Statue of woman with tits popping out of clothes, standing in well filled with floating rose petals. After the bus trip back to SF I had to beat a hasty retreat to the airport and fly the 28 hours back to Singapore (via Taiwan) for my dad's 60th. Sigh. Would that I could've had more time on holiday in san francisco. Ah well, I guess I should be grapeful that I had the chance to go at all. Haha, grapeful. Ugh. Groan.

After I failed to feed him, he went back to having a bath.

This vineyard was the most opulent of the lot, with pretty gardens and statues and sculptures littered throughout it (Italians...) Built into one of the walls was a watering pool which this little chap was making full use of. He obligingly posed for this photo.

... over to and including all that wasteland on the right which they apparently hadn't figured out what to do with yet. There's a waterfowl preserve in there near the middle of the picture. One could take a whole day walking across their land methinks.

They owned all the land starting from that hill on the left...

Our last and final vineyard was HUGE.

Scenic

I know, I know, it all looks terribly boring, but I was having a great time. Think we were on to our third vineyard tasting session by now. This picture does give one a sense of the size of these things.

Sheer expanse of grapevines. That's a lot of grapes. They taste nice too.

Lucky bird had a... bird. In the cage with him.

for some reason this vineyard had peacocks in it.

sonoma wine country

more big tree.

during the summer when the water dries out, salmon fry hang around in the pools engaged in the process of, well, growing up. In their second autumn / winter when the waters rise they start their run. (ie they stick around for the first year)

this is what a salmon run looks like when it's dried up.

hole-y tree.

more trees

People, and trees

Interestingly, they grow by tubers. Big mother tree sends out a ring of tuber-root things. When Mother is threatened, she secretes hormones which make the tubers grow into big strong trees. Often this results in a ring of trees surrounding a bigger tree or a dead stump, such as this one.

Miur woods, to be honest. Home of the coastal redwoods, the red sequioa - yet more big trees. Did I mention in my previous posts that the giant sequioa have no tap roots? I don't think these guys have, either.

The next day I took a trip to the enchanted forest

This is a view of the San Francisco skyline by night. Our guide drove us out here as the mystery bonus last stop not advertised in the brochure, for us all to take beautiful scenic shots of the grand skyscrapers shrouded at their very tops in a gentle mist. Naturally, my camera couldn't cope and turned out a black canvas with dotted lights all over it instead. When I finally install photoshop on my computers in Singaland I fully intend to edit these pictures and see if my camera actually managed to SEE anything. The diagonal line of lights on the left is the golden gate bridge. Well, at least nobody else's digital camera was able to capture the image either. Smirk.

Anyway these were two dramatic pictures of sunset taken over fields of rolling nothingness. I just thought it was remarkable how the grass looked like the sea, sort-of, so I snapped the shots. Maybe I'm turning into a bit of a shutterbug... shudder.

The cayotes tend to pose for cameras when vehicles stop, because tourists sometimes chuck them food from their cars. Hence in cayote's brain, stopped car = food. Presumably striking a dramatic pose earns him more. Our driver / guide also nattered on about the three times he had spotted bear in Yosemite park, in his twenty year career, including the time he had everyone craning their necks to spot the maybe-bear hidden far away in a bush, when he almost ran down the bear sitting in the middle of the road which he uh hadn't noticed. Heh.

Perfect. That is one Ugly Cayote. (groan.)

This is a Doh! moment. Always remember when taking photos through glass that the flash will ruin the shot. Since I couldn't figure out how to turn off the flash (Y chromosome forbids us from reading the manual) I pressed the camera up against the glass instead. (the lens contacts the glass, obliterating the reflected flash-effect)

Aww what the hell, one more for the road. There're rumours of Japanese blood in the family. My finger trembled on the trigger. I had a mini epileptic fit. Goshdamnit, it was beautiful, okay? I just wanted to take more pictures of it. Count yourselves lucky there weren't any topless knockout blondes on the beach in LA. Well, there was one, but she was lying face down in the sand, bugger it.

I dunno. Whatcha reckon. Anyone getting sick of Half Dome and River yet?

and Half Dome. I wonder if I should go into the postcard business.

See? River.

Yet another view of Half Dome, with a river this time.

This is her Man. Err Buck. Bronco. Whatever. I forgot to say, the deer roam free here, meaning there wasn't any guardrail or anything. This was taken from a distance of about six feet. As you can see, he didn't think I was terribly interesting, giving him lots in common with most of the human female population around me. Sniff. I toyed with the idea of stepping closer, but apparently lots of tourists get hurt every year by spooking large, horny animals...

This is her again, after I knelt down. Says a lot how much she moves doesn't it?

Here she is, taken from behind. Damn, that sounded really, really dodgy. What I MEAN of course is I snuck around behind her and shot her. In a nice, animal loving way. Damn!

The village centre on the valley floor was quaint and pretty. My photographs of the logwood hotel and visitor centres set against the backdrop of mountains, in the midst of pretty trees were predictably enough eaten by my camera. This particular shot was not. let's play Spot the Deer. There really is one in here. If ou look hard enough, you'll make out her eye, and then her head and neck. It's a bit like a 3D stereogram. Heh. Hours of fun.

