its been a very busy day. Woke up again around 5:45am, we left for Zion national park. We reached there before sunrise, and I took some pictures, but because of the sunrise light, everything looks pretty bleached out. In reality (my naked eyes) the colors were fairly bleached too. The sun rising behind me in this pic.
I was really tired in the morning and I think it shows in some of the pictures, i went to bed around 3 am. I stayed up reading :). Ill probably do it again today. With so much bus riding, i might as well sleep on the bus. Some of the site seeing is interesting, but lots of it is prairies, cows, mountains.... and then more mountains, grass, and cows.
(Post tunnel pic above, can you see the difference, yeah, well too bad, unless you want to see the other 200 pics i took, you probably cant tell.)
Zion National Park has two parts; a pre-tunnel and post tunnel portion. The dynamics of the rocks changes as your pass through the tunnel. There is more smoothness to the rocks on the other side. I don't know why, they might have explained it, but the tour in in mandarin and I didn't catch it, so If you want to know why, look it up.
On a personal note. I am really getting sick of being crammed in a bus. I felt pretty claustrophobic by the end of today. I am also getting pretty sick of Chinese buffet by now. Buffet period. Breakfast was buffet style continental with waffles and eggs, then lunch was this nice buffet that seems like a pretty famous little hot spot called the Ruby Inn. It was in a beautiful little town that offered to rent out mountain bikes to see Bryce canyon, horse back riding, and helicopter tours of the canyon as well. The ruby in was insane, i have never seen so many people in line for food before. It was mostly French and Chinese people. What does that say about buffets, or does it speak more of the French and Chinese....?
As we drove into the town towards Bryce apparently people with multiple wives were "punished" by having a light bulb above their house that was on all the time. The government didn't intervene if they didn't have more than 3 wives apparently, short of putting a light in front of their home. When we saw the lights.... well for one, every other house in this little town had the "light," and second it was like one tiny 100 watt bulb just hanging in the middle of the street. It looked more like some weird decoration than some kind of punishment.
We stopped at a gift shop right after Zion and there was a humming bird feeder that attracted quite some attention, not just from the hummers either. I stopped and was able to get a few nice shots of this little birds. Considering i was about 15 feet from the little buggers I am pretty happy with how they came out.
After bryce canyon we drove about 4 more hours to salt lake city where we are to spend the night. We ate more buffet for dinner. This time some rice soup, duck, and pig ears was the specialty on the menu. I bet its the best pig ears in Salt Lake City. I wouldn't know though, since I dont like them :). Once we got to our hotel, we walked downtown to the Mormon downtown square. We set out just after sunset. We took some pictures down there. The city is pretty nice. It seems artsy downtown. I tried to capture some of it, but lacking a tripod everything came out blurry, holding my breath just isn't good enough. this last one here is time lapse, i think 2 seconds. Who knows its a freaking ultra compact!
Again just click on any photo to get an enlarged version. I think these posts are going to be getting shorter and shorter as I can feel myself getting tired at night, and apathetic already to posting. I will try and keep it up, but we will see how my stamina fairs.
