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Shoutouts

27 Oct

My travels now being at a temporary end my travel emails will cease as well. I hope you have enjoyed reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them. I would like to make some brief thank you’s.

Thank you to my shoes. They were the only pair I had which became evident by the end of the trip when they could stink out a whole train. I would especially like to thank my feet for putting up with near chemical warfare conditions for so long and not complaining on those long walks.

Thank you to the European public transport system, with the exception of Spain, for generously giving me free transport around your cities. It was much appreciated.

Thank you to Tim for being a top travelling companion while it lasted, for doing all the driving (even though I offered to help), and for sorting out the auto drive-away fiasco. A word of warning to anyone who travels with Tim in the future. Whatever you do, do not repeatedly criticise his choice of soft drink. It makes him crazy with rage.

Thank you to Emily for being so nice to me in Barcelona after I was mean to her in London.

Thank you Lee for the book ‘Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee’. A book detailing how the native Americans got fucked up the ass by the government of the day.

Last, but not least, thank you to the voices in my head for keeping me company.

Dave out.

Yaya LA

27 Oct

My impressions of LA are slightly skewed by the fact that I was staying in a really nice private room and getting a guided tour through oriental cuisine. I had a pretty good time in LA but you could have about 20 different types of experience ranging from fun to dead. It is a really spread-out place which you realise when you look at a map and see that although you have walked for two hours, in city terms you have barely moved. I have never seen the attraction in LA. Most people seem to come for Disneyland and Universal Studios but things like that don’t interest me very much. We were staying in a hostel in West Hollywood which was within walking distance of the avenue of stars. Some people lie on the ground next to a famous star to get their picture taken which makes about as much sense to me as shitting on it. The stars don’t just go down the main street but have branched off into side streets where they place the worthy but unknown.

In general, LA is a very ugly city. If you have a lot of dough you can buy your way into the nice parts but for the masses it is a vast expanse of concrete and freeways. The car is king here. If you don’t have a car you are left to contemplate the pavement as everyone else drives by. Not having a car makes it difficult for me to comment on the place as a whole as I only saw a tiny fraction of it. I wanted to take a tour of South Central and Compton but if there ever were any tour buses going down there they took too many bullet holes to keep going. It’s hard to tell whether people are being nice out of friendliness or because they are afraid of being shot. Another LA cliché, the smog, is ever present, some days being worse rather than any days being good. It’s hard to see places that are five miles away and the atmosphere is of a place permanently shrouded in mist.

After a couple of nights near Hollywood we headed down to alternative digs on the beach. Santa Monica is just north of Venice Beach but is more of a Beverley Hills on the beach. On the bus trip down there it was so misty that you couldn’t see the tops of buildings but it may be that it was actually foggy that morning. The fact that you wonder about it at all is a statement about the pollution levels. Santa Monica is the nice part of LA with palm-tree dotted main streets, expensive restaurants and nice shops. Shopping seems to be the main pastime, narrowly beating walking around looking good. There are more fake tits than you can poke a stick at. It’s a giveaway when a little Asian girl walks by with 38DD’s.

I didn’t form any strong impressions of LA. It was all a haze and I was trying to stay awake long enough not to miss my plane. I turned up at the airport about six hours early just in case. When I went through security they confiscated a pair of scissors from me which I was planning to utilise in stabbing the pilot in the eye so that I could take control of the plane and crash it into Disneyland. I got tagged as a security risk and on boarding the plane got a very gentle frisking and my possessions thoroughly searched. It certainly made me feel safer. I am back in Canberra now which is a lot nicer than I remember. I must have being remembering the boredom without the lovely clean air and flourishing flora. I don’t want to come across as too parochial but I haven’t seen anywhere as lovely as Australia.

Dave out.

- Well, I’m glad that’s over. I was getting sick of reading those long winded excuses for travel writing.
- What should we do now? Watch TV?
- That would be lovely. You know, I don’t understand why young people go travelling at all these days when you can sit in the comfort of your easy recliner and learn about the world that way.
- I totally agree. When TV hadn’t been invented yet I went on safari to Africa but do you think I saw any animals? Not on your life. I saw a lot of grass and got bothered by flies.
- Young people seem to think that before we had TV we sat around and talked or played cards. Not in my household. We used to sit in silence and look at the window.
- As did we. I cried from boredom one time. Not sobbing, you understand, but a tear leaked out.
- The most exciting time I had was when a pigeon landed on the window sill.
- You lucky bastard!
- Yes, the neighbours were quite jealous.
- I used to dream of seeing a pigeon.
- People don’t appreciate the hardships we went through. They’ve been spoiled rotten.
- Not only that but they’ve become quite odd. You take that young David for instance. What was all that stuff about masturbating to keep warm and vomiting on cats in there for? I found it quite unnecessary.
- Did you get his email about toilets?
- No?
- It was horrid. He was droning on about how the German toilets have a shelf and the American toilets have a whirlpool action. Personally, I don’t even know what colour my toilet is. I have no desire to even look at the filthy thing.
- Quite right. There could be a portal to another dimension in my toilet and I wouldn’t know about it unless I fell in.
- I blame the parents for not being strict enough with him. That boy is crying out for a strapping.
- It’s too late now. You need to do it while they’re still young so that you get all the girly tears out of them nice and early.
- No. There’s no hope for that one. What’s on TV?
- McGyver.
- Which one is it?
- The one where he constructs a sex toy from a packet of marshmallows and the spare parts from a Buick and uses it to extract the confession from a nun gone bad.
- Oh yes. That one’s quite good. Switch it on.

