Yosemite

Let me say this: If, during your time on earth you at some point have the ways and means to go and visit Yosemite National Park and Sierra Nevada and you don’t go…then i’m afraid that is part of your life you can consider wasted. It is without a doubt, the most spectacular place i’ve ever been. Go. Seriously.

The approach to Yosemite takes you through what seems like an endless expanse of untouched forest. Then when you’re least expecting it the ground drops away in front of you to form a huge valley far bellow whilst the hills around you rise up to become towering granite cliff faces and dome-shaped mountains. It is a genuinely breath-taking sight to behold. Up until that point I had always thought that the Lake District, Dartmoor, even the Forest of Dean were doing a pretty good job of being areas of outstanding natural beauty but now i’m thinking that they need to up their game. Perhaps a volcano or barrier reef wouldn’t go amis. Yosemite is in a different league entirely.

After getting our breath back we stopped off to have it taken away again. Yosemite is home to the world’s largest living organism, the blue whale.

Spot the mistake? Correct. The world’s largest living organism is in fact the Gian Sequoia Tree, not the blue whale.

Despite our best efforts we were unable to spot any blue whales amongst the trees that day. I do believe that they were hibernating at the time. Thankfully Yosemite does feature a fair few Giant Sequoia trees, and unlike blue whales, these are relatively easy spot and fairly slow-moving creatures.

The Sequoia are actually quite rare and only grow in a few groves around the park and the surrounding Sierra Nevada area. The trees themselves are actually flame resistant. In fact in order to release any seeds, the cones need to be warmed by fire first. It’s all very Lord of The Rings. To help them out the park rangers have in the past set fire to the groves in order to aid cultivation. The best way that I can think of to describe these wonders of nature is to say that they are really, really big trees. Both in height and diameter. One of the tree stumps in the grove was so big that it had an archway carved into it that you was wide enough to drive a car though. The pinecones these things come from however, are nothing remarkable. They’re about the size of a golf ball, kind of like the pine cones we get back in the UK. Actually this does seem even more remarkable when you think about what it eventually turns into.

Yosemite is also home to a whole bunch of bears. As a result we get given the ‘bear talk’ by tour leader Mex, before we go off wandering into the woods on our own.

Basically bears are addicted to anything with a man-made scent. Once they taste a Snickers or Hot Dog, it’s difficult for them to go back to nuts, berries and the odd fish. Fair enough I suppose. Human food obviously has a distinctive scent to it and this does attract any bears in the local area. All the campgrounds therefore feature bear proof boxes in which you must store all your food and drinks in. Any food left in your tent is likely to result in you getting a midnight visit from Yogi and Boo Boo. Cars are not bear proof boxes. A bear will probably be unable to open your car door in order to retrieve the Snickers on the dashboard (bears love Snickers) so must instead resort to tearing the roof of the car off. It all achieves the same result.

Food is not the only thing that carries with it a delicious scent. All of your toiletries will smell mighty appetising to a bear as well and so you are advised to store these in the bear boxes also. If you’ve just had a shower or put on some face cream or deodorant before bed: sweet dreams.

Obviously you also have to be a bit unlucky to get a bear visit, but they are definitely out there. We did get a glimpse of one on the drive through the park and if you do wake up in the middle of the night (not hard when your tent is assembled over a mattress of rocks and pinecones) you will most likely hear various snuffling and grunting sounds outside, or the sounds of things being ripped apart elsewhere on the site. There was an annoying group of school kids camped near us during our stay. Their teacher liked to wake them, and the rest of the campsite at 6:30am by screaming at them at the top of her voice. I think we were all half tempted to accidentally leave a few Snickers bars all over their camping area and in their sleeping bags.

If you have an encounter with an angry bear when you’re out and about then you apparently just have to curl up in the fetal position and let it kick the crap out of you for a bit until it gets bored and goes away. It doesn’t want to eat you unless you’re peanuts and caramel coated in chocolate. Mountain Lions on the other hand, according to Mex, do want to eat you and so with those little fellas you do need to do your best at fighting back before it rips your face off.

N.B. The above bear advice only ‘works’ for black bears and brown bears. If you’re elsewhere in North America and are unfortunate enough to come across a Grizzly, then I think all you need to do is ensure you’ve written your last will and testament. The bear will do the rest.

Next day on our Trek America tour was hiking day. Being as hard as nails as I am I opted for the strenuous 15 mile hike around the valley and up to a place called Glacier Point. (Google image search ‘Glacier Point’). I wasn’t alone in my trek. Five others from the group were also hard as nails: The Danes, Jacob and Gowtham; two delightful Australians, Elicia and Katherine and the lone Frenchman, Vincent. Together we all set off on our quest to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, and then go on to Glacier Point, hopefully being back at camp by 6pm in time for pizza.

It was an arduous and exhausting trek. Three weeks later and my knees still haven’t quite forgotten what I put them through. The descent from Glacier point was horrific and never-ending. Also our route was actually 16 miles. This was due to what some would consider a wrong turn immediately after setting off from camp. Should’ve gone left, went half a mile right instead, had to turn around and come back. Easily done.

