¿what's the spanish for wavicle?

OK. Still no word from yahoo about my email. I have started using my gmail account instead. Actually it is much better (yes i realise i am somewhat behind the curve only realising that now.) pmg102@gmail.com it is, pmg101 was already taken.

So, not having email meant i missed all your christmas wishes, or perhaps you're all just cabrones and you didn't send me any. I'm joking! Actually, what it did do is totally scupper my plans to meet up with les françaises in puebla for new year's, since i only heard from them today, and it's already the 31st! However, the flipside of that is that I therefore stayed in Morelia a little longer, and had the pleasure yesterday to spend the day discussing philosophy of physics, among many other things, with a charming local girl! But i get ahead of myself.

I had a good time in Guadalajara. I left my car parked in the street, just outside the parking meters zone. After four days, I thought I should check on it, for peace of mind, so I walked up there, to find the driver's window smashed! On closer inspection, I realised that actually it was just open -- in my half-asleep idiocy on Monday morning when I moved it, I had left the window open. Nothing had been touched -- there wasn't even a homeless man asleep in it. So take what lesson you like about crime versus fear-of-crime. I did shut the window though, before I left it again.

It was also the festival of the Virgen de Guadalupe whilst I was there, so with a few others from the hostel we went and consumed remarkably unhealthy mexican street food, consisting mainly of deep fried things with sugar, whilst not buying things from the many artisan stalls. And we saw some Aztec dancing! Apparently they dance for days on end.

The hostel is dead cool, they hook you up with fun local things each night. Guadalajara has a big art scene, so a couple of times there were trips to galleries and things like that. One girl from the States was staying at the hostel, but had been working in a local community for the previous six months, and she took us to meet her host family for a birthday party. It was great to leave the centre and go out into the real Mexican suburbs, even if they did take advantage of our offer to buy beer and tricked us into buying 50 bottles.

I missed the opportunity to see more french films (seems to be a theme) and/or a bullfight by deciding after a week to leave, for the pretty towns of Colima and Ciudad Guzman, on the way to Maruata's empty beaches for Christmas week. That was amazing. Especially creeping around the beach at one in the morning looking for turtles laying eggs! They are a 400-million-year-old species, and it is amazing to watch them. That was where I met the turtle girl and her boyfriend, Canadians, who (since there were so few people staying) I saw every day. When the time came for leaving, it turned out we were all headed to Morelia, so I offered them a lift, and was then invited to dinner with her family, which was where I met her sister the quantum physicist. Hopefully I will be able to put some of the pictures that they took up here.

Both of my cameras are now used up: I am trying to decide whether to develop them here to paper, or CD, or send the films home, or what. I also have realised (OK, it was obvious to everyone else) that not having a digital camera was a mistake. I am thinking about buying one, but it's pretty galling when they're more expensive here even than home, and certainly than the States.

On the way into Morelia, for a joke but not really, we stopped at a Burger King. You have to marvel at the fact that they can make a Whopper taste identical in Morelia, Mexico, Great Bend, Kansas, and Brighton, England. Or you might think it is a bit sinister. Apart from that, its been tacos, quesadillas, and comida corrida all the way! Oh, and fish, at the beach. Mmmmm.

So, I hope everyone else had pleasant Christmases, and a Feliz Año Nuevo to you all. I have tequila and limes: hopefully I will be able to persuade the Dutch girls at the hostel to share them with me. Apart from that, I had my hair cut. The poor man was very mystified that I wanted those clippers for cutting the side and back pushed all over my head. But he came through bravely. And all for GBP 1.75. I love this country!

no email :(

if anyone has tried to email me, i am not receiving emails at the moment. thanks, yahoo. i have contacted them to ask what is going on. i have had that account for over 5 years and never had a problem, and now that i need it it goes pear-shaped!

had a very relaxing xmas getting a tan, swimming with turtles, drinking coconuts and sleeping under palm palapas on the beach at maruata. hoping to make it to puebla for new year!

happy holidays a todo :)

¡viva mexico!

the cadence of my journey has changed somewhat now
that i am across the border. i have slowed down quite
a bit. partly this is because the US being in many
ways culturally similar to home meant that i could do
a sort of high-speed trip. actually i covered over
10,000 miles in the two months i was there. and partly
it is because driving in mexico is a rather different
proposition than driving in the US. i think this is a
trend which will only continue...

so, first i spent one week in monterrey, as it turned
out, staying with a family which was pretty cool.
except that she wanted to practise her english on me
so i didnt really get much of a chance to practise my
spanish! but i got by, during the day when she was at
work, in my conversations with shopkeepers and museum
attendants, so was kind of chuffed. middle-class
monterrejians aspire to be USAian. it seemed a shame,
but i suppose inevitable.

