Running Manhattan Island

So you think THIS was pointless? On this trip - yes this same trip madames and sirs! - I also braved the glaciers and yeti to climb to the highest point in Berks County, Pennsylvania, as well as finished running the length of the Schuylkill River in Berks. For other stupid running projects go here.


Above: at the trailhead. Below: the High Line at dusk.



This was different than my usual trail runs and goofy running projects: I've long wanted to run the length of Manhattan Island. I don't mind occasionally being somewhere that, if I get bored, I can at any random point pop into a bar for a drink or a deli for a soda. (I'm all about proper hydration.) It also provided a nice change of pace to my usual projects; last weekend I did as much of the next leg of the Tahoe Rim Trail before the snow got too deep. So I started with our hotel near Times Square, headed south, then got on the 1 line at Ferry South and went as far north as I could, ran up to the northern tip, then ran back. Pictures below start on the High Line. You'll have to forgive the tilt as when I took them I was running or being jostled.












Above, through the forest that is...someone's flat, 10 feet away. Below, typical view when crossing over intersections.


The High Line (an old raised railbed turned into a nice linear pseudo-nature park on the West Side) was crowded (why was I surprised that something in New York was crowded? Not sure. On the other hand, I'm always shocked how deserted a street can be when one block away there are throngs of tourists and businesspeople. Normally I don't care about architecture but along the High Line as you can see there's some really interesting modern stuff.

After that, my route took me down to the Financial District, past the new World Trade Center and just about right past the Stock Exchange. I made a point of seeing the the charging bull statue (did it used to be this big of a tourist site? And I completely forgot about the girl). I had my most New York moment when a guard at the construction site blocked me and said (read in NY accent) "Hey big guy, tsclosed, ya can't go in theah." The financial world just really does not seem to be a happy way to make money and I feel sorry for the poor bastards that spend years in that district - seriously.




Two pictures above, approaching the new World Trade Center, and then directly above, in its shadow. Below, ah the pathos of New York.















And finally I had arrived at the farthest point on the south end of the island in Battery Park. And there she is (first, as she actually appears from Battery Park, and then closer up from the Staten Island Ferry):





Then I got on the subway to go to the north end. As a geographical aside: in one of the pictures you'll see that the vertical rock walls across the Hudson on the Jersey side are quite obvious. These are magma (in Jersey! What?) and are actually related to the Wachtung Outliers, the same formation that the Jacksonwald outliers in Pennsylvania are part of, 200 million year-old volcanic rock from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province that appeared at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary when the Atlantic opened and spread in earnest.

The Palisades and other rock formations along the Hudson were likely scoured by occasional floods occurring when a glacier melted out enough for a natural glacial dam to burst. Hence the glacial erratics you find in places like Central Park. (At the link you'll see it's assumed these were all here and were deposited by glaciers where they are now, and they certainly do have evidence of glacial scouring, but if you could find one where the scour-lines are not oriented north-south, as might happen if it was moved by the flood, you've got yourself a winner, i.e. a rock where deposit by flowing flood water is a much better explanation than a locally sideways-moving glacier.) If that's the history, then Manhattan Island is the result of occasional catastrophic glacial floods roaring down the Hudson. To wit: 1) It's much longer north-south, the same direction as the river. 2) The biggest, steepest slopes are north-facing ones in the northernmost part of the island (Inwood Hill Park and Fort Tryon, including the slope down to the river at the north end of the island, which would have been where the flood hit), that took the impact of the flood and protected the land in the lee of those hills (Manhattan Island was going to end up being anywhere there was a big rock outcrop that could accomplish this); these rock deposits likely protected the rest of the island during the flood and and 3) There are far more rock outcrops in the north island, consistent with this. See my quuck and dirty Evernote sketch. North (upriver) is to the left as if you're looking across the Hudson at Manhattan from Jersey, and the vertical relief dimension is of course exaggerated.



