Two things make a big difference to a trip. Local knowledge and explorer instinct. With our friend David, I stayed up late in the night tapping into the first and swapping the second.
Continue readingTag: united states
Living in Washington, DC, is not like living in Beijing, China. There are a million differences (and a few similarities to be covered another time, not least the traffic). Perhaps the most telling for me is the difference in hiking.
Continue reading
“I don’t have time for this right now”, she said gruffly into the phone. And she was busy – for a burger bar in a small village in the desert hundreds of miles from anywhere, this place was hopping. If it was film noir, she’d have said, “of all the burger joints in all the towns in all the world, an alien walks into mine”.
Because this wasn’t any old roadside dive. This was the Little A’le’inn in Rachel, Nevada, just about a stone’s throw from one of the most secretive locations on Planet Earth, Ground Zero for the 90s alien conspiracy folklore that fuelled the X-Files, Independence Day and Men in Black: Area 51.
Continue reading
Our preparation for the nearly 4,000 meter Wheeler Peak in Nevada was not nearly as detailed as many people, including us, do for Borneo’s Mt Kinabalu. This was mostly because Mt Kinabalu is a high volume tourist machine, and Wheeler is happily remote and undeveloped, so you’re not forced to stay at a hostel overnight and make your summit push at 2am. You just wake up and climb it. This probably explains why I was so puffed on the last push to Wheeler’s summit. That, and the 15 kg child on my shoulders.
Continue readingStanding alone at night on the rim of a giant crater in a desert beneath the Milky Way, I had two strong feelings. First, I viscerally understood why Neil Armstrong said the lunar surface “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States”. True enough, that night in the high desert of the United States looked to me a lot like pictures of the moon. Second, and more powerfully, I suddenly felt like all that open space was somehow crushing me, this tiny creature on the side of a cliff beneath the vastness of that black, endless, infinite sky.
Continue reading
Seven years ago, the Space Shuttle was still flying, though not for much longer. China had yet to fly its multi-crew Shenzhou missions to the Tiangong orbital space laboratory, or land the Yutu “Jade Rabbit” rover on the moon, in each case becoming just the first nation after the US and USSR to achieve the feat. I wrote these impressions of the 14 May 2010 launch before I knew much about the Chinese program, and before I’d processed the black and white images included below.
