Showing posts with label hot springs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hot springs. Show all posts

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Footloose on Los Nevados (Colombia 08)

We were amazed; humming birds live and thrive at 4100 m (13,500 ft) elevation in the Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados. Obviously, there are enough blossoms with nectar to sustain these little guys. They definitely do better than we sea-level-sissy tourists do in this thin air. But, surprisingly, none of us got sick or even felt particularly fatigued.
The visitor center served us coca tea (mate de coca), which is supposed to reduce altitude effects. But I looked at the package ingredients, and the amount of coca was so minuscule, it really was just over-sweetened tea. Oh, well.
The plants up here in the mists are quite spectacular - unusual succulents, lichens, and fungi. The fog and drizzle blows in and out, revealing an amazing garden of unusual plant life, bathed in the soft light.
Lava flows, Los Nevados
In color, the light is mellow. In black an white, it is almost ominous.
Hotel Termales del Ruiz, Los Nevados, Colombia
We stayed at the Hotel Termales del Ruiz, which is built literally over a hot spring. The oldest part of the complex was built in 1937, and during the post-war era, thrived as a ski center and hydrotherapy center. Being at 3500m elevation (11,500 ft), the air is brisk. The accommodations were very nice; the restaurant was OK needed a bit of organization or efficiency management. The hot pools were divine.
The area boasts 14 different hot springs, varying in temperature between 28º and 91º Celsius, with waters of different chemical conditions.
Chair with a view, Hotel Termales del Ruiz, Los Nevados
This ends our short sojourn on the Los Nevados volcano. The hiking trails to the summit area were closed when we were there due to active volcanism, but I would like to return some day to do some hiking (there are a thousand places to which I would like to return some day....).

The black and white photographs are from Fuji Acros film exposed with a Leica M2 camera.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

The Deepest Canyon: the Kali Gandaki River, Nepal

Dear readers, I am trying to catch up with some overdue projects. One of these is to summarize my 2011 trip to the Mustang region of Nepal. I listed some of the waypoints of this trip in a 2011 post. This post will be about the fantastic walk down the Kali Gandaki River in west central Nepal.

