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Australia has long been a source of mystery for most of the world. Even before any European had ventured this far south there were theories of a Great Southern Land. It was thought that there needed to be something to balance the planet properly. When the early sea explorers finally bumped into Australia, its final shape was unknown for many years to come. Likewise, when Australia had been colonized by white people the centre of the country remained a mystery. In fact, anything much further west than the Blue Mountains near Sydney was unknown. There was a driving force for looking, beyond the thrill of exploration. Expeditions were financed in the hope of a country full of pasture land, some thought that they would find an enormous inland lake, but despite the early promise of the grassy southern tablelands, these early dreams petered out, one weary footstep at a time.
Thanks to modern maps it is hard to find something unknown to explore, so I had to pretend that I didn’t know where I was going, and to try to act surprised by my destinations. This is doubly difficult when you arrive in a town with an interesting reputation, such as Wagga Wagga, or just Wagga if you prefer, which has produced a disproportionately high number of top class sportsmen, my favourite of which is Mark ‘Tubby’ Taylor, the former Australian Test cricket captain, and owner of the largest posterior in modern cricket. Thankfully, as I continued to drive west I came across towns that I knew nothing about, and that I still remain largely ignorant of. Towns such as Hay, which may well be named after a local speciality in that substance.
Before I continue with my travel tale, I feel the need to impart the mode of my transport. I am driving a car and sleeping in the back, where I have room to stretch to my full length. I feel like a snail carrying his house around, but thankfully I don’t leave a slimy trail wherever I go. To extend that simile I become a slug when I leave the car, which does not please me. Despite the obvious disadvantages of sleeping in the back of a car it is a liberating feeling to shun the comforts of a hotel, which includes the inconvenience of finding them. I simply say ‘Here looks good’, and retire for the night. Of course, if I had the funds to finance a three week hotel tour my opinions would probably change.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, this road trip is taking me west of Canberra, to far Western New South Wales, then the Flinders Ranges, Adelaide, Melbourne and back to Canberra. I recommend buying a large map and some coloured pins to keep track of my progress. Currently I am near Broken Hill, once a big mining town but now just as famous for being an artisitc oasis in the cultural desert of the outback. Broken Hill is the largest town for miles around. It would not exist at all if valuable substances had not been found in the ground here, for Broken Hill is in the desert, and Australians tend to prefer the sand at the beach. The change in landscape happens very gradually. Dry grassy plains with a few tress and hills gradually becomes flatter, then the grass gives way to shrub, the soil turns to sand, the trees disappear, then the ground becomes covered in little rocks. It is not a desert like the Sahara, more like Mars with bushes. Despite some light rain the creeks around her’ don’t have signs, they have tombstones.
I am currently parked near a ghost town called Silverton, of which I will write more later, but night has fallen with a thud, leaving me with just the stars and the moon for company.
Dave out.
I’ve always had a low opinion of the French so it’s no surprise that during my last European trip I spent as little time in the country as possible. Almost all the French people that I’ve met have been arrogant, pompous and rude, and similar stories abound from people that I’ve talked to. With this as an introduction it may come as a surprise that my latest trip abroad was a week spent in the French countryside. My excuse is that I was there on the kind invitation of my sister, Rachel, and her partner, Tony. They had been on holiday for a month but had devoted this week to assembling Rachel’s European based friends in the one place.
An old house in a little village in the Burgundy countryside played host to Brendan, Kerry, her partner, Chris, and their son, Felix. For now I will assign these additional players to the shadowy sidelines of this email, perhaps never to return. I think that it’s bad manners to write about people that you’ve just met, apart from when they’re snoring, so I will shelve my analytical skills for all but 2-year old Felix, who occasionally provided the evenings entertainment.
The house we were staying in was an old farmhouse that had been expanded to three floors, but still retained some obvious signs of country living, such as the massive wooden table in the kitchen, the stonework and wooden beams, and in my room a collection of meat hooks built into the ceiling. Thankfully, all the jugged hare had long gone, and although I feared having my dreams invaded by rotting, green hares, I remained unscathed for the duration of my stay.
