar… how outrageous! Also, the speed bumps. They are not built to slow you down, they are built so that you have to come to an almost complete stop if you don’t want to destroy your car (and your brain against your skull). They call them quebramolas, or strut wreckers, for a reason, but since some are in the most unexpected places and barely marked, they should be called heart attack makers.

The ugly: Bolsonaristas’ utter disregard for democracy with their banners calling for the army to stage a coup to “save the country”.

Trancoso then and now

I came to the idyllic town of Trancoso some 38 years ago. My then-girlfriend and a friend were camping in Porto Seguro, Bahia, in what was the peak of an extremely low-budget hitchhiking trip we took across Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. That’s when we heard for the first time about Trancoso, a small, remote, free-spirit community about 30 km to the south, and decided to go on a day trip to check it out. And that’s how one morning we took the ferry to Arraial d’Ajuda, the town across the Buranhém River from Porto Seguro, and from there we walked and hitchhiked the rest of the way, along an unfrequented dirt road that ran more or less parallel to the coastline. A discarded coconut we found on the way, its water already consumed but still with a fairly thick layer of meat inside, became our meal for the rest of the day.

We fell in love with Trancoso: the laid-back atmosphere, the people’s friendliness, the sense of community, and last but not least, the nudist beach. We felt we had barely gotten a taste of the place when it came time to head back if we wanted to have any chance of riding the day’s last ferry back to Puerto Seguro. “Screw the ferry”, we said and stayed until dusk. The night — a warm, stormy, moonless one — fell on us when we were tracing our steps back along the same road we came in. We had dense jungle on both sides of the road, and the noise from all sorts of critters was deafening. Magically so. It was amazing for me, although not so much for my girlfriend, who was terrified.

Some good soul took us in his car part of the way back to Arraial d’Ajuda, where we spent the rest of the night wandering along the town’s streets and enjoying the live music some bars offered (all from the outside, as we had no budget to consume anything). We then killed a few more hours just sitting there, exhausted, until the ferry resumed its service in the morning.

Today, 38 years later, Trancoso is an entirely different village. It became a chic place for the rich and famous who fool themselves into buying a piece of authentic life. It’s full of boutique pousadas, the tranquility ruined by traffic that does not fit its narrow streets, the beaches blocked by clubs and restaurants and big houses. As BrazilBeyondRio.com states, “this elegant little beachside town didn’t even have electricity until 1986, not that you’d ever know it today. Trancoso was once so isolated that Brazil changed its currency and the locals didn’t even realise. […] Beyoncé, Leonardo di Caprio, Gisele Bündchen and Naomi Campbell have all spent time holidaying here, and CNN journalist Anderson Cooper is one of Trancoso’s best known residents.” Yikes! I should have read that before coming!

Chile: Atacama

After getting ourselves reacquainted with loved ones in Santiago, we took a six-day trip to San Pedro de Atacama, an intriguing little town at the foot of the Andes Mountains that serves as a gateway to explore the breathtaking region. The Atacama Desert is known as the driest place on earth, so much so that some weather stations have never registered rainfall at all.

When it comes to conveying magnificence I’m better behind my camera than my keyboard, so I’ll shut up and leave you with the following pictures.

The good, the bad and the ugly of Chile

The good: Santiago’s extensive subway network. Modern, clean, fast, convenient. I’ve always been a fan of it.

The bad: Santiago’s air quality. I’m not used to not seeing the mountains in December, hidden behind a thick layer of smog.

The ugly: Santiago’s aggressive drivers. In this part of the world the turn signal is taken as a declaration of war: “you want to cut me off… over my dead body!”. You’ll be more successful if you merge without announcing it (and then optionally you can use the turn signal once you have control of your new position, so that no one can fault you for not signaling).

El Tatio then and now

Almost forty years ago I traveled to the Norte Grande, or Great North, for a second summer in a row because a malfunctioning camera ruined most of my pictures the year before. I was so mad I wanted a re-do. Or an out-do, since this second time I was determined to visit El Tatio, which wasn’t as easy as it is today, particularly with the budget of a college student.

El Tatio, as I now know, is the third largest geyser field in the world, with almost 10% of the planet’s thousand or so geysers. The largest is Yellowstone with about a half, and second is the Valley of Geysers in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, with roughly 10%.

So, not yet twenty years old and fixated with seeing a geyser for the first time in my short life, I got as close as I could by public transportation and found myself in the tiny highland village of Caspana, 3300m (10800ft) above sea level, and just a couple hundred inhabitants.

I got some fruit at a modest stand and asked the owner if he knew the way to El Tatio. It turns out that he did, and he even graciously drew me a map with the trails I had to take before connecting with the truck road at the very end. I never knew if I just lucked out or it was common for Caspanians to both have that knowledge and be so patient with complete strangers.

I put my freshly acquired apples in my backpack and off I went, mostly along a riverbed, to meet those mysterious geological contraptions, still a good thousand meters higher. It took me two days, during which I didn’t see another soul.

Once there I was warmly received by the solitary guard looking after the dorms and machinery left after various failed attempts to harvest geothermal energy. A friendly nortino craving for companionship, he let me use the facilities, including a bed and a marvelous pool that fed from a hot spring. I spent two or three days there, with all the geysers just for my eyes only, immersed in a fascinating experience that marked me deeply. Had I known back then that I had before me, and all for myself, one tenth of all the geysers in the world I would have been even more mesmerized.

Sadly, I don’t remember the guard’s name, but in spite of him being twice my age we kept in touch for years by mail. Real, actual, slow, pen-and-paper mail, if you are old enough to remember it. He always addressed his letters to “amigo caminante”.

Unlike Trancoso, El Tatio hasn’t changed much in 40 years. It’s the same playful geysers with the same solemn backdrop of mountains that go 6000m high, the unflappable adults looking after the boisterous kids. But the experience feels very different as it lacks that spiritual, transformative power. And that’s because there’s no sense of accomplishment when you get there in an “adventure” truck with reclining seats, there’s no peace when the delicate music of the geysers is distorted by the noise of a thousand-strong crowd, there’s no timelessness if they tell you that you have 30 minutes to enjoy the place.

Instead of taking it as a loss, I just feel even more fortunate of having lived that once-in-a-lifetime experience which is now simply unrepeatable. If my memory allows, I will treasure it for another 40 years.