The Hindu Business Line : Enroute to San Jose

When you set off from the town of Simi Valley some 40 minutes from Los Angeles, the early morning air gives you a hint of what lies in store; it is light, crisp and clear with a bouquet of lavender, rosemary and wintergreen. Yet nothing quite prepares you for the first sight of the Pacific Ocean just half-an-hour out of that small town of one lakh people. The four-lane highway curves round a spur thick with pine, and nature offers the first glimpse of her awesome creation.

US 101: El Camino Real

The highway we are travelling on, in a Honda SUV at 80 miles an hour, seems like a magic carpet, smooth as glass; your coffee does not spill. You want to push the window button but the speed discourages you and all you can do is stare at the blue expanse and know that far beyond that horizon stretches the largest and deepest body of water in the world, that the first settlers to come across it would have done so on rafts, not courtesy Singapore Airlines.

That vista of ocean crashing gently on rocky beach, with narrow sandy spits, gigantic forlorn rock formations near the shoreline and, to your right, forests and wild flower beds, gently sloping hills forming a dark green line across a blue sky will hit you every five minutes as US 101, known variously as Pacific Coast Highway or Route 1, speeds you to San Jose and San Francisco, 600-odd miles north. US 101 is the oldest and a historic highway in California retracing the route the Spanish explorer Juan Gaspar de Portola followed in 1769 up from Mexico. In his footsteps came missionaries and the soldiers who built forts and 21 missions along the coast, calling their track El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, that served as the main north-south California road till 1926 when US 101 was commissioned.

Vista Points

Sea lions moulting on the beach

It’s around 11 a.m. and the changing vistas of forests and sea on promontories, flatlands and spurs now promise much more as we near central California and Big Sur, the start of what is arguably the high point of Highway 1. You might wonder if we have stopped anywhere, considering there are no traffic lights, malls or McDonald’s, just low mountains, trees, craggy shorelines and the Pacific ocean.

Well, the State helps with “Vista Points” where you can pull over, stretch your legs and breathe the air, bucketfuls of fresh sea ozone laden with the fragrance of pine, casuarinas and cypress.

At one such spot, a small ridge fenced off, we look down at a narrow strip of sand and there they are — California’s famous sea lions basking in the sun among seaweed, rocks and the lapping waters on golden sands. At the edge of the fence, beneath thick hedge skirting the ridge, fat squirrels and raccoons wait for their fast food that American tourists like those in India feed them despite notices not to do so.

Sunbathing sea lions? No, these mammals are moulting. Information Boards tell you sea lions come ashore to this protected beach, shed their skin and acquire new ones. Most are young pups that moult twice in the first six months. They stay ashore during moulting till they acquire a new coat that insulates against the cold waters. A faint unpleasant whiff hits you and you head back to the car for the Big Sur.

Heart and soul

Four hours out of Simi Valley, Highway 1 begins to climb steeply; so far the undulating road has been close to sealevel, never losing sight of it or the mountains. Now we are in a green cover of causurinas and pine, the air gets cooler, the salty tang of the ocean gives way to the sharp fragrance of leaves, and spring flowers such as honeysuckle. Where has the ocean gone? Then you glimpse it through the thick foliage down below like the cosmic painter’s shy afterthought.

This is the heart of California’s geography, the masterpiece of the Landscape Artist that took a million years to create. A pristine space of dense vegetation, mountain trails, streams and of course the Pacific Ocean, Big Sur has been kept as close to nature as possible. By the roadside a wooden board proclaims the Henry Miller museum with an arrow that points to a dense thicket; but time is short and one can only imagine among the gaggle of tourists that have also stopped by, the writer of banned books trudging up the trail to the arcadian retreat he had discovered in 1944 with his mail. In 1959, after writing the Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, a rambling exegesis on life, art, love and the Big Sur, Miller told a Parisian friend he could not think of settling in France because it did not have a promontory like Big Sur.

But his Nexus trilogy made it famous and today it is the mecca of exalted living — New Age remedies and fantastic trekking trails. Reluctantly we push on; Big Sur needs days or weeks, a lifetime to explore.

The road we are on is also called the Big Sur Highway and meanders into less undulating hills tapering to the spur with Monterey Bay below.

Caramel-by-the-Sea

Caramel-by-the Sea is probably the most vivid example of how different California tries to be from the rest of America’s deadening urban landscape. It is a small, upscale town, full of chic-art galleries, age-defying treatment spas, no parking metres, no fast food chains and, we are told, no neon lights. It also counts Clint Eastwood as a longtime resident, was featured in his directorial debut, Play Misty for me and had him as mayor.

So exclusive and reclusive is the town that you could almost miss it for the tress and the petunias, hibiscus and daisies flowering recklessly and the rolling hills with stylised houses peeking through the pines and cypresses.

At a toll gate a smiling uniformed guard welcomes us in European-accented English, hands us a brochure and waves us on. We are now on the famous 17-Mile Drive, the private property of the Pebbles Beach Company that owns the even more famous Pebbles Golf course overlooking the ocean, resort and lodge and some fine vistas you drive past. We stop at Spanish Bay, a flat treeless rocky headland with steps down to the ocean lapping gently over rocks.

You can walk down to the water’s edge, splash its cold and clear water over your face, exhausted by so much beauty marred slightly by the knowledge that this is private property that the Lone Cypress, a single piece of nature on a rocky vista point, made famous by the company logo, is trademarked.

Steinbeck country

You head back to the toll gate and rejoin Route 1 that now leads to Monterey Bay, the site of whales, dolphins and the renowned Monterey National Aquarium and, for this writer, the even more famous Monterey Jazz festival that has featured the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck and Dizzy Gillespie. Wish it were September and festival time.

So far we have seen no whales or dolphins but the chances are higher of spotting frolicking dolphins than tigers in Mudumalai reserve. Monetery Bay is now a fashion statement of art galleries, waterfront eateries and the “jewel” is Cannery Row immortalised by John Steinbeck’s debut eponymous novel he wrote in 1945 when the Row’s hundred-year-old sardine canning was declining. The opening paragraph introduces you to the Row thus:

“Cannery Row in Monterey is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a nostalgia...” But time moves on and Steinbeck unlike Miller would not have recognised his favourite location today.

Salinas, the Nobel-prize-winning author’s birthplace, is 17-miles inland off the highway; it houses a museum but we are pressed for time; it’s evening and San Jose is a couple of hours away. We drive past quaint towns with Spanish names and at 10 in the night, reach our San Jose destination in Silicon Valley.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime car ride.