The rest of the hike though, was completely worth it. I am unsure what superlatives I can use to describe the views from the top or the waterfalls that we crossed over. I would go so far as to say that they were ‘really nice’ views. Once I reach a country where the internet isn’t powered by carrier pigeons I shall upload the ten thousand photos I took and you can all see what i’m going on about. Glacier point, was actually right above our campsite, but looking down on it, it could just have easily been a colony of insects, we were that high up.

Later that evening and we make it to the pizza place, completely drained, but glowing I think, with a sense of achievement and five friendships fairly cemented. We recuperated on slices of pizza and discussed hikes with the rest of the group.

Along comes Rum, camera in hand looking as calm and content as ever.

“Evening Rum. What did you get up to today?”

“Ohh, umm, I just did the Glacier Point Walk, up to the top you know, tried to find you but you were far ahead. Got to the top and came back down, saw a bear, took some pictures, you wanna see?”

Ridiculous.

San Fransisco

Luckily, for LA, the rest of California is awesome. The other two well-known cities on the Pacific Coast, San Fransisco and San Diego are nothing but a good time. More on San Diego at a later date, the first big stop on our Trek America itinerary was San Fransisco.

San Fransisco is famous for a whole bunch of stuff. The Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Chinatown, cable cars, homeless people, gay people, hippies…homeless, gay, hippies?.. Bottom line is that there’s a lot of stuff packed into this city and to see it all would require a number of days there.

We rolled into town in the afternoon after leaving Big Sur, took a quick tour of the city in our Trek America-mobile, had a spot of lunch by the bay and were then given the opportunity to walk across the world’s most photographed bridge, The Golden Gate.

The Golden Gate Bridge is not a little bridge. Walking across it takes about 45 minutes. During those 45 minutes you do however get some amazing views of the bay area and some good leg exercise as well. Periodically along the bridge are signs advertising free counselling services along with phones that provide a direct link to a Samaritan on the other end. This is due to the bridge also having the unfortunate title of being the most popular place to commit suicide in the world. The icy waters below look particularly unforgiving and the phones and signs do give it a bit of an eerie ambience.

Obviously everyone on the tour ended up taking far too many photos of the bridge itself, mainly because it is so awe-inspiring and photogenic. Rum is particularly keen on photography and it is entirely possible that his camera is actually an extension of his body. I don’t think it left his side for the entire duration of the trip. For him in particular I think the photography opportunities provided by the Golden Gate were all his Christmases coming at once.

The most popular tourist attraction in San Fransisco is Alcatraz Island that sits in the middle of the bay. The island is most famous fo being a maximum security prison back in the day where the likes of Al Capone served time. Worth a badgers I thought and so onto the ferry I hopped.

Now California is generally pretty warm and welcoming. Not so on Alcatraz which is instead, cold and miserable and frequently covered in mist. If you did actually manage to escape from the prison complex there was unfortunately, no way you’d survive the swim back to the shore. Those who tried, didn’t make it.

The island and prison are pretty well-preserved and the excellent audio tour is actually narrated by ex guards and prisoners themselves. It all gives you a pretty good idea of what prison life was like for America’s most feared criminals. Hint: it wasn’t all that great. Also still visible is the graffiti dating back to when the island was occupied by a group of native americans. This all happened after the prison closed it’s doors to murderers and mob bosses, at a time when the natives were getting an increasingly bad deal from the US government. Above the sign that reads “United States Penitentiary” someone’s painted “Indians Welcome”. Above the old guard’s office someone has creatively coloured in parts of the stripes on a ‘stars and stripes’ shield so that it reads “FREE”.

Those of us Alcatraz-ing it up had to ensure we were back on the mainland and waiting at pier 39 by 5pm. We were scheduled that evening to all go out on a Bay Area ‘Sunset Cruise’.

The words ‘sunset’ and ‘cruise’ are possibly slight exaggerations. San Fransisco is famous for being misty almost all of the time and as such is not allowed a sunset. ‘Cruise’ would be applicable if there was perhaps a pool on board the boat, maybe some deck chairs and perhaps a variety show in the evening. The actual boat however, was far more exciting..a sail powered catamaran. It did have a makeshift bar and buffet in the cabin though so still maintained a touch of class.

Riding over the rough bay area waters in the mist was awesome. As previously mentioned it’s pretty icy out there and so the jackets provided came in handy as without them I think we all would have come down with a spot of hypothermia. Those of us with big cojones took a trip outside onto the front deck, which was actually nothing more than a safety net seperating you from the waves below. Staying on your feet is a real challenge, more so when you’re trying to drink a beer and eat a cheese cracker. How ‘Rum’s’ $1000, Digital SLR didn’t end up as the Bay’s next victim i’ve no idea.

San Fransisco also presented us with the first of many incidents where I would have to buy drinks for the loveable rouges of the trip, the Danes. Jacob and Gowtham, hailing from Legoland are both under 21 and this unfortunately presents a few issues where alcohol is concerned in the US. Everyone else would be off buying drinks and they’d be standing there sheepishly in the background. Fortunately for them I am sometimes too good-natured and was unable to stop myself offering to order their drinks for them.

