1987/04 Monterey - City of Monterey |
|||||
About the only thing I knew about Monterey before researching for this trip was that it was the location of John Steinbeck’s novel “Cannery Row”. The characters in his novel live in the area of the sardine canning factories back in the 1940s before the industry collapsed. 
There was some kind of museum there at the time of my trip but I think I noted it as a place I’d go on a rainy day but then I didn’t have one. I think my pictures show some of the area before it was gentrified into what now (1987) looks more like a theme park. There are now guided tours and the buildings have much more colourful paint than I remember.
I knew nothing about the Monterey Bay aquarium but the organizers of the conference had included an evening reception there for the attendees. Its most famous feature
is its kelp forest tank which is around 30 feet high, the tallest I’d ever seen. 
Our reception was located at the bottom of the tank, with dozens of software engineers munching on seafood treats and gazing at the sardines and rays and sharks circulating above us through the kelp. It occurred to me that all it would take was a twitch in the nearby San Andreas Fault for the tank to fracture and cause our positions in the food chain to be reversed. The tank picture is from Wikipedia.
Monterey’s harbour is said to be teeming with fish but more obvious were the seals and sealion s that were draped over buoys and piers. I don’t know what the guy in the water was up to but the seals didn’t seem
to care.
Monterey Harbour was bordered by parks and trails and flowers particularly mass plantings of what I now know to be Australian “pig faces”, much prettier than they sound.