Below, you can see the rock lines from the glacier scouring, and no I never did find one where the lines were close to orthogonal to the direction of Manhattan's long axis, i.e. that could have been dropped there during one of the floods. Below that picture, a rock in the southern preserved meadow area which believe it or not had cactus growing in it.




Near the north end of the island I got off the Subway at Dyckman Street. Yes. Dyckman. HAR HAR HAR! Seriously though, Inwood Hill Park was probably the place I was most looking forward to seeing. If you see land across water that looks close, it's the Bronx, if far, it's Jersey. I scrambled down the bluff and touched the water at the north tip of Manhattan Island, where the East River divides from the Hudson. Inwood Hill doesn't look much like "Manhattan" I know!


















Of note, in Inwood Hill Park I also passed by Fort Cock Hill. Yes, Fort Cock Hill. It's on a hill with extremely hard rock thrusting into the sky. Little known fact about Fort Cock Hill, apparently Dyckman himself used to hang out there all the time. "Dyckman's hanging out at Fort Cock again," the locals would say, I report from 100% true and accurate history that I totally didn't make up for childish puns.

From there it was to the highest point in Manhattan, Linden Terrace at Fort Tryon (neat park, check out the Cloisters.) Some people say Bennett Park is the highest point so I went there too just to be safe. (Again, also in the northern part of the island.)

Then it was a long, long slog from 185th to 39th. Blocks in NYC are relatively short but come on, there were still 146 of them left. Few observations here except: 180s/170s seemed whiter, 170s-120s very Latin. The big civil structure is the oddly Gigeresque ceiling of the George Washington Bridge tunnel. I then checked out Grant's Tomb.

I had actually run out of time because I had agreed to meet a friend for an early dinner so I just took the subway from 116th back to the hotel. Dinner turned out to be worth it.






That's a New York Strip of course (I've also had French fries in France, Belgian waffles in Belgium, and Irish twins in Ireland.) This particular steak was in Wolfgang's Steakhouse on the ground floor underneath the New York Times Building, which by the way doesn't look at all like it's failing. An old fashioned and a gin and tonic were also had. I then went back the next day to run the remaining 77 blocks (4 miles.). Main observation is that the high rises and people density on the sidewalks picked up in the low 70s,that is, it again felt like "Manhattan."

Also from New York, not from the run, just very NYC photos:



Above, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island as seen from Todt Hill. Below, the old Pan Am Building (it dates me that I even know it as something other than the Met Life Building.)








Starting with the photo above, all pictures are from the Met. This figure is the Egyptian god of caffeine toxicity. Below: the Egyptians would not have deified felines if they knew to what undignified depths their descendants would eventually sink.







Also not particularly from this run, but about New York: yes there's a "density of variety" to food that you can't find elsewhere (for example I lost count of the Sichuan places within a few blocks of my hotel) and I did have a great meal at Szechuan Gourmet on 39th between 5th and 6th Avenue, but honestly, California still does Asian food better. The West Side is much more interesting - denser, more lively. People complain about the subway but it seemed fine to me.

Staten Island is interesting and of course has great Italian food, some cool views, and the Todt Hill neighborhood is chock full of big houses, some of which belong to "connected" families. The house from the Godfather is there as well, and although I have photos below I was very careful not to take pictures of houses in this neighborhood (no kidding, I'm pretty sure I was being followed at one point by a heavily tinted black Escalade and didn't want to draw further attention.) I hadn't been to Manhattan I think since summer 2005, and the main thing I noticed was a lot more jumbo-tron screens, and not just in Times Square either. Below, in order: the Brooklyn Skyline from the ferry, the foggy Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the forest on Todt Hill in Staten Island, and a view of the Jersey Coast from Todt Hill. Todt Hill is apparently the highest point on the coastal plain from Florida to New England and some of Todt Hill felt more like Berkeley, CA than New York City.









