Al's Adventure: Part Five

Meet Al

Hi folks, my name's Al. I've taken up residence on Alex's travel blog as I made the decision to spend my inheritance on travelling the world for a few months, and I'll document my exploits from time to time as I go. Sometimes I'll be travelling alone, sometimes with friends, and sometimes just crashing at somebody's flat (cough Alex and Lachy cough) - it's going to be interesting, as I'm not one to often leave my comfort zone. My journey starts with a tour of the US, followed by some time in Fiji, a few weeks in Australia, and ends with a brief stint in New Zealand. Let's do this.

Part Five

Here we are, the last section of my USA tour. There's a lot to cram into this one so bear with me. Me, Jonny and Maria set off from Portland in our rented Mazda - which cost a fair amount for two days, mainly because we're under 25 - and headed south towards the Californian coast. I don't count Seattle and Vancouver as being by the Pacific as they technically lie in the Puget Sound Bay, which isn't really ocean, so arriving at an eerily misty seaside town late at night was our first exciting glimpse of the Pacific. That night we slept in a motel run by the creepiest family, to the sound of sea lions barking. The next day was a mad dash down to San Francisco, admiring the amazingly tall redwood trees, checking out the coastal scenery of Route 1, and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour (the carpool lane, however, was a big bonus).

San Francisco is one hell of a city. Rammed full of people, about twenty forms of public transport, and hills too steep to be in a city, it's just crazy, colourful and loud. Our first night was spent at an Indian restaurant/Irish bar (that's right, combined) before enjoying a whisky in Little Italy. The next couple of days saw us playing old fashioned arcade games down on the pier, riding the cable car up and down the hills, climbing Coit Tower to admire the view, cycling to the ocean and then up to the Golden Gate Bridge JUST missing sunset by a few minutes, couchsurfing with a woman named Jess who treated us to a meal in Chinatown, bumping into a guy from St Andrews in the street, and watching fireworks on Pier 39 (the famous one) whilst eating Mexican food.

Just a quick mention about the cycling: they told us to return the bikes on the other side of the city by 9pm, but what we didn't realise was they didn't give us lights on our bikes. This meant that after sunset we had to cycle along pavements illegally, and through pitch black parks avoiding pedestrians and just whistling to be make ourselves known - it was stupid and difficult, especially after getting lost. However, we DID play an on-rails interactive zombie laser-shooting game on the pier, as well accomplishing a Mission Impossible style laser maze (where I showed a nimbleness I didn't know I possessed) - so that made things better.

Anyway, one of the highlights of the trip was renting our own campervan and driving through the streets of the city while people admired our paintwork (a massive osprey, for some reason). We even rode down that famous steep winding road in San Francisco, win Jonny telling me "This is it Al, we've made it in life." We took the van down the Californian coast, then camped under the stars just outside of Yosemite. That took a lot of driving, and we did have crappy salad sat in a dark, misty car park on the way there, but it was worth it when we finally camped and saw how many stars were above us (hint: a crazy amount).

People will think we're crazy for not even spending a night in Yosemite Park, but Jonny didn't want to camp in the cold (we were at 8000ft, can you believe), and our lack of time meant we decided to head out for the desert sooner rather than later. However, the day we spent in the park was amazing; the trees, the lakes, mountains like I've never seen before. After all the hectic travelling we'd been doing, it was nice to just sit by a silent alpine lake and do nothing. Hiking's for chumps.

So yeah, that evening we just drove and drove until we'd descended about 7000ft and camped by a desert road in Death Valley.

The next morning, stood outside the campervan underneath a big blue scorching desert sky, I threw a Breaking Bad reference Jonny's way. "Yo Mr White!" I shouted, pretty chuffed when Jonny grumbled "Yes, Jessie?" "When we gonna cook, yo?" It was a good moment, but maybe you had to be there. (If any adults reading don't know Breaking Bad, then just ignore this whole paragraph)

Death Valley is an insane place. Just like a massive, empty park where people drive miles and miles to see each attraction. You just pass each other on the big empty roads with a thought like "I wonder if they're going to see the abandoned mining facility, or the canyon full of colourful rocks?" We camped at a ranch with a pool, golf course, tennis courts, bar, cafe, buffet restaurant, everything. A bit TOO much for one of the driest places on earth... Still, chilling by the pool was a treat. So was watching the sunset from a rocky hill in the middle of the desert, beer in hand.

