Palm Springs and Joshua National Park

After spending the last couple of weeks lazing around in San Diego, we decided to head inland and north a bit to Palm Springs. It’s a mid-size town a couple of hours east of LA (right on the San Andreas fault line), with a reputation for being a bit of a retirement community for wealthy Californians. It was much hotter than the coast, being in the Colorado Desert, and surrounded by colossal wind-farms, with thousands of turbines.

We had decided to go to Palm Springs as it’s only about forty minutes away from Joshua National Park, which we wanted to hike. The park covers an area where the Mohave desert meets the Colorado desert and, although you wouldn’t exactly call it lush, compared to the other deserts we’ve been in there was a lot of plant and wildlife. Plenty of snakes too – I came dangerously close to treading on a big old rattlesnake and several other unidentified varieties over the course of two days…there were also big lizards, around ten inches long, sunbathing on the rocks.

The weird thing about the park was that although it’s basically just a big wilderness area, the plants and rocks seem to arrange themselves very artfully and the whole place looks very purposefully ordered, like a giant rockery that someone’s planted in to display in a garden centre. Also because of the time of year, all of the plants and cactuses were flowering, so there were lots of beautiful colours.

We also took a ride up into the mountains surrounding the desert on the (apparently) biggest cable-car on earth, which holds eighty people in each car. The floor of the thing rotates around three hundred and sixty degrees as it climbs 8,000 ft, so you get a great view to accompany the nausea. Stupidly we went up in our shorts and flip-flops – not thinking that it might be a little bit colder at the top – and then had to walk round in the snow with cold toes.

After getting frustrated lugging around my big SLR camera for the last few months, and annoyed with the poor quality of Tracy’s camera, I’ve traded the whole lot in for a top-end compact (a Canon G10 for the camera nerds out there), which has been brilliant so far, and it’s made a real difference to the amount of crap that I have to carry around.