First up, some photos from yesterday that didn't make it into the last post.

An eerie smoky sun rise

And the sunset

Last night I watched Into the Wild, a film about a boy who abandons his home life to travel the USA. A decent portion of the movie took place in the area where I am staying so I decided it would be cool to go and visit some of the locations.

One of the only real tourist attractions in this area is Salvation Mountain (which was featured in the movie). It is a huge religious art installation built out of clay, straw, latex, and paint on the side of a hill. The site is free to visit and there was no one around when I got there. It was pretty impressive to think that it was almost entirely created by one man. Nearby was another location from the movie, a trailer park/squatter camp known as slab city, which I decided to observe from afar....

Slab City

Apart from this there was nothing else trying to force religion on you

About an hour southeast is a park called the North Algodones Dunes Wilderness Area and that is where I decided to go after Salvation Mountain. The main attraction is the large sand dunes that form up against the base of a mountain range.

The dunes were an awesome sight. I stopped at a car park to take photos and decided to climb up one of the nearby dunes. It was an easy climb although my shoes filled up completely with sand. Maybe that's why some people call them sand shoes? It was pretty bright on the dunes so I had to edit these photos pretty heavily to show the topography which is why the sky looks odd.

Looking at my map I noticed that I was now less than an hour's drive from the Colorado River so thought I might as well go on and see it. The town that I was driving to was called Palo Verde and I imagined it must be fairly large as it was signposted about 100 miles out. When I arrived it turned out to be a tiny village with a population of only 110 so there wasn't anything to see. The landscape during the drive was great though and it was well worth the time. The river was also pretty nice although swimming was banned which was annoying.

The Colorado River

A view from the drive

I now have bunch of videos ready to go but I can't post these until I have a better internet connection which probably wont be until Thursday. Tomorrow I head into Joshua Tree National Park for two nights where I suspect there will be no signal at all so my next post might not be for a few days.