I hate to end on a negative note, but a) SO MUCH SMOKE (tobacco, marijuana, etc.) - WILL NOT MISS and b) one thing that I used to like about the Northeast and New York especially (as opposed to California) was - people working hard, working smart, planning ahead, being on time, and taking their jobs seriously. I ran into a number of examples in the travel and service industry during our stay where this was clearly no longer the case. This means the famous New York (and general Northeastern) brusqueness is no longer a compromise in exchange for good service, so I was quite glad to return to California. The figure below shows my very rough impression of regional work and service cultures and the trend consistently observed on this trip.

El Salvador and Guatemala

Dusk falls over the jungle at Tikal.


So what was my excuse? A good friend from high school was getting married in Guatemala. So I went there to be in his wedding. And, to get more points, I also went to El Salvador.


EL SALVADOR

The most densely populated Central American country, it's one of the few on only one ocean (the Pacific), and has some cool parks, good seafood, and an interesting history - set aside as a colony just to grow indigo (which collapsed when aniline dye was invented in the 1870s) and with a smaller native cultural and genetic component than most if not all Central American countries. One day I did walk across a large fraction of the city and had a lot of interesting conversations with shop-owners along the way. People were extremely friendly and approachable and everyone seemed to have a relative either in Washington D.C., or the oddly-specific San Francisco suburb of Daly City. It seemed very much like NAFTA had benefited them, judging by the many small new-looking factories with foreign flags all over the place, and by the informal Tom Friedman standard, i.e the many taxi drivers, shop owners, etc. who said NAFTA was a good thing. I like to buy national soccer jerseys where I travel and I got what remains my favorite running shirt, an awesome blue jersey you can see in the photo of your handsome blogger at the top right of this very blog. (More than once people have called out "¡Salvador!" as I ran by them.)

Outdoors: it was nice for this Californian to learn that the Pacific does get warm once you go far enough south, but I finally got to a black beach, which turned out not be all they're cracked up to be. From the mountains in the interior I was tortured by the distant mirage of an absolutely beautiful white sand beach on the blue green ocean. Just as I complained in Morocco, trail-running was not really a possibility, despite the awesome-looking volcanoes ringing the town, as everyone assured me I would be robbed or worse. There was a possibility of taking a guided tour with people who had actually fought in the Salvadorean Civil War on the trails they used as guerillas. I'm already a little uncomfortable with American Civil War re-enactments, where everything is far in the past. And it seems even stranger that a few times, Japanese and American soldiers have met on the actual soil where they were trying to kill each other. But tourism? On the site of a very recent civil war with many unresolved questions? No thanks.

For some reason I strongly associate this trip with two books I read, Infidel, by the amazing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Chung Kuo by David Wingrove, neither of which are about Central America. I tried to read something in Spanish by a Guatemalan Nobel prize winner, El Señor Presidente by Miguel Asturias, but had to confront that while my spoken Spanish isn't bad, it isn't up to reading a major novel.




Above: a random event I ran into on top of the volcano. (Funeral? Wedding? Holiday? In Latin America it's often hard to tell.) Below: my guide insisted that these were venomous, and I tried not to openly scoff, because as everyone knew in 2008, the only venomous lizards were gila monsters. Well guess what! A year or two later it was found that komodo dragons were venomous, and so are many of the iguanas that people keep as pets. I don't know if this particular character is venomous but I'm much less likely to dismiss it as impossible now. I took this while waiting in line to get into the Joya de Cerén excavation, and in a theme that continued throughout my visit, the guide picked up a random orange fruit and showed me that the stem was in fact a cashew. The fruit itself was like a durian but without the charm.



The next four are Joya de Cerén, the pre-Columbian Pompeii. The eruption was not as violent and deadly as Pompeii but it similarly left a very well-preserved village, including the footsteps of people running away during the eruption. The ash is quite obvious.









The next four are also Joya de Cerén, but outside. As you can tell by the last one there is still a lot left to unearth. This is true throughout Guatemala, where even in the partly-excavated cities there are mounds covered with vegetation and soil that are obviously buried structures. (In this climate it doesn't take long to get buried by vegetation.) If you've been to any of the sites in these places it's no surprise that new imaging techniques are finding evidence of whole new areas of cities.