There wasn’t a lot to see in the sleepy town of Villiers-sur-Yonne, but the surrounding countryside beckoned. The nearby town of Vezelay had the advantage of being situated on the biggest hill for miles around, and as is usually the case in such instances, the best spot was taken by a church. As churches go it wasn’t very ornate or elaborate but it made up for that with a towering, dignified simplicity. On the day that I saw it the outer wall had an additional armour of backpacks stacked four deep. I don’t know whether they get this kind of crowd every Sunday, but on this day it was packed with French scouts. As they stood on the cold flagstones, occasionally shifting from foot to foot, they belted out some of my favourite religious tunes in a manner that soon had the birthmark on my scalp itching in a very sinister fashion. At the end of the service the flag bearers marched out through the crowd, followed by the priests. The next man that came along, judging by his impressive headgear, was some kind of high priest. He had a politicians instinct for seeking out children, but rather than kissing them he simply touched them on the head. The parents seemed a lot more impressed than their children.
Back at the house it was cold. We should have had a big oil burning stove pumping out enough heat to cause a sweat to break out, but due to a misguided change of fuel by the owner it was completely clogged up. As I’m heading into my fourth summer in a row I was quite grateful for the chilly atmosphere. For a couple of nights a few of us stayed warm with some brisk games of table tennis before bed, but this nocturnal activity was halted by a food poisoning attack brought on by a French custard tart.
It’s a pity in a way, because I was starting not to hate the French quite as much as I had previously. Outside Paris the typical snooty attitude had been moderated, some of them were even friendly, but I can’t forgive being sold an off tart. It was so virulent that within three hours of consuming it I was redecorating the toilet in the new seasons colours. It was a curious progression from feeling healthy to throwing my guts up. I wandered off to bed quite early to have a quick nap. This turned into a long lie down feeling slightly unwell, until the dreaded thought entered my head.
– If I was leaning over the toilet right now I would probably throw up.
Casting such negativity aside I tried valiantly to get to sleep, but soon reached the point of no return. I calmly walked to the toilet before gushing forth a quantity of liquid that felt better suited to an elephant sized stomach. I returned to bed a shivering, sweaty wreck and passed the rest of the night as best I could.
The morning revealed another two casualties, Kerry and Brendan, so I had some company in my planned activity for the day of doing absolutely nothing. Actually, my main activity for the day was a desperate attempt to get my appetite back for that evenings meal. Rachel and Tony were preparing a leg of lamb to be cooked in a sealed pot for seven hours. Apart from wanting to try this succulent sounding dish for gastronomic reasons alone, the price of lamb in France would make it a crime to let any go to waste. It turned out as good as it sounds, with the meat literally falling off the bone, which looked as if it had been lying in the bleaching sun for months.
There are good and bad things about spending a week in the company of a toddler. The bad is obviously the odd tantrum and general yelling. The good are the cute goodnights and that they do stupidly entertaining things with very little prompting. Felix’s bedtime trick was to run around the kitchen table, which is quite a long way on such short legs, only halting before drawbridges constructed from lowered arms. We soon had him uttering a secret command to get through.
– The 13th century is sooo boring.
It was quite a strange site, especially as Felix, not having the strongest grip on language, soon chinese whispered himself into uttering a drivel of vowels before ending with gusto on ‘sooo boring’.
It would be criminal to stay in Burgundy and not sample a good range of wines. One winery we visited was located in what used to be an underground rock quarry. We walked through a long wide tunnel towards the degastation station, with only the sound of popping champagne corks filling the silence. The nearby town of Chablis had more places to taste wine than restaurants, which is a sure path to tipsiness.
There was a canal running past the front door of the house that we stayed in. One fine day Rachel, Tony and I went for a walk along it until we came to a little lock where two barges were lined up to come through. We watched as the lock keeper wandered around opening gates and sluices, then managed to get a ride on one of the barges back up to the house. If we had followed the canal even further we would have arrived in Paris, which is where we drove at the end of the week in order to fly back to London.
Dave out.
I apologize to those of you who have some interest in my life and are trying to keep track of it. There is yet another twist in the tale, so you will all have to reset your Dave radar once again to show the little green blip in the fair town of Canberra, with any luck attending a tertiary institution.
