The best down time I’ve had on this trip so far was a visit to David and Sally Kibblewhite (who had been my teachers at Woodstock School) in their beautiful home in Opotiki, on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The weather was beautiful: I finally got to see some sunshine after days of clouds and/or conference rooms. But there was something strange and unsettling about the light. Was my body, tuned for the high sun of the northern hemisphere summer, rebelling against the return to short winter days? Or was it that the sun was on the wrong side? I never did figure it out. I also would not have said that I knew much about the night sky, but that, too, looked wrong. I did finally see the Southern Cross, which included the brightest star I’ve ever seen in any sky, anywhere.
Category Archives: travel
Cachaça Tasting
^ this photo by Ludovic Poitou reminds me of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére.
Another group activity in Porto Alegre was an evening of cachaça tasting at Ãgua Doce. Brazil’s national drink is made from distilled sugar cane juice, but beyond that there’s plenty of scope for variety in distilling and aging methods and flavor additions.
Some of us tried a few during dinner; I especially liked a coconut-flavored one that Eduardo got. Then we had an official tasting of five different types (aged in oak, aged in cherry, “plain” as used for mixing caipirinhas…). Most of us bought a bottle or two to take home, my choice was a sweetish liqueur version.
Of course while we were in Porto Alegre we had to go to a churrascaria. This method of cooking originated with the gauchos of southern Brazil and is mostly about all kinds of very good meat, though there’s also a buffet of salads and vegetables, and you can get grilled cheese (in large, melty chunks, not sandwiches).
Truly some of the best meat I’ve had in my life (there are times I am thankful not to be vegetarian), and the tableside capirinha service helped to wash it all down.
I was delighted to learn that the Fogo de Chao chain is of authentic Brazilian origin and considered good, so there are a few places in the US where I’ll still be able to enjoy churrasca.
Our last day in Porto Alegre, a bunch of us went to the open-air market at Brique da Redencao, which runs every Sunday from 9 or 10 am. The official booths even take Visa, though you have to go to one of a handful of special stands to use it, and ONLY Visa is accepted (this is true of many places in Brazil, as we had found).
It’s a combination of artisans’ fair and flea market, with some very interesting things. I bought a mate cup (cuia), a little wooden carving of a jaguar, a stunning jasper necklace, and something very special for my daughter – all of which got me grief upon arrival in Australia (they’re very strict about quarantining wood and animal products, to protect their fragile ecosystem). But nothing has been confiscated. Yet.
Calistoga: Neck Deep in the Big Muddy
Had a very busy week with Sun events in San Francisco, for which my husband joined me on the tail end of his two-and-a-half month research trip to Columbia, MO. I was thoroughly flattened by the time my conference responsibilities ended on Thursday (with a tour of the show floor and several long conversations), and still not over the nagging sinus infection/cough I’d had for at least a week.
Thursday night we stayed over in San Francisco, but didn’t do much. Friday we took off up Highway 101 for the wine country, stopping for lunch with a friend in Mill Valley. Traffic was heavier than expected (I should have calculated for a Friday afternoon), so I called to reschedule my appointment at the Indian Springs Spa in Calistoga for 5 pm rather than 4.
I started with a 50-minute massage which, while not as thereapeutic as the massage therapist I see in Colorado, was certainly relaxing, and helped work out some of the knots of a long, hard week.
Then it was on to the famous Calistoga mud bath. Many establishments in the town offer this, but at least three people had told me that Indian Springs – probably the oldest spa in town – is the best.
A mud bath is actually an hour-long process that starts with wetting yourself thoroughly under a warm shower from the local mineral geyser. Then you are led into a room containing concrete baths that look deep enough to drown in, filled with a gently-steaming, viscous black substance. I’m probably not the first client to look rather askance at it.
The attendant helped me step into a tub and lie down; it proved to be shallower than it looked, so that, with my butt resting on the bottom, the top of my body was just at the surface of the volcanic ash mud. The density of this stuff was such that my arms and legs floated, and I had to push down to get them under the surface.
The attendant slathered mud all over my front, including my lower face (she asked first), and left me to cook, my head resting uneasily on an inflatable plastic pillow. Every time I raised an arm to pull the pillow more securely under my head, the mud on my upper arm would separate from my torso in wet, sucking chunks, leaving the exposed flesh looking very white by contrast. When I sniffed it experimentally, the mud was largely odorless, smelling only faintly of soil.
After a while the attendant came back and asked if I wanted more mud on. The additional inch thickness made me much hotter. Shortly after, she asked if I wanted a cold compress on my forehead, and I gratefully agreed.
I was ready to get out soon after that, though I’m not sure I had stayed the allotted maximum of 15 minutes. The attendant scraped the bulk of the mud off my limbs with the side of her hand, then helped me get out of the tub – it would have been difficult to pull myself out of that thick, clinging goo.
I took another mineral-water shower to get the rest of the mud off, then was bundled into a deep, Victorian-style tub filled with hot geyser water. The attendant kept bringing me cups of cool lemon-and-cucumber flavored water, and a wooden manicure stick was supplied so I could get the final mud out from under my nails.
Then there was a steam room in which I was told to stay “as long as you want,” which wasn’t long. Finally, I was wrapped in a towel, led into a curtained wooden cubicle on a quiet corridor, and left to rest for 15 minutes with cucumber slices on my eyes and a cold compress on my forehead.
Enrico, meanwhile, had been lounging and reading in and around the big mineral-water pool. After I’d taken a final shower and dressed, I drifted dreamily out to find him waiting outside the spa building.
“What was that supposed to do for you?” he asked.
“I don’t know, good for the skin I guess. It was certainly relaxing.”
“Well, you do look kind of glowy.”
Cosmic Ray
Garden of the Gods, Colorado
St. Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC
Ross and I arrived in New York the morning of St. Patrick’s Day – a mistake I will never make again. Our taxi had to drop us two blocks from the Roosevelt hotel because the streets were already blocked off. We then had to fight our way through the crowds (with our suitcases) to reach the hotel, only to find that it was too early to check in. So we left our suitcases with the bell desk and, despite exhaustion (we had woken up at 4:30 am to get our flight from Austin), went out to take pictures.