It’s Not Grand, It’s Fucking Massive

27 Oct

The train journey from New Orleans to Flagstaff, Arizona, proved to be one of the most interesting times of my US trip. The journey took three days via LA and was mainly interesting because my normally lacklustre love life came back from the dead in the form of a Taiwanese lady called Ya-Hui. It all began innocently enough when she shared a box of goldfish crackers and I offered to share my blanket, which is now forever known as ‘Blanky the lucky blanket’. She changed all her travel plans and we went to the Grand Canyon and LA. I include this mainly to explain the change from I to we in the writing.

The train trip would have been dull otherwise, passing through the huge emptiness of Texas, if it had not been for the snogging sessions and a little kid called Robert. Robert was two and his vocabulary was greater by one if you didn’t count strange noises. Despite knowing more than one word, if I hadn’t sat next to Robert for the best part of two days I would have thought that he could only say mama. A typical conversation with his mother would carry out like so: - Mama…mama…mama…
- What?
- Mama…mama…mama…
- What?
- Mama…
- What?
- Mama…
- WHAT!?
- Mama…
- What do you want, Robert?
- Mama…
This carried on for most of his waking hours till his mother looked more dead than alive. On the morning after the second night on the train a man came up to Robert and said “If you say mama one more time I’m going to tie your tongue in a knot.”

We arrived in Flagstaff at six in the morning with it cold enough to see your breath. The advantage of travelling with someone else is the private room option at hostels which makes the stay much more comfortable. Flagstaff is part college town, part hippy oasis. It’s a centre for the alternative people trying to drop out and get back to nature while still being able to buy a good pizza. There is not much of interest culturally but most people come to Flagstaff because it’s the closest big town to the Grand Canyon, which was our ultimate destination.

The bus up to the canyon was besieged by road works which added about two hours onto the journey. The road travels through scrubby desert country until you get within range of the canyon when suddenly the most crap looking hotels and themed restaurants spring up, the lowlight being the Fred Flintstone Campground. Thankfully the Americans get all the bad taste out of their system before the canyon itself which has a little village on the south rim but has been left remarkably obstruction free. In fact, there is such a lack of fencing that they get an average of 14 deaths there per year, six having occurred at the time of our visit. ‘It’s hard to prepare for the canyon. Unlike mountains which are easily spotted from miles away, you have to be right in front of the Grand Canyon to get the proper effect. It is everything you imagine it to be and more. The vastness of the scale is almost too difficult to fit inside your head. If you do good deeds in this life I firmly believe that you get reincarnated as an eagle at the Grand Canyon hunting squirrels all day. It was a good place to share with someone.

Dave out.

With Sweat Rolling Down My Back

27 Oct

I greet you from my near penultimate email with the happy news that I have found an American city that I really enjoy. Perhaps this is because it prides itself on it’s former independence from the union and has a distinctly out of the way feel about it, though I think it has more to do with the emphasis placed on food, music and drinking. I speak of New Orleans, the big easy, the place that stress forgot. From what I can gather life in New Orleans consists of getting up late, avoiding the heat of the afternoon with a nap, eating some tasty food, listening to some jazz and getting drunk.

That’s not a bad lifestyle in my opinion and comes remarkably close to my own life if left to its own devices. I would consider living in New Orleans but for one thing – it’s the hottest place I have ever been to. In humidity terms it feels like a bathroom in winter after a hot shower and no fan. The mist is palpable in the air and almost seems to take on a yellow hue in the fading light. You have probably never walked around in your steam strewn bathroom for ten minutes but you can take it from me that you don’t want to. I worked up a sweat lying down in the shade. The humidity isn’t as noticeable during the day only because the sun cuts through it with a searing aggression and forces you to take cover. I would need a specially adapted space suit to continuously circulate cold air before I could contemplate staying here for any length of time.

I have the utmost sympathy for the early inhabitants of this city, by all accounts the dregs of French society at the time. They had to force people to come here which is not surprising when you consider that the city is located in swamp land next to the continuously flooding Mississippi. Coming down on the train I spotted a small community living in the swamp on raised houses. One of the cars was parked in a driveway under a foot of water. I suspect that the state of Louisiana remained independent for quite some time simply because the Americans didn’t want it. This long independence gives New Orleans it’s unique flavour – the elaborately decorated houses in the French quarter, the Caribbean and European mixture of the food and the insular nature of the inhabitants.

New Orleans is the only city in America where you are allowed to drink alcohol on the street, not that I was aware that it was illegal elsewhere until I came here. One result of this is that every American tourist wanders around clutching a beer. A far better consequence is the daiquiri shops. Here they have adapted a slushy machine to deliver frozen cocktails in a handy takeaway cup, the sizes being equivalent to McDonalds. A few white russians soon calmed me down but I couldn’t believe it when I saw one lady order a large ‘little bit of everything’. It looked potent enough to kill.

Another speciality of the region is hot sauces. The idea seems to be less about new types of sauce as new names for them. I tried the red ass – red habanero sauce which was a medium. It had a ten second delay on it before the left side of my tongue developed a welt. I decided not to try the hottest sauce which was named ‘Burn in Hell, Osama – Evil Hot sauce’.