Above: a fire tree. Below: typical views of the Salvadorean countryside.







The next few are from El Bosque Imposible (the Impossible Forest), a national reserve. It earned its name from the ruggedness and how difficult it is to cross. I joked with my driver that it should be called the Impossible Road given the way in. It's also infamous for both jaguars and mountain lions - it seems like this used to be El Salvador's answer to the Sundarbans' tiger buffet. The guide said during mating season you can listen for the cougars screaming their come-ons back and forth across these canyons. She also said she's had to turn around on hikes because of large boas and other snakes coiled in the trees at face-level right next to the trail, though fortunately we never had such problems. We did have a random cloud of wasps pass over us when we were at the highest point; when the guide saw this she froze and said "Don't move until they're all gone," then once they passed said "When the guide is nervous, you should be nervous too." Of course there were lots of dangerous-looking tropical plants and vines to complete the picture. I felt a bit like I was on a hostile alien planet at this point. To top it off, this is where I was taunted with a view of a far off white-stand beach. Still, on the drive back down, there was so much tropical fruit basically falling into our mouths through the open windows that the driver offered to stop a few times and when I got back to the hotel I was still full.






















GUATEMALA

A side note: when I went on this trip, I was at a point in my life where, for whatever reason, I started being less interested in tolerating the discomfort necessary for a true "adventure". Because I no longer felt I needed to prove anything? Or recognized how useless that is? I had the money? I focused more on what I was there to see and do? Who knows. I knew while I was in San Salvador I would have to go down to the bus terminal and buy my one-way ticket to Guatemala City. When I did, I talked to the person at the window and learned there were two ways to get there. For $20, the "chicken bus", which most people who've traveled outside the OECD countries will understand; and for $36, a double-decker with air conditioning, a computer screen at every seat with free movies, cocktail service, and attractive attendants. Would I have had amazing, unique conversations with the people I met on the chicken bus? No doubt. But did I want A/C and martinis? Even less doubt. I found myself wondering why I was even hesitating, and forked over the extra $16.

Guatemala City

Guatemala City is small, and the nice parts of it are really small. It's alright, but not that historic or pleasant (or safe) as a walking city - that would be Antigua, which unfortunately I didn't have time for. Some of the realities of life in Latin American cities are quite clear here. Asking people for directions outside of their few square blocks - I mean educated people who have been around - often met with blank stares, even when I could point to my desired destination on a map. Also, it became clear when we went out with my friend's in-laws-to-be that there were about two blocks in the center of the city that served as night life for the upper class. Everyone there seemed to know each other, and many of them were family members of industrial magnates or ambassadors. (Relevant: my friend's fiancee and her family are fairly light-complected; most Guatemalans are not.) A couple days after the wedding I went along on a trip to the "good" mall with her, and I asked her pointedly who all the white people on the fashion billboards were. "There are light-complected people in Guatemala!" she objected indignantly. "Yeah, and all two hundred of them were at your wedding," I said. That was a quiet ride back. I should shut up sometimes.

Pacaya Volcano An active volcano just west of the city. Locals hike up it all the time, I guess because it's less active than Volcan de Fuego (which will definitely kill you, as opposed to possibly.) My friend's father-in-law had actually camped on it with his mother at one point! When I got there and realized how active it was - with booms and lava flows - I went part way up, and then had a rare moment of common sense which you can see in the videos below. Forgot actual volcanic activity - lightning is an even bigger problem on volcanoes in the tropics than elsewhere. Interesting experience. Wouldn't do it again.





The following three are (I believe) from the national museum in Guatemala City. Of course it's a Latin American Museum so it's loaded with more pre-Columbian treasures than you could imagine. I don't think stone carving realism achieved these heights anywhere else in the New World.







