The Aquarium and Big Sur

One of the main sights I wanted to see on this trip was the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  It is world famous and rightly so.  It is also right in Cannery Row, made famous by John Steinbeck.  Our Lonely Planet guide was correct when it said that Cannery Row bears no resemblance to the novel and it is just a bunch of touristy shops and hotels along the water.  I suppose it needs to be said that Cannery Row in the book was a seedy place that no tourist would want to visit but it is a bit too bad that it has become what it is today.  Nevertheless, we did walk along the main street as we had time before the aquarium opened at 10.  Peter calls all the ticky tacky stuff "eye candy" and makes it look better than it is, in his photographs.

We wanted to be in San Luis Obispo that night so I had given us two hours, from 10 to noon, to look at the aquarium.  As I discovered with other things, that was not nearly enough time.  In fact, the guide book also says that you should consider spending the whole day there and they were right as usual.

I wanted to see the river otters first because I have a thing for them but we were waylaid by the sea otters, swimming around their tank.  Feeding time for them was going to be in only 15 minutes or so and a crowd was already beginning to form.  I think the otters also knew what was coming because they were quite animated in their swimming and playing.

There was no room for us to see the feeding so we left and went to the river otters enclosure but they were fast asleep.

So we wandered around the other parts of the aquarium and found all the tanks to be breathtaking.  One section just had jellies in it and they are displayed to their best effect, with lighting just so and maybe magnification, although we were never sure about that.

There were small jellies that were self-illuminated, with tiny lights that pulsed along their ribs.

The main fish tanks were glorious, with all sorts of fish in them, from large tuna to hammerhead sharks to schools of mackerel that may survive the sharks by being in schools, or maybe because they feed the sharks other things so they don't eat the smaller fish.

They had a special exhibit called "The secret lives of sea horses" that was so well done, I figured they had to keep it as a part of their permanent collection.

In the round entrance to one area, there was a tank near the ceiling, with just sardines swimming round and round in a silvery circle over your head.

We went to the bat ray pool where you could see rays and other fish in a set that also had "shore" along one side, with real shore birds standing around.  A sign on the wall said that all these birds were rescues and most were being rehabilitated before they would be set free again.  Some had been injured to the extent that they could never survive in the wild and so they were permanent residents of the exhibit.  They even had a gizmo hidden under the end wall that made waves lap the shore line.

I tried to pet one of the rays on the petting side of the pool (there were small sharks on the other side - no petting there!) and I touched one briefly as it swam close enough to the side for me to reach.  But the rays were mostly keeping out of the way of the people hanging over the edge.  (That’s a flat halibut below – you’ll have to go to the whole set at Flickr to see if there are rays.  We’ll put the link up later but you can start here and check back every now and then as we progress.)

We missed the penguins completely but we did see a bunch of children putting on dry suits and masks and flippers and being introduced to a constructed tidal pool by aquarium staff.  They never had anything that cool when I was a kid!

Finally we had to leave.  We had a quick lunch at a 50s style diner where I had the fish taco (wrap) which I felt a little guilty eating after admiring the live fish so much.  However, as Peter pointed out, they actually sold cans of tuna at the aquarium itself!  Then we headed down the coast on highway one, to the Big Sur.  It was originally just called "el pais grande del sur" or the big south country.  They recommend you get gas and food before you start, as everything along the coast is expensive and infrequent.  We did that but the drive is only 90 miles and only takes a couple of hours even if you stop everywhere, so the advice is a little alarmist.  We stopped for water and a pee in the middle and it was fine.

And the scenery lives up to the hype.

You can't drive that fast because of the roads - the turns are sharp and the slopes are steep so while you may get up to 50 mph in spots, you regularly have to slow down to 30 and there are lots of places where it is posted at 10 mph.  And you do want to stop at all the turn-outs there are.

The first one we hit was the Bixby Bridge, one of the really beautiful pieces of engineering over one of the many ravines along the coast.  (There were two bridges like the Bixby and I may have the other one up here.  Sorry.)  Sometimes, there are bridges but as often, they just wind the road into and out of the sides of the mountains as the slope down to the Pacific.

Since we were driving from north to south, we were on the outer lane of the two lanes of traffic and I got to look down into the ocean, down the hills to my right, when I wasn't trying to do the driving from the passenger seat.  Peter does a fine job of driving, especially when it is challenging but I do admit to wearing a spot on the floor from trying to hit the brake more than he was.  We also had the GPS on and I finally took it away from him because he kept exclaiming about how it twisted and turned like a video game and I thought he should be watching to road a little more.

We passed a surprising number of cyclists, including fully loaded touring cyclists.  The shoulders on that stretch of road are narrow and there are many horizontal twists in the road, so it seemed a little dicey from that perspective.  But it was the vertical challenges that made me first, and then Peter, agree that this was one cycling route we were probably never going to attempt.  I finally wondered aloud whether anyone has ever cycled the Big Sur coast TWICE.  We sincerely doubted it.

As usual, don't forget to click on the pix to see them larger, and soon we will have full sets up at Flickr, so you can see everything.