Starting south from San Francisco on the afternoon of our wedding day, Mark and I kept fast to the coast road, heading for the cliffs of Big Sur, a legendary oasis of raw beauty whose natural hot springs were our first night's goal. We promised ourselves detours some other day, as we passed old-fashioned towns like Watsonville, framed by strawberry fields, and Castroville, where the future Marilyn Monroe was crowned Artichoke Queen. At the turn-off for Soquel, we saluted Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who, 40 years ago, launched their first Acid Test there.
Even without drugs, there's something hallucinatory about zooming along the very edge of the land, with an eternity of ocean glittering at your shoulder. The turquoise vastness is one thing, but the water is more fascinating in its shifts of mood: glassy dark and still; then sparkling, playing bright staccato; often wild, spitting white gobs of froth. Around Monterey, gigantic underwater canyons churn the waters, spiralling them up, to spew ferocious breakers that attract the world's most risk-loving surfers.
Highway One picks up a turbulence of its own as it roller coasters along the brink of the cliffs. Mark and I were buffeted along, mesmerized by the asphalt's curves and by the sight of what has been called "the most beautiful meeting of land and sea in the world". In the next couple of days we could come back to Monterey (whose Cannery Row is no longer the stinking "poem" beloved of Steinbeck, but polished up for tourists), to artsy, quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea (where Clint Eastwood was mayor and Play Misty For Me was set), or the churchy, Victorian town of Pacific Grove, where the monarch butterflies settle in orange-gold clouds on their way to Mexico. Now, though, we steered through the late afternoon until we reached 17-Mile Drive.
PHOTOS: AGENCIES
It was hard, in the flush of driving, with the Rolling Stones blaring from the car's speakers, to make ourselves peel off the highway. But this drive through the Del Monte forest is a glory. Our car was ushered through the toll gates on the cusp of dusk, when the road was almost empty. We turned off our music and let the sounds and perfumes of the new night swirl around us. Slowly, we cruised through the inky haze, framed by the blasted Monterey cypresses, which Robert Louis Stevenson saw as "ghosts fleeing before the wind". Gulls shrieked overhead, sea lions barked from the coves. The world smelled dark blue-green and salty.
Back on the highway, with few other cars on the two-lane, almost shoulderless road, our journey grew even more unearthly.
South of Monterey, the highway carves an increasingly tortuous path through the wilderness. Before the road was dynamited out of the rocks in the 1930s, people took days to slope in over the Santa Lucia mountains on mules and horses.
Now, with Highway One ribboning through it, Big Sur still feels remote. Stunningly so. Its praises have been sung by Jack Kerouac, who couldn't cope with the canyons' primal beauty -- drawing hordes of admirers and enlightenment-seekers to the area. And yet only a sparse community lives here all year round, in the verdant mountains, or stapled to the cliffs in cottages with regal views over the Pacific.
There's no town of Big Sur for tourists to stumble upon and spoil. Just a tiny, country gas station (the only one for kilometers), with a post office, a bakery-pizzeria and a corner shop.
The coast and woodlands are so pristine, it's as if you're spying backwards through time -- witnessing the world as it was in its greenest and bluest beginnings. Where we stayed, at the rustic yet sybaritic Ventana Inn, the cliffs loom 3,600 metres above the ocean.
All our meals felt ceremonious, even burgers and fries, especially over at the celebrity-speckled Sierra Mar restaurant with its enormous glass walls. Everyone gazes at the ocean as if it were cinema -- which it radiantly is, especially when someone spots the plume of a whale. Then people share their binoculars, trying to divine whether it's a gray, a humpback or, more rarely, a blue.
Also clinging to the cliffs is Esalen, an east-west retreat devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called Human Potentiality. In spite of its comically free-range chickens, squawking in the face of the Pacific, the institute gives off an arcane, mushroomy aura.
In Big Sur, against the black of the ean, the heavens are so starry it's dizzying. Before summer draws everyone here, it feels as if you have the universe to yourself. And trekking inland, away from the sheer fall of the cliffs, you can still sense what Kerouac called the "roaring aerial mystery" of the place. There's a vastness and a hush -- broken only by owls or coyotes -- that make the nights here extremely nightly.
Away from the road in the mountains, the water glitters distantly through redwoods, oaks, eucalyptus and pines.
At Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park, there's a noisy Eden, where a waterfall gushes 25m into the sea. Higher up, among the trees, the acoustics are more earthy. There the ground can be mossy and the air dank, as in a rainforest. Elsewhere sheep and cows graze the greenest grass in the world. The landscape changes wildly, and Hollywood has used it a body double for places as disparate as Hawaii (From Here To Eternity) and rural England (Hitchcock's Suspicion).
Our favorite hike happened by accident. We'd gone hunting re in a steep, lavender- perfumed meadow, complete with birds, bees and dragonflies. The cliffs were Technicolor with wild flowers, with not another person in sight. Down at the rocky shore, there was another surprise: dozens of otters, wrapped in kelp, with their snouts gleaming in the waves. I gasped, imagining the waves smashing the otters against the rocks.
Then I gasped again when, after the crash, their heads bobbed back up, unharmed. A massive wave, backlit by the sun, offered an X-ray: So many furry creatures twizzling, doing corkscrew dives to elude the almighty thumps of the tide.
A host of Harley-Davidson riders zoomed past us, then pulled off the road to Piedras Blancas beach. Instead of heading up Enchanted Hill to the castle, we joined the congregation at this otherwise inconspicuous flatland, where the greenery scrabbles down to the shore, so that gulls and squirrels share the same world.
The crowd was gazing, from only a few feet away, at a much bigger crowd. Hundreds of elephant seal pups were flubbing, motherless, on the gritty sand, snoozing against one another, working up oomph for their tentative, first swims in the rocky shallows. Even the bikers were awed.
On our last day, heading home to Los Angeles, we felt the air warming, turning tropical. We watched the redwoods and pines give way to palm trees. They line the beachfront in the serene town of Santa Barbara, then mingle more profusely with evergreens, cacti, lemon trees and bougainvillea in Malibu. Even this hyper-civilized rush of the highway, littered with movie-star palaces and villas, is painfully beautiful. Especially under the spell of late afternoon light. The hills glow, then darken and turn misty, mixing the beauties of Tuscany and Mexico -- to which Highway One would soon take you if, blessed with oceans more time, you stayed on the road.
Travel notes:
Where to stay: Ventana Inn (www.ventanainn.com); from NT$5,000 per room. Carmel Country Inn (www.carmelcountryinn.com), from NT$13,000. Santa Barbara: Cheshire Cat Inn (www.cheshirecat.com), from NT$6,300.
Getting there: Fly to LA or San Francisco then a car hire with www.bhrentacar.com
For further information visit www.visitcalifornia.com.
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