In order to make my time in the UK feel less like a cunning plan to avoid winter I decided to throw in my temporary catering job and take advantage of my remaining few weeks in the northern hemisphere by seeing some of those things that I meant to see in my previous three year stint. For some reason the Scottish highlands have always pulled on my heartstrings. I don’t know whether this is because my heritage lies there if you travel back far enough, or simply because it is the home of whisky, but I’ve always wanted to go and now seemed like the perfect opportunity.
So this is why I find myself sitting on a park bench in Kelvingrove, Glasgow, under grey, spitting skies. Glasgow is the stopping off point for Fort William and Ben Nevis. I could have gone to Edinburgh again, the two cities are not very far apart, but my natural curiosity rose to the surface and I had an urge to add to my slim file of knowledge on the Glasgow. I know that they used to build a lot of ships here, it’s a predominantly working class town, it gave rise to Billy Connoly and that Glasgow used to have a huge heroin consumption. I now know that I understand German more clearly than the Glaswegian accent, it doesn’t rain here all the time, and that on a Friday and Saturday night the city centre is dominated by 15-year olds wearing slipknot shirts.
It would be easy to paint a grim picture of Glasgow. On Sunday morning I was walking along the banks of the Clyde and came upon a group of tramps that had formed a lounge room of discarded armchairs under a bridge. One of them was holding his own form of communion by shooting up next to the main road, only a stones throw from the local church. There’s no doubt that this city has seen some hard times, but the locals meet it with a resilient humour that tries to laugh in the face of adversity.
The city doesn’t compare well with Edinburgh in the natural beauty stakes. It is an industrial place, but there are parts of it where you can escape the city and disappear into another world. The river Kelvin winds up through the suburbs, and following it takes you on a walk that captures the essence of nature within a city, much like Central park in New York. Of course, I’m not claiming that Glasgow is the New York of the north, but it’s refreshing to be able to walk through a city while being totally enclosed within the confines of a wooded valley and with a stream burbling along next to you. When I climbed out I found myself in the Botanical Gardens with just the faint hum of traffic in the background. Admittedly, they are the worst Botanical Gardens that I have ever seen, with a smashed glass-house slowly being overrun with ivy, but it was good while it lasted.
Fort William is a town groaning under the weight of the tourism industry. Every second house seems to have been converted into a B&B or hostel, and the high street is littered with shops selling Scottish trinkets that only Americans would be stupid enough to buy. It’s easy to see why Fort William warrants all this accommodation. It leaves behind the sprawling southern Scottish cities and seems to embrace the towering mountains that surround it. It’s the largest town in the highlands and, located halfway up the west-coast, it lies in the shadows of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the UK.
It is an amazing feeling to hoist your pack on your back and start walking, soon to find yourself alone but for the company of the streams and hills. The stroll on my first day took me underneath Ben Nevis and along the Nevis river. I squelched along the riverbank enjoying myself thoroughly, even when I almost lost my boot in deceptive mud a few times. While the abundance of water did make for soggy progress it brings the countryside to life with countless little trickles happily letting gravity do the work. After struggling along next to the river for a while I decided to head uphill. I followed a waterfall upstream and sat next to it on the brow of a hill, enjoying the warm sunshine and letting the scenery work it’s magic.
As enjoyable as that day was, it was just the prelude to the main event. The climb up the godfather and mother of all British mountains, Ben Nevis. In my usual manner I made very little preparation for this walk, but learning from my earlier mountain hiking experiences I decided that taking some water and a change of shirt would be a good idea. This proved to be a fortuitous decision as within minutes of setting off up the path I was drenched in sweat. I put this down to a combination of the facts that I was walking directly into the rising sun and have a general lack of fitness.
The Scottish highlands are a rocky part of the planet, so it was no surprise that the path was like walking on a dry creek bed, or that sometimes it actually became a creek. It’s a spectacular path that winds its way past a loch and a waterfall before starting a long and twisting journey to the top. It’s the kind of mountain where the top appears to be close but keeps shifting further up. As soon as you get to a point that you thought might be the top you can see the mountain stretching onwards a bit further. My decision to reread ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was proving a good one, because as long as I ignored all the German tourists I could imagine myself as Frodo on his tortuous journey and stride forward with righteousness on my side.
