TRANSCRIPT
Why I Love Natural Hot Springs
What I love is it is just a radically different environment. Also, it’s hot water that is fed by volcanic activity, often deep, deep, deep in the earth. It’s something in a way of like being in the womb again. It’s a place of safety. It’s a reminder that the world is not always what we see on the surface.
Like, here I am in New York State, upstate New York, filming this video. I grew up in upstate New York, the East Coast of America. There are no hot springs, as far as I know, really almost anywhere in the East Coast of America. I certainly never have been to one. I think there may be some warm springs down south, maybe in Georgia or Florida, but I don’t even know if they’re even hot. I don’t think there’s any hot springs in New York State or in the whole Northeast, probably because there’s so little, if any, volcanic activity.
Now, you get out to the Rocky Mountains, get out to the West Coast, Washington State, the Olympic Peninsula, coastal Oregon, California, down into Mexico—hot springs, hot springs, hot springs! I love them. It’s just something about getting into them. It’s like bathing in the warmth of the core of the earth. That’s what it is. This isn’t heated by the sun that’s shining in my face right now, by the way. This is being heated by the ancient historical molten iron core of the earth.
And there’s something about it for me. It does something to my soul—psychologically, physically, emotionally transformative for me. Also, it’s a goal. Sometimes to get to a hot spring is very, very difficult. I think of one that I went to in Thailand. I was living in China a couple of years ago. I have a visa that only allowed me to stay for 60 days, so I would have to leave every 60 days. Well, I got a very cheap flight to Thailand, a very random place called Krabi that I’d never heard of in Thailand—a little town. I thought maybe I would be able to go and find a beach where I could just relax for a few days and then go back to China and continue my life there.
Well, I heard there was a hot spring, a hot waterfall no less. Well, I couldn’t hitchhike; it was too far. I didn’t have enough time, so I rented a moped. A little scary! Don’t want to crash, don’t want to die. Spent a day, went there. I was all alone in a natural hot spring. Cost almost nothing. And I found this ring in the bottom of the hot spring in the dirt. This is where I sometimes wonder, is there something bigger than me?
But I remember this—sitting all alone at this huge natural stream with dirt all on the bottom and stones that went into a little waterfall. I could sit under the waterfall. It was amazing! I’m like, I wonder what the dirt and stones are here. So I put my hand in it, reached out, and the first handful of stones I picked up had this beautiful silver ring in it. It was like a magic ring. Do I believe in magic? Well, I don’t know, but I certainly do believe in strange miracles of life, strange synchronicities. And I don’t know how I knew; I just looked at it and I put it on my finger, and there it has remained for more than two years.
Well, I was like, there must be diamonds in here. Maybe other people have dropped stuff. Where does stuff go? I spent the next two hours, handfuls and handfuls, every single bit of the bottom of this stream I picked it up. I found nothing. Found some interesting looking stones, but it was like the first handful out of maybe 2,000 handfuls of stuff that I reached and pulled up this amazing thing. It was kind of like, what’s the statistical coincidence of that? That happened in the magic of a hot spring.
One thing I’ve learned with hot springs is bring lots and lots of fresh water to drink because you sweat a lot and you can pass out. I’ve heard people pass out in hot springs sometimes, can’t walk back. Well, one thing I love is being in hot springs that are surrounded by snow sometimes, right in the middle of the snow, steaming is a hot spring. You get in it, when you get out, you can jump into the snow. Now, they say it can be dangerous. Yes, lots of strange things, strange bacteria and fungi can live in hot springs.
I’ve been in hot springs where they’re inside of caves, and you get in there and in the wall there’s phosphorus and algae—orange algae, green algae on the wall. It’s like lit up. I remember I was at one hot spring, a secret hot spring. I don’t even know if you can go there anymore, but it was inside of a cave just north of San Francisco. I actually hitchhiked out of San Francisco up. I found this hot spring in a cave. People told me about it; they don’t tell anyone. Well, I went inside of it, and it had beautiful orange phosphorescent algae in there. If I bump against it, ooh, it lights up as orange. I could see what was going on in there.
And then you could go out from there and swim in the ocean because the Pacific Ocean was right there. And this hot spring only was good at low, low tide. When high tide came, it filled up the cave, so you couldn’t even get in the hot spring. The water wasn’t even so hot anymore because it mixed with the ocean water, but it was a freshwater spring that came out of the bowels of the earth, the bowels of Mother Nature.