The Kali Gandaki River makes a great gash through the Himalaya. The river's headwaters are in the Mustang region near the border with Tibet. It then flows south through Mustang (formerly a kingdom and subject of a future post) through gorges and valleys. South of the town of Jomsom, it cuts through the mountains again. "The river then flows southward through a steep gorge known as the Kali Gandaki Gorge, or Andha Galchi, between the mountains Dhaulagiri, elevation 8,167 metres (26,795 ft) to the west and Annapurna I, elevation 8,091 metres (26,545 ft) to the east. If one measures the depth of a canyon by the difference between the river height and the heights of the highest peaks on either side, this gorge is the world's deepest." (from Wikipedia). Eventually, the river flows into the Ganges, after flowing over an immense megafan, comprising sediments eroded from the rapidly uplifting Himalaya.
My 2011 waypoints along the Kali Gandaki valley, with elevations in m above sea level. (Maps drawn with ESRI ArcMap software.)
In decades past, many Europeans and Americans walked down the great gorge when they made the trek around Annapurna (one of the world's great walks). But in the early 2000s, a rough road was cut along the right (west) bank of the Kali Gandaki, and an airport was built in Jomsom. This led to many tourists either flying out or taking a bus. As of 2011, the trekkers' route was becoming underused, and some inns and restaurants had closed.
Jomsom before landing at JMO.
Before my October 2011 walk downstream, I had just completed the trek through Mustang to Lo Manthang, the ancient walled capital of the Kingdom of Lo. My friends flew back to Pokhara from Jomsom Airport (IATA: JMO), which is at elevation of 8,976 feet (2,736 m). The airport often suffers bad weather and has been the site of several crashes. Most of the town is located on a plateau above the river valley.
For my walk down the gorge, I was accompanied by a friendly young Sherpa, Pasang, who had been with us all the way through Mustang. There was also a porter, Rahm, to carry my duffel bag, although we really did not need his services. Regardless, these fellows depend on tourists for income, and I appreciate their hard work.
Day 1. This took us from 2800-m high desert plain into a scrub terrain with juniper and pine that looked like the US southwest or Greece. The first town south of Jomsom was Marpha, which is in an apple-growing region. There is a well-known distillery as well as an ancient monastery.
Approaching Tukuche, the trail hugs the edge of the broad gravel riverbed, occasionally crossing tributaries on rickety wood walkways. One option is to follow a path along the gravel riverbed, but you are exposed to blowing dust. The route along the west side of the valley is better, and, in many areas, the main road.
The High Plains Inn - Dutch Bakery in Tukuche is a great lunch stop, and the hungry trekker is obligated to eat an apple strudel (or two) topped off with an espresso. The route down the Kali Gandaki has  plenty of inns and rest stops like this, so really, this is an easy trek.
We met a lady who was sorting beans that had been drying on a roof. I wonder if they cook red beans and rice? In this area, many villagers stay for the winter, so they carefully stock supplies. But further north in Mustang, the weather is more severe, and villagers migrate to lower altitude areas or to India to find winter work.
Our destination for the night was Larjung, another tidy little town. It is still 2,500 m high, and the villagers were drying corn and other items in preparation for winter.
This was the Riverside Lodge, a nice place with hot water in the shower. Part of the roof was flat, providing a surface to dry corn. The tree had apples. The restaurant was good. Happy chickens lived in a coop and clucked around.
Day 2. The next morning, we continued down stone paths towards the gravel bed of a tributary that enters the Kali Gandaki. The road make a long detour upstream, but the walking path crosses the gravel bed.  In spring, the walking path must be impassable, and pedestrians need to follow the road. As you can see, at this elevation, the flora had changed to alpine forests with pines, much like Austria.
We continued downstream to the village of Kalopani, still at an elevation of 2,500 m.
This is one of these very interesting and somewhat swaying steel suspension bridges that cross the Kali Gandaki.
Looming above you to the east is the might peak of Annapurna, Annapurna I is the tenth highest mountain in the world at 8,091 m above sea level. Annapurna is an especially dangerous peak for climbers, with a death to summit ratio of 32 percent.
I was glad to be well below in the valley. We descended steeply during the afternoon along the river valley to the hamlet of Ghasa at only 1950 m elevation. The Eagle Rest Guest House & Garden Restaurant was really nice, and finally we saw other trekkers. Before this stop, we saw very few Americans or Europeans. My green day pack contained water, camera, and personal items. The porter carried my red duffel, which held clothing, sleeping bag (not needed here), and bulky things.
This fellow with the wet nose wanted a room, also.
Day 3. We continued downhill towards Thalpa, about 1800 m elevation. The valley walls towered above us. Yours truly, of course, looked his dorky best. I had been above 3000 m for two weeks, and here at "low altitude" the air felt so thick.
A tributary, the Rupse Chhahara, plunges down the mountain. The bus trundles through the water. Some of the year, the route must be impassable. It takes a degree of bravery to take one of these busses. My anthropologist friend said every now and then, a bus falls off the mountain. By now, we had dropped to 1590m elevation.
Dana, at 1461m has some old stone buildings with Tibetian-style windows of beautiful craftsmanship. The town has a guest house and a bus stop.
The valley near Dana is bucolic, and the footpath takes you along ancient stone walkways through the farms.

By midday, we reached Tatopani, at 1190 m. We descended steeply into broad leaf forest and finally into jungle.
On recommendation from my friend, I checked into the Dhaulagiri Lodge and Restaurant, near the southern end of Tatopani. Nice place, with an excellent restaurant. They put me into my own little cabin, and right outside my room were bamboo and banana plants and geckoes (no obvious snakes). I paid the porter, Rahm, and he headed back upriver.
Tatopani is famous for the hot spring, and I soaked with chubby Japanese visitors.

All in all, this has been a spectacular trek, a passage through geologic history as well as botanic altitude zones.

Change is coming. The villages here are still poor, but they have electricity and serve hikers who are making the Annapurna loop trek. Most lodges have rooms with private bath, but hot water is still rare. The towns have schools and health clinics. The road is a treacherous dirt and rock trail carved out of the mountain-side. As of 2011, busses and jeeps regularly broke down or fell off, squashing their occupants.
Day 4. Two Germans that we met in the lodge, Pasang, and I chartered a taxi take us to Pokkhara, from where we flew to Kathmandu. The taxi took 5 hours as opposed to 8+ on the public bus (which often breaks down). It was a tiny car, and we were rather squashed. And we had to stop a few times to let the goats move off the road. (Note: this was Oct. 21, 2011, and we learned late in the day that Colonel Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi, the long-term dictator and butcher of Libya, had been killed by Libyan militiamen.)

Photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera, some RAW files processed with PhotoNinja software,

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea

Bombay Beach - it sounds so exotic. Is it a luxurious tropic resort? A coral island in the Andaman Sea? Well, not quite; it is a decaying, seedy resort on the shores of the Salton Sea in southern California.
Look at the aerial photograph of the eastern side of the Salton Sea. Bombay Beach is the rectangle in the center right. It is only about an hour drive from Palm Springs. This was a semi-trendy resort in the 1940s, but fish kills and environmental degradation of the Salton Sea largely killed the town. Once upon a time, Hollywood celebrities came to the Salton Sea to water ski and enjoy the winter sunshine. Not any more.

The mental_floss web page is less charitable
"It's a 10-by-10-block square of squat houses and mobile homes that was somebody's idea of paradise back when the town was incorporated in 1929. A beachy getaway 150 miles from the Pacific, it was supposed to be Palm Springs with water -- but decades of hyper-saline farm runoff and other problems turned the sea into a nightmare; plagued by fish and bird die-offs and outbreaks of botulism that leave its banks littered with corpses and its beaches smelling like hell, all but the hardiest tourists and investors had fled the scene by the late 60s. Even worse, the Salton began to overflow its banks, flooding the bottom part of town repeatedly. The remains of dozens of trailers and houses that couldn't be saved still sit rotting, half-buried in salty mud, along what used to be the town's most prized few blocks of real estate." 
Even the slate.com called it a "skeleton-filled wasteland." The setting attracts visitors interested in the post-apocalypse scenery. It would be a great setting for a zombie movie. There is a 2011 documentary named, "Bombay Beach," with music by Bob Dylan???
Drive on into town on Avenue A after turning off from California Hwy 111. Oh oh, it already looks like a place for urban decay photography.
The view north is a bit bleak.
But there is a shop and mailboxes, so there are some residents still here.
But continuing west on Avenue A, you do not see much evidence of active habitation. In this photograph, I think the box contains a swamp cooler. It is an old-fashioned air conditioner in which a fan blows air through a mist of water and cools via evaporation. In this climate, the humidity feels good.
The surrounding blocks are also a bit (just a bit) bleak.
 A road leads out past the levee to the lakefront. Was this a parking lot for beach-goers?
The lakefront is really rough, just scrap from former trailers and cottages.
Hmmm, someone was buried alive...
The beach is somewhat of a mess. The pilings are coated with salt, and the beach sediment consists of pulverized fish bones.
Back in town, Fifth Street is the waterfront esplanade (all right, the levee view esplanade). The graffiti is more interesting than the view.
On Avenue G, someone collected classic Volkswagen Beetles. At least they won't rust while awaiting concours restoration.
Finally, here is the official poster from the movie. It did well at independent movie festivals.
Not all is lost. Head east into the hills, and there are a number of modest resorts that attract Canadian visitors in the winter. This is Bashford's Hot Mineral Spa in Niland. The hot spring water flows into pools, where you can sit and absorb the mineral salts. If you are soaking at dusk, you see the swallows and bats swooping about and catching insects. It is very relaxing.

2014 Update

This is a late-1940s photograph from Desert Beach, from the Salton Sea Museum. The caption reads:

Skippers sail trim yachts, not subs, 40 fathoms below the Pacific on California's Salton Sea.

Desert Beach Yacht Club, 241 feet below sea level, welcomed the flyers with burning sands, 95 degree water and warm hospitality. A member of the American Power Squadron, the club holds speedboat races each fall. buoyancy of the salt-packed water makes for record-breaking runs.

Please click the link for a black and white version of Bombay Beach.

The aerial photograph was taken my my friend, Bill Birkemeier, from InTheLens.com. My daughter brought me to this great site (she knows my photographic interests). The ground-level photographs were taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, with RAW files processed with Adobe Camera Raw and DxO Filmpack 3. The zombie-like atmosphere inspired me to experiment with color. The green-tone color frames were created by the cross-process emulation (i.e., E6 film processed in C41 chemicals). The red Volkswagen was faded blue, but with the Kodachrome intensity slider moved to 100%, the colors reversed. Rather cool.