It sounds funny to say, but I found the top of Ben Nevis to be a slight anticlimax. I don’t think the view from the top is that much better than the view you get on the way. Also, after three hours of struggling up loose rocks you start to yearn for a change, which makes the fact that the top of the mountain is a flat football pitch sized area covered in loose rocks slightly disappointing. But you forget all that once you plonk your weary ass down and take in the view, which stretches away into mountains on all sides, with the odd loch glinting in the sunlight. It was a perfect day with the odd cloud rolling over the top just to remind you how high up it was.
The next day I felt like I had just climbed the highest mountain in Britain. I hobbled down stairs of the hostel, my boots stained with the white salt of evaporated sweat, my movement impeded by blisters, and my calves feeling like they were made of a new type of wood that is capable of feeling pain. Not one to be seen lying idle when I could be toughening my feet up, I took an aimless wander, the sort that I specialize in and that quite often lead me somewhere interesting. It wasn’t looking promising as I attempted to reach the other side of the u-shaped lock that Fort William is situated on in order to look at some uninspiring houses. My every turn was being met by the sort of housing that give beautiful landscapes a bad name. I found myself walking along a path that went past the railway yard, a deserted oval, and an electrical sub-station. By this stage most normal people would start listening to their aching feet and go home, but my perseverance was rewarded when I stumbled across a castle.
Australia is not blessed with a large amount of old buildings, which has probably increased my reverence for them. I find it staggering that a 15th century castle can be surrounded by the most ordinary, boring places imaginable and only be marked by a sign 100 metres from it’s entrance. Admittedly, it’s not a very big castle or in good condition, but it goes to show how lightly history is taken in this part of the world. If we had a castle in Canberra it would be sign-posted from 100km away.
I whiled away a pleasant hour sitting in a crumbling tower, which in better days was the king’s chamber, by reading my book and taking the odd warming sip of incredibly cheap whisky. It was the kind of whisky that needed to be sipped carefully as with overindulgence you ran the risk of waking up in the morning to find your head neatly split in two and your brain writing around in agony on the pillow.
My next move was to head to a place called Mallaig, which is where the Inner Hebrides begins. The night before I left the hostel I experienced my number one hostel hate in a disturbingly aggressive form. I refer, of course, to snoring, a sound which has the ability to drive me to murderous thoughts. This particular night I was stuck in a dorm room with not one, but two snorers. One of them had a whistling undertone and the other sounding like a pig that had been shot in the throat. I’m planning to start an association that will seek out and brand snorers, thus herding them all together into the same sleeping quarters. I think this is the only way that I will avoid committing a pillow-related homicide at some point in the future. Even so, I am considering getting some earplugs and ramming them up the nose of the next person I hear snoring.
The train journey from Fort William to Mallaig is reputed to be one of the most spectacular in the UK, and my journey had the added poignancy of being driven by a bug old steam engine, the last running of it for the summer. It certainly adds to the fun of a train journey to have those chugging sounds coming from up ahead, and to watch hordes of trainspotters train their expensive cameras towards you. The scenery is magnificent, with majestic mountains dropping away into deep lochs. It is the only place that I have been in the UK that feels like wilderness, not just countryside. There are”t any little farms dotted about, just mountains, water and sky.
Apparently the small fishing town of Mallaig only took off in 1901 when the railway arrived. I can only imagine how small it was before then as it barely rates a mention now. There is a smell of smoked fish hanging heavy in the air but the town is dwarfed by the surrounding terrain. A vast mountain range that ends abruptly where the sea begins. There is no gentle introduction to one another, they just collide. It is the most rugged coastline that I have ever seen.
This natural beauty is enhanced by the sky, which alternated between thunderous clouds and clear blue sky in the blink of an eye. Occasionally the clouds break and the sun will shine like a spotlight on one particular mountain. ‘Do you see the light’?” I cocooned myself in a hotel room with a westerly view and watched the clouds roll by. Presently it looked bright enough to go for a walk, but no sooner had the thought entered my mind than rain started hammering into the window, making me feel glad to be inside. When I did get out the Small Islands poked out of the sea like mountains that had accidentally wandered off. All the sky was dark with the exception of the horizon behind the islands, which glowed with an eerily bright light.
That night in the hotel room, just as I was just drifting off to sleep, I heard a strange sound. It was as if someone was moving in the bath or scraping a chair across a wooden floor. With sudden dread I realized that I could hear snoring, presumably coming from the room above. It appeared that there was no escape.