But when I would go and swim in the ocean, there was also phosphorus and algae in the ocean that was blue. So it was like I’m swimming and my arms had become blue with phosphorus and algae, and then I’d walk back and the blue would go away and I’d go back into the orange.
I heard an amazing story that happened once. Someone told me this story that inside the cave there were a whole bunch of naked people because mostly people go naked in hot springs, especially in the West Coast of America—not all around the world, but in a lot of places, yes. Well, there was a bunch of people. I wasn’t there, but this is what I heard. A bunch of people were packed into this hot spring all together—nude men and women. And suddenly, out of the ocean came a behemoth, and they thought it was a shark. And it came out of the ocean and it went right into the middle of all these people in the hot spring, and it started flailing around. And it was gigantic—a behemoth from the ocean.
And people were climbing the phosphorescent walls. People were running and bumping into each other. Someone got smashed by something. People got their glasses knocked off. Nobody knew what was going on. People escaped out of the cave, and then this giant behemoth went back out. It escaped and it went back into the water, and people saw what it was. It was a sea lion, probably like 400 pounds. And what it was is there was a marine mammal rescue center some, I don’t know, 10 miles away from where this hot spring was. And this was a rehabilitated young juvenile male sea lion.
And what had happened, sadly, maybe funnily enough, is he got acclimated to people, maybe got domesticated a bit. He liked people feeding him fish, and he started associating people as his friends or as people who would give him food. And so he’s swimming along the coast after they released him back into the wild. They weren’t going to feed him anymore, and he was lonely or maybe he was hungry. And what he hears as he’s swimming along the coast at low tide is he hears all these voices having fun in this beautiful cave of a hot spring. And he thinks, oh, friends or food. And he swims over and he hops up and jumps in. And suddenly, a giant 400-pound or 500 or 600-pound sea lion is in the middle of a throng of naked people.
Say in Celsius is like 120 degrees. What is that? 50 something degrees? I’m sorry, in Fahrenheit, 120 degrees Celsius is something over 50 degrees probably.
And the thing is, coming out of the cold Pacific Ocean, and it is cold, and he panicked. He’s flailing all over the place, and he’s like, “Wow, what is going on with all these people and hot water everywhere?” And he doesn’t know where to go. He’s as panicked as the people were. He managed to turn himself around in the cave and hop out and go back into the water.
I remember also last year I was in Sri Lanka, and I looked up hot springs in Sri Lanka. I was able to hitchhike to one way, way out in the middle of nowhere. And in this hot spring, I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have believed it existed until I saw it myself. Frogs in a hot spring? Whoever would have guessed? This is hotter than my body temperature. Almost like frogs, I thought they would have died immediately. I would have thought if you threw a frog in there, it would die. But no, there were frogs that could live in this hot water.
I went to another hot spring in Sri Lanka that, okay, you couldn’t get in it. They said, “Don’t get in the water,” but you could dump it over yourself. So hot! And seven different hot springs, it was like a personal cleansing. But from that hot spring, I was able to walk. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been able to walk and see wild elephants.
I’m so sorry to say they were in a garbage dump when I went with a man who told from the hot spring, who I met there, who told me, you know, he liked me. He was like, “Ah, you’re an interesting guy. Come, come.” He brought me to the garbage dump. He says, “Sometimes to hang out here, we make them go away.” He’s like, “Go, go, go! Get away! Go away! Shoot away!” This wild elephant.
I remember one hot spring I went to in Chile. I went in at night because I arrived late, and I lay in this hot stream. A whole part of the stream was hot, and I lay on my back and I looked up, and there were shooting stars going over my head. I was like, “Wow, I’m really getting a dose of amazing natural phenomenon.”
Well, I’m going to close with this last idea. I remember recently reading a book, a very interesting book about the possibility of life outside of planet Earth, life out in the universe, life on other planets. And one thing that I found, although it seems pretty clear from all that I’ve read, science right now has no clue if there is life out there.
But one of the ways they study alternative environments, very, very hostile environments that might in some way be similar to hostile other planets, other environments on other planets where life might form, or how life formed in the hostile planet of early Earth billions and billions of years ago, is they study hot springs. Because hot springs are weird, and they have all sorts of weird plants and animals and fungi and algae that live inside them and around them. Things that can live in boiling water. Things that can live in boiling water that’s full of sometimes strange and even toxic minerals. Water that no human could drink, even if it was cool. And yet animals can live in it at 100 degrees Celsius, at 200 degrees Fahrenheit, boiling water with beautiful colors and strange things.
It’s like this is a chance to study how life formed in an extreme environment, often a hostile environment, and yet an environment that sparks my curiosity.