The Petén: Tikal, Yaxha, and the Island Village of Flores

Guatemala City is in the cooler highlands of the country's center. The Petén is in the northeast of the country, the tropical and often swampy tropical lowlands as you get out on the Yucatan Peninsula shared with Mexico and Belize. It's also where all the Mayan ruins are, and my friend's in-laws were kind enough to set up a flight for me while I was visiting. I opted for the 1-hour plane ride rather than a horrendous bumpy unreliable car ride on washed-out roads.


Above and below, some critters from Tikal. Howler monkeys would be terrifying to hear during their dawn chorus if you didn't know what lazy goofy guys they are. They're also scary because they urinate from the trees, tourists look up to see what's dripping, and then they finish. I swear they do it intentionally. The turkeys are amazingly colorful as you can see. I actually got a trail run in here, which despite the miserable humidity wasn't so bad; I guess I was expecting to be hot and sweaty. I realized as I was running back that there were all manner of nasty snakes (that I couldn't identify) to step on or fall on me from a tree. I also noticed the "Danger Crocodiles" sign at the little ponds I ran by. Bad times.





Above and below: tropical trees are strange. Below, a ceiba with classic tropical buttress roots, which Wallace recorded on his travels.



Below for many pictures: Tikal, which mostly speaks for itself.












If you haven't seen Apocalypto, you should - for its depiction of what life may have been like in a Mayan city (and, complete spoiler, here's the twist ending.)




The steps are every bit as steep as they look. The large headstone-looking objects are stelae with inscriptions about kings and military victories. They are not fully translated, but we understand their dating system, which is why we can say things like "On July second A.D. 748, Two-Grass vanquished his enemy Eight-Rabbit from the next city-state" because that's what the stelae tell us. (Of course, can we trust the stela-carvers? Prehistory is based on physical objects and can't lie to you in the same way.) Below, that's where sacrifices (human and otherwise) took place, with a gutter system for the resulting blood.


















You may note the fuzziness of these photos. We were there right before the rainy season was to begin and the humidity was unbelievable. While I got treated to a true tropical thunder-squall in the Petén (constant thunder claps, black clouds suddenly obscuring the hammering sun, rain drops the size of your fist, all on top of you in minutes) that didn't make up for the basic fact that I am not an animal designed to be in the tropics. Until this moment I had thought of myself as indestructible, able to survive in any climate, desert, glaciers, jungle, throw it at me. After being eaten alive by mosquitoes, sweating so much that my clothes were literally as sopping wet as if I'd jumped in a river, and literally having fungus start growing on me in a matter of days, I realized that the jungle is not a place I belong. (For the record, I still do fine with glaciers and deserts.) What didn't help was that my travel companion, while civil and helpful at the time, was very defensive about her reiki practices, and didn't miss the opportunity after we got back to snottily point out that she hadn't been bitten at all while I got devoured. (Of course! That's the only possible answer!)




Above, what the main pyramid looks like from the back. Below, howler monkeys were often hard to spot, but if you look they're there.






The view out over the canopy. To Mayans, an open view of the sky unobstructed by trees must have been a revelation. Supposedly some of the Mayan city-states were so small that from the tops of their pyramids, the rulers could actually see the other city-states. I dozed off sitting up there and when I woke up a toucan had landed on the stone just in front of me.







Above and below: Flores, a village on an island in a lake in the Petén. This was a village before the Spaniards came but that's not obvious now. The water came up to just outside my hotel room and at sunset someone (a German of course) was swimming out there. I don't know which I would be more scared of, crocodiles or fecal coliform. Below that: a classroom in San Andrés. I knew someone from high school who had started his own NGO and built a school (put cinder blocks on top of each other, installed wiring, etc.) and then taught the kids. Talking to him I finally started to get some of the problems of conservation in developing countries; he'd just gotten the government to set aside land for a preserve around the lake, but people were still logging and hunting it, because not only had they never heard of this idea of a preserve, but once they did, they thought "well if it's public land that means I can go in and take whatever I want", and it doesn't help that people are desperately poor. One of the more meaningful things I've ever done on a vacation was here, where I explained the periodic table to a bunch of very attentive little kids, having to stop occasionally and tell them "Okay, I don't know if this is actually the right word for these things in the nucleus, but let's just call them 'protón' and 'neutrón', and if someone else uses a different word later they're probably right." (I guessed correctly. Three cheers for Latin-based words with predictable phonologies in English and Spanish.)