The next morning I brushed weariness aside and caught the ferry to the Isle of Skye. I stood on deck as the cold wind slapped my face and made my eyes water. Being in the middle of the Sound of Sleet, the name of the passage of water separating the Isle of Skye from the mainland, gives you a better view of the surrounding mountains, but there are no words to do them justice. It is an amazing part of the world. I didn’t have long to spend on the island, and didn’t explore enough of it to do it justice, but it’s a good excuse to come back to this part of the world someday.
Dave out.
If you had asked me a year ago what kind of country Taiwan is I would have cleared my throat, scratched my head and said ” … ummm” before coming up with the entirely unoriginal notion that they seem to manufacture a lot of cheap products. The only reason that my impression changed is that a woman I had met traveling around the US, Ya, drew me to the tropical island. Before you get your hopes up that this will be a steamy confessional I’ll shatter them now by pointing out that this is a serious account of an interesting country, not some smutty, cheap romance.
My travels started with a farewell to my parents on a below freezing pre-dawn morning in Canberra. I was flying from Canberra to Sydney and then on to Taipei and London a week or so later. It was a beautifully clear morning in Canberra with the dark sky peppered with stars and just beginning to turn blue as the sun started it’s day. It was a cold walk across the tarmac to the plane and I discovered that one of the drawbacks with taking the first flight of the day is that the plane hasn’t had a chance to heat up yet. It was only a small jet but had the nice feature of sheepskin lined seats. I thought it was a pity that the stewardess wasn’t wearing ugg boots as a finishing touch. Once we had taken off the scenery began to be illuminated, revealing lakes of clouds nestled in the valleys, like little blankets covering the land as it slept.
My Sydney to Taipei leg of the journey was with Eva Airlines, the national carrier for Taiwan. When I mentioned Eva to anyone they generally said “Who?”, but I tend to think that anonymity in an airline is not a bad thing when you consider that crashing is a big cause of notoriety. The flight passed without incident, which gives me an opportunity to roughly describe the features of Taiwan. It’s not a big place. You can go from one end to the other in about five hours. It is an oval shape with the longer part running north to south. It has a coastal plain along the west coast and a huge mountain range along the east coast. This gives it the appearance from the air of a whale that has just broken the surface and is diving back down again. Taiwan is located just off the south coast of China. They don’t see themselves as part of China politically but are very much Chinese culturally. I don’t want to delve into the whole history of the country here, but to sum it up very simply, when the communists came to power the losers went to Taiwan to start their own country. Taiwan is 22 million strong and an economic powerhouse.
Flying into Taipei, which is on the northern tip of the island, you can see mountains poking through a fine mist of pollution. It’s a scenic setting that has been marred by over-development. It’s an example of the practical being valued more than the beautiful, a common practice from what I saw of some of the countryside. My first encounter with the deadly acronym took place just before customs. Everyone passing by had to have their temperature measured. Luckily, they’ve advanced beyond rectal thermometers and now simply point a device at your forehead. This was a common feature at restaurants and department stores but was the only sign of the SARS epidemic which had caused so many deaths there recently. I was disappointed in a way because I had already come up with a good title for my email and now I had nothing to battle. The rudest shock was nothing to do with SARS but was simply the heat of the place. I went from below freezing to a night-time temperature of 28 degrees, so the walk from the bus stop to the hotel had me sweating as much as if I had just completed a marathon and stepped out of the post-race shower. Sweat wasn’t rolling down; it was violently spurting out in an effort to find somewhere to cool down.
It makes a big difference when traveling to a strange country if you know someone that lives there. It is even more helpful if that person actually knows how to organise things, so in contrast to my usual style of turning up and figuring stuff out from there, I could just relax and enjoy the ride. The recent travel warning about Taiwan unsurprisingly had a bad effect on the number of people traveling there but it couldn’t have been better timing for me because suddenly hotels were offering incredible deals. The hotel room was in a slightly Japanese style with matching low ceilings in the bathroom. I was occasionally reminded of this when I straightened up in the shower but I forgave all as it had air conditioning. During my period in Taipei it was my homebase, the place I retreated to when I ran out of sweat.
