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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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WILDLIFE IN LAKE BAIKAL

 Unique wildlife:

Lake Baikal


           Lake Baikal is rich in wildlife.  Nearly 300 species of birds nest around the lake, and many more stop off on their seasonal migration, especially in the marshy delta of the Selenga River.  White-tailed eagles patrol the shores for carrion, and brown bears are forest residents.  More than a third of plant and animal species living here, such as the Baikal sturgeon, are found nowhere else in the world.

          Baikal’s most famous residents are the steel-grey nerpas, a species of freshwater seal.  How seals came to be here is a mystery, although scientists speculate that they swam up rivers form the Arctic Ocean and were cut off from the sea during the last Ice Age.  When the ice melted they never went back, but became isolated in the lake.  Nowadays, seals can be seen basking on rocks on the Ushkany Islands and other central and northern parts of the lake.  Nerpas feed mainly on golomyanka, or Baikal oilfish, the most common fish in the lake.  These bottom-dwellers come close to the surface to feed at night.  Oilfish lack a swim bladder but have a high oil content and porous bones, which allows them to move up and down in Baikal’s water unaffected by changes in pressure.

          Another notable resident of the lake is the omul, a small, silver-sided, salmon-like fish occasionally caught by nerpas and the primary catch of local fishermen.  Smoked omul is a delicacy sold in markets around the lake and popular with travellers; locals prefer their omul salted.  A traditionally dish, known as stroganina, consists of a salad of finely cut strips of freshly frozen, raw omul served with onion, salt and black pepper.

           Nerpas and lake fish can be seen in the aquariums of the small museum of the Limnological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the village of Listvyanka on the lake’s southwestern shore, but there is also a good chance of spotting them in the wild, for Baikal’s water are unusually clear.  The clarity of the water is maintained by the poppy-seed-sized copepod Epischura baikalensis that dominates the plankton, gobbling up minuscule particles of food and specks of pollution to make Baikal one of the clearest lakes in the world.  On a good day, visibility is at least 40m (130ft).  When Vladimir Putin descended to the bottom of the lake in the submersible Mir in 2009, he declared: ‘We can see the bottom of Lake Baikal, which is very clean and beautiful.  The water is pure form an ecological point of view, but in fact it is a kind of plankton soup’.
Location: Lake Baikal, Russia

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