This worked fine for one round of beers but the Americans are pretty hot on asking for ID if they think you’re under 100 years old. One supermarket in Austin wouldn’t accept my driving licence, NUS card or passport as a valid ID… The US Department of Homeland Security didn’t have any problems with it when I entered the country but some supermarket manager obviously thinks they got it wrong.

“If you can just come back with a US ID we’d be happy to serve you sir” the store manager helpfully advised.

“Right, well sadly I think there might be a few problems associated with that on account of me being English, hence the passport.” Luckily for me the Mexican corner store next door came to my rescue. The only piece of paper with a picture on they required was the crumpled green one in my wallet featuring a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

So the second round of drinks meets a stumbling block when the bar tender asks for IDs of everyone i’m buying drinks for. It was time for operation ‘I’m going to buy you some whisky, and you’re going to discreetly (seriously, these two are the least discreet people i’ve ever met when it comes to this sort of thing) pour it into your cokes. This was a more succesful tactic and we were able to get in a fair bit of time in a small dive bar. Here I waited for ages for my songs to play on the jukebox and the Danes beat me and Rum at pool. Sadly the defeat was not without consequence as we now had to put up their tent in Yosemite National Park. The less said about that game, the better.

One final word of warning to all those who may wish to visit the wonderful city that is San Fransisco.. Those streets really are ridiculously steep and I would advise against going for a morning run up and down them if you didn’t pack decent running shoes in your backpack. Stupid people who do decide to go running in their flat casual shoes may reap the rewards of horrific blisters on the soles of their feet.

Australians

The hostel i’m at currently is full of Australians. Not saying this is a bad thing, but the ratio of Australians to non-Australians is something like 5:1. This has pretty much been the case at most of the places i’ve stayed as well.

Australia doesn’t have all that big a population, and so if every hostel on the backpacker circuit (Europe, Central America, South America, USA, Thailand etc) is full of Australians, it makes me wonder just who exactly is actually back home looking after Australia, making sure no-one has left the iron on, watering the plants etc? Because it certainly isn’t the Austalians.

Now Australia is a favourite destination of European backpackers. Loads of people go there before or after doing the whole South East Asia thing. The only conclusion that I can therefore come to is that Australia is being looked after entirely by European backpackers and the England cricket team (who recently arrived to go through the necessary rigmarole of retaining the Ashes).

Even the Australian cricket team are probably not at home. I hear they worked really hard all last year doing menial jobs and are now inter-railing it around Europe on a gap year having just the best time ever.

Trek America / Pacific Coast Highway / Big Sur

The drawback of travelling everywhere by greyhound bus is that it’s difficult to get off the beaten track and see places that aren’t part of the big cities. With this in mind i’d pre booked myself on a 14 day organised tour of California with stops in Vegas and The Grand Canyon with tour company Trek America.

I’d been looking forward to this leg of my trip for a while as I was kinda hoping it would be like a holiday within what basically is a big 4 month holiday. Hopefully it would be two weeks where I wouldn’t have to worry about where I was staying that night, what bus I had to catch or what I was going to eat.

The whole trip began pretty tentatively. This was probably due to having to meet in a hotel lobby at 7:30am (which meant I had to rise at 5am), and also because everybody was a bit afraid of ‘making the first move’. You got the sense that everybody was trying to figure out the personalities of everyone else before revealing their own. Two weeks later and this seems fairly ridiculous.

Day 1 of the tour involved travelling in our white Trek America minibus from LA, up the Pacific Coast highway to a place called ‘Big Sur’. Before encountering this spectacular coastal scenery however, comes the need to stock up on supplies. Enter the wonderful world that is Walmart.

Walmart is amazing. Yes, it does sort of destroy small independent business but where else can you buy everything ever. Seriously the place was huge. I went in to look around and ended up purchasing some food and drink for the road, a sports related gift for a friend back home and a pair of binoculars…They’ll come in useful for wildlife watching in Costa Rica perhaps?..

All of this comes at a ridiculously cheap price as well. In fact i’m pretty sure the store actually paid me to shop there. It fell down a bit on not having a license to sell alcohol, but as an alternative you could wander on down to the sports section of the store and purchase a gun and ammunition instead. It’s swings and roundabouts.

Travelling up Pacific Coast Highway was pretty stunning, most of the state of California is, to be fair. Hundreds of miles of deserted unspoilt shoreline where extinct volcanoes meet the Pacific Ocean in spectacular fashion. One beach we stopped off at was a famous habitat for elephant seals. Now i’ve vistited seal habitats in the UK before. They tend to involve a lot of walking around and then you get to a viewpoint where, if you look far off into the distance through your Walmart binoculars you may get a glimpse of a seal. Or it could be a rock. You tell yourself it’s a seal to make the trip worthwhile.

