Historical Wanderlust

Check out this cool interactive map depicting 23 epic journeys from times now past!

Especially check out Jack Kerouac trail where he veers South into Mexico:

"Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic."

Todos Santos is an artsy oasis in Mexico's Baja California

Most travel guidebooks, and many been-there-done-that travelers, will tell you that Todos Santos, a little artist enclave on the Pacific Coast of lower Baja, is "a lot like Taos."

On a spring-break visit, I chatted with artist Margaret Woodall, who was lazily daubing at a canvas in the shaded courtyard of a Todos Santos gallery during the town's second annual artist-studio tour.

"I came to Todos Santos 15 years ago from Taos, because Todos Santos reminded me of Taos back then," said Woodall, a slim, tanned grandmother who lived a good while in the famed New Mexican art colony, although she's originally from Kentucky.

She's a confirmed convert to Todos Santos, a town of about 5,000 people 45 miles north of Cabo San Lucas. "I like the ocean here. The mountains are the same, but there's no snow!"

And this sun-warmed courtyard, with its coral-pink wall festooned with longhorn cattle horns and framed by banana-tree leaves and cactus, was just the kind of place to get creative juices flowing.

Woodall's works on the gallery wall included a painting of pangas — the local fishing skiffs — on a beach at nearby Point Lobos. It's a subject we saw repeated at Galeria de Todos Santos, a short walk away through quiet, narrow streets of historical adobe buildings draped in purple bougainvillea.

There we met Erick Ochoa, a young Mexico City native, educated as an architect, who makes his living as an artist here.

He showed off a painting in progress, focused on the figure of a Mexican fisherman next to his beached panga. Ochoa's Edward Hopper-style use of light and shadow brought the subject to vivid life.

Taos is known for the quality of its high-desert light — the town's website devotes a whole link to the topic — and fans give Todos Santos similar plaudits.

"In summer, when it can be very hot, there are amazing cloud formations, and everything is bright — in Technicolor!" Ochoa said. "For an artist, there's everything you need here."

The same is true for art lovers. Twenty-seven local artists — about an even mix of Latino and Anglo names — welcomed visitors during the studio tour, which happens in March. A weeklong annual arts festival is in February. Galleries are everywhere, especially in the old-town blocks just uphill from the oasis ravine that cradled our little hotel, Casa Bentley.

Welcoming the Casa Bentley's guests are elaborately carved wooden gates, with sun and moon figures commemorating a 1991 solar eclipse, by artist Charles Stewart, another Taos expatriate who is credited as a founder of the Todos Santos artist community in the 1980s. (He died in April.)

Through the gates we met the hotel's builder and proprietor, Bob Bentley, a retired professor of geology from Central Washington University and a walking, breathing combination of Papa Hemingway (he has the white beard and straw hat) and John Steinbeck (he has the big poodle and the storytelling gene).

With a cup of coffee at a table beneath his wide-spreading rubber tree, "Doc" Bentley, 77, told us of the town's growing reputation among what he calls the "woo-woo" crowd, which fancies this a center of everything from magnetic healing to magical powers. "Lots of folks from Sedona find their way here," he said, referencing Arizona's center of New Age spiritualism.

That aura was encouraged by Mexican tourism authorities' official designation in 2006 of Todos Santos as a "Pueblo Magico," or "magical village," a designation given to some 40 towns across Mexico based on their natural beauty, cultural riches or historical significance.

But Bentley says it's the climate that makes the place perfect.

Nearby mountains, the Sierra de la Laguna ("essentially a fragment of uptilted rocks from out in the Sea of Cortez," our ever-the-geologist host explained), shield the area from summer's superheated weather systems that feed northward up Baja to as far as California's Death Valley.

"We have a little microclimate here — it's really pleasant, day after day. And there isn't any rain," said Bentley, noting that the last bad hurricane was in 1996.

The climate drew him to retire here after spending 15 years of off-and-on visits overseeing the construction of his hotel, which started with an adobe farmhouse dating to the mid-19th century. Additional structures are of local red amphibolite rock, along with polished inlays from Bentley's father's trove of 30,000 agates, jaspers, turquoise and other semiprecious stones collected during a lifetime in eastern Oregon, where Bentley grew up.

Modeled in part after a castle in Portugal, the hotel has a tiled pool fed by a waterfall, multilevel patios, an elaborate fountain, a grove of century-old mango trees and quirky touches such as the large palm tree growing up through the roof of our bathroom.