i started off being very circumspect with respect to
food and water. however nothing went wrong so i became
more and more adventurous. now i pretty much eat
everything, yes including salad, and i clean my teeth
under the tap, and i am pleased to report i have had
no ill-effects as yet!

so after a lovely week in monterrey, i drove down to
zacatecas, a lovely colonial town in the middle of
mexico, where i liked the hostel so much i stayed a
week. i decided to take spanish lessons there too,
since a teacher at the university language centre
would do 1-on-1 for 4 GBP an hour. i tried to speak
spanish in the hostel as much as possible too, as some
of the other guests were trying to improve their
spanish, and i bought (randomly) an agatha christie
book in spanish and a diccionario, the former i have
conquered the first two chapters of with the aid of
the latter.

and yesterday, i finally left and drove down here to
guadalajara, mexico's second biggest city (mexico city
the first, monterrey is the third), with two absurdly
beautiful french-canadian girls whose university has
an exchange program with the university in puebla.
both, alas, have mexican boyfriends... during the
journey, we conversed in a melange of french, spanish,
and english. the early stages of learning a language
are really fun and rewarding, as you pick up new
vocabulary daily.

the city is, well, big, (7mi ppl i think). the hostel
seems to be a little too anglophone for me. i have
already met two people who had been at zacatecas --
i'm not sure i like the 'gringo trail' factor too
much. i will probably stay here a few days (perhaps a
week, true to form), then swing by morelia to see the
monarch butterfly migration, whence to the michoacan
coast to find a playa for christmas :).

nada mas, hasta la proxima!

updatelet

right, i have 18 minutes of internet time left in san antonio public library in texas until the town shuts down for thanksgiving, so let me do a quick summary of the last few weeks.

well, i am now gearing up to cross into mexico, and i bought this book in austin which has scared me stupid. i bought some chloraquine in a wal-mart, and it cost $98!!

after charleston i teamed up with a fat swiss girl for a few days and we dropped by savannah and then stayed a couple of nights in the tree houses at the hostel in the forest which was amazing! i left her there, as far as i know she's still there :).

then i sped by st augustine florida which is the oldest town in the US, and feels like it. its just like the mediterranean, tho a bit tourist-heavy.

i tried to drive through biloxi mississippi: the highway just stopped though, with the bridge ahead only half standing. on the opposite shore you could clearly see skyscrapers half subsided, and junk everywhere. i did actually drive through new orleans, tho i didn't stop. it is a mess. you all saw it on the news anyway, so you know how it is -- but it's pretty bizarre to pass through. oh i forgot mobile alabama where i had some amazing oysters, and dothan alabama where i didnt bother to attend the national peanut festival. i spent a few days in lafayette louisiana, the heart of cajun country, with lots of good food (crawfish, gumbo, etc) and tried to track down some french speakers which is hard. learned some interesting history of the place too. its certainly a long way from the McDs wal-mart strip-malled USA of stereotype.

i stayed in austin texas a long weekend: there is an incredible live music scene there. every night of the week, every bar in town has some form of live music. and often free! and $2 budweiser -- even i'll drink it at that price. its a cool city too, a little liberal dot in an otherwise conservative republican state. oh and props to the girls in southside bbq in elgin who were the first people i met who actually laughed at my accent. "wow, you're actually from england? that's so amazing!" ;)

a guy at austin hostel tipped me off to global freeloaders. its wicked -- way to get free accomodation! so i'm trying to use it to arrange my first nights in mexico, with some woman who wants to practise her french, bizarrely enough! and she offered me a cup of proper english tea that her english friend sent from leicestershire -- how can i resist that. i'm getting a bit US culture-tired actually. miss home! ;)

the moustachioed lady tells me i have five minutes remaining. hope everyone's well, think i better sign off, wish me luck in crazy mexico, not too sure when i'll next get to the net to update!

night night sleep tight

well i suppose it had to happen eventually. bedbugs. saturday morning i woke up with bites all across my shoulders and arms. in the early hours of sunday morning i actually felt the biting and put the light on to find two or three of these little blighters happily cavorting on my pillow and in the bedclothes, after a tasty supper of me. wide awake now, frantic searching revealed four or five more including some babies. cute eh. i gave them all a good blast of insect repellant and watched with a sort of horrified glee as they slowly curled up, then stretched out, and then died.

i have bites on my hands, face, neck and feet now too. also they are probably living in my luggage. i put it all through the tumble dryer set to very hot for half an hour -- but i wouldn't be surprised if they somehow lived through it. apparently they can live for up to *a year* then come out and get right back into sucking blood.

in other news, i was shocked to read today that 22 people were killed in a tornado in kentucky and indiana on sunday. it seems nearby (although it's not: 500 miles or thereabouts) because we *weren't* that far from there, only a couple of weeks ago. travelling has made the world smaller already.

also, i'm starting to get heartily sick of rich white self-obsessed shallow privileged college kids. charleston is definitely a beautiful town. but the 'college town' thing is even more sickening here, in a place with a lot of poverty, and a very blatant black/white divide. it appears to me, against my expectations, that america has bigger class divides than britain. perhaps because i'm confusing wealth with class.

and everybody's having a remarkable time

Readers of taste will remember today's title from a DJ Shadow album. It is sampled from a recording of a gentleman who went to Memphis, Tennessee "in order to purchase some automobiles". Leaving Memphis yesterday I decided DJ Shadow suited the mood -- and then he went and name-dropped the very "sun-deck of the Peabody Plaza Hotel" that I had just been in!