We woke up early before leaving the valley, to watch the sunrise at the lowest place in the USA (200ft below sea level! I've never spoken about feet so much in my life until I got here.) It's called Badwater Basin and it's just covered in salty crust, salty pools, and surrounded by a mountain range that looks badass in the rising sun. Oh, and we saw a desert fox being all mysterious on some rocks. Like the nomads we've become, me and Jonny then hit the road for Las Vegas - not an ideal place for a campervan.

It turns out that you can park in any of the casinos for free, so we picked one and it turned out we were right in the middle of the Strip. This is the weirdest city I've ever been to: people walk the streets drinking huge cocktails, they smoke cigarettes indoors, they walk past homeless people right outside the casinos where they'll spend hours throwing their money away into slot machines. And then there's the buildings. Pirate ships, castles, volcanoes, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canal (complete with fake blue sky overhead so it feels like daytime all night), Roman palaces -they have everything just crammed together on this one road, with outdoor music and escalators to help you move from casino to casino. I put a dollar into a slot machine, and won twenty, which was pretty awesome. Vegas ain't dragging me under.

Me and Jonny spent some time playing arcade games, and spent our prize tickets on some tat from the gift shop (including fake tattoos for him and a sheriff's badge for me), before trying our very first oxygen bar on the Strip. The idea here is that you get tubes up your nose to breathe in oxygen from different coloured cylinders and it's supposed to energise you, while the girl walks up and down giving head massages. Nice. That evening we went to a Vegas comedy show, where Jonny built a little fortress out of our passports and wallets to hide the fact that we were drinking cocktails and so wouldn't get picked on by the comedians. We ended our night by just wandering the length of the strip, watching the volcano spout its lava, and the Bellagio fountains dance to Frank Sinatra. It was then we realised camping in the car park of the Linq casino might be a bad idea, what with the security racing round on segways, so we had to camp out by some casino in the middle of the desert - a real pain in the arse after such a long day.

The following morning started off with an unplanned detour to Hoover Dam; not much to say other than that it's an insanely big wall of concrete built in a big old gorge and it's bloody impressive. No wonder it's one the modern seven wonders of the world. We hit up a classic diner for some ranchos heuvos (I can't even tell you what that is, eggs and cheese and stuff) then rode our way along Route 66 in the sun, blasting Queen's greatest hits on the radio. I then fulfilled a dream I didn't know I had: camping in a Flintstones themed campsite. We drank beers round the campsite and listened to Mumford and Sons which was nice. (Although is it sexist that the campsite laundromat was called Wilma's laundry? You tell me...)

Conquering another classic American tourist landmark, me and John visited the Grand Canyon. It's big. Bigger than it looks on TV. It just stretches off as far as you can see, so obviously we took loads of touristy photos of ourselves, before visiting the geology museum right on the side of the cliff. The next couple of days was just road tripping through the desert back to California to visit Los Angeles, a city so big it's actually made up of 53 cities apparently. It's stupidly big, and not in a 'woah' Grand Canyon way but rather an 'urgh, it's just miles and miles of concrete strip malls' way. We slagged off the city quite a bit on our long drive through it. However, we finished the day driving through the Santa Monica Mountains to camp by the sea at Malibu - that, my friends, is a nice place to camp. Better than the truck stop from the night before, that's for sure.

I'm going to be honest, LA was not what I've seen in the movies. The traffic is horrendous, the pavements are packed, and to get between two places worth seeing it'll take you hours. We still managed to do some cool stuff though: open-top bus through Hollywood led by a tour guide in Slytherin robes, saw Nightmare Before Christmas at the El Capitan theatre with added snow and smoke effects etc., saw the red carpet premiere for Interstellar and even caught a glimpse of Matthew McConaughey, and walked along Santa Monica and Venice Beaches to work on our northern England tans. I'm sure there are many reasons to love LA, but it wasn't mine or Jonny's favourite city, meaning I felt even more guilty hopping on a plane to Fiji and leaving him there.

The Victorian High Country

Over Christmas I spent about a week in the Victorian Alps with Lachy, framed on either side by a night spent in the skiing town of Mt Buller, and filled in the middle with trail riding through the mountains. I haven't got round to writing a blog post about that yet but safe to say it was one of the best adventures of my life.

Anyway, on Friday we drove up there again for a 'mental health weekend', since Lachy's about to start exam revision and I've been stressing about various things I probably don't need to stress about. We set off through Friday-evening-heading-out-of-the-city traffic which wasn't our best idea but soon enough we were driving on open highways, surrounded by grass and gum trees and grazing animals. It was a breath of fresh air. There are many things I love about living in the city (never having to order things off the internet because I can find them on my street, someone qualified to teach me anything I want to know within a short range of my home...) but sometimes that feeling of 'it never stops' can be exhausting.

