TRAVELOG

  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.              ...

 Big Sur Coast:          A magnet for writers and artists, home to rare plants and animals, California’s Big Sur is intimidating, yet inspiring.   Since 1937 it has been served by a road that no one thought could be built.           Stretching for 90 miles (145 km) between Carmel and Cambria is the slice of California coast known as Big Sur.   Even the name sounds magical, a polyglot of Spanish and English meaning ‘big south’.   Gazing south from Carmel, it is easy to see how settlers arrived at that name: colossal mountains rise straight up from the Pacific Ocean, some of them weathered into 400m high (1,300 ft) cliffs, often besieged by monstrous waves.   This coast is a ship-killer, too, a place that skippers avoided lest they fall into its rocky claws.   No wonder pioneers took so long to trickle down this stretch of coast.   Even today it is largely uninhabite...