Well OK, I didn't actually stay at the Peabody: at $200 a room it is a bit beyond my budget. I *did* however see NIN among others at the Voodoo music festival in the baseball arena opposite, and afterward hung out with some Chicagoans who *were* staying there. And I used the phone in their lobby. So it was a rather strange coincidence to have it name-checked the following day on an album I'd had for years...

After crossing Kansas, which wasn't really as big as I'd expected, in St Louis I met up with my former schoolfriend Paul Seet who now lives in Chicago. We hung out for a week, taking in Anna, Illinois (home of Bunny Bread), Paducah, Kentucky (home of nothing in particular), and Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee. People started talking funny nearly as soon as we hit Kentucky.

It turns out that although Paul and I have a lot in common (like our names, and our school years), he is an American in ways that I am not. I see eating out as an opportunity to relax, enjoy good conversation, soak in local atmosphere, and sample interesting local cuisine. Paul sees it as a necessary evil with the aim of consuming as quickly as possible food the quality of which, from the brand name posted outside, can be predicted with complete accuracy. I see sleeping as a necessary evil which must be done to make the next day pleasant, and should cost as little time and money as possible. For Paul it is the key part of the day, where he can relax in the personal space which is for a short time his and his alone, safe from the marauders and risks of the outside world. I find Interstates boring and depressing, unlike their ever-interesting and more leisurely cousins, the state and county roads. Paul prefers the Interstates for their efficiency to the ever-stressful twists and turns of the back-roads.

So just these three differences: and apart from that we agreed that it was nice to see each other. I characterise him as 'American' in these preferences (predictable food, comfortable beds, efficient transport) because it seems that America tends to agree with him in these respects. Hence the rise of the Brand, favourite antihero of the lazy liberal. I prefer the unexpected, the unusual, the interesting. So do some other people.

I can't think of any kind of useful conclusion however. And although it is the first rainy day in a week of hot sunshine (I got sunburned Sunday at the show!), hence stopping by the library to update y'all, I should really get out and see something of Chattanooga. Perhaps the Choo Choo (although I favour the Civil Rights/Trail of Tears museum). So how about you, gentle reader, putting your own conclusion in the comments?

Staying just one night

Driving across Southern Utah was an incredible experience. From Grand Canyon, I came through Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Grand Staircase (Escalante), Dixie National Forest, Arches National Park, Colorado National Monument, Rocky National Park, and of course all the land in between. Google image search for any of those names to get a feeling for what it's been like: my photos are probably rubbish, and won't get developed or scanned for months anyway.

Grand Canyon's chief virtue is its size, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I managed to find a rock to perch on, and read my book, occasionally looking up and going, "Wow, that sure is a long way away." The other Canyons are more comprehensible, and therefore to some degree more attractive. I did a few hours' hiking in Arches which is just like walking in a petrified shipyard -- or spaceshipyard. These enormous red rocks, lined up in rows and rows.

At a certain height, pines are replaced and joined by "aspens", a gorgeous tree with delicate silver-white branches, and translucent leaves which are yellow-to-red now, in their fall colouring. With the sun shining through them, and the leaves trembling in the wind, almost every turn in the road presents new photogenia. I got a great view of the full moon rising above mountains, while the last of the evening sun lit them up fiery red. I couldn't stop to photograph it, but I didn't need to.

In the Rockies I reached 11,000 feet at a pass at the Continental Divide, as it's called, and it was snowy all around! From there I descended into Boulder, where I've spent a couple of days hanging out because all the continuous onward movement had started to become unsettling. It is a wonderful town to have stopped in, too -- its main features are lots of trees (in autumn colour), a pedestrianised Main Street chock full of independant coffee places and used book stores, and a huge and gorgeous campus (the University of Colorado) and its attendant 30,000 students. A girl posting posters told me that it has the highest concentration of PhDs of any town in the US, and that it has 300 days of sunshine a year. An odd man from Georgia reading David Icke in Moab Hostel had commented on the beauty of Boulder's girls: he was right. Last night, I went to see open mic poetry at a co-operatively run food store and cafe. And it has a great Public Library with free internet access! But today I leave, for Denver, and then to start the long lonely crossing of the Great Plains, leaving the South-West for the South-East.

Before I go though, I wanted to say something about this whole National Park deal. I picked up a book in here by Henry David Thoreau, about walking, wherein he made the distinction between Nature as primary actor, with Man hosted in it, as against Nature contained and managed merely as a pleasant diversion among Man's many available pleasant diversions. He was writing in the 1800s: he was a part of only the sixth party of white men to climb Mt Kerridge in Maine, and soon the whole of the Eastern seaboard was to be logged for arable farming. Now, whenever I visit these great beautiful wild places of America, I can never wholly shake the feeling of being package-touristed, with "marked trail" this, "entrance fee" that, and "visitor centre" the other. It's a shame: it spoils the trip. In an odd way I look forward to entering the wholly unremarked Great Plains region, where the beauty is hard to define, package up and name -- and for that reason goes generally unrecognized. Finally perhaps there I will be able to feel more like Man within Nature, than experiencing Nature as a construct of Man.

---

NB: Dom, you may be interested to know that I went through Dolores, Colorado. Those who haven't read Lolita will be uninterested to hear this. On a side note, in Oregon I actually saw a town called "Loleta" in Humboldt County, which seemed a large coincidence.

sick

damn i caught some silly american cold. i thought i'd shook it then camped out in sequoia national forest and the temp dropped to like -10deg during the night. i woke up freezing cold and just jumped into the driver's seat and drove with the heating on max, until my feet had thawed out. so i don't feel sociable and i feel all sleepy and just snotty. grrr.

since SF its just been mostly a sort of inadvertant national parks tour -- yosemite, sequoias, death valley, zion, and grand canyon. i made a detour via grass valley to try and find ed buryn, the guy who wrote the inspirational "vagabonding in the USA" in 1975 or summat. it was pretty cool managing to meet up with him. however, horribly, his daughter had died in an auto accident only the month before. i just hoped that half an hour talking to me about travelling might help ease his pain. made me ratchet down my speed a notch too -- tho 60 in the burban feels like about the most it'll do anyway.

most amazing day must have been in lone pine, where i was stranded one day waiting for the truck to get fixed after it overheated in the desert (not my fault! the radiator was cracked!). i went into the chamber of commerce asking if there was anything to do in town for one day, seeing as i didnt have a vehicle (they just looked confused). when i came out this lady got into some crazy electric car, i go "wow what a cool ride" and she's like "want a lift?" so i followed her round her hilarious small-town organising day. linda snell USA.

most amazing night was last night. stayed in tecopa hostel in death valley. there's no clouds, and its absolutely silent, and the ex-hippie that built the hostel built a tower u can climb up and watch the stars, and talk for hours setting the world to rights with some random literature major grad from seattle on his own trip, the only other guest in the hostel (and human for hundreds of miles, it seemed!). saw some shooting stars and definite UFOs over nevada desert too...

right goin to bed. try and get rid of this stoopid cold.

town country town country

Entered the US to little fanfare, except for the payment of $6 for the pleasure of giving the federal government my fingerprints and a mugshot. Easier than I had expected. First hurdle overcome.

Three nights in a hotel while I acclimatised and recovered from jetlag, then three in the friendly if slightly chaotic Green Tortoise (above the needle exchange -- playing good block/ bad block to get to the mini mart for beers in the evenings), one in almost complete isolation on Vashon Island, a 10 minute ferry ride, across the Puget Sound, and then, after a slightly fraught but eventually victorious day used-car shopping, the beginning of a slow crawl down highway 101 and the west coast of washington, oregon, and northern california. Met too many crazy people to list, and nearly stacked the truck on many occasions from the sheer draw-jopping beauty of the coastline vistas. Even if things are slightly spoiled by the surfeit of seniors in RVs and official "vista point"s.

After six days driving, including 2 nights sleeping in the back of the truck (ouch, it actually gets pretty cold at night, even despite those walmart-purchased $4 fleece throws lining my three-season sleeping bag), I am now happy to be cooling my heels in San Fran -- altho I am already on my second hostel. There's about 7 in town, each with different qualities, and in different areas. Or perhaps I just can't get out of the habit of continual onward movement.

The map is indeed not the territory: I have found it almost impossible to estimate driving times from looking at the trusty rand mcnally (last year's issue (that's the '05 one, go figure) can be bought at a 60% discount from walmart, hoo-yah for corporate destruction of downtown shopping districts). An hour's hiking in the redwood forests of NorCal became 3 when I seriously underestimated the scale of the map, and I had to accept a lift from a couple of liberal seniors the last part. They were not impressed to find that despite my cute english accent I was destroying planet hourly with my 15mpg Suburban. That bothers me somewhat too. Not enough though.

Enough for now. San Fran rocks tho. Apart from all the homeless people, rudies, and crackheads. But hey, It's America Stupid.

Till the next hostel with free internet...