The reason it’s difficult to spot seals in the UK is because they’re all hanging out in California. I would too if I was an elephant seal. It basically looked as if multiple lorries all carrying cargos of elephant seals had shed their loads all over the beach. You were literally up to your eyeballs in elephant seals. They were lying anywhere and everywhere. On top of other seals, on rocks, in the sea. Sometimes they’d move and make noises and a few were having a mild disagreement in the waves. I’d go so far as to say the beach was cluttered with seals and it did actually look a bit untidy. The state of our beaches today, geez.

We were camping that first night at a National Park between LA and San Fransisco called Big Sur. Camping meant suddenly being told by tour leader, Mex, to find a ‘tent mate’ from amongst the others. A wave of silent panic sweeps over the group. For those travelling in pairs the decision of who share a tent with is obviously already made. But for those such as myself who are lone rangers it’s an altogether more traumatic experience. I’ve hardly spoken to any of these people, let alone sussed them out. How do I know who to go with!? Looking at the other lone rangers I could tell they were thinking along the same lines.

My choices were a Frenchman, a Korean and a Welshman (sounds like a joke right?). Usually in these type of situations you try and weigh up the pros and cons of each person in order to make an informed decision. Unfortunately we’re supposed to be adults and no-one wants to actually look like they’re doing that else it all comes across as primary school playground politics. With this in mind I put all my eggs into the nearest basket and turn to the person on my right, the Korean.

“Wanna share a tent?” I ask. I recieve a shrug and a nod back and it’s a done deal, panic over.

Turns out i’m excellent at choosing a tent mate. Garam (or Rum as everyone ends up calling him), the Korean and my good self put up a mean tent and you couldn’t really wish to meet a nicer person. Each tent has a name written on it so you always know which tent in the trailer is yours. The name of our humble abode for most of the next two weeks was ‘Iceman’. All the tents were named after characters from the film ‘Top Gun’. It’ll come as no surprise to my nearest and dearest that after we’d arranged our stuff inside the tent Rum’s half looked like he was anticipating a royal visit whereas my half looked like it had already been visited, by 300 elephant seals. Sorry Rum.

Los Angeles County

Word to the wise, guys. LA is overrated. There really isn’t all that much to do there if you’re me. It’s probably slightly better if you’ve got a truck load of money or are here to do touristy things like Universal Studios or take a tour round LA to see where famous people live. I can’t imagine anything more boring though. Google Street View means I can get a pretty good view of Jennifer Anniston’s house for free and there’s always the option of zooming in to have a look at her back garden as well. LA isn’t really a haven for dreadlocked, sandal wearing independent travellers. (That’s what I look like now, obviously).

LA itself is actually a county made up of loads of smaller cities. I happened to be staying in the city of Santa Monica which is right on the Pacific coast. It all feels very OC-ish when you’re wandering about. Palm trees line the streets and most people fall into the ‘young and beautiful’ category. The weather was pretty grey and cloudy when I was there, but this sort of reminded me of home, and to be fair I was still travelling around in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals. I guess perhaps there’s not so much of that going on back in the FOD at the moment. I imagine that in the height of summer, Santa Monica is the place to be and be seen in, if you’re the type to give a shit about that sort of thing. LA, I suspect, is one of those places where quite a lot of people do.

Now whilst most of LA county is pretty dull. Santa Monica is actually ok. The beaches are nice and if you take a left and keep walking down the sea front you’ll hit Venice Beach. Venice Beach, is a freak show. The people who hang out or ‘work’ on the beach may as well be exhibits.

Amusingly our trip down Venice Beach begins with a Synagogue, ‘The Pacific Jewish Centre’ but it goes down hill pretty quickly from there. There are dozens of street vendors selling the kind of tat you’d expect, then there’s a hippy lady parked up in her hippy camper van campaigning for some sort of hippy cause. She has a sign up next to her advising tourists that she charges $1 a photo. Capitalist.

Further on down and we reach a place that ‘prescribes’ medical marijuana (it’s legal if it’s medical in California). Naturally this is the most ridiculous medical clinic, (if you can call it that), that i’ve ever come across. People outside hand out promotional flyers and generally annoy the public.

”Hey man, you look sick, come inside, get prescribed, get high”… Why don’t you get a real job.

Next door is the equally ridiculous clinic, ‘Botox on the Beach’. Stop off here between burgers and fries. Only in LA I suspect.

Botox alone however, is not enough to give you that Hollywood body you apparently desire and so about a block down we reach the ‘muscle beach’. This is basically a body building gym, on the beach. These guys (and girls) are ripped and they know it. Why would you work out here if you weren’t? It’s a fascinating scene as the gym itself is sort of caged off from the rest of the beach. This gives the impression you’ve entered some sort of human zoo and you end up staring at these steroid and surgically altered freaks of nature from the other side of the bars.

Next area of the zoo is the hiphopopotomus and rhymenoceros enclosure (credit to Flight of the Conchords for those). Suddenly you’re being pestered at all angles by amateur rappers holding out headphones for you to listen to their rapping and hip-hopping with the hope you’ll buy a CD. Unfortunately for this particular species they become very annoying very quickly.