I have a feeling that I wouldn’t like the town so much at certain times of the year when it’s reputation as a party town brings frat boys by the thousand to ogle breasts and drink until they feel unwell. Most of the tourist action is centred around Bourbon Street which the locals seem to have employed as a distraction tactic, leaving the rest city relatively unscathed. The city was quiet at the time of my visit. The students were back at school, the festivals were over, and the locals seemed to be enjoying being able to claim their city back until the madness starts again. I mooched from one air conditioned place to another, only braving the heat long enough to enjoy a cigar next to the river while listening to some jazz.

Dave out.

Are you on Crack?

27 Oct

By this stage in my trip I had come to the conclusion that most US cities are crap. Their various problems usually outweigh the positive points. You would think that with my newfound knowledge I would start avoiding cities but I’m not a common sense kind of guy. I had always wanted to go to Denver, probably because of the romantic image Kerouac portrays of the place. It sounded like a good setting for a city and was close to the wilderness if I felt the need to escape.

Denver is straight out of ‘City Building for Dummies’. There is a big boulevard leading down to the capitol building and the rest of the place is set out on a rambling grid pattern. It’s a very nice main street, reminiscent of Barcelona’s Ramblas, but suffers from the blandness of big chain stores and the tinge of boring that mainstream America brings to everything it does. There are aspects to the place that speak of a more colourful past. There are a huge number of bars and an equally high number of drunks to match but the main street is peppered with people begging. As befitting the image of the place I have never seen a population with more missing teeth.

My first impression of the city as a rambling drunken orgy would have stayed with me if not for a notice posted on all the doors of the hostel. It proclaimed that someone had been caught smoking crack in the rooms and that they, along with everyone in the room, had been thrown out. I found out that Denver has a big crack problem with whole neighbourhoods being taken over by crack heads and dealers. It seems like another problem that has been accepted as unavoidable, one article I read stating that crack was considered to be Reagan era. That would explain a lot about his behaviour.

The morning after my arrival was Labor Day and at 9:30 am the bars were half full with drinkers sucking down the beer. It makes for a good atmosphere and Denver is quite a friendly place but as I wandered around the movie title ‘Things to do in Denver when you’re dead’ kept popping into my mind. There was a big fair on which occupied my time for a good 30 minutes but the rest of the time was spent in shops and eating. I spent about four days there but can’t precisely recall doing or seeing much of interest. That’s just the kind of town it is. 2 million people getting pissed out of their minds a lot.

I came to Colorado, the state that houses Denver, more for the scenery than the city. The train west from Denver goes through the Rockies, some amazing canyons and enters the desert near the border with Utah. I came back out here to a small town called Grand Junction to have a closer look at the Colorado National Monument. This is a set of mountains, canyons and monoliths stained with red dirt. They were formed by the erosion of dirt from around the harder rock and their presence lifts an otherwise dull landscape into the extraordinary.

The town of Grand Junction is a sprawling mess. Once a major transportation hub it has remade itself with the help of the gas and oil industries. The result is a permanent tar smell hanging heavy in the air. I’m sure the headache will clear up soon. I walked out of town the next morning and after just a few miles the atmosphere clears and the great ridges stand out. Soon I was walking through desert country as the thin crust of topsoil gave way to sand underneath and huge granite boulders combined with red sandstone to give the place an alien feel. Once you leave all trace of the town behind it begins to feel like going back in time. As I climbed to the top of one ridge a huge canyon stretched out before me with waves of red stone heading into the distance.

I was determined to get down into the canyon to have a closer look but the path that led me into it soon disappeared and I was left to battle my way through the bushes as I climbed up the other side. I had a rest in a natural cavern that had been smoothed out over the ages and felt like an Indian scout waiting for the approaching cavalry. As I continued along the other side of the canyon I started to become worried about where I was going. Any trace of path had gone and I had been walking too far to want to turn back. For all I knew there was another canyon cutting my path back home, so I decided that I needed to get into the canyon I was currently walking above and get home through the bottom of it. This was harder than it sounds. The canyon walls were quite steep and I was about 200 feet from the canyon base. I scouted one route down which suddenly became more perilous than I cared for when the narrow ridge down became covered in two foot deep sand, making the drop on the other side loom into view. As I was heading back I saw another way down a little further on. It looked hard but possible so with unthinking cockiness I ventured forth.

The way down was over a sandstone cliff which looked to have holds the whole way down. I scrambled down part of it on my feet before sliding down a steep part to a foothold. As I surveyed my new position I became a little bit uneasy. It was starting to look harder than it had from above. Instead of sliding down most of it on my feet I saw now that I would have to do some rock climbing. There was no going back now so I shifted position and managed to find some holds that took me part of the way down. I wasn’t too high, about 10 metres to where the steepness levelled out a bit, but you go and measure a 10 metre drop; it’s not the kind of distance you want to fall. As I began climbing down I started to wonder how I got into this position. I was fully stretched out, hands and feet on holds and looking for more further down but I had run out. I spotted a good hand hold just below me and as I shifted my right hand on to it it gave way and I pulled a huge chunk of the cliff out. Luckily there was a hold created and I grabbed on to it but now I was starting to poo my pants. I was stuck on a cliff that seemed likely to crumble in my hands, it was still a fair way to fall and my legs were starting to get wobbly after the four hour walk that had preceded my climbing adventure. I considered just letting myself drop, but I like to avoid pain whenever possible, so I was leaving that as a last resort. In any case, it’s very difficult to let go of a cliff. The natural response is to hang on at all costs. The last argument against this course of action was that no-one knew where I was and I didn’t fancy crawling for five miles with a broken ankle.

