A hike, a home
On the 1st of January, Stephanie and I drove out to Stinson Beach for a hike up into the hills below Mt Tam. It was an unexpectedly gorgeous day. The sun was so warm it must have been 70 or 80°F. The sky was clear except for a slight ocean haze that gave the horizon a soft focus.
We’d just returned home the day before, after spending the holidays in Austin with my family. It’s worth emphasizing that it was the first time we’d returned home in over a year and a half. Until then we’d simply been moving forward, traveling from one place to another in a linear progression, ever since we’d left San Francisco in August 2010. I thought I’d regain that sense of belonging when we first returned to San Francisco, but I didn’t. In retrospect, October and November and December were weird. I felt out-of-touch with my surroundings and pretty uncomfortable in my own skin.
But on that beautiful day, hiking up the Matt Davis Trail, through wooded glens and over exposed grassy hillsides, I felt completely in my element. I had returned. I realized that it becomes a home when you return to it. Simply reappearing in San Francisco after 13 months wasn’t enough. We could just as well have dropped our bags anywhere. It takes concentrated time in a place for it to become home. Then you have to leave it and return.
A sun-dappled path through the woods
A staircase enshrouded with Spanish moss
The Coastal Trail diverges
“Sort Sol” in San Francisco at Sunset
On my walk home tonight I saw these birds flying around in formations that resembled the Danish sort sol, or “black sun”. I felt compelled to pull out my camera and snap a few stills. As it happens, my 21mm lens broke last weekend, so instead I had my 35mm with me, which turned out to be the perfect focal length, capturing the whole flock without feeling too wide or too tight.
Pomo Canyon
A few weeks after arriving in San Francisco, Stephanie and I hiked the Pomo Canyon trail in Sonoma Coast State Park with Jonathan, Stacey, and friends. Along the way, I took a few photos that I liked—I think they look quite nice together.
Looking up within a sequoia “fairy ring”
Mossy trees
Foggy sequoias
Windswept hillside
Unfinished business at Arches
After thirteen months away, we returned to San Francisco on Friday, driving from Austin over seven days. Along the way, we stopped in Moab to complete a hike at Arches National Park that we had attempted four years earlier. It was overcast and we got caught in the rain at the end, but we did succeed in making it all the way around the Devils Garden Primitive Loop.
Ocre en Provence
I thought I had a pretty good feel for Provence (thanks in part to Peter Mayle). I did not expect to stumble upon, literally, ocher.
Northeast of Apt there’s this funny little area known as Colorado Provençal, just outside the village of Rustrel. Stephanie says she’s wanted to go for a while, but I don’t remember hearing about it until we flipped through a brochure in Loriol showing orange rocks jutting out of the green Provençal garrigue. A few weeks later, heading south from Auvergne, we sought out a campground in Rustrel to explore this Colorado-en-France.
If there’s a sign, then it must be for real
It wasn’t until we went hiking through the red, orange, yellow, and white rock of Colorado Provençal that we began to realize this place was more than just a pretty and unusual landscape: it was once a carrière d’ocre (ocher quarry). Thanks to an old map at the campground, we discovered it wasn’t the only one—a handful were scattered throughout the region. Another poster showcased several ocher-related sites in nearby Roussillon: a conservatory, a self-guided quarry trail, and an underground mine.
The red rocks of Colorado Provençal
I had heard the word “ocher” before, but I couldn’t tell you how to spell it (ocre, ochre, ocher?) let alone what it meant. I had the sense that it referred to an obscure color, but I didn’t know which: brown, yellow, orange? It was clear though that ocher was more than just a fancy name for autumnal fashions, it was something that existed in nature.
Shades of ocher
My curiosity was piqued. I wasn’t interested in the wine, the olive oil, or the fields of lavender that so many people come to Provence for. I wanted to know everything I could about ocher. Understanding it seemed to be a key to understanding something quintessentially Provençal: its color.
Aqua rando en Corse
Sometimes it takes a few years for a plan to come together. I think it was during our second trip to France that I first heard about “Aqua Rando” (short for Aqua Randonnée, literally: Water Hiking) where people don wet suits and swim/slide/hike down narrow alpine streams and gullys. I kind of imagined it being like whitewater rafting—without the raft.
Our previous trips to France never allowed enough free time to consider doing one, and I wasn’t sure if we’d get around to it this trip either. On our last day in Porto Vecchio, I was flipping through the various brochures we’d picked up, and thumbed through one for Canyon Corse—the next day we’d be driving to Bastia and they were located on the way. We called and signed up.
