Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As you will appreciate, this is somewhat paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. The Ger-
mans came and were obnoxious and unthoughtful, as adolescents tend to be, and stole the
tree from me. They perched on the fence and started taking pictures. I derived some small
pleasure from wandering in front of the cameraman whenever he was about to click the
shutter,butthisisanactivityfromwhichitisdifficulttoextractsustainedamusement,even
with Germans, and after a minute or two I left them there jabbering away about die Pop
Musik and das Drugs Scene and their other adolescent preoccupations.
InthecarIlookedatthemapandwasdisheartenedtodiscoverthatRedwoodNationalPark
was almost 500 miles away. I could hardly believe it. Here I was 300 miles north of Los
Angeles and yet I could drive another 500 miles and still be in California. It is 850 miles
from top to bottom-about the distance between London and Milan. It would take me a day
andahalftogettoRedwoodNationalPark,plusadayandahalftogetbacktowhereIwas
now. I didn't have that kind of time. Gloomily, I started the car and drove on to Yosemite
National Park, seventy miles up the highway.
And what a disappointment that proved to be. I'm sorry to moan, I truly am, but Yosemite
was a letdown of monumental proportions. It is incredibly, mouth-gawpingly beautiful.
Your first view of the El Capitan valley, with its towering mountains and white waterfalls
spilling hundreds of feet down to the meadows of the valley floor, makes you think that
surely you have expired and gone to heaven. But then you drive on down into
Yosemitevillageandrealizethatifthisisheavenyouaregoingtospendtherestofeternity
with an awful lot of fat people in Bermuda shorts.
Yosemiteisamess.TheNationalParkServiceinAmericalet'sbecandidhere-doesapretty
half-assed job of running many of the national parks. This is surprising because in Amer-
ica most leisure-time activities are about a million times better than anywhere else. But
not national parks. The visitors' centers are usually dull, the catering is always crappy and
expensive, and you generally come away having learned almost nothing about the wild-
life, geology andhistory ofthe places you'vedriven hundreds ofmiles tosee. The national
parksaresupposedtobetheretopreserveachunkofAmerica'swilderness, butinmanyof
them the number of animals has actually fallen. Yellowstone has lost all its wolves, moun-
tain lions and white-tailed deer, and the numbers of beaver and bighorn sheep are greatly
depleted. These animals are thriving outside Yellowstone, but as far as the park service it-
self is concerned they are extinct.
I don't know why it should be, but the National Park Service has a long history of incom-
petence.Inthe1960s,ifyoucanbelieveit,theparkserviceinvitedtheWaltDisneyCorpor-
