The Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) inland lakes in California. It is salt water lake and it appeared more or less by accident when the waters of Colorado rivers broke a dike and eroded two watercourses whose waters eventually filled the Salton Basin. The Salton basin is one of the lowest places in the United States.

So we had to see this famous sea. One can imagine a nice beach community with shady palms, luxurious houses and clean sparkling sand. Imagine the yachts sailing in the distance and gay Mexican music in the air. The streets are bursting with tourists who have hard time to decide which Mexican restaurant to choose: they all look so inviting with their bright colour facades and salsa music. You get the picture.

Well, as you have probably guessed the reality was pretty disappointing. There was a Yacht Club Drive there but no yachts in sight. Not even a former yacht club building: how did they get a street with the name like that? The brightest building in town was a high school: painted in garish yellow colour with a picture of a wild cat. I could not read their motto.

Well, Salton City is located right in the desert so the plant life there is minimal. A little bit of chaparral. And, no, they have no palms there to speak of. A few we saw at the beach looked very pathetic and a few were burnt. There was one Mexican restaurant but it looked spooky. Very few people outside but that is pretty much a norm for any California town, especially desert towns.

It seemed somebody had high hopes for a real estate boom in that area. For example the aforementioned Yacht Club drive had two lanes separated by the inner strip. There were quite a few new looking houses, new but very ugly. But I saw some ads advertizing cheap houses, like around $100000 which is more than anyone should pay for that area.

Probably the most shocking part about this "sea" was fish. The beach was covered with dead fish. It seems that it gets so hot here that tilapia does not have enough oxygen to breath. They grasp for the oxygen in the air because the heat does something to the water that deprives fish of oxygen. Once the high wind actually revived them. It looks like now they have the annual fish die-off. There were also lots of birds who evidently were not interested in dead fish but preferred them alive.

The general impression of the place was rather dreary and the opposite of the picture I described above.