Where we’d be canyoning: les aiguilles de Bavella
We showed up the next morning for a three hour course through Pulischellu canyon. I thought maybe there’d be a few slides and a lot of in-stream hiking, but it turned out to be quite the opposite.
Hiking to the start of the course
After a 30 minute hike in bathing suits and climbing harnesses, we arrived at the start: a 9 meter natural slide into a frigid alpine pool. From there we were belayed down a slide/waterfall, jumped off a 4 meter high cliff face, slid down all manner of rocks, did some “freestyle” jumps, and at the very end, slid on our backs, headfirst into a torrent of water that shot us off a cliff with a 3 meter drop. It was a non-stop adrenaline rush.
Cooling off in the wetsuit
Out of Africa
After three nights in Jinja we crossed back into Kenya, spending a night in Eldoret before getting to Lake Naivasha. While there we biked through the nearby Hell’s Gate National Park which turned out to be a lot harder and hotter than we expected, with less wildlife than we saw during our visits to Maasai Mara and Lake Nakuru. I did get a pretty cool shot of three zebra butts.
No promises, but this is probably the last animal shot for a while
From there we headed back to where the overland trip started three weeks earlier: Nairobi. We camped for two more nights (20 total), said our goodbyes to the friends we’d made (who still had many more weeks ahead) and helped to welcome the assortment of new souls who’d be filling up all those empty seats on the truck—including our own.
On the evening of June 4th, we flew to France by way of Doha, Qatar and Milan, Italy, arriving in Nice the following morning.
White Nile Whitewater
After our long day with the mountain gorillas, we had a free day in Musanze, so a group of us went to see Lake Kivu, which forms the border between Rwanda and the Congo. It’s a limnically active lake, which means there’s a risk, however minuscule, that an underwater eruption would cause captured CO2 in the lake to bubble up to the surface. And because CO2 is odorless and heavier than oxygen, anyone near the surface would face certain death due to asphyxiation without having any warning (except perhaps the lake suddenly appearing carbonated). So of course we went swimming.
The next day we said our adieus to beautiful Rwanda and crossed back into Uganda, spending the night at a campsite on the shore of Lake Bunyoni. From there we continued on to Eldoret, stopping for the night, before finally getting to Jinja where we planned to spend three nights. Jinja is something of an adventure playground, with most activities centered around the class 3-5 rapids that occur just beyond where the White Nile exits Lake Victoria. The first day we were there, everyone signed up for a full day of rafting (I mean, c’mon, whitewater rafting at the source of the world’s longest river—hells yeah!), and on the second day folks did whatever they wanted: more rafting, kayaking, tubing, quad-biking, or in our case, not much of anything.
View towards Bujagali Falls on the Nile from our campground
On the morning of May 28th, we got picked up at the campground and shuttled over to Nile River Explorers to get suited up. With our packed breakfast in hand (fruit salad and egg chapati) they bused us over to the put-in, gave a quick safety talk, and got us into the rafts. 70 people in 10 rafts, and this was the slow season. The rapids in the White Nile are separated by long pools of fairly deep, still water, so whereas most rafting guides would try to avoid the tricky parts of a big class 5, the guides on the White Nile seem to relish every opportunity to send the raft, and everyone in it, flying into the drink. So after a comprehensive out-of-boat training session in the calmer waters, we started off.
All aboard!
The day consisted of 8 series of rapids, most of them class 4 and 5, one of which was the tail end of a class 6 we had to portage around. Though several folks in our group desperately wanted to flip, and we came close a few times, we never went over (which I kind of appreciated). However on one occasion we did lose Stephanie, as we hit a rapid unexpectedly off-center. (Sadly we didn’t get any photos of this momentous occasion.) One of the other reasons we weren’t too worried about falling out was the dozen or so whitewater kayakers along with us who acted like pickup trucks whenever anyone had the “misfortune” of having an out-of-boat-experience. Stephanie was quickly towed back to us, a little shaken, but still in one piece.
The most memorable rapid for our group was probably the first, a class 5 which had two possible exits: a gradual chute off to the left, and a 3 meter high (10 foot) waterfall straight ahead. Of course everyone wanted to go over the falls, but we ended up being only one of two rafts that successfully did—and we were the only raft to do so without losing anyone in the process! As a result, we felt pretty awesome for the rest of the day. Here are the photos:
This is how the day began
