east, south, west, north

[rezendi]

index of pictures

Highway 10 to Twentynine Palms (I counted only twentyeight) and Joshua Tree National Park, staggeringly beautiful and disturbingly alien. Good timing on my part; the usually barren desert was in bloom. I really did feel a little as if I was exploring another planet. I think this is largely due to the eponymous vegetation, which looks warped and unearthly, due to the fact that, as I'm sure you all know, the Joshua tree is actually neither tree nor cactus, but a member of the lily family. An ominous, sometimes twenty-foot-high member.

I timed my arrival at Ryan Mountain for exactly midday, and realized as I parked that I had neglected to bring any sunscreen. I've noticed over the last few decades that people hardly ever ask me "so is it easy being so smart?" Of late I've started to think there might be a reason for this. The estimated hiking/exposure-to-blistering-sun time was 3 hours. Fortunately, as is usual with American parks, the estimated time seemed to have been devised by crackhead octogenarians; I was up and down in 75 minutes including plenty of photo stops. A glorious hike.

Brief stopover in Palm Springs, which I just didn't get. I've been conditioned by newspapers to associate it with extreme wealth and privilege. I may or may not be opposed to wealth and privilege (it really depends on the context) but I have noticed in the past, eg in the Hamptons, or Aspen, or even the muted Canadian version in the Muskokas, that areas of wealth and privilege do correlate well with pretty scenery and cool stuff to look at. But Palm Springs...there's not much there there. It's nice that they can irrigate the desert into lushly green golf courses, but really, it's like Florida's Longboat Key without the ocean.

86 South. I intended to stop for the night in Salton City, but a) it was incredibly creepy b) there were no motels, so I continued on to Brawley, and the next morning doubled back a little to stop by the shoreline of the Salton Sea. It's very picturesque, as catastrophic engineering failures go. It also stinks to high heaven with sulfurous salts and Lord knows what else. I think the military has the right idea in using the shore as a weapons test area.

8 West, through God's own gravel pits, spectacular rolling hills thick with red boulders. The only "TURN OFF AIR CONDITIONING" road sign I've ever seen outside of Death Valley. 94 West, a winding car-commercial highway that parallels the Mexican border, past the omnipresent green-and-white vans of the Border Patrol. I saw no illegal immigration attempts, but I imagine the coyotes do most of their work by night. On the 5 back north, today, there were several CAUTION signs above a picture of a family in mid-scurry - no, really - and a Border Patrol stop, for every car on I-5, about half an hour north of San Diego.

Tijuana was less unpleasant than I expected. Poorer and dirtier than San Diego, sure, and the area near the US border is basically a giant strip mall of pharmacies (the first attempt to sell you drugs - legal ones - takes place approximately 20 feet past the turnstile that is the Mexican border, before you reach the comatose Mexican border inspectors who don't even pretend to pay attention to you). But it's still considerably more prosperous than most of the rest of this planet, the beggars and hustlers were few and never in-your-face, and the warrens of crap for sale in the tourist zone at least seemed to be reasonable-quality crap at first glance. (There was no second glance; I'm not much of a shopper.) "Not unpleasant" is not the same thing as "pleasant"; while there's nothing really bad about Tijuana, there's nothing actively good about it either, except for the closed-down jai-alai palace.

Amusing discovery: Mexican supermarkets have transformed the position of "greeter" introduced by Wal-Mart. They have dispensed with the greeting part entirely, and instead, they have a pretty woman in short skirt and tight shirt stand just inside the door and pout silently at the incoming customers. Naturally I was shocked and appalled by this kind of medieval objectification. I went back several times just to make sure.

5 north to San Diego, wouldn't mind spending a full week there one of these years. This morning, 5 further north to San Clemente, where I parked and napped above the beach for an hour or so, and back up to Venice, from where I type. My Suzuki Swift is not exactly an ideal road-trip vehicle - it has a miniscule gas tank, develops an alarming shudder around 75 mph, and just today has started to chug a little before deciding to start - but it lived to tell the tale, and it needs live only another week, before I wander off to the other side of this little spinning ball of dirt.