Darkness fell as we drove past Mansfield and up to the mountain, and the headlights illuminated a kangaroo standing stock-still by the side of the road. It was the first wild kangaroo I'd seen that wasn't dead at the side of the highway, and I was transfixed. Ten minutes later Lachy braked when he spotted a wombat on the verge, and we reversed to get a better look at it. It stood there hyperventilating for a few seconds before sprinting back the way it had come.

The following morning we set off on our 'hike'. Since it was our mental health weekend, we didn't want to push ourselves particularly hard, so we aimed for the summit of Mt Buller. Since Buller is a very popular ski resort in Victoria there are slopes and buildings and ski lifts all the way to the top, but a path took us off around the side of the mountain so we could forget about civilisation for a little while.

As I write this, the next in a series of thunderstorms is passing over us in Melbourne. It has been roaring thunder and end-of-the-world rain all night long. Apparently, this is spring in Victoria. It was 22 degrees and gloriously sunny when we set off up Mt Buller; the chairlifts were stopped and the place was a ghost town. It was the same the last time I visited. When I finally do see the town packed with skiiers in winter it will be a real shock.

I have been becoming increasingly interested in birds, living in the city, since they're the only wildlife I really get to see on a regular basis. We saw a laughing kookaburra perched on a powerline on the drive up, and as we walked to the summit we heard the strange call of a pied currawong, and caught a raven in the process of cracking open an egg (a bird's or a snake's, we aren't sure).

Since we were so high before we'd even set off, the views from the summit were incredible. In the lower picture you can see the white of the trees that had been burned in a bushfire years before - I didn't get a decent picture of it, but there are white trees racing all the way up to the edge of the town of Mt Buller. It's frightening how close the flames must have come to destroying the town.

Mt Buller fire tower and summit

We walked along a bit of a ridge at the summit and Lachy called me over to look at something - a snowdrift. I scrambled down to it and made a snowball. It was 22 degrees - that's British summer! I was pouring sweat and yet here was a big ol' pile of snow, cold to the touch, the real deal.

In the evening we went 'possum hunting' - we took torches and walked out around the mountain a little way, searching the trees for the rare pygmy possum which survives in only a few locations in Australia (and most probably the world). Needless to say we didn't find any, but it was both frightening and exciting to feel like we were the only people on the mountain. (We weren't, quite.)

More adventures coming up soon!

Al's Adventure: Part Four

Meet Al

Hi folks, my name's Al. I've taken up residence on Alex's travel blog as I made the decision to spend my inheritance on travelling the world for a few months, and I'll document my exploits from time to time as I go. Sometimes I'll be travelling alone, sometimes with friends, and sometimes just crashing at somebody's flat (cough Alex and Lachy cough) - it's going to be interesting, as I'm not one to often leave my comfort zone. My journey starts with a tour of the US, followed by some time in Fiji, a few weeks in Australia, and ends with a brief stint in New Zealand. Let's do this.

Part Four

I've been here a month already. Four bloody weeks. It feels like only yesterday my friends were forcing a line of shots down me while I tried to say I had too much packing to do to get that drunk. Anyway, this week had a bit less train travel and a bit more city-hopping.

My first evening in Seattle was spent at the airport, learning that Jonny's luggage had probably been stolen. We were so keen to get to the pub that we pretty much brushed it off as 'one of those things' but, looking back, it's not that great. He had his best clothes in there, apparently, and now they're gone due to Seattle airport's publicly-accessible baggage carousels. The tossers.

So then, Pike Place Market. It's the big crazy market near the waterfront of Seattle - Stephen Fry went there in his documentary about the U.S., it's so famous - and our hostel happened to be over the road. You could buy all sorts there: peanut butter and jelly bagels, comic books, supposedly original TV scripts for shows like Doctor Who and Firefly, leather-bound journals (of which Jonny bought one), artwork, and a hell of a lot of fish. The fishmongers seemed to love their job, as every few minutes they shouted "we got another tip!" and cheered. We wandered over to the Space Needle, Seattle's most famous building, but decided not to pay the $22 to go up as it was pretty cloudy. Instead, we ate lunch in a renovated armoury and then wandered round the Pacific Science Centre - a cool museum containing things like robotic dinosaurs, laser shows, a butterfly house, and a colony of naked mole rats blindly climbing on top of each other.