I call the manoeuvre that got me out of the jam the Bacon leap of faith. I was trying to circle round to my left where the cliff got a little bit less steep, but I had been blocked by a big jutting piece of the cliff that was completely smooth. A little further beyond this rock was a short sloping ledge with a stunted pine tree growing from it. I’m not sure how I did it now but I jumped around the rock to my left, landed on the ledge at a run and managed to grab onto the tree to stop myself falling head first. I was momentarily safe and took the time to have a brief rest and calm down a bit. I managed to slide down the remaining five metres of the cliff and ended up with a graze on each hand and a cut on my leg. I could live with that. There’s nothing like managing to avoid a lot of pain to make your day better. On the way back to the hostel a magnificent rainbow stretched across the sky and comforted my mind as my aching body walked the five miles home.

Dave out.

The Bay of Pigs

27 Oct

I wanted to leave a small interval between my experience of San Francisco and my telling of it. I’m not at my best when I’m pissed off and an email written soon after leaving there would have been a long, incoherent rant of rage. It probably still will be but at least now that I am a little bit calmer it might flow out better. San Francisco was a shithole. I went to the place with a totally open mind. I was looking forward to it. I wanted to enjoy the place, but I’m not going to look favourably on a city just because of it’s reputation. I’m still not sure why people like it so much. Sure, there are really steep hills that trams go up, there are nice views of a patch of water and something interesting once happened here in the 60′s. All evidence of the summer of love has been consumed, digested and shat out in the form of bums and junkies that plague the streets. Walking through San Francisco is like wading through a human cesspool.

My impression of the place may have been filtered through my first experience there. I arrived on the overnight train and got into San Francisco tired and hungry. After depositing my bags at the hostel I went in search of food but no sooner was I out the front door than some guy was asking me for money. I explained that I didn’t have a lot to spare as I had been travelling for three months. His response was to tell me that if he had been younger he would have beaten me till I pissed blood and taken my money. It’s lucky I was perfecting my bad muthafucker walk at the time as it is probably the only thing that saved me. The atmosphere of the place didn’t improve much from that point. I went around Fisherman’s Wharf, which was incredibly commercial and full of tourist hustlers, walked around to the Golden Gate Bridge and then down to the Golden Gate Park and the Haight district. Nothing really caught my eye as being worthy of the city’s reputation. Portland felt like more of a hippy town.

As I was walking back to the hostel a drug bust took place in front of me. Five unmarked cars pulled up and guys ran out to arrest a teen on a push bike. One of the cops dropped his keys and had to run back to get them. By this stage I was feeling less than loving. Disappointment was mixed with revulsion for the place. It seems Americans are willing to overlook certain problems a city has when evaluating it’s charm as a destination, but for me the atmosphere of a place is almost the most important part. San Francisco is the only city I’ve felt nervous in, apart from a McDonalds in Paris when a girl started beating her boyfriend up. The nicest people I met in the whole city were a couple of Swiss backpackers who shared a spliff with me but by that stage the whole experience was beyond redemption.

I spent most of the next day hiding in a record store but did take a wander around Chinatown which was big but lacking in charm. To compound matters my only jumper got stolen from the hostel while I was using their computer. This turned out to be a problem in cold and foggy San Francisco, even though it was the height of summer. I’m reminded of a quote by Mark Twain. ‘Go to San Francisco? I would rather eat my own vomit’. Not his most eloquent moment, perhaps, but it’s meaning resonates through the ages.

Dave out.

It’s, like, the West Coast, Dude!

27 Oct

Quick note: I should have mentioned in the last email that after Chicago Tim went east and I went west. It was just a matter of personal preference and neither of us are fans of compromise, which in this case would have just seen us hanging around the middle of the country.

I stayed at East Glacier for quite a few days, partly because accommodation was very cheap and partly because it was a refreshing change of pace. However much I liked the place the fact remained that I had a one month rail pass and a large chuck of the country still to be visited. My next destination was not carefully pondered or ruminated upon. I knew nothing about Portland before coming to the US apart from the fact that they had a basketball team in the NBA. Portland is on the northwest coast, near the border of Oregon and Washington, and just below Seattle. I went there because the train went there and it sounded more serene that Seattle.

From East Glacier the trip to Portland is nine hours by car and 16 hours by train. The train takes a very leisurely view towards getting from one place to another but I don’t mind as it’s very comfortable and saves money on accommodation. The train meanders through the low point of the Rockies, passing through some towns so small that they barely exist at all. The staff at the big hotels come out and wave at the train which is not as onerous a duty as it sounds as there is only one per day. I did get the feeling that it was part of the job rather than an overflowing of natural cordiality. The train leaves Montana by night and when you wake in Oregon the next day the forests are just as thick and the hills just as steep. Oregon is home to enormous pine trees. You can’t escape their presence and the city of Portland almost feels like it’s there on sufferance while the forest decides whether to swallow it up or not.

