Mt Harvard.

One defining aspect of living in Lafayette: restlessness.

After barely a month of living here, I found a group of similar-minded people and booked it out of the state for the long weekend, driving 20 hours westward to the mountains of Colorado.

Six of us shared a car on the way there, trading shifts and driving through the night. The best shift of all was mine: sunrise, just as we were entering Colorado, as the terrain began to change and mountains began to rise up out of the plains of Kentucky.

Getting close to Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs.

I couldn't have hand-picked a better road trip group than this one. Hardly five minutes passed when we weren't talking or bantering; the conversations were so entertaining that I'm surprised any of us got any sleep at all.

Pit stop to take in the view.

Mt Harvard is what they call a '14er', a peak of over 14,000 feet, of which there are 54 in Colorado alone. Harvard is the 3rd highest in the state, and rises out of the small town of Buena Vista. There we met up with 9 others, and made camp near the trailhead. In a feeble attempt to acclimatize to the elevation, we slept at around 10,000 feet.

Talk about an early start; our alarms went off at 2:30am. After breakfast by headlamp in the chilly night air, packed with several liters of water and thousands of calories of trail food, we started the tramp in one big group.

The group broke apart before long. Five of the stronger guys booked it up the mountain, reaching the peak well over an hour before I did. Another 14er, Mt Columbia, is attached to Harvard via a 3-mile ridge, which is exposed, steep, very strenuous, and takes a conservative 3 hours to complete. The group of five who first reached Harvard crossed over to Columbia and thus managed to summit two 14ers in the same day, an awesome accomplishment.

Me, I was happy to take my time. The hiking was fairly straightforward up until we hit treeline at about 12,500 feet. From there, the nasty talus (boulder field) began. Since we were approaching the summit from the west face of the mountain, we couldn't see the actual sunrise, but the peaks behind us turned pink with daylight as we began the final ascent.

Snacks and a nap break at 13,000.

Piles of rock pointing out the trail.

The final kilometer took 2 hours to complete and was quite tiring. Not only was the terrain very steep, but the gusts of 40mph winds kept knocking me around, and the altitude had its effects as well.

My walking buddy behind me, looking very small.

Our walking trail can be seen faintly down the middle. Bear Lake to the right.

It was a tremendous feeling to finally make the summit at 14,420 feet. The top was very exposed, with little flat space to rest and a sheer drop on the other side. Still, I couldn't help dawdling. I found a small space to dodge the high winds, and sat there contentedly for the next hour. The weather could not have been more perfect. Blue skies, white clouds, visibility for hundreds of miles.

Panorama video from the top.

The descent was quick. My walking partners and I kept up a driving pace down the talus, back down to treeline, all the way to the trailhead.

After everyone else had arrived back at camp, we promptly packed up and headed home, but not before a much-needed meal of Mexican in Colorado Springs. Another 20 hours later, exhausted but happy (especially, these boys, who climbed both Harvard and Columbia), we arrived back in Lafayette.

I'm already looking forward to the next trip, and am glad to realize that my exploration kick from the past year has not quite ended (and indeed, may never need to).

Indiana State Fair.

Last weekend, my friend Alex drove down here to my new abode in Lafayette, Indiana. Since I'm still relatively new to the Midwest (going to school in Chicagoland does not count, in my opinion), we decided to get a feel for its culture by going to the Indiana State Fair down in Indianapolis, about an hour drive from where I live.

Deep-fried foods being a quintessential element of all state fairs, it was a gluttonous day. We started out with a "pepsi burst", which Alex is seen munching on here. Fried dough balls, coated with cinnamon sugar and doused in a pepsi-based syrup. I was hoping more for a fried ball with carbonated pepsi inside which would gush out when chewed. Oh well.

It is difficult to resist the sight and smell of gigantic turkey legs being roasted on a grill. Despite the legs being as big as my face, it was not difficult for us to finish one off, doused in black pepper and hot sauce.

The culinary highlight of the day was the infamous donut burger, which is exactly what it sounds like. A grilled beef patty, with melted cheese, onions and pickles, between two Krispy Kremes. The prospect of clogging my arteries with the thing terrified me until I ate it. It was an interesting blend of sweet and savory, and tasted oddly like a Big Mac. Not something that I'd do every day, but I certainly enjoyed the novelty of it.

And then there was the hot beef sundae, which I had been meaning to try since seeing it at the Tennessee State Fair a few years ago. It was delicious, but not quite as cool as it sounds, being a normal concoction of mashed potatoes over chunks of beef, topped with corn and gravy.

The most hilarious moment of the fair was when we discovered a machine called VibraBody Slim, meant to shake your fat off with varying speeds of vibrations. When you turn it on, the platform on which you stand begins to shake back and forth, and your entire body begins to jiggle - a sight that had me doubled over in laughter for a good ten minutes. Speeds increase all the way up to level 30, at which point my vision blurred and I became quite nauseous, and could feel my brain vibrating within my skull. We revisited the machines at the end of the day, and discovered that 3 out of their 5 display models had been sold. Oh, oh, Indiana.

The rest of the time, we just strolled around, enjoying the sight of carnival rides, tractors as big as houses, smaller farm vehicles from the '60s and '70s, hogs, goats, draft horses, blacksmith demonstrations, smoke-emitting wood-chopping machines, and many other things that I find charming about rural America.

This thing cost as much as my parents' house!

A word about these pictures: I no longer own a digital camera, having ruined my previous one with an unfortunate water spill. However, my dad gave me his old Canon EOS Elan II, a 35mm SLR camera made in the late '90s. Having never used a film camera before, it was a challenge to fiddle with settings without being able to immediately see the results, and to be limited to just 36 pictures for the entire day. However, I'm largely happy with how they turned out, and I think the grainy quality almost highlights the rustic feel of the all-American Midwest.

There are some instances when I feel that advanced digital cameras are almost too perfect in how they capture reality, whereas slight imperfections can give an image a quality of dreaminess, which I'm drawn to. I'd really like to use this Canon as a base for learning more about film photography.

End tangent. The weekend was a good one. I'm settling into Indiana just fine.

Pandas in Chengdu.

No trip to China is complete without going to see pandas! Needless to say, the welfare of pandas is taken very seriously in China, and Chengdu's Panda Breeding and Research Center is no exception. Though these animals are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, to this date the Chengdu base has successfully bred 88 surviving pandas.

I arrived early in the morning during their feeding time. Apparently, they spend sixteen hours a day snacking away and the rest of the time napping. Not surprising given that all the energy they consume for their big bodies come from tiny, fibrous stalks of bamboo.

Feeding time for the red pandas.

Playful things.

Sleepy things.

So badly did I want to just pick one up and squeeze it, but that option would have cost me 1000 yuan ($150)! Maybe next time.