”Sure i’ll have a listen”. I put on the headphones and the rap merchant stands there expectantly. The hip-hop is pretty mediocre and I quickly switch from actively listening, to wondering how long I should listen for so as to appear polite. Too short seems rude, too long and i’ve built up hopes and expectations for a sale, plus i’m wasting my own time. I think I listened for 20 seconds, but my were they a long 20 seconds.

”You want me to sign it for you” he asks, pulling out a CD and a marker pen.

”Um, well, I don’t really think I have any change to be honest”‘..

”That’s ok, I got change”.

”Ah, great” I root around in my pockets and turn on my GCSE drama acting skills. ”In fact, you know what? I don’t think I have any cash on me at all”. I manage to remove the notes from my wallet so that it appears empty when I produce it as a prop.

”No worries man, there’s an ATM just there”. And sure enough there is, right behind him.

”Oh is there? Brilliant. Well, I don’t really want to take out any money now as I was just going for a walk down to the beach see, are you going to be here all day? You are? That’s excellent news. Well on my way back i’ll try track you down and hopefully purchase a CD, if you’ve got any left.” He seems to be ok with this and I beat a hasty retreat, making a mental note to take a different route back and make absolutely no attempt to try and find this person ever again.

The next few guys pulling the same kind of stunt got the shorter “‘No thanks” response. The fifteen or so after that got no response at all as I resorted to the ‘pretend you’re on the phone’ trick. Now i’m sure there are some decent hip-hop artists out there on Venice beach, hoping to get that big break and make it big. My advice to any reading would be to try and distance yourself from your competitors. Certainly don’t be the fifteenth one in line because that’s not going to achieve anything and most of those people on the phone are just talking to themselves. Go stand by the Synagogue before anyone realises what the game is.

I also took a trip down to Hollywood with a guy I met in the Hostel called Phil, from Reading, UK. We discovered fairly quickly that there’s not a whole lot going on in Hollywood. If you go to the Hollywood & Highland Shopping Center on the main boulevard and climb a few steps you can, if you squint, see the famous Hollywood sign in the far off distance, like really really far off. Contrary to mine and Phil’s belief, the sign is not on a hilltop right above Hollywood but miles out in the middle of nowhere. Pointless.

The other famous thing in Hollywood is the ‘Walk of Fame’….oooooohhh. The walk of fame is about 2400 pink stars set upon the sidewalk (I mean pavement, sorry), engraved with the names of celebrities past and present. The purpose of the walk of fame, we discovered,  is to keep your eyes to the ground as you walk along, there-by preventing you from looking up and realising that there’s absolutely nothing else of interest along Hollywood Boulevard.

On my last full day in LA I took a train to the Motherfuckin’ Streets of Compton as they’re officially known. Compton is the natural habitat of the likes of Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg etc. It’s also home two of the most infamous gangs in the world, the Bloods and the Crips, who occasionally have gang wars to decide who gets to hang out where. I’d been off the train for about two minutes when some gangsta looking brother from tha hood approaches me.

”You need to keep your head down in a place like this boy” he says.

Considering that all i’d done in Compton so far was get off the train and walk out of the station I decided that this was not the best of omens. Perhaps I wasn’t as ‘gangsta’ as I initially thought. A few minutes later I was on the next train out of Compton heading back to the relative safety and insanity of Santa Monica.

Dallas/Fort-Worth/Fried food.

Dallas and Fort-Worth are essentially brothers. They’re very close to one another, so much so that it’s difficult to tell where Dallas ends and Fort-Worth begins. The urban sprawl doesn’t seem to end. They do however, have two fairly different personalities. Dallas is possibly the older brother, interested in forging a career in big business, probably oil. Fort-Worth meanwhile has a part-time job that it doesn’t have much interest in. In it’s spare time it likes to dress up as a cowboy.

Now those of you lucky enough to have visited Disneyland in your youth may recall Frontierland, which was basically a mock-up of a Wild West movie set, complete with French-Texan accents (if you went to the Paris Disneyland), artificial cacti and saloons where you could buy a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

Fort-Worth is pretty much like that, except the cacti are made of cacti, the cowboys are Texan-Texan and I would advise against going into any of the saloons enquiring about Mickey Mouse ears. Like Disneyland it’s obviously all done up for the tourists, but one has to admit that it is done pretty well. They’re pretty serious about their western cowboy heritage here and herd a bunch of Texan long-horned cattle through the historic part of town twice a day to prove it. Just like it was in the old days i’m sure.

You can also visit a western wear store to stock up on cowboy gear if you failed to do so in Nashville. I may have bought myself a cowboy hat. Boots are pretty pricey though. Once you look like one of the Magnificent Seven you can now walk on down the street to Billy Bob’s Texas Honky-tonk, ‘The largest Honky-tonk in the world’, whatever one of those is. On Fridays and Saturdays they have rodeos in the bull ring inside this enormous bar, along with a casino and a stage where famous country singers perform. Sadly i’d picked a Monday to go to Fort-Worth and so it was pretty empty which was a bit of a shame.