Portland is a strange mix of subcultures. It’s as if they’ve been watching MTV for 20 years and have randomly attached themselves to one group or another. There are punks, skaters, mountain men, anti globalisationists, hacky sackers and junkies galore. It’s the kind of place that was built when no-one gave a shit what it looked like as long as the damn thing worked. Ugly bridges cross an ugly river connecting suburbia with a mediocre downtown. I liked the let it all hang loose feel of the place but it felt like a better place to live than visit. Portland isn’t used to tourists and takes on the aspect of someone guiltily disturbed while doing something unfashionable.

I spent most of my time in Portland walking around the very leafy suburbs with their very nice and very big houses. The ‘burbs had a soothing effect on me, especially as they were teeming with very friendly cats. I love patting cats and went from one to the other dispensing much appreciated head rubs and chin scratches. I felt sorry for one of them; a short haired ginger Persian. I felt sorry for it simply because of it’s horrible squashed in face. I had to struggle not to be sick when looking at it’s ghastly visage but it was such a friendly cat that I gave it a pat anyway. It was so happy that someone hadn’t simply thrown up on it that in trotted along next to me as I went further along the street to another cat waiting for my magical fingers. This normal tabby reacted to my new friend in quite a normal way. It hissed and indicated that to get any closer would be to risk bodily health. I was just getting into my head rubbing routine on the new cat when I looked back and saw squashed face cat giving me a look of abject sorrow and betrayal before running off. I have rarely witnessed a sadder creature and was relieved that cats don’t understand the concept of suicide.

I suppose every city has something unique to offer, and while Portlad’s offerings aren’t extravagant, I can’t think of anywhere else that you can find them. For a start there is the drinking fountain candelabra. Instead of having just one spout to drink from some bright spark has thought, “No, we can do better than that”, and delivered four spouts arching out from the central stem. I never saw more than one person at a time using them but it’s comforting to know that if four very thirsty people arrive at the same drinking fountain at the same time that they can all quench their thirst simultaneously. Another strange invention graced the only supermarket I went into. The modern supermarket generally features a conveyor belt to move the groceries towards the cashier, but in Portland they prefer a large rotating disc which circles your shopping around the chewing gum. I didn’t really see the advantage in this approach and it seemed to knock cartons of milk over quite regularly.

Portland is a quietly boring and depressing place, something that a high proportion of junkies can be a symptom of. Another clue was the sign on the bridge offering suicidal people a number to call for counselling. It seemed like a last ditch effort and was probably there more to avoid traffic congestion. I think the bushy and quiet nature of Portland hides a secret. I kept observing little signs which when taken on their own appear to be nothing out of the ordinary but when connected they paint a grim picture. There was the abnormally high number of missing pet posters, the unusual plants growing in the gardens, the number of men with goatees and shaved heads, the women in dark clothes and the freshly severed goat’s head in the hostel bathroom. I feel sure there is mischief afoot in Portland. You need only look at the local papers which featured the story of two missing teenage girls who had recently been found buried in a backyard. I had almost forgotten I was in America.

Dave out.

The Rockies Are Where Real Men Rough It

27 Oct

Quick note: My hands are very sore and not used to typing anymore. This is a very long email so I hope you appreciate my suffering to bring it to you. I suggest that you make yourself a beverage and a small snack before reading it although you should be warned that there is a brief moment of lewd content.

I felt a natural affinity with the Chicago and Illinois region because of the Blues Brothers movie, which is set there. It was the one film my sister and I were allowed to stay up and watch no matter how late it was on. The entry in the TV guide would be highlighted and the whole family watched it and laughed each time. At an incredibly young age my sister could do the hard bit in ‘Minnie the moocher’ and for days after watching it, when he was offering cups of tea, my dad would say “Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips”, with the associated hand gestures. I went to sleep with the Illinois accent ringing in my ears and coming to the place is like a trip down memory lane.

With that said I was getting a bit sick of big cities. I didn’t come to America to research the history of the skyscraper or to compare the subtle differences between a New York and a Chicago hot dog. I wanted to see the land, the thing that makes the United States an amazing place – the mountains, the deserts, the plains. Well, maybe I had seen enough plains for a while. All I knew was that if I went to another city I was in danger of flipping out.

This situation led to me shattering all previous journey endurance records with a 32 hour train journey to Glaciers National Park and a small town called East Glacier. The park is situated in Montana, at the very top of the United States and is combined with the Canadian Wareton Park to showcase 1.5 million acres of the US version of Switzerland. Luckily the train had enough leg room to accommodate even my stretched limbs and as I settled in for the journey the train rumbled through the Chicago suburbs for 10 minutes before breaking down. This wasn’t a good sign. An air hose had blown and it took them two hours to replace it as the old hose had rusted on. Apparently breakdowns are very common which I suspect is the real reason for the comfortable seating.

31 hours of the trip were terminally dull. The train travels through Wisconsin at night, with bushes and trees framed against the night sky, but once the light started creeping back into the landscape we were in North Dakota, otherwise known as the flatlands. By this stage I was sick of looking at fields but at least the crop changed from corn to wheat and there were a few cows and horses to break up the monotony. A little further into North Dakota are the badlands which live up to their name. Stagnant pools and sketchy grass give the place a depressing air until you get to the grass plains of Montana with it’s horse herds.