On my second night there, Ya and I went to a night market, which in temperature terms is the closest I have been to hell. I had the utmost sympathy for the people cooking over woks in their little stalls, but Ya pointed out that I shouldn’t feel sorry for them as they make a lot of money. I don’t think she has ever spent an evening cooking over a hot plate, which is bad enough in a reasonably cool kitchen, but to do it in temperatures pushing 50 degrees is a hell of a way to spend your life. I was suffering just walking around the place. If you can imagine the outside temperature being the hottest you’ve ever felt in your life, and this is at night, and then taking a walk through somewhere even hotter, you will have an idea of the experience.
Without a doubt the best feature of Taipei was the food. In city terms it isn’t anything special, with lots of ugly buildings and barren parks, but once you head inside some restaurants the true magic of the place is revealed. At the National Palace Museum they have a piece carved in brown jade representing a slab of Dung Po Pork, which says a lot about how much respect the Chinese give their food. In my time there I was almost permanently stuffed full of food, including Dung Po Pork, which does something magical to a piece of pork thereby rendering the fat on top as tasty as the gelatinous filling of a pork pie. Even the food on the trains was tasty. On trains in the US you get microwaved hotdogs and pizzas, in the UK you get crisps and sandwiches, but in Taiwan they sell lunchboxes with a bit of rice, assorted vegetables and some meat. It makes all the difference to a journey.
The only trip we took around Taiwan itself was to travel to Mt. Alishan, which is located precisely in the centre of the island. You get there by traveling halfway down the coast and then switching to an alpine train which heads up into the mountains in a manner that reminded me of Switzerland. The scenery at the start was of houses and farms on the plains, but the hills soon appeared in the distance, and before long we were climbing up into a jungle similar to how I imagine Thailand and Burma. The track wound around small settlements going constantly higher. Soon the jungle started to change to forests of bamboo scattered with trees. The hills had turned into mountains by this stage that stretched away in all directions. The ground fell away sharply by the side of the tracks giving glimpses of the valley below. By halfway it felt incredibly high but we had as much to climb again. The air took on a welcome cool note and the scenery changed once again to the sort of forest you might find in Europe. It was such a stark difference to what we had so recently left that it felt like another world.
One of the specialties of Alishan is the sunrise. I have a very low opinion of sunrises, but in spite of this Ya convinced me to get up at 4:30am to make the journey by train to the top of the mountain. In most western countries in the world you might get a few old people getting up for a sunrise but here the station was packed with people of all ages. We couldn’t even get a seat on the way up. I’m not at my best in the mornings but it was a fine day and refreshingly cool, so wandering up to the viewing point wasn’t too taxing. You could still see the lights of a town twinkling in the valley far below as the sky lightened overhead. It was a spectacular looking place, with very steep mountains covered in trees. The sun rises over Mt. Jade which, at about 2500m, is the highest mountain in northeast Asia. We were told that we were lucky to be seeing a sunrise at all as the area is notoriously cloudy and a sunrise hadn’t been seen in the last 11 days. To be honest, I saw better sunrises in Sydney, but it was nice to see the spectacular scenery slowly uncovered. The other specialty of Alishan are the giant trees. Although not as big as Californian redwoods they are incredibly old. On one walk through a section of forest next to the hotel there is one tree 2000 years old and about 32 of them in a range from 700 to 1600 years old. Most of them didn’t just sprout straight up but split apart so that four trees were growing on the one trunk.
My time in Taipei was generally spent eating, sleeping and trying to cool down after venturing outside. The streets of Taipei are fairly wide but it still felt closed in and oppressive. There wasn’t ever a clear sky in the city with the pollution haze detracting from the friendly atmosphere and making the place feel dirtier than it was. It might have also been that there was nowhere to get away from it all. On one of the days Ya and I went to Yangmingshan, which is a mountain just outside the city. It is a nice place with grassy fields much like a park but in a totally natural setting. I assume there are good views as well but when we where up there it was as misty as a sauna. Even on this mountain outside the city there were people everywhere. Taipei just feels like another overcrowded city, the kind of place that you can’t escape from. Only the food elevates it out of the ordinary. The best parts of Taiwan are away from the crowded city and plains, up in the cooler mountains. Apparently there is some lovely country along the west coast but that will have to wait for another time.
Dave out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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