On my third road trip series this year (after Alaska and Washington State), I made my way through San Francisco and down along the Pacific Coast Highway to LA, before snaking through the vast expanses of deserts at Joshua Tree and Death Valley, and concluding the trip in Vegas.

As always, it was a revitalising trip, made more so by the sun, the sea, the sand, and the simple pleasure of being able to wear shorts and sunglasses. Thongs/flip flops offer a liminal experience too! Wonder and curiosity swirled into marvel, as the land offered the redwoods, which gave way to the cypresses, then the palms, then the cacti. But unchanging was the presence of sand, from that of the sea to that of the desert. 

Yet the lingering flipsides of solo travel also remain, amplified by the wide distances I had to drive through rugged and barren landscapes, where sometimes the only evidence of the built environment were long-abandoned ghost towns. Vestiges of our pursuit of wealth and our atavistic penchance for greed. While I snorted up the white lines on the highway framed by these settings, it didn't take much for the scales to tip from solitude to loneliness. The dark thoughts start to emulsify and spread to every edge of the windscreen. 

At the end, there is always however joy that breaks through. Joy in being alive, in being able to savour these cliff edges and alien landscapes. But to tear further into this contradiction of feelings would reveal more about the author than about the journey. I'll have to leave that for another time.

In the meantime, perhaps an apt metonym for these feelings may be projected by the Hoover Dam, which I visited as one of the last destinations on my journey. Such a feat of human perseverance, to build something so grand and impactful in the most hostile of places. And its benefits to society and its life-giving powers are hard to deny. But at what cost? We humans think we can build towers and tear down mountains with our technology and our ingenuity, but often we play God with little regard for the long-term effects of our actions. We drink goblets whose brims overflow with our own ego, while paying little heed to the ecology we've endangered, or the land we robbed from others. What is it that we really can be proud of?