Montana is quite a long state, measuring from east to west, and mainly consists of grassy plains. I was heading towards my second sunset on the train and had given up trying to enjoy myself when from out on the horizon loomed a set of sharks teeth. The start of the Rockies is an amazing sight, especially as it comes on the heels of such a vast expanse of flatness. From out of nowhere enormous mountains sprang up and lifted my spirits. The train even started to deviate from it’s normal dead straight course and we weaved around the slightly hillier plains in front of a set of mountains stretched across the sky and decorated in twilight pink.

I had arrived at East Glacier which is nestled in the shadows of the mountains. The town holds about 300 people during winter but is mainly a summer destination centred around the station and the massive lodge style hotel. The town doesn’t appear to have changed greatly in a hundred years with old stores simply being restyled rather than rebuilt.

The hostel was located behind a Mexican restaurant which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The Mexican restaurant reminded me of where I worked in Canberra but here they served much nicer food to a smaller audience. It gets remarkably cold in East Glacier at night and in a bare bones hostel there was no easy way to keep warm. For two and a half months I had been sweatily trying to remain cool and now I was lying awake at 4:30 am with my feet stuffed in my backpack and a towel doing it’s best to comfort me. In the end I had to resort to rigorous masturbation in order to try and generate a sustainable body temperature.

I arose early in the morning and wearily took a stroll around town. Dawn was just breaking and casting a feeble light on those looming monsters to the west. The mountains are the result of a couple of continental plates practicing their sumo wrestling skills. While the mountains did look great I had more pressing things on my mind, such as getting warm, eating breakfast and securing warmth for the night. For some strange reason a town where temperatures drop to -80 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and which receives a least 60 feet of snow did not sell any sleeping bags or blankets. I only found an overpriced blanket at the lodge gift shop but I refused to squander my money and redoubled efforts to find a cheap bedding solution. My salvation came with a roadside billboard advertising a camp store and associated merchandise at Two Medicine Campground. A trail map revealed the place to be a ten mile hike away. I quite like walking and while it had become an overcast day it was still early in the morning so I decided to see a bit of the place while fulfilling my task.

The first thing you notice when you start a hike up here are the warnings about bears. ‘Bears have injured and killed many people in this park.’ it proclaims and goes on to list a set of rules for hiking in bear country. I immediately broke the rule against hiking alone and I was pretty sure I would break the rule about making a lot of noise, as to me that defeats the purpose of being out in the countryside. I had my own plan for dealing with bears. If one tried to attack me I would perform the samurai dave ‘two finger on one eye’ gouge and surprise it into submission. The attack had successfully worked on cats, dogs and small children so I was confident I could execute the move on a larger opponent.

With bears now slightly on my mind I wandered up through light forests and little fields blossoming with wildflowers. Pockets of blue, mauve, yellow, red and white kept popping out at me, as I was in a highly alert state on the lookout for bears. Suddenly, about 20 yards to the left, a large black shape darted out from the bushes. I jumped a bit to position myself better for the attack but it turned out to be only a cow with little calf in tow. I had a steak for dinner that night in revenge.

I can’t do justice to the scenery in words. I don’t think pictures can really capture it either. The vastness of scale is enormous and it gets bigger the more you climb. Once I had cleared the tree line the plains I had come from stretched out behind me and still more mountains loomed ahead. It was so quiet that I heard the wind ruffling the feathers of an eagle that passed close overhead. I was starting to think that it was going to be a tougher walk than I had expected. I was constantly surprised when I turned around at how high I had climbed, yet the path kept going higher and higher, twisting back and forth on itself as the steepness grew.

I was walking through a rock-strewn landscape now with only the odd bowed pine tree as testament to more trying conditions. I found out that it had snowed in the hills a couple of weeks earlier and if you had told me at this point in the walk I would not have been surprised. Clouds started rolling in from the peaks and the tempestuous alpine weather looked like it was about to maul another victim. Luckily, I have watched many survival programs on TV and knew that I should stop moving, change into dry clothes and build a shelter. I had forgotten to pack my tomahawk that day so the multi-level shelter with granny flat was out, but the shrivelled pine trees on top of the mountain served me well as a temporary hideout while the storm blew up, rained gently for ten minutes, then left again. I was almost disappointed but took the opportunity for a final assault upon the summit.

I was pretty bloody tired by this stage. I hadn’t expected the ten mile hike to take me over the top of a mountain, Mt Henry in this case. Mt Henry is 8870 feet high and I was starting from 4796 feet, so that gives you an idea of the sort of climb it was. It seemed to go on forever with each small summit simply revealing a higher one further on. I had to stop and recover every hundred metres as the thin alpine air was taking it’s toll. I’m no slob but nor did I go hiking every weekend in London, so my fitness was being tested. Every time I stopped I gazed around in dazed awe at the scenery – the range ahead of me and the now tiny valley. When you reach the top of Mt Henry you follow a ridge to another mountain before the path starts to follow a route that has been blasted out of the side of the mountain. To the left was the steep side of the mountain and to the right a 2000 foot drop covered in loose shingle. As I traversed the narrow path I began to think that it was quite possibly a world record for the longest and most arduous walk in search of a sleeping bag.