Older brother Dallas doesn’t have a whole lot going on to interest the tourist. I did make it my mission to visit a gun shop in Dallas but on finding the address I decided against going inside as the store was at the time, surrounded by police cars. Probably best not to stick my english nose in their business. Luckily for Dallas tourism, John. F. Kennedy was assassinated here back in the 60s and so this gave them an excuse to build a museum about him which is located on the 6th floor of what used to be the Texas School Book Depository. People who know stuff will know that this is the building from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shot at JFK. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that the shot was fired from the grassy knoll further down the street however.

The museum itself was all very interesting and does a fairly good job at looking at both sides of the story and various conspiracy theories. You also learn a fair bit about JFK and world history at the time so that’s a plus. On the grassy knoll you’ll meet some of the more hardcore conspiracy theorists who don’t work for the museum. They’ll talk to you for ages on why it was all a big CIA/Mafia/Cuban cover up and will show you various photos and newspaper articles to back it all up. The actual point where he was shot is marked on the road with a single ‘x’.

Whilst in Dallas I actually visited a British pub called ‘The Londoner’ that afternoon to watch England’s sensational nil nil draw with European powerhouse, Montenegro. I noticed that the Wembley crowd were wrapped up in coats, hats and scarves. I was outside in the beer garden in shorts and T-shirts. Man that was a hot, sunny day.

I also managed to notch up a hat trick in terms of visiting cities when something big was going down. Balloons in Albuquerque, Austin City Limits Festival in, well Austin and now, in Dallas, a celebration of all things from the Lone Star State, the Texas State Fair. I had underestimated the size of Texas State Fair somewhat. My expectations at first were that it would be a bit like Yorkley Village Fete that takes place yearly ‘up the rec’. On reaching the fair, which is so big that it has it’s own specially designed ‘Fair Park’ on the outskirts of Dallas, I realised that this was massive.

You’re welcomed into Fair Park by a 50ft cowboy statue thing. His name is Tex, of course. From there you can do all kinds of fair stuff. You can play the games and win a cuddly cow, take a ride on an enormous ferris wheel or go and see the livestock exhibited by various ranches from around Texas.  I got the feeling though, that, while this is all well, good and fun for all the family, a hefty (literally) percentage of visitors came to the fair with something else topping their agenda. That would be eating. Eating crap to be more specific.

The source of American obesity, i’m pretty sure, lies somewhere within the grounds of Fair Park, Dallas. Somewhere amongst the rows of fried food stands if you want to triangulate a position. I stood around for a while playing a game of ‘spot the thin person’. It was fairly challenging on account of there not being any.

Here are some of the fried foods that people were queuing up to eat. All of what follows, my friends, is real:

• Fried Chicken
• Fried Hamburgers
• Fried Hotdogs
• Fried Corndogs
• Fried Alligator
• Fried Turtle
• Fried Banana
• Fried Funnel Cake (Batter covered in sugar and cream, not really a cake to be fair)
• Fried Cheesecake
• Fried Mars Bar
• Fried Oreo
• Fried Pizza
• Fried Ice Cream
• Fried Coke
• Fried Beer
• Fried Margarita
• Fried Butter….

I opted for the fried ice cream and a Dallas cop very kindly treated me to a corn dog (they were invented at the fair don’t you know). Both were actually surprisingly tasty but I feel that ingesting such culinary delights has probably also shortened my lifespan significantly. Life is for living though. It’s also for eating if you’re from Texas.

Austin

The time had come in my US adventure to cross through the biggest state in the country and visit it’s capital, Austin in Texas.

The unofficial Austin tagline, seen on t-shirts and posters around the city is ‘Keep Austin Weird’. The population is pretty youthful and is largely made up by students from the University of Texas and Austin’s citizens generally take pride in not being as typically American as places like Dallas or Houston. They are however, like all Texans very proud of their state. Everyone walks around wearing the orange colours of their university and you’ll see more Texas state flags around than US stars and stripes. Texas was, for a few years back in the early days of US history an independent country and they’ve not forgotten this. Texas, more than any other of the states i’ve visited has it’s own unique personality and identity.

Pro Texan slogans you’ll see around the place on bumper stickers include “Don’t mess with Texas”, “Everything is bigger in Texas”, “I’m from Texas, what country are you from?” and “I wasn’t born in Texas but I got here as soon as I could.”.

Even more important to Austin though, is live music. The state capital is generally regarded by music fans as the live music capital of the world, far out doing the likes of Nashville and Memphis in terms of the number of venues and musical diversity.

There’s not so much going on in the day, although that being said you still don’t have to look all that far to find a band or singer/songwriter performing somewhere. The main entertainment hub is 6th Street. It’s pretty standard, but very long, closed off to traffic and lined with a huge number of music venues. If you keep walking the atmosphere becomes less like a frat party and the scene becomes a bit more alternative, possibly a bit more pretentious. I ended up in a bar which was basically a converted bungalow next to a highway. The bands were playing outside in what obviously used to be a front garden. They’re obviously pretty lax on noise complaints here.

