Best Travel photos of 2008: Where we took you this year
In November, Times staff writer Hugo Martin looked for a cheap way to tour California’s iconic ski resort Mammoth Mountain in Mammoth Lakes, California. Among his finds: Wild Willy’s hot spring, and here’s what he had to say:
...We hiked along a wooden boardwalk to an open meadow, where hot spring water gurgled out of a fissure in the ground. The water trickled down to a 3-foot-deep pool -- about the size of a large hot tub -- that was lined with rocks and concrete.
We stripped down to our skivvies and climbed into the hot tub-sized pool, looking like throwbacks from Woodstock trying to commune with nature.
The magma-heated water drained the tension and aches from my muscles. A cool breeze rustled the short meadow grass. The only sound, besides our laughter, was the rippling of hot spring water.
More cheapskate fun. More priceless memories.
Photo: Snowboarder Tommy Fynn of Brisbane, Australia, rubs mineral-laced mud from the bottom of Wild Willy’s hot spring on his face while enjoying the Eastern Sierra
Join us on a visual journey of where Times photographers went this year, to places like Mango’s Tropical Cafe in Miami’s South Beach, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the rugged Na Pali Coast in Kauai.
In November, Times Food Editor Russ Parsons explored Nick’s Cove, a new complex on Tomales Bay an hour or so north of San Francisco. Here’s what he found:
Hotel rooms often are boring places you have to put up with just to explore some place exciting. At Nick’s Cove ... you could be perfectly happy spending most of your time just exploring the hotel rooms.
Not that you’d actually call any of these places “hotel rooms.”
A string of a dozen cabins, cottages and other assorted structures stretched alongside Highway 1 just north of the town of Point Reyes, Nick’s Cove is a kind of Ralph Lauren meets Northern California fever dream of a resort.
It’s almost impossibly chic but not in an overly obvious way. Rather than settling for the kind of streamlined, highly polished glamour you find in most luxury resorts, Nick’s revels in eccentricity.
Photo: Kayaks rest on a boat launch along Tomales Bay near the town of Marshall,
In May, writer Rosemary McClure toured Miami’s South Beach, and had these observations:
Fifteen minutes behind Paris Hilton. An hour behind Michael Caine. A day behind Queen Latifah. Everywhere I went in Miami I just missed a celebrity. The only name I didn’t hear was Britney Spears. Everyone else in the celestial pantheon seemed to be making merry here.
Such is life in Miami, where star sightings are as common as Hummer stretch limos in L.A. Southern California still reigns as the celebrity capital of the world, but Miami has gained a rep as Hollyweird South.
Photo: Don’t know how to salsa? No worries. This club in Miami’s South Beach also offers dance lessons. A bartender dips a waitress at Mango’s Tropical Cafe. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Staff writer Dan Neil in March wrote about night diving with manta rays on Hawaii’s Big Island. Here’s part of his experience:
One big step off the boat and into the dark. When I hit the water, I feel all the familiar feelings, the ocean seeping into my wetsuit, the frantic bubbles on my face, the ineffable moment when the body’s gyroscope switches over from gravity to buoyancy. But nothing else is familiar. I’m floating free in the blue-black ocean, a few hundred yards from Kona’s volcanic bluffs. The water is about 40 feet deep here, but just a few hundred yards to the west the Big Island’s seamount plunges into the miles-deep oceanic abyss.
Photo: A diver in the Hawaiian Aquarium at the Maui Ocean Center cleans the glass walls in the walk-through tunnel. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Staff writer Susan Spano wrote a yearlong series of stories about China in a run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. She describes her first visit to Beijing, in part:
I suppose I should not wonder when people ask me about poverty, traffic, pollution, xenophobia, strange food and a host of other unflattering clichés born of previous encounters with the city. I must be patient when they grieve for the old hutong neighborhoods supposedly swept away by development, when they marvel at my ability to get around without a guide and when they ask whether my cellphone was tapped.
The truth is this: There was the polluted, awkward, unfriendly Beijing I visited 10 years ago, and there is Beijing now, physically and psychologically transformed.
Photo: A bicycle rider in Beijing whizzes past a mural of a Nike ad starring Kobe Bryant. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
In September, Times staff writer Susan Spano took us on a head-spinning tour of Vatican City.
In ancient times, a low hill on the west side of the Tiber River in Rome overlooked a sports field, or circus, marked by a red granite obelisk from Egypt. In AD 64, the Apostle Peter was crucified and buried in its shadow, incising the place in history.
Today people come here to see Michelangelo’s Pieta, the Raphael rooms, the ancient Laocoan statue or to study some of the crowning architectural achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Some just want to be able to say they’ve visited the smallest country in the world. Others come as religious pilgrims.
Photo: Inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where women must cover their shoulders and men must wear long pants. (Richard Derk / Los Angeles Times)
Times staff writer Susan Spano visited Venice (before this year’s big floods) and wrote:
Pianissimo, pianissimo.
That’s how morning comes on the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Pigeons dawdle around a trash can, in no rush to pillage. The young woman who tends the newsstand gives her dog a bowl of water. Then the grate at the Bar all’Orologio clangs open, a sure sign that another summer day has begun in Venice.
Photo: Looking along the Rio Malpaga, a canal near Campo San Barnaba, shows colorful buildings, bridges and boats that define
In July, staff writer Hugo Martin hopped on a horse for a traditional cattle drive and found:
The heifers are acting surly, but my horse pushes forward. My young crew of 10 or so cowpunchers encircles about 30 head of cattle on a wide pasture in the shadow of a sawtooth mountain just west of Bridgeport. Our horses slowly lead the cattle toward a gate at the far end of the field.
“Move on,” I yell, as I nudge my mount with the heel of my boot. “Heeeaaah!”
For a moment, I think I’m a cow-herding, range-riding, genuine cowboy.
Who am I fooling? I’m just a part-time pretender, one of several dozen greenhorns playing cowboy at a dude ranch only a few miles from a 24-hour convenience store, a corner deli and a big-box retailer. I have donned a pair of old boots and mounted a swayback horse because I think I have the grit and guts to cut it as a cowboy.
Photo: Horses are rounded up every morning to be saddled-up for guests to ride at the Hunewill Guest Ranch in Bridgeport, California. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Writer Rosemary McClure in June explored Southern California’s Channel Islands where she found solitude and wildlife.
Only my footprints marked the wet sand along Water Canyon Beach.
Only my ears heard the wail of sea gulls resonating off the sandstone cliffs above.
Only my eyes saw a bright orange starfish rising and falling with the tide as the sea battered its rocky ledge.
I found solitude, adventure and an unspoiled, world-class beach only 26 miles from the Los Angeles megalopolis. And I reveled in it.
Photo: A nesting seagull on Anacapa Island complains loudly when someone moves too close to her nest. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)