Thankfully the path started heading down from the dizzying heights and I could once again breath normally. The Two Medicine Camp-ground is a lovely spot, near a lake and surrounded by more enormous monsters. When I looked back at what I had come over I simply couldn’t believe it. After five gruelling hours I had reached the camp store. When I went inside my heart sank as the only available warm item was an overpriced blanket. I bought it anyway and was thinking about giving it away as a present but I went through too much to get it. It’s good to have a blanket with a story behind it.

The most exciting wildlife I saw during my rambles were ground squirrels, or as I like to call them, chipmunks. They’re cute little things when they sit upright and eat their pine nuts like corn on the cob. They use the trails as shortcuts but when the hear you coming they shout “bonsai” and leap into the bushes. Glacier National Park is the kind of place you need to come before you die, and judging by the average age of park visitor that’s exactly what’s on their minds. Apparently one man committed suicide by walking off into the wilderness to be slowly overcome by the cold. I was thinking that this wasn’t a bad way to go until it was revealed that a couple of bears thought the body was a new range of frozen snack and gnawed it a little bit.

The place that’s on everyone’s lips who has been to the park is the ‘Going to the Sun’ road. It cuts through the park from east to west and crosses the continental divide. To give you an idea of the type of mountain, one of the first viewing spots looks upon the mountain used as a logo by Paramount Pictures. It still has the snow still on it in late August. The road follows a perilous path, you sometimes feel like you’re more off the mountain than on it, but it is a truly spectacular drive.

Dave out.

Funky By Name, Not By Nature

27 Oct

Quick note: this email has been sitting in my pad for over two weeks. For a country that was instrumental in the formation of the internet it hasn’t got very good access to it. I shall type till my hands become crippled with RSI.

The trip was going swimmingly at this point. It was a flat and straight road with warm air and good tunes on the stereo. We even met some sensible Americans that offered to cook us a Cajun meal and share their 50 bottle collection of scotch. This is close to my idea of a perfect evening so it made the next chain of events even harder to bear.

We met ‘the Scotch couple’ in a town called Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln is a college town which halves in size when school and the football aren’t on. We were there to deliver the car to nearby Omaha but decided to stay in Lincoln to eat up some time and recover from driving 1400 miles in three days. The day before we had passed through the border separating Missouri and Kansas, the state below Nebraska. This would have been as unremarkable as the borders between all the other mid-western states except for the fact that the instant we crossed the border the roadside fast food restaurants disappeared from the highway and it was pristine cornfields for as far as the eye could see. I would like to say that all the billboards disappeared as well but there were still a few pro-life ones popping up, giving the impression that Kansas was even more conservative than the rest of the places we had just visited – no easy feat.

It was a short drive north into Nebraska which, boringly and unsurprisingly, featured a lot of fields. The town of Lincoln was near deserted as we drove through it but we just wanted to get to the hostel and rest for a couple of days. The hostel was located amidst the sorority lodgings, underneath the chapel. As you know, religious institutions make my skin itch after a prolonged exposure, so it wasn’t looking good. Thankfully we were housed in a massive ramshackle room with a ping pong table, pool table and an old stereo with eclectic LP’s like the Goldfinger soundtrack and The Clash with ‘London Calling’. The pool cues were so sticky that I rubbed the skin off my hand and the ping pong game made my thighs ache for days.

We were feeling a lot more relaxed until Tim contacted the owner of the vehicle we were delivering. Her name was Funke (pronounced fun-kay). She said that she was in Med school all day on the day that we were supposed to be delivering the car but being the nice guys we are, and wanting to avoid spending a whole day in Omaha, we offered to have the car there by 7 am.

Due to a mix-up involving multiple street names we ended up being late and were informed that Funke had left the house. By this stage Tim and I just wanted to take a nap but instead we drove the car to the hospital and enjoyed a breakfast in the cafeteria. After breakfast we got the bad news that a car we had been expecting from Omaha to Phoenix was non-existent. To put this news in context people have been known to commit suicide rather than spend 24 hours in Omaha. It is a truly atrocious city with nothing to recommend it and plenty to make you want to leave. It was a demoralising moment and after the early start, a day that had just begun felt like it should have ended already. Eventually the car was delivered and we washed our hands of the whole ordeal. There was a bus leaving to Chicago in 20 minutes and at that point in time a 10 hour bus journey seemed like heaven.

Our trip from Omaha to Chicago featured Bob the bus driver. Bob had an Illinois twang and he jazzed up the usual bus commentary with his very own comedy routine:
- If you leave anything on the bus make sure it’s something I can take to the pawn shop.
- My name’s easy to remember. It’s spelt the same forwards as it is backwards. B-O-B.

The standard didn’t improve much from there but just as I was writing Bob off as a lost cause he proved his worth. About eight hours into the trip we hit a huge storm. Lightning was touching down on either side of the bus and as I edged away from all metal objects the rain flooded down, cutting visibility to about 10 feet. It was at this point that I noticed that US highways have no reflective road markings and as we passed cars that had pulled over to the side of the road I ceased joking about Bob and prayed to god that he was a career bus driver and not a failed comic. He proved his worth in the end by safely getting us to the big smoke and I for one was glad that he hadn’t given up his day job.