Austin doesn’t conform to a particular genre of music so the acts at this bungalow bar were all pretty diverse. It went from an acoustic singer songwriter with a Texan drawl, to an indie pop sort of bands with keyboards and moustaches  to a live hip-group. The standard was pretty high and everywhere was packed with people out to watch some bands.

Now I have, it seems, developed a habit of visiting cities whilst some major event is on. In Albuquerque it was the balloon fiesta, in Austin it was the Austin City Limits festival. Austin has two major festivals each year. South By Southwest being the big one that takes over the whole city earlier in the year, ACL being the more local one that’s just a weekend in Zickler park south of the river.

I wasn’t aware that ACL was taking place until I turned up at my hostel when all I heard was “Hey dude..you hear for ACL?” The lineup was pretty good, and I took an immediate liking to saturday’s acts. I wasn’t however planning to go, it was sold out so buying a ticket from a tout would be expensive etc.

Thankfully I have persuasive sister in Jocelyn and she eventually convinced me that I was wasting a good opportunity if I failed to go along and try and get a ticket.

So Saturday came around and I wandered down with the festival crowd to see if I could nab a sneaky ticket. I had $100 in my pocket and decided that was my limit. Face value of a Saturday ticket was $85. I asked a few touts on the way and $100 was the standard price. To my slight dismay I thought i’d have to spend my entire wad to get in. I do like to shop around though so kept trying my luck as I walked towards the entrance.

Finally I came across a guy selling tickets under a bridge.

“How much for a day ticket?” I ask, gearing myself up to haggle.

“Hundred bucks boy” he replies.

“Well i’ll give you $90” I say, $90 feels like a good number, it was getting late in the day, but i’m obviously not going to get it for face value.

“Face value is $85, $100 is fair”

“Exactly” I say “Face value is $85, so you charging me $90 means you’ve made a $5 profit, well done.” I can be a bit of a cock sometimes.

I don’t think he was expecting this as he seems a bit thrown off, “Tell you what, I can do it for face value, $85” ok? I’ll go with that. This is music to my ears and I hand him $85. He hands me a printed off piece of A4 ticket. I eye it with some scepticism.

“This is a real ticket?” I ask, realising my money is now in his hands, and so is no longer my money.

“Sure is, it’s an e-ticket, they’ll swipe it at the gate, no problems, I don’t do bad tickets man”

“You’d better not” Wasn’t all that sure what’d I would do if it was a dodgy ticket, this was texas, he probably had a gun.

“You gunna give me a tip then?” He asks, I think this was his plan all along.

Sadly for my friend I don’t think he’d read my earlier blog post on tipping where I go off on one just a little bit about how I hate tipping with a passion. His question gets about a nanoseconds worth of thought. “No. Goodbye”.

As I stroll towards the festival entrance, A4 e-ticket in hand I begin to worry whether or not I hadn’t just been fleeced to high heaven. Not a whole lot I could do about it though so I had to just power on through and try my luck. It would be so easy for him to just sell photocopied tickets like this. Even if it was real, the name on the ticket meant that I had to now do a pretty good impression of Nina Koenig, the original person to buy the ticket. Nina can be a guy’s name, right?

Thankfully with 80,000 other tickets to deal with. The guy on the gate didn’t give it a second glance. My heart was in my mouth as he scanned it with the barcode reader and there was a brief pause. Then there’s a ping sound from the machine and i’m suddenly being ushered through the gate and onto the festival site. Awesome.

There’s not a whole lot to report about the festival. It was pretty much like a british festival except it was ridiculously hot. I saw some good bands (Gaslight Anthem, Gogol Bordello, Dangermouse and Muse) and paid $8 for a can of Carling on 3 separate occasions. I drew the line at tipping a dollar a drink here. The sign on the bar said that they were working for tips but i’m pretty sure there’s a big profit going on somewhere when i’m paying that much for a can of watered down piss and they need to speak to their employer if he’s not going to pay them to sell this crap.

Aside from music. The other thing to do in Austin is bat watching. Every evening in the summer if you wait around Congress bridge at sundown you’ll be witness to feeding time for about 184357460876310856 bats that live under the bridge.

Quite a few people gather on the lawns surrounding the bridge in anticipation for this night time feeding frenzy and play the waiting game. For a while nothing happens, looking up at the underside of the bridge reveals no bats and you wonder where exactly they’re all hiding. Then, just as the sun disappears beneath the horizon the air becomes thick with bizarre super high pitched frequencies and then a bat appears fluttering around the underside of the bridge. Then another, and another.

You know in those films, where billions of bats swarm out of caves creating a huge shadow against the horizon? Well that really happens, every day in Austin, and it goes on for about 45 minutes. These bats just keep coming and coming. I’ve no idea where they were coming from but they were appearing from somewhere. It’s was all the more bizarre that this was taking place in the middle of a thriving metropolis such as Austin. You would perhaps expect something like this happening in a cave somewhere out in the wilderness but this was happening right in the middle of the capital of Texas.

Eventually it got too dark to see any more bats, but the air was still thick with the sound of furious flapping and high pitched squeaks. A surreal experience. Austin is weird.

