Now we see people around. Lot of cars too. We climb up to the view point.Take some pictures. The eroded Badlands at the Zabriskie point looks mesmerizing...in a sense, the beauty is so crude, so stark, it seems like an illusion. I have never seen anything like this before. The weird striated patterns has taken the color of the afternoon's sun. We climb down some of those hills, the road is treacherous. One stupid step, and we would go down some hundreds of feet below. However for the sake of photography, we take some chances. Zoya especially is particularly enthusiastic about taking pictures. She sees more through lenses than through her eyes. As for me, I take quite a few. I ask the guys to take my pictures, some that I can put up in my social networking site :P Okay, that's not so true.
Sometimes, I just like to be away from my group and just breathe in the beauty.I do not have words to say, what fascinates me here. May be the coldness in the entire view? The feeling of death; loneliness. The feeling of being abandoned? I don't know. All I can see, is that I could synchronize the view with my thoughts, my feelings and my perception.I wish I were 16 again, when I had the words to express these finer feelings. Somewhere down the road, amidst many chaos, I have completely lost it.
From this place, we can see the flatland valley far away, down somewhere. We only have four days and too many places on the list. For me, coming by car is fun; but hiking through such one place for few days is much more adventurous. I like the feeling of being lost. I like walking. It gives me the feeling of being a part of nature. Of everything around.
May be that's why the idea of travelling alone, by myself has always appealed. When in a group, we are sometimes so engrossed among ourselves, that nature only serves as a background to our merriment. We enjoy it, but feel it much less. When alone, I can absorb it better; I do not stand separate but integrate myself with it.
From Zabriskie we drive further down. We stop next to watch the sandunes. The funniest thing I feel about this place is, we found everything on our way here. From a city we drove, found ice on the road, in some places, now we were in some dry mountains, then we find sand dunes and desert with some random greens, and then there is this flat basin. The geographical variation within one small area was really amazing! Ivan is for some reason excited about a certain green bush. I guess in Russia they don't have many green trees (????) ( JK!) We walk around the sands and then back to the car for the next place.
The flat basin. Ours ears are feeling funny inside. This is because of the great pressure variation. The place is 160m below the sea level. The soil here is cracked into blocks, like a weird art on the floor. It was a dead place, nothing around, a green beer bottle. That's all.
I feel like running, far and far. Let my heart cry out, vent out all my sorrow, burden, pain, tears everything in that vast openness. It is the most strangely beautiful place I have ever seen in my twenty two years of life.