Below, Yaxha. Another city a couple hours from Flores. Only 40% excavated. At the time, the rest of the known cities were only about that much or less. Frustrating that this hasn't occurred yet, but on the other hand it's pretty exciting to think about the discoveries that are surely yet to be made.





One of the mysteries of Mayan cities is that they don't seem to have been used for living - not by many people anyway, only by royalty and the priesthood. They do have some dwellings reconstructed but they're not impressive next to the ceremonial buildings. This is interesting for a few reasons, one of which is that there's an ongoing archaeological debate for cities in the Americas (including ones in the modern United States like Cahokia) - did the cities grow and then the religious monuments were built, or did the ceremonial and religious function of cities come first? Since the Americas are thought to reflect the developments that occurred in the ancient Near East (except delayed by about 4,000 years) the answer to this may have far-reaching implications for our understanding of ancient history. The recent discovery of many more buried structures spreading out around the core Mayan cities with the great pyramids may give the answer to this. And it makes sense - imagine if Martians landed on the Mall in Washington, D.C. a thousand years from now. They might like the monuments, but they'd wonder where everybody lived.

























The leafcutter ants had quite a thriving civilization going in the shadow of the fallen Yaxha, leaving noticeable trails on the ground where they move back and forth. It struck me that they cannot understand that impossibly long ago from their perspective, a species far more intelligent and longer-lived than they built their own hive - but the ants outlasted them, oblivious that there was even anything to collapse, much less that it had. This leads quickly to all kinds of thoughts about finding alien life, the Fermi paradox, and the sober reflection that even ant civilizations have their own terminal failure modes.




Lake Atitlan - the Lake Tahoe of Guatemala, high enough in the mountains that it remains cool. My friend's in-laws had a cottage up there Cerro Del Oro with its own beach and not only let us stay there, but loaned me his kayak. There are locals who set traps in the lake to catch fish and although they work the waters for years, they never learn how to swim and sometimes fall from their boats and drown. The lake is surrounded by three separate Mayan languages still in vigorous use. (Cakchiquel is one of them. I recorded three videos walking through Cerro del Oro (here here and here, video is kind of annoying, mostly so I could unobtrusively record people speaking Mayan.) In fact one kid about 10 years old came up and started talking to us in good English (refreshingly, out of curiosity, not asking for money) and when I asked him how he learned English, he said "By listening to tourists like you." Turned out he only spoke English and Cakchiquel, and not Spanish. The homeowner had also scared us with stories of alacranes (scorpions), saying his brother picked his shirt up off the floor one morning and put it on with a scorpion inside (= a bad time.) On the way up my friend's mother-in-law rode with her daughter, my friend and me, and we took a brief detour to the local gravity hill, which she insisted (as everyone does) was unique in the world. The flowers up there were amazing. At one point we stopped for everyone to taste the sweetness of coffee beans still growing on the plant and for some reason I was in a hurry to get there; one of my biggest regrets from the trip actually!














Above: our hosts noticed my fascination with this blanket, as I had become convinced that the symbols were a code (some of them repeated, seemingly non-randomly but not in a low-information pattern either.) My friend's father-in-law told me it was made by the wife of the groundskeeper and that he would be stopping by later. I asked him if they meant anything and he said no, which somehow only deepened my suspicion. I took this picture in case I wanted to tackle the problem later but you're welcome to it if you have free time!



Below: typical roads away from the lake, using lava rock to build, and finally the start of the road back to Guatemala City.