Hola

I guess i’m back in a position where I can more frequently update this blog. I’ve finished my two week tour of California/Nevada and Arizona and spent some fun filled days in San Diego. I’m now in Cancun, Mexico which is a bit of a shithole and i’ve got some pretty ridiculous heat rash so can’t really go out at the moment. More on all that soon. I still haven’t told you all about Austin or Dallas or LA or San Fran or Yosemite or Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon or San Diego so i’ll try get my writing into gear whilst i’m currently out of action. Watch this space etc.

Maintain Radio Silence

Tomorrow morning at 7:30 i’m starting a two week organised tour of California, Nevada, Grand Canyon etc. Not sure how many computers are out in the desert so it may go a bit ‘all quiet on the western front’ for the next 2 weeks. Assume I haven’t died. I will continue to update where possible. Will try and post some photos before I fly off to Mexico on 3rd November.

Over and out.

Billions of balloons. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I wasn’t really all that sure where to go after New Orleans. I’d already booked my stay in Austin and Dallas for the end of the week to coincide with a flight to LA but was now faced with a few day’s worth of time to kill. Houston and San Antonio weren’t really inspiring me so I kept looking west, past the great state of Texas and into the state of New Mexico and it’s capital Albuquerque. Perfect place for a day trip (quite literally a day trip, it was a 27 hour bus journey to get there). I awoke on the Greyhound bus just as we were leaving the featureless Texas landscape and heading into the deserts of New Mexico. The brown Texas earth slowly turned to red and the Texan bushes and trees were replaced with cacti and tumbleweeds. This is the real wild west right here.

The ground was still pretty flat, stretching out for hundreds of miles in every direction. Gradually though, shadows appear in the west that begin to rise up out of the desert. As the bus gets closer I realise they’re mountains, the southern tip of the Rockies, beneath which sits the city of Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is another city that I wish i’d had more time in. It’s really quite different from the other metropolises i’d previously visited. Being in New Mexico, the city is, as you would expect, very hispanic. ‘Old Town’ is full of quaint little buildings in the traditional Mexican adobe architecture style. You’ll also find mariachi bands dressed in their traditional Mexican costumes serenading the crowds and there are plenty of opportunities to pick up a sombrero or food-wise, a burrito or enchilada.

Albuquerque is also surrounded by Indian reservations and as a result there is a sizeable Native American population in the city. You can also go on tours up into the mountains to see the ancient petroglyphs that natives carved into the rock thousands of years ago and stock up on Native American jewelry and moccasins.

Now it just so happened that I waltzed into Albuquerque during the week-long International Balloon Fiesta held on the outskirts of the city. I wasn’t originally planning to go see the balloons as it was out on the edge of town and to see it would involve getting up early. I’m not a morning person. Thankfully I met a more ambitious traveller than myself at the hostel, Joe, who was from Cheltenham of all places. This, together with our shared love of ‘The Onion’ (best website on, well, the web – www.theonion.com ) and ‘Peep Show’ meant we got on pretty well. Joe was keen to see the balloons and did some research into what public transport to take, drew a little map and worked out what time we’d have to leave in the morning. I helpfully sat around eating a pie i’d heated up.

The planning done I decided to stop being a wuss, man up and go see some muthafuckin’ balloons. How many times are you going to be in Albuquerque when the world’s premier balloon festival is on? Probably not all that many is the answer.

Balloon folk are morning people it would seem because the day’s ballooning festivities started at 5:45am. We get up at 4:30, catch an empty train to the middle of nowhere, wander down some dark Albuquerque roads and make it to the festival site in time for a breakfast burrito and flavorless coffee.

The field was just a sea of trucks with balloon trailers, but, like the mountains rising up over the desert, the view of the horizon was soon obscured by the silhouettes of hundreds of balloons inflating all over the park. The need for darkness now became clear. The flashes of flame from the burners illuminated the canvas to show whichever design was on the balloon. Against the dark desert backdrop it was quite a sight to behold and my camera now contains 385926359 balloon photos to sift through on my return.

Pretty soon there were hundreds of balloons taking off from every angle. You were free to wander around so could stand right up next to them as they inflated and took off. This was a good thing, desert nights are pretty cold, but an inflating balloon makes for a pretty good patio heater if you stand by it.

Hundreds of balloons flying over the desert is one of the most spectacular things i’ve seen and I would imagine that it looked even more amazing from up in the air, flying amongst them. For some reason some of the balloons chose to land in the city itself, including one on a building site, one in a chemical plant and even one on the railway where we were waiting for our train back. These are probably not high up on the list of ‘best places to land your balloon’.

Whilst waiting for my next Greyhound bus I took some time out to visit the Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The museum is in Albuquerque as it was here where much of the atomic bomb design and testing was done. It was all fairly interesting. Did you know that Brazil nuts contain 1000 times more radiation that the next most radioactive type of food. Think about that one when you tuck into your Christmas nuts.

It was a shame to leave Albuquerque so soon, I hope to return to New Mexico again someday as a balloon pilot. I was now heading to Austin, Texas, ‘live music capital of the world’. This time it was only a 22 hour bus journey so that’s one plus point.