The town gets an occasional tour bus up from Cabo San Lucas. There are one or two tacky T-shirt shops and a Coldwell Banker real-estate office. But unlike more populous parts of Baja, Walmart has yet to make its way here, and drunken college students on spring break tend to stay in Cabo.

You'll find a dozen decent restaurants and cafes within walking distance around downtown. A local fish shop and an open-air kitchen at Casa Bentley let us concoct our own delectable shrimp tacos one night, a reminder that this is a coastal town.

But Todos Santos isn't right on the ocean. From our inn, my daughter and I walked 25 minutes to the beach, along a narrow, dusty track past horse pastures and a pen of friendly goats who poked their heads through wire to get scratched (yes, that spot, just at the base of the horn). A temperature in the 70s and cooling breezes made it a fun outing rather than a hot trudge.

The town's setback from the ocean, a small interceding lagoon, and an abrupt seafloor drop-off that creates treacherous surf unsuitable for swimming add up to a mostly undeveloped and beautifully wild beach. Blue water thunders ashore on a broad swath of caramel sand. A sign says it's a turtle-nesting area.

Only a few local families dotted the beach. A man played bucking bronco with his kids. Someone flew a kite. Wide expanses of empty beach beckoned the footloose.

It was the kind of scene that would inspire artists, no matter where they came from.

And, oh, by the way: I've never been to Taos. Maybe I'll visit someday.

I hear it's a bit like Todos Santos.

———

IF YOU GO:

Todos Santos (meaning "all saints") is on the Pacific shore, about 45 miles north of Cabo San Lucas on the southern Baja California peninsula, considered one of the safest places to travel in Mexico these days. Established as a part-time religious mission and farming community in the early 1700s, Todos Santos evolved by the 1990s into a colony for artists from across Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.

GETTING THERE: Most visitors fly into Los Cabos International Airport near San Jose del Cabo, about a 90-minute drive by rental car from Todos Santos. Or you can take a taxi from the airport to the Aguila bus station in San Jose del Cabo (about $17 U.S. for up to four) and catch an intercity bus to Todos Santos (about $12.50 U.S. per person). Intercity buses are modern, clean and efficient, with service about once an hour between towns on the southern peninsula.

LODGING: We stayed at Casa Bentley, one of Baja's better bargains. Get past the dusty, unprepossessing street out front and you'll find a lovingly nurtured compound resembling a small stone castle, built by a retired geology professor. Five suites range from $80 to $130 per night, April to December, and $110 to $170, January to April. www.casabentleybaja.com.

Hotel California, on the town's main drag, is the best-known lodging, thanks to the thoroughly debunked (see www.todossantos-baja.com/todos-santos/eagles/hotel-california.htm) yet persistent urban legend that it inspired the Eagles song of the same name — a rumor that helped make Todos Santos famous. It's a beautiful, 1950s-era hotel in its own right, lavishly renovated in the early 2000s. Spring prices range from $80 to $150. hotelcaliforniabaja.com.

The year-old Hotel Guaycura is the newest on the boutique hotel scene, in a 19th-century brick building in the center of the old-town gallery district. Spring rates from $195 to $500 per night. guaycura.com.mx.

MORE INFORMATION: www.todossantos.cc or www.todossantos.com

———

By Brian J. Cantwell (c) 2011, The Seattle Times.

Helping the Homeless in San Diego

Helping the Homeless in San Diego

Helping the homeless in San Diego, 1stSaturdays.org, is an organization based in the San Diego area. Comprised of a group of friends, and friends of friends, they get together on the 1st Saturday of every month. Together they distribute clothes, supplies, personal items, and food and drinks to the homeless in San Diego. The group is not associated or affiliated with any groups or organizations. Just friends and neighbors helping friends and neighbors!

Isn't that the way it's suppose to be?



According to 1stSaturdays.org the 1st goal of the organization is to help the homeless community in San Diego. The 2nd goal is to add positive energy and love into the world and into our lives at the same time. So give a shout if you have something that can help out another.

You can check them out here:
http://www.1stsaturdays.org/

“A beautiful bowl of glory”: Rancho Gordo’s Steve Sando on beans, trade, and the tortilla project

(via The Ethicurian)

Steve Sando (right) with Félix Martinez Gomez and his family, near Cuicatlan, Oaxaca. They grow chilhuacle chiles, essential to so many Oaxacan dishes but rare now thanks to several years of disturbed weather patterns.

International trade can wreak havoc on small farmers and the global food culture: impoverishing peasants, destroying old ways of cooking, and reducing biodiversity. Now and then, however, international trade can have the opposite effect, building up farmers instead of rolling over them, preserving heritage foods instead of flooding the fields with a few varieties from big agribusiness.

Rancho Gordo's Xoxoc Project (pronounced 'sho-shoc,' a word derived from the prickly pear cactus called xoconostle) is one of these rare positive stories about how trade can help small farmers and food artisans. (Grist writer Tom Philpott has some excellent pieces, such as this one, about the negative effects of trade on Mexican farmers and Mexican society.)

Gabriel Cortés Garcia and Yunuén Carrillo Quiroz, founders of Xoxoc

The collaboration with the already established Xoxoc company started when Steve Sando, the founder and owner of the Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Food company, was on one of his frequent trips to Mexico. Always looking for interesting heirloom beans to plant in California and sell to his devoted customers (who include me), one of his contacts told him that he should meet with the Xoxoc collaborative. Sando’s contact was right: Xoxoc led him to interesting beans like Zarco, from Quanajuato, and Ayocote Morado, from Hildago. But he realized that his plan to bring beans back as seed for planting in California wasn’t the best approach — importing beans directly from the Mexican farmers would be better. That way, the farmers could get a good price for their crop and continue to plant heirloom varieties, and his company would get a reliable supply of the beans in the near term. As the project matured, Rancho Gordo added new products to the Xoxoc Project line, including omega-3 rich chia seeds, a Mexican oregano that he calls “oregano indio.” (Although it is probably not related to European oregano, as I explained in a post for Mental Masala.)

The most recent initiative from Rancho Gordo is the tortilla project. Rancho Gordo buys dried heirloom corn from the bean farmers involved in the Xoxoc project, imports it, then has the La Palma tortillaria in San Francisco’s Mission District make fresh tortillas to sell at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and the Rancho Gordo store in Napa. I've tried them several times and they are delicious -- full of corn flavor, lacking that unappetizing chemical aroma emitted by so many commercial brands. And it feels good to be supporting small farmers and heirloom corn varieties.

I first met Steve a few years ago during the infamous Carlo Petrini dust-up in San Francisco (covered by Bonnie at the Ethicurean) and I run into him here and there in the Bay Area at farmers markets, the Eat Real Festival in Oakland, and at his store in Napa. I wanted to learn more about the Xoxoc Project, so I asked Steve some questions via email.

Where do your Mexican farmer-partners live, and what's the terrain like there?

They live in an ex-hacienda in the state of Hidalgo. The closest town is called Chapantongo, not too far from Ixmiquilpan. The land has been ruined by hundreds of years of cattle grazing, and the only thing that seems to grow now are the cactus paddles and their fruit. The locals have a long tradition of making things out of the fruit. Xoxoc took it a step further and made a commercial venture.

The xoconostle look like prickly pears (or tunas) but the seeds are all in the center instead of throughout and the 'meat' is very sour; you wouldn't eat it raw. But it's an essential ingredient in dishes like mole de olla [a spicy meat stew] and certain salsas.

. . . Read more . . .

Carless Los Angeles

A dreamy, photoshopped Los Angeles devoid of cars -- a beautiful and impossible fantasy:

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

New "Artificial Leaf": Next Step In a New Energy Source

One of the most exciting new sources of energy that scientists are developing is based on nature's own process of photosynthesis. All plants store energy by using the sun's rays to change certain molecules into other forms. This is (very loosely speaking) like splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen: when oxygen and hydrogen are put back together, they release energy. The problem is, most methods of splitting water are expensive and slow.

But Scientists all over the place have been working on catalysts that can split water using sunlight for a while now, but until recently, they've all been using expensive elements like platinum. Now, MIT claims that they've created a paper-thing solar cell that uses a cheap catalyst to split water. The genius of this setup is:

• It is cheap and efficient
• The catalyst is stable and lasts far longer than earlier attempts
• It can be used in any type of water, and would produce clean drinking water once the hydrogen and oxygen are put back together

In other words, this kind of energy source could be used anywhere in the world, by anybody. Any time I've read about it, the topic of using it in third-world scenarios always comes up, but it can also be scaled up for wider use.

The team haven't released their findings in a peer-reviewed journal yet, so the full story is still unknown. And there's still one major problem: no-one has yet built a safe, cheap hydrogen fuel cell to make use of all that hydrogen. But it's still an exciting step forwards!

If you want to get more pumped about what this technology could do for the world, check out this video featuring Dan Nocera, one of the lead researchers on this project at MIT.

Bill Gates on the Future of Energy

TED Talks always give you something to think about, but today we wanted to share this one featuring Bill Gates discussing his work on new energy sources.

"And so, we need energy miracles. Now, when I use the term miracle, I don't mean something that's impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The internet and its services are a miracle. So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. Usually, we don't have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline."

We at Baja Trek tend to feel that the most urgent problem is to reduce energy usage rather than find new energy sources, but realistically, we'll need to do both. So it was exciting when he spoke about the work being done to use the dangerous and, at the moment, useless waste materials put out by nuclear power plants to create even more power. The machine that would accomplish this is called a traveling-wave reactor, and it sounds pretty swell.

We're particularly excited about this idea after having watched Into Eternity, a fascinating, sad, bizarre, Kubrick-esque documentary about a Finnish project to bury spent nuclear waste miles below ground and keep it there for the 100,000 years it takes for such materials to become non-radioactive. Watch the trailer below!

Government by the People!

Most of the time, we try not to get too political, but you'll have to bear with this exception cause it's something we really care about!

Baja adventurer and burro near end of journey

Baja adventurer and burro near end of journey

Reposted from the San Diego Union - Tribune

By Ed Zieralski, UNION-TRIBUNE

Friday, March 4, 2011 at 5:23 p.m.

Publish Post

Burro explorer

- Graham Mackintosh

El Cajon's Mike Youghusband, his burro, Don-Kay, and stray dog, Solo, take a break during their long trek of the Baja Peninsula. Photo by Graham Mackintosh.

El Cajon’s Mike Younghusband is nearing the end of his incredible walk of the Baja Peninsula with his burro named Don-Kay.

Younghusband, 61 and a former El Cajon police officer, has walked over 1,000 miles and has less than 50 miles remaining to reach Cabo San Lucas, his final destination. He left Hernan Ibanez Bracamontes’ Rancho Ojai in Tecate on Oct. 1 with Don-Kay, a 4-year-old burro he purchased from Bracamontes, and his two pet dogs, Rusty and Max. But the road proved to be too dangerous for his pets and he sent them home with legendary Baja traveler Graham Mackintosh.

“I can hardly believe I passed the 1,000-mile mark,” Younghusband said in a recent e-mail prior to reaching Todos Santos. “I’m still healthy and excited to get there.”

Younghusband plans to check in at the police station in Cabo to document his arrival in Cabo San Lucas. Mackintosh said he hopes to join his friend at Cabo. Mackintosh said some of Younghusband’s family members are going to take a cruise to Cabo San Lucas and plan to be there when the adventurer arrives in mid-March.

Part-way through his trip, Younghusband picked up a stray dog he called Solo, a female dog who has stayed with him and Don-Kay through some tough going.

“I have a lot of stories that will blow you away and can’t wait to share them,” he said. “They had a parade for me when I got to Lopez Mateos, talk about humbling.”

Mackintosh has stayed in touch with Younghusband throughout his journey. He has visited him on a couple of occasions when he was in Baja doing lectures or delivering books that chronicled his own adventures on the Peninsula and its islands. Mackintosh followed his progress from Younghusband’s daily reports via his SPOT device. Also, the members of BajaNomad.com have been instrumental in Younghusband’s safe journey to this point. At one stage members of the Website’s forum page helped rescue Younghusband, Don-Kay and Solo from death’s door when they ran out of water. At other times, BajaNomad members met up with Younghusband and shared food and drink with him.

Mackintosh isn’t surprised his friend stuck out his hike to the end.

“I was pretty convinced it was do or die for him,” Mackintosh said. “He spent a lot of time and money and made a big commitment to this. He met so many great people on Bajanomad.com., many wonderful people who helped him and continue to help him.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/mar/04/baja-adventurer-and-burro-near-end-their-journey/

Mexico Moves Towards New Energy Sources

Although Mexico has been one of the top three exporters of oil to the United States for some time, its output peaked a few years back and oil production in this country has been in a steady decline since then. Fortunately, this situation seems to have kick-started programs to investigate new sources of energy. Check out this post from the cleantechies.com blog, Top Ten Highlights of Cleantech in Mexico. Number 10 sounded like a particularly promising one:

10) Solar Mexico. Solar Mexico is a private initiative that works with the Mexican Foundation for Rural Development and is sustained through private donations from Mexico, the United States, and others. The mission is to supply renewable sources of energy to poor, rural families and improve their quality of life in ways that are socially and environmentally beneficial, this includes items such as solar ovens, battery-less flashlights, and solar water distillers.