Turn 180 degrees around and you behold the face of El Capitan. Does anyone remember the Star Trek movie that had Kirk and Bones climbing a mountain, and Spock flying by in his antigrav boots and rescuing Bones when he fell? (or was it kirk.) Anyway they were climbing El Capitan.
El Capitan (even in this picture) is dotted with scores of crazy people with scant regard for their lives climbing it. They are barely visible with the naked eye, so far away is it from the viewer (we drove up nearly to the foot of the mountain and could barely make the climbers out unless aided with binoculars). To give you an idea of how tall El Capitan is, and how mad the climbers are, El Capitan stands at 20,000 feet tall, and takes four to five days to climb. You sleep on the rock face. Turning over in your sleep might have less than pleasant consequences. One of the other tourists (of course) asked what happens if you need to take a leak or a poo. The answer is you carry a thermos flask thingie around with you. Just make sure you don't mix up the coffee and... heh heh. Will our hero survive El Capitan? Tune in next week! How's that for the ultimate Cliffhangar.

This is called Bridal Veil Falls, because... when there's lots of water falling from it in spring / winter, it looks like a bride's veil. The black colour marks where the water falls in season (I'm guessing the water carries silt which stains the rockface black). Naturally I chose to visit at the end of summer when all the water's dried up. Sigh.

Yet more half dome and mountains. this time with valley floor included. The little grass thingies are actually trees. Many trees make a forest. Cor blimey, we learn summink new everyday don't we?

Half dome in background. Funny how the yanks invaded the country, took something with a beautiful name like !@rjasifoajEDickaifja (okay, so I don't really remember how the Indians spelt it, sue me. It was unpronounceable whatever it was) and renamed it something as imaginative and creative as "half-dome". That's american enterprise and ingenuity for you.

One thing that struck even me wasn't a falling boulder as the viewer might have hoped, but the way the light shifted over the span of minutes, variously illuminating different parts of the mountains as the clouds moved.

Mountainey pictures. Half Dome in background. Can't remember what the other peaks are called.

Beats me why I took this photo. Think it was to illustrate how high up we were. The brown stick thing is the top of a very tall, dead tree. If you look hard at the valley floor in the middle of the photo, you will be able to see a house thingie. If you look real hard you will see a fat man holding a sign that says Bush Sucks Ass, Vote Kerry! Just kidding.

Yet more devastation.

More of the same. Bear in mind these are being taken from a moving minivan. Use your imagination - that's a LOT of dead trees. Incidentally the big fire took place about fifteen years ago. I think the word for this is "devastation". It must have been devastating at the time. Devastating is a nice word to use when describing a girl's eyes to her, they become nice and pleasant after that for some reason.

We all got back on the bus to journey to the valley floor. Along the way, we passed a burnt-out section of forest. Apparently, a half century's worth of aggressive firefighting had resulted in a massive accumulation of underbrush, so that when the fire came, it came real hard and fast (sounds dodgy...) and was virtually unstoppable. Today, the national park ranger and firemen-type people actually set small controlled burns of the underbrush to prevent this from happening ever again. They must be the only people in world whose job is to set forests on fire.

More of the same. Not quite as big. The tree in the foreground is a very, very tall tree, the sort you see in movies in large forests where James Bond types scoot around on snow speeder thingies and liberate evil villains from the tyranny of their lives.

Finally, someone dumb enough to get into my field of view. Size of person for comparison. Note, person in foreground, tree in background. Nobody wanted to step into the tunnel for me unfortunately; they were all too busy gawping or fondling each other (we had a newly married couple. The bloke looked sixty, the bird looked sexy. And about twenty. Russian, blonde, very beautiful, very bus... uh, well endowed.)

See? Burnt through. When it went, it went with style.

They call this one the Tunnel Tree. As you can see, there is a tunnel in it. It was wide and tall enough to fit a horse carriage through, in days long past. Today, it fits a minivan full of tourists through with some effort. However, the trail has now been closed to vehicular traffic. This particular tree burnt to death. Nobody can figure out how it managed this, seeing as it's fireproof. Shrug. Oh yes, and for those who are interested in trivia, these trees do not have tap roots, meaning all 250 feet of them is supported by little superficial roots spreading out around the base of the tree. Reassuring, eh? (I don't get it. My brain doesn't remember things when I want it to, but stomp along with brain in cruise mode and near everything our guide said stuck in my head... for instance, the acorns of this tree are about one by one centimetre, absolutely minute. It's conckers!

If you look carefully, you'll spot holes in the trunk. Woodpeckers like this tree because it is nice and soft and easy to make holes in. They store nuts in the holes. Isn't this neat? you get a nice picture session and national geographic education all in one. I should also mention the burn marks on the trunk. These trees are naturally fire resistant since they're full of resins and tannin. Meaning if you chewed on the trunk you'd stain your teeth nasty yellow I think... The acorns this tree produces rely on fire to clear the underbrush, and open up in extreme heat to liberate their seeds unto the nice, clean fertile burnt-out soil beneath. One plant's poison is another plant's... meat? err.