Chicago has a gleaming skyline which competes admirably with New York but doesn’t quite have the legs. It’s perched on Lake Wisconsin which is the biggest lake I have ever seen. It’s like an inland sea with the waters stretching to the horizon. Chicago feels like the kind of place New York was before they discovered community spirit. There are a lot of beggars, and people on the train look like they’re a twitch away from going postal.

Dave out.

What On Earth Are You Doing Out Here?

27 Oct

I left you on the rolling plains of middle America, driving quite fast. As the lights dim and the opening credits end you can see the two protagonists in a car listening to conservative idiots on the radio and staring at the straight road ahead, now oblivious to the never-ending fields. I started to feel a bit sorry for the early explorers of this region as for hundreds of miles they would have gone over a little hill with high expectations of some exciting discovery only to see the plains stretching on even further. I expect attacks from Indians would have been a welcome relief, although despite their stereotyped aggressive nature the native Americans were more likely to help the people who would eventually return in far greater number to destroy them.

In modern America there are fast food chains and billboards littered along the highway to break up the monotony. We passed the odd city or two with the skyscrapers rising out of the surrounding pastures and looking slightly out of place. Most nights were spent in cheap roadside motels, which have their own charm, but for one night we were drawn into St Louis, Missouri, gateway to the west.

St Louis is located where the Missouri meets the Mississippi. This conjures up a romantic image of paddle steamers, the blues and sippin’ gut ache whisky by the banks of the river. The reality is a stark contrast as St Louis has long since shed it’s small town image and has become a sprawl of highways and derelict buildings overlooking over-developed and polluted rivers. The city’s big tourist attraction is a giant arch, symbolic of its role as gateway to the west. It’s not a bad analogy to apply to the place as it felt like an unsettled transit point.

Funnily enough that’s exactly what Tim and I were using it for. We hunted out the youth hostel which was located in a charming part of town just next to the expressway. We were almost going to drive off as the hostel sign was attached to an abandoned building but they had just moved down the street. Looking back at that point we wished we had sought an alternative.

The hostel was run by a religious weirdo with a child molester’s gut and mottled skin. He also sported one of those Amish ‘beard only’ facial stylings which is a sign of a strange one. The only other bloke we’ve met like this was a human guinea pig for commercial drug companies in three states. A slightly strange hostel manager would have been no problem but spending the night in a semi-derelict dorm wasn’t an attractive proposition. Added to the mix was a crazy Canadian who loved to talk and a Prozac popping waitress who thought the best way to get a tip was to tell us a bad joke every five minutes and slap us on the shoulder.

We retreated to the hostel as night was falling and Tim administered some medication to help us achieve the sweet release of sleep. Unfortunately for us a pair of our fellow hostellers began a protracted conversation on the hardships of looking for a house in the area. After a brief respite from this the crazy Canadian came back to regale everyone with his night at the baseball and future travel plans. When all was finally quiet a string of electric lights flashed at me through the window and adjusted my brain waves to a sleeping pattern. The strangest thing about the youth hostel were the toilets. They were basically in the same room as the beds but instead of having a normal door they sported saloon style swinging doors. I’m not sure if this was to facilitate a quick entrance and exit but it did leave you feeling slightly exposed.

We left the city in the morning vowing never to return and hungering for some small town action. We were also hungering for some small town pie and following a newspaper tip we arrived in a town called Washington to sample the famous Cowan’s Pie. It was fantastic food. I ate a simple omelette and fresh hash browns followed by some homemade blueberry pie as ‘Stand by your man’ played on the jukebox. It made up for the previous night and we spent the morning lolling by the banks of the river being deafened whenever a freight train announced it’s presence and blasted through.

The rest of the day was spent meandering through back roads, soaking up the isolation. Missouri is a poor state yet even the homes with five abandoned pickups out the front had a huge satellite dish. Tim was getting into the hillbilly spirit by wandering around with no shoes on until he met his match at a gas station. The attendant refused him service if he remained barefoot and kicked him out of the store. I think she was right in her actions as once you let the standards start slipping who knows where it’s going to lead. No shoes could lead to pissing in the milk. We were right in the heart of conservative bible belt America and the huge wooden crosses in the fields were a reminder of days when they were used to scare away more than black birds. There’s a noticeable decline in the number of black people once you leave the east coast cities. It would be easy to assume that this is because of prejudice but I suspect it’s because black people have more sense than to live in a boring shithole.

One of the strange things about America is that in the middle of nowhere you come across these enormous Wal-Mart stores. Among the items sold here are a fine range of high power hunting rifles, knives and bows with razor tipped arrows. In a small town a little further along a pawn shop featured an assortment of handguns and assault rifles. To purchase these weapons you need to have lived in the United States for six months and be over 21 years of age. There was one youngster with his face pressed against the handgun cabinet who seemed all too keen to celebrate the happy conjunction of legal shooting and drinking age. We left the store feeling a lot less safe and tried not to get into any road rage incidents.

Next to the giant Wal-Mart’s you sometimes get giant supermarkets selling giant sized portions of everything. Tim had the following conversation with the checkout chick:
Jess: Do you mind if I ask you a question?
Tim: No. Go ahead.
Jess: Are you Australian?
Tim: Yes we are.
Jess: Do you mind if I ask you another question?
Tim: No.
Jess: What on earth are you doing out here?

It was a good question and seemed to sum up the attitude of a lot of people we met. Our usual response was “Just passing through”.

Dave out.

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