After getting a beer buzz on at the Cheesecake Factory downtown, we had some free spaghetti at the hostel and then set out on a pub crawl. The second bar was full of transvestites, and I got hit on by a bloke called Ernesto whose brother is apparently running for mayor of Miami. Other highlights included an underground bar believed to be the last place Kurt Cobain was seen in public, which had a big projector showing videos of monkeys riding sheepdogs which were herding sheep; me and Jonny got to bust out our signature dance move in a dance club whilst incredibly drunk (it involves miming rope); and on the walk home, the hostel guide played music from his backpack, so we just danced home through the streets of Seattle like idiots to the Cha Cha Slide.

After seeing the quirkier parts of Seattle, including a giant troll under a bridge, and an underground tour of the old city, we caught the bus northward for a spontaneous trip to Vancouver (mainly because we couldn't find accommodation in Oregon for the weekend). It turns out this was a great decision. Vancouver is awesome, especially if you like your cities merged with forests, lakes and mountains. Arriving in the evening, we walked down by the harbour and into the first casino we saw - where we drank whisky and gambled some of Jonny's money away at the blackjack and roulette tables. On our way home, we dropped in to a noisy pub to sit at the bar, drink a pitcher of beer, and watch ice hockey like true Canadians. We got chatting to folk sat near us, and ended the night walking through the city centre rammed with thousands of hockey fans, while our new friend Melissa told us the best sights in the city to visit and shared some of the local plant life with us. Sorry Mum.

The next day we took a ferry and a bus to a big old gorge just next to the city (one of Vancouver's suburbs is actually built around it, it's amazing) and crossed a suspension bridge that just kept on swinging over the river. As the rain came in, we rented bikes and those really embarrassing waterproof ponchos and went cycling round the sea wall of Stanley Park - 7km of lighthouses, boats, forests and beaches. We stopped off at a restaurant for a drink and the concierge asked if he could take our coats, but I didn't want to hand over my poncho in such a fancy place so I just stuffed it in my bike helmet and sat by the fire. And so ended my brief stay in Canada.

Another bus ride later (and another scary trip through customs) and we reached Portland, Oregon, known for being a weird, kooky city. There's not much to say about this place that'll blow your minds, it's just full of young people with beards and moustaches, and parks filled with stretchy folks doing gymnastics during the day instead of working. Me and John, as he likes to introduce himself here, drank lots of local ales, ate lots of Cajun tatertots and wandered around the massive late night book shops Portland has. We even caught a book-reading by a semi-famous author whose book has become a big show in America (Resurrection, for those interested). After a failed attempt at renting a car with a girl named Maria we met at the hostel to visit a local national park, we proceeded to drink more beer and watch Gone Girl at the vintage cinema near our hostel. We must have done something right, because our waiter gave us free tickets and the cinema had alcohol and reclining chairs. The film, however, is totally messed up and weird, which didn't mellow us out as much. Still good, though.

The three of us decided to road trip it to California, so that's what comes next week, folks.

Al's Adventure: Part Three

Meet Al

Hi folks, my name's Al. I've taken up residence on Alex's travel blog as I made the decision to spend my inheritance on travelling the world for a few months, and I'll document my exploits from time to time as I go. Sometimes I'll be travelling alone, sometimes with friends, and sometimes just crashing at somebody's flat (cough Alex and Lachy cough) - it's going to be interesting, as I'm not one to often leave my comfort zone. My journey starts with a tour of the US, followed by some time in Fiji, a few weeks in Australia, and ends with a brief stint in New Zealand. Let's do this.

Part Three

Let's start with the big stuff, three words: Stephen King's house. He lives in Bangor, Maine, and we sat in the car outside his house at night like the creepy stalkers we are. I also took part in an American pub quiz, which they just call 'trivia' here, and lost pretty badly due to our lack of knowledge of American high school sports teams; I got lost in the forest on the University of Maine's campus like a true tourist; I got questioned by a jogger while I sat on a bench, as she apparently likes to check on the mental health of young people on their own (in case I'm contemplating crazy gun stuff, I guess); I tried fried dough covered in syrup and powdered sugar -delicious; and I had margaritas with Jack and Jess before heading back to Boston. I can't thank them enough for their hospitality, and I'll miss their dogs.

Back in Boston I visited the New England Aquarium, where I may have insulted the staff by saying one of the turtles looked sad. "Nope, just old and tired. We DO look after them," was pretty much her response. My ferry trip to Salem to learn about witch burning was cancelled due to stormy seas, so I went out to