But really, some of the learning can also be easily done online. Some of the learning can be done TOO easily online. So here's a challenge for whoever's reading our blog:

Without searching online for an answer, leave us a comment to tell us how did America get her name?

Did ol' Chris Columbus see a vulture as he came to these shores? And since the word vulture is translated to the word "Merica" in the local tribe's dialect, Chris claims to have found A-Merica?

We have already Googled for the answer, of course. So you don't have to send us links in response. But tell us a story, regardless if it's true or not! :)

DC

written by  DanYilin on April 15, 2009 from Ridgecrest, United States
from the travel blog: go.
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I am glad we decided to visit Death Valley, for its uniqueness as a National Park. Where Yosemite NP fairly typical in what you would expect from a National Park - some forested areas, waterfalls, etc; the geography and geology of Death Valley NP was something totally unexpected. We spent the evening before checking on the possible sights to see in Death Valley, and were totally intrigued by the names of some of the sights - Devil's Golf Course, Dante's View, Badwater Basin, etc.

So, with Phantom of The Opera blasting from the IPod and setting the correct mood, we drove into Death Valley!

Sandy salt. Or is it salty sand?

The primary feature about Death Valley is the incredibly strong winds, with some additional powerful gusts thrown into the mix. The winds are responsible for the erosion of soil over millions of years, making this a valley. The dry land goes down to 85m under sea level, which is way deeper than what Yi Lin and I can safely dive!

The crust beneath the salt

The secondary feature of Death Valley is the salt pans. Somehow, the seas got mixed up in this area millions of years ago, and the high evaporation rate (due to winds and trapped heat) have evaporated all the water in the seas, leaving behind salt pans and sand dunes.

Four times saltier than the ocean.

We visited Badwater Basin, which was the lowest point in all of Death Valley. The story goes, that in olden times, a traveling merchant brought his mule to a pool in this area for a drink, but the mule absolutely refused to drink! The merchant, trusting his mule labelled his map as Bad Water, and the name stuck ever since. Of course, the mule only refused to drink from the pool because the water was too salty!

Devil's Golf Course - not to be confused with the one for humans.

The Devil's Golf course is essentially a pock-marked piece of land that is so covered with sand dunes and salt pans, that it was remarked that only the Devil could play golf there. Well... if you ask me, the place was so hot and dry that I think only the Devil would want to play there anyway!

Colour me beautiful with the Artist's Palette.

Lastly, we drove along a one-way loop aptly named Artist Drive. Along this route, you can see knolls of varying colours, thus having a surreal resemblance to an artist's palette. The greens, blues, pinks, purples and oranges embedded in the soil are all due to the presence of the various salts in the region. Those who took Chemistry before should be able to identify the elements that make up these colours - copper, iron, maganese, etc.

I barely scraped through Chemistry, so don't ask me! :)

DC

written by  DanYilin on April 16, 2009 from Furnace Creek, United States
from the travel blog: go.
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Note: pictures were downloaded from the Web and not taken by me, as per his request. Cos seriously, it's kinda spastic to take pictures of each other's cameras with each other's cameras and go through the trouble of downloading these pix. We've got a year-long trip to plan you know!

Dannie's Olympus C5060 - gives incredibly blue skies and the flexible LCD screen is tops for taking pictures at awkward angles and lets us take photos of ourselves easily.

Yi Lin's Canon 450D - good enough for taking decent pics and has a small enough grip to fit into her palm comfortably. Used with R-Strap courtesy of hubby's buddy, Roy.

The lense used with the 450D - a wide angle 10-22mm which is fantastic for scenery shots and decent for closer shots. However, human subjects must be centrally positioned or they will appear wide.

There are alot of reviews on these camera models out there on the Net. What we would appreciate are reviews of our photos! So feel free to let us know what you think of them, be it good or bad (we can take bad reviews... I think... ouch!)

YL

written by  DanYilin on April 17, 2009 from Tecopa, United States
from the travel blog: go.
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Tecopa is big enough to appear as a little black dot on our driving atlas, about 70 miles from the centre of Death Valley. But from our experience driving through Australia and New Zealand where towns on the map can turn out to be equivalent of a gas station, we know the black dot status alone does not make it livable. But hey, the HostelBookers website actually had an accommodation listing for Tecopa - Ranch House Inn & Hostel, which sounded pretty substantial. Since it was only for a night, we booked ourselves 2 beds in a dorm to wrap up our visit in Death Valley, at US$22 each.

So we spent the day cruising through Death Valley. The wind was threatening to blow us off the road and was intent on dumping an entire sand dune onto us wherever we went. Our hardy little Chevy weathered the weather very well and stayed on the road. But the car was an older model which didn't come with automatic controls for the windows. No matter how tightly we wound them up, the wind stubbornly blew through the tiny gaps and drove us crazy. It was like being locked up in tiny room with someone whistling non-stop into your ears. The dastardly wind also thought it was pretty entertaining to -
(1) blow hard against our car doors so that we couldn't get out; and
(2) when we did manage to get out and were bending over into the back seat to get our stuff, to slam the car doors hard against our backsides.

Windblown bush

Death Valley is a desolate lonely place. So devastatingly empty and yet full of beauty. It's pure isolation and yet harbours a world of extremes. Within a few hours, we experienced:

(1) The top-of-the-world feeling at elevations of 6,000 feet and diving to a depth of 282 feet below sea level (see Dan's entry for images of Badwater Basin);

(2) Driving amongst stoney mountains and then finding ourselves ankles deep in soft sand dunes... and then walking on a runway of pure white table salt;

Streaky bacon!

Rippling sands under dramatic skies.

Catwalk down this runway of salt!

(3) Gazing at endless drab brown landscape and then taking a detour into rocks so colourful they looked like an artist's palette;

A painted masterpiece.

(4) Freezing at high altitudes and then sweating away like gymrats deep in the valley;

(5) Thinking we're in a place so parched and dry and then finding ourselves in the middle of a desert storm - complete with (more) wind, rain and lightning (more details to come);

(6) Being convinced that Death Valley is completely inhabitable then walking right into a fresh green fruit-bearing oasis the next day.

We left Death Valley in search of Tecopa while the sky was still bright (that's the smart thing to do right) and also in search of cheaper gas outside of the park cos our gas gauge was starting to point at scarily-low levels. We were at our grimiest point on this trip, all covered in sand and dust and Dan commented "for the first time ever, instead of flopping onto the bed, turning on the TV and logging on, the first thing I would like to do is to take a shower."

We traveled 56 miles before coming across a Chevron pump station selling gas at more than US$3 per gallon! (As a benchmark, the cheapest gas we've managed to get so far in the US was US$2.07 and Chevron is almost always the most expensive of the lot.) So we stingy-pokers pumped just US$10 worth of gas, which according to the atlas, would be enough to get us to Tecopa and up near Vegas the next morning where we could get cheaper gas.

Now, desert roads are very scary - the road stretches endlessly before you and the land around you is all brown and flat. It's incredibly hard to spot anything in the distance... and it got harder to do so under the fast darkening sky. What made it worse was that the buildings were all painted in various shades of brown/grey/mud and very low to the ground. We just couldn't find Tecopa. We drove up and down, round and round, in and out, in all frickin' directions and I started wailing in panic cos I was convinced we were going to have to spend the night out in the desert after we ran out of gas, out in the howling wind and on top of that, get hit by the freak lightning streaks that were starting to flash around us.

And then, all of the sudden, we could make out the words "hostel" in a distance. And it was ours. I have never never ever been so happy to see a hostel. This was what it looked like in the day time - so except for the marker (which was unlit and small in scale when compared to the vastness of the desert), it was totally impossible to locate in the dark.

Our home in the desert.

Ranch House consists of 3 containers - the office, the inn and the hostel - all very cosily and eclectically decorated by the owner herself. We had a dorm for 8 people all to ourselves.

A surprisingly cosy find in the middle of nowhere.

The lady running the place was so very friendly that her warm welcome immediately comforted us and lifted our traumatised spirits. Just as she was showing us around the place, the storm came good and proper and started dumping rain onto us. The lighting flashes lit up the dark shadows of the mountain range and the wind violently tossed the garden chairs around.

Then... the power went out. And so did the water supply.

No shower.
No TV.
No Internet.
No flopping onto the bed.

The owner had earlier recommended dinner at the only source of food in Tecopa - a little blue bistro not far from the inn. There is no fast food in Tecopa. Even the Golden Arches and Coca Cola have not found their way into this place. We foolishly thought we would be able to fill our cold tummies with some hot food at the bistro. Uh uh. Hello Singaporeans, there is a power outage here?!

No body at bistro.
No food.

Dan cooked our last 2 cups of instant noodles and threw in the leftover Spam. Thank god for Spam - it made our noodles taste almost gourmet. While he cooked, I went out to get a few shots of the beautiful desert sunset.

The setting sun burning up the mountain range.

One last fiery blaze before darkness falls over the desert.

Then we wiped up the best we could with wet tissue. And used the toilet. BAD mistake. There was only ONE good flush left and I had used it all up.

No flushing for the rest of the night.

I swore then that I would never let another drop of this precious water go to waste.

So made our bed by flashlight and lay down. It was 8pm and very very cold. It was pitch dark so we couldn't really see whether the room had any heating. Anyway, no electricity probably meant...

No heating.

With nothing else to do, I tried my best to get to sleep while Dan tapped away at the games on his iPod Touch. We froze most of the night away while alternating between fighting over the blanket and squashing up against each other to share body warmth. The electricity came back on in the middle of the night, but we were too cold to get out of bed to do anything. The next morning, we woke up to see a thermostat staring back at us. GREAT.

We packed up and headed to China Ranch - an oasis in the desert! It sounded pretty exciting and we also heard that there was a date plantation and bakery (and even a gift shop!) at the ranch. It really was lush and green and teeming with plants (cactus flowers were blooming!) and quaint artifacts.

China Ranch hidden in the oasis.

Anybirdy home?

A quaint signboard

We had a delicious date shake and bought packet of fresh dates for the road. As we headed towards Vegas, I pondered over whether it was easier to survive in a mountainous desert like Death Valley or in the endless sand dunes of an African or Middle-Eastern desert.

And I decided that the best desert to be in was Las Vegas. Which seemed like a gleaming glittering oasis of hot food and water (a bath please - even a coffee pot one will do!) after out night at Tecopa.

YL

written by  DanYilin on April 17, 2009 from Tecopa, United States
from the travel blog: go.
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Thanks for following our blog! We will be moving it to blogspot - which allows Dan and I to create blog entries in different coloured text. So that you don't mistake all the corny entries for mine.... kidding!

We just want our own identities to come through on our blog. We will still be keeping the template from Blogabond so that you can still track our travels on the map.

Please keep leaving comments! We love reading them. We check our blog everyday for them (yes... we crave your company) so please talk to us!

See you soon on http://danyilin.blogspot.com/

YL

written by  DanYilin on April 18, 2009 from Tecopa, United States
from the travel blog: go.
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