Foxen Canyon Wine Trail with Modo

Foxen Canyon Wine Trail

Hartwell's Visit to California

Best of Yosemite Photos

The best photos from our May 2011 trip to Yosemite:

6th Anniversary

Had a wonderful full-day date to celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary. Started off the day with a delicious breakfast at our favorite local family-run Carpinteria restaurant, Esau's. The interior of this place is all surfing theme. There are several surfboards hanging in the dining area, and many paintings and photos of surfing, and continuous video footage of surfing legends. The food was delicious. I had a "gnarly burrito" and Sweewawa had a smoked salmon omelette.

Then headed off for Stand Up Paddle Boarding near the Santa Barbara Harbor, a first for us! We fell a bunch (me a lot more than Sweewawa) but the wetsuits were warm and it was a blast. Started to get the hang of it pretty quickly. SUP is decidely even more fun than ocean kayaking. First of all, the challenge of keeping your balance is quite invigorating, and once you get good enough at it the feeling of standing and paddling along the gently moving waves is quite relaxing. You really get a great view doing SUP. The picture below is right where we were paddling -- absolutely gorgeous stretch of coastline right near the Santa Barbara harbor. Definitely excited to make this be one of our regular sports.



After working up a mean appetite, headed to Cold Spring Tavern, a unique establishment I have been wanting to try since even before we moved here a year ago. I thought this place would be perfect for our anniversary, and it was.

Cold Spring Tavern was built in the 1860's as a way station for stage coach travelers as they made their way across the San Marcos Pass. This now paved road is what we use to travel from Santa Barbara over the Santa Ynez mountains to get to Lake Cachuma and the Santa Ynez Valley wine country beyond. The buildings, decorations, and the surrounding nature really make you feel like you are experiencing an untouched piece of history. Dining here is the first time we had had this feeling since enjoying Honey Mead by candlelight at the Fleece Inn in Bretforton, UK (in the Cotswolds). As if this wasn't enough, the food was delicious. I had charbroiled new zealand rack of lamb with champagne - mint glaze -- nom nom nom nom. Bar-b-que baby back pork ribs, which was also excellent.



After our early dinner there was still plenty of natural light. We rode our "stagecoach" back over the San Marcos Pass and decided to take the scenic route past the Santa Barbara Mission. Took a romantic stroll along the Mission Rose Garden before heading home.



What a day!

Theenie

Theenie loves hanging out on her porch. She was struggling with hairballs for a while during the last couple of weeks (shedding off her winter coat) but she's all better now and likes the view from upstairs :)

Downtown Santa Barbara

Spent my vacation Friday afternoon wandering the streets of downtown Santa Barbara, and visited the old Courthouse which has the best view of the city.

A Kayak Trip from Santa Barbara Wharf

A Kayak Trip from Santa Barbara Wharf

Now it is February. Into the breezy arms of a Santa Barbara spring came the Rabbit Year of Lunar Calendar. Bobo visited us last weekend. Having checked out three kayaks from the wharf underneath Brophy Bros, a favorite restaurant, we set off for a tranquil afternoon in the open water.

The tiny red Scrambler kayak came with a long white paddle. On the way out of the familiar wharf where yachts and sailboats dock, we stumbled upon a harbor seal sunbathing on a pipeline, amongst tens of gray pelicans, white egrets and noisy gulls. From the way he raised his big dreamy eyes at me, I recognized him at once – it was here, the very same spot where we met last weekend.

Prevailing wind combs the ocean from North to South. We found ourselves drifting in a salty whiff, above the flickering light and shadows, under a transparent sky. For some reason, thoughts of riding on a vast green field in a carriage alone in a spring time, somewhere in Southern China kept on coming back to me – could it be because of the rhythmic ups and downs? Or maybe it’s the intricate smells of invisible life around?

I still remember that period of time in childhood, when I used to believe in flying blankets. Sitting on a woven bamboo matt by the window, quietly and piously I waited for it to take off – I never told anybody what it was on my mind, so many a summer night, my parents thought I was just watching TV with them. And although my matt never took off, I never got disappointed, not until my first plane trip.

It is sea kayaking that awoke the old dream of flying blanket in me.

Fleeting sunrays and monotonous waves join and split all around us, weaving a intriguingly soothing rhythm. A sea lion swam close; his dark little face emerged and took a silent glance from behind one of our kayaks. Mark paddled hard to catch up with him, only to find him disappearing without a trace. Then I thought of a Lord Li poem, The Fisherman:

Like a leaf the boat drifts,
on a breeze the oar rests;
the barely visible line,
through a puny hook it threads.

Flowers spread on the shore afar
wine joggles in the bottomless jar.
The path to freedom is hereby paved,
miles and miles on the endless waves.

The path to true freedom he never was on, with his entire life smothered in royal luxury and partisan anxiety, ordered to commit suicide as a wartime prisoner in the end. Yet it was the glimpse of a desperate yearning, a hunger for something fresh and free that touched me deeply when I first read the poem. After all who truly lives a life of freedom, from the gains, losses and compromises woven by the intricate nets of human relations? We let our thoughts wonder from time to time, like kayaks drifting on the vast and salty sea, inhaling freshness and trueness, venting the urge to be free.

Thus I looked up afar – Channel Islands have concealed themselves behind the foggy horizon, where it’s hard to tell distant clouds from the ocean, and the ocean from the sky.

Google Art Project

Very cool . . . Google has opened the doors to the world's best art galleries online via Google Art Project!

Staycation / San Ysidro Canyon

Have really enjoyed being on vacation for a few days. The great thing about living in Santa Barbara is that if you do have some time off, there's less of a need to travel anywhere because you already live at a great vacation destination. The first day of vacation we rented some ocean kayaks from Santa Barbara Paddle Sports and paddled along the coast, starting at the Santa Barbara Harbor and paddling out seawards. Saw a seal and some pelicans up close, and got some beautiful views of the mountains, the city, and the open ocean. Yesterday played some tennis at UCSB, with the beautiful mountains again as a backdrop. Today as Sweewawa headed off for a day of teaching Physics and Math, I ventured out solo to explore another hiking trail -- picked the San Ysidro Canyon in the region of Montecito. This beautiful trail snakes along a creek and lush canyon, and ends up at a gorgeous 60-foot fall. Below find some photos from the excursion:



Cheers, Dr. Kowawa

Ellwood Butterfly Preserve

Butterfly

Cold keeps Eucalyptus awake

all night.

Silent giants crowded in their own shadows, waiting for

lazy morn to wake up, for her

fingers of sunrays warm and hum of breeze low

to put them at last to

sleep,

where clouds

form islands afar, ocean befogs

the mountain and leaves scatter into butterflies, all

in a gust of dream.

Yawn-borne dreams of Spring swirl as Carmen

once did. How

the edge of her skirt loud with

red and yellow sheds such

muted allure

no one awake knows.

So they swirl through many a past

life and life to come in me.

Streams of worlds bloom and fade at the

flutter of their wings.

Here's a movie I put together of the experience. Enjoy!



And a couple of more beautiful videos from youtubers with better video equipment than I have :) . . .

Journey on the Big Sur

Journey on the Big Sur

-- Sesameboat

This December has been wet. When the five day shower finally came to an end, a mini pond has formed around our house. Tomato plants lay blackened and drowned in the front garden; our cats spent their days crowded motionlessly in the half soaked bed, casting long gazes on the back yard walls, which seemed to be shedding colors in the rain. The whole Santa Barbara blurred up as a painting tarnishes in water. The sky grew leady, the ocean grew pale; the redness of the roof tiles, the greenness of the roadside shrubs, together with countless other hues slowly oozed into one another, making the town look even darker. It is only towards the end of the month when the weather finally started clearing up. Having been stuck at home all this time, a brief traveling seemed to us the best way to welcome the New Year.

And so we did. On the brink of the New Year, we hopped in our car and headed north along Highway 1. The trip took around five hours each way. Our destination was Carmel-by-the-Sea, a tiny town tucked between the rocky peaks and the wavy coastline of El Sur Grande – the Big Sur.

Elephant Seal Beach

One of the first attractions along this route was the Elephant Seal Beach near the town of San Simeon. Early spring to late summer is the breeding time for elephant seals. During this period, they are more likely to stay ashore nursing the babies than fishing in the sea, and we were just lucky enough to bump into the scene: hundreds of these huge sea mammals scatter on the soft sand. Male elephant seals looked rather like beach rocks with their dark wet skin and rotund bodies. The females, though, had quite a different appearance. Ivory-silver colored and much smaller in size, they looked like youngsters at a first glance. Watching them nap on the sand was quite funny – it reminded me of our cats, for they, too, slept with tummy facing upward and whiskers twitching in dreams.

The real elephant seal babies, wrinkled, black and helplessly cumbersome, snuggled up and cried to mom for milk from time to time. As I stood there watching the heart softening scene, I noticed a faint odor mixed in the salty sea breeze. It got stronger so it seemed, when we walked up along the shore.

Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a gull pecking the small body of an elephant seal. It was a dead baby, from starvation or illness we don’t know. There amidst the nursing moms and the gulping newborns, the dead baby seal itself was the feast of another species. The subtly repugnant smell probably came from the slow decay, as the weather was chilly here in San Simeon. I tried to locate the mom – just feet away all the seals were busy feeding or resting, nobody seemed any different.

In his masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Paul Gauguin had made the everlasting quest on life and death by putting the newborn, the youth and the old woman, crying or brooding, excited or confused together on one scroll of heavy colored painting. I had a flashback of th

is piece, and couldn’t help feeling that even a genuinely talented artist like Gauguin came across pitiable when compared to Nature herself.

Nature paints the scroll of life and death every day with such beauty, cruelty and ease. Creatures such as seals don’t quest. Embodied with the rich vigor of life, they fit unawares in our world as Gauguin’s flat figures on his canvas.

Waterfall House

The road got curvier shortly after the Elephant Seal Beach. Hence we entered among the peaks of Santa Lucia Mountains. Mark and I started looking for a word that could rightly describe this territory -- “Stately” seemed too pretentious; “Magnificent” seemed too vague; “Lofty” failed to capture the masculinity, while saying they are merely “masculine” would have missed a very important point: these mountains were solemn and imposing: Cliff lines that plunge deep into the ocean were half veiled in a transparent mist, and valleys so shadowed by dark pine trees close in on the narrow highway at times, before abruptly retreating, revealing the vast open sea over the next turn. Santa Lucia Mountains did not come across as a hiking friendly place – not merely for safety concerns, but more because of a feeling – as if doing so is to intrude, to disturb, as if these mountains deserve more respect than that.

Even the reeds looked different. They were much tougher here than the ones growing on wet land or by ponds. Instead of bending and waving in the winds, these reeds thrust up towards the sky like disarrayed arrows and swords. They gave us a weird feeling of having stumbled upon a deserted battlefield – the blood once shed long darkened, the roar once resonated long faded, the cause once died for long forgotten, leaving behind only millions of arrows on the lonesome cliffs. Santa Lucia was, in that sense, a forlorn place. The occasional electric poles by the cliff side were the only thing that reminded us of modern inhabitation.

I’ve always wondered about those pioneers who, driven by the Homestead Acts, first ventured into this daunting wildness. What was it like to live on the cliff along the coastline, greeted by the Pacific Ocean every morning, threatened by rock slides every night? What was it like to set up ranches at a place without roads, without power, and over years hoping to prove to the state government that the land you lived on was “improved”? How many people succeeded, and how many failed?

Somewhere along the way stood a sign called Waterfall Vista, and it was here we decided to take our first stop for a walk. The trail ran parallel with a quiet creek, curving its way amidst the thick redwood forest. Then it led to a short tunnel that went underneath the highway we just drove on. At the end of the tunnel, all of a sudden, we found ourselves standing on the outside of a cliff, directly facing the ocean and the beach.

And what a beach.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, even to the eyes which had been accustomed to the grand scenes of Big Sur. Here the ocean adopted a crystal green hue, as emerald held in the sun. Huge surrounding rocks with leaning cypress and pines defined a small patch of silver sand, which gently dipped into the green water like a child’s palm. Right at one corner, an eighty feet waterfall flew down the cliff and smashed onto the beach, creating a mist that was joined, from time to time, by the foaming high tides.

The Waterfall Beach looked unworldly and delicate, as Eden looked in Paradise Lost. Right underneath the fall, I see Eve rinsing her long flowing hair, and naked Adam sunbathing by the rock at ease. If there were a place that made you forget all the mundane worries, it would be right here, on the Waterfall Beach. We stood there long at lost, on the trail that hangs on the cliff, looking down at the silver sand. The beach was inaccessible, as such an unworldly place should be.

The trail led to a platform with a couple wooden benches, and, oddly enough, the base of some piled-rock walls. The view here was splendid, with Waterfall Beach to its left, Santa Lucia valleys as its backyard, and the vast green Pacific at the doorstep. On a small peninsula now overtaken by wild cypress, I could see layers of pebbles that outlined what seemed once to be a huge garden.

Here indeed, once stood a mansion, owned by a former congressman and his wealthy wife, donated to the State of California upon his death -- for she had hoped to turn it into a museum of Indian relic -- and eventually torn down after her death.

Who is not to feel a bit empty, roaming on such a ruin? -- “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Carmel-by-the-Sea – a Nouveau Riche’s Bohemia

I have always been a fan of the Bohemian artists. Among them my favorite one is Modigliani, a young Italian painter who suffered from lung illnesses since childhood, thus forced away from his beloved sculpturing into oil painting. Throughout his life, Modigliani rarely ventured into landscape. His most famous pieces are mostly portraits.

It might have been a warm afternoon, more than ten years ago, in the huge and dusty library in Peking University. I sat there slowly flipping pages through Modigliani’s biography and portraits, greeted from time to time by necks long and thin, faces stretched and pale, eyes narrowed and yearning. The unique distortion bares resemblance to sculpturing, revealing, I thought, the painter’s own distorted yearning for the art of sculpturing.

That thought gave me a sharp sense of pain, for it reminded me of the lonely and odd life I was living. As a physics student, I never quite understood my own field, and never quite fit in scientists. What excites them always bores me deeply. For years I’ve yearned to be a writer, gulping down novels and poems at the expense of studying.

I didn’t belong to the aggressive group of overachievers of course, neither did I belong to the cool group of slackers – while they were busy partying, I was buried in the Humanity section of the library, working harder than a literature major – for nothing. Left in between the cracks of Arts and Science, I may have appeared weirder to my classmates than the distorted faces in Modigliani’s portraits.

Thus the word “Bohemian” found its way into a soft spot in my heart. I felt intimate to the concept – being a Bohemian is not about walking down a crowded street with wild hair and weird costume just so you’d appear avant-garde. Rather it’s about being different, ignored, and lonely.

Without that piercing loneliness, there wouldn’t be such a thing as Bohemian. Art is a most personal belief; it drives one into the abyss of individuality. Things that may appear crucial to others – acknowledgments, companionship and even the sense of social dignity all seem dispensable when, fortunately or unfortunately, the nymph of Art casts her gentle spell on you.

Bohemian as a trend is a ridicule to the word itself. It grew into the worst nightmare when the so-called Bohemian legacy was left among the wealthy – in a country untouched by aristocracy, where the short roots of wealth trace back to no other groups than businessmen and celebrities.

Carmel-by-the-Sea might once have been a paradise for artists with true talents; nevertheless it is a very different town now. It is one of the most expensive as well as ostentatious towns in U.S. – a Bohemia according to the nouveau riche.

Everything about Carmel was so quaint and classy: layers of gray wooden roofs dance in the arms of the redwood forest dense; numerous art galleries turned Ocean Avenue into an exquisite necklace. Along the seventeen-mile-drive lie the world’s most luxurious golf courses, while neighborhoods with dreamy backyards lead to the dog friendly beach.

Such appearance did remind me of a small European town, take Genoa for example – reclusive, subdued yet rich with history, it’s the kind of place where outcasts lead their own slow lifestyle. But then I thought of the vast golf course by the sea, and couldn’t help noticing that land here is ridiculously expensive, even to the California standard, driving hotel prices sky high and making a local store that doesn’t sell Jewels or Art impossible to afford its rent.

And that is not European at all, nor is it truly subdued and quiet. One of my favorite things in Genoa is to roam along the narrow alleys at night, watching doves resting on the long clothesline, and shirts and skirts waving in the soft lamplight. Deep down the alleys there often was a mixed smell of sweet climbing rose, salty fish net with a faint trace of cat pee. Those bumpy Genoa alleys connect cheap restaurants offering fresh pesto and porcini, tiny markets with local olive oil and salami before joining into Piazza de Ferrari, a grand square with more than a thousand years of history. Deep culture and vital tradition, rather than expensiveness backed up the charm of Genoa.

So, back to Carmel. How is a local artist supposed to afford living here, unless he or she has been tremendously successful already? The retired investment bankers love decorating their social life with well known artists, same way as Carmel ladies like to wear huge diamonds – in a Bohemian style that is.

Happy Birthday Sweewawa!

Celebrated Sweewawa's 28th birthday today with some home-prepared Surf & Turf. It turned out quite well. Below are some photos of the feast as well as links to the two recipes I used, which I would certainly recommend.







Filet Mignon with Rich Balsamic Glaze

Broiled Lobster Tails

New Year's Eve at Big Sur

We had a wonderful trip up the Central Coast to Big Sur to celebrate New Year's Eve. Here's a short video I shot:

Big Sur

Very excited we will be driving up US 1 through Big Sur to celebrate New Year's eve. We'll stay in Monterey on the eve and drive back in 2011 :) Here's a great video I found on YouTube on Big Sur.

Bela Fleck @ the Orpheum Theater

We had the pleasure last night to see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones live at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, CA with special guest the Alash Ensemble (Tuvan throat singers). What a beautiful holiday show! Below are a few photos I took, and some more info on Alash.













Alash Ensemble

Aniso Trail / El Capitan State Park

Post Thanksgiving weekend we made the short trek to the Aniso Trail, part of El Capitan State Beach, about 20 miles north of Santa Barbara. "Aniso" is the Chumash Indian word for seagull, and this trail follows their ancient trade route, high along the bluffs overlooking the ocean and the serpiginous coastline of sandstone cliffs. The hike also provides beautiful panoramic views of the Santa Ynez mountains. This cool autumn hike served as the perfect relaxation to round out a great Thanksgiving vacation.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from Carpinteria, CA! Have fear as the Chinese tiger is here.

Goleta Beach / UCSB Campus

Loon Point

It's a pretty tough life when every weekend is a beach vacation . . . . but I'm getting used to it. Here's a beach minutes away from our home in Carpinteria. I like.

Loon Point hike is a gorgeous stretch of beach between Summerland and Carpinteria, CA. 40-foot sandstone cliffs tower along the beach and eucalypti, Monterey cypress, and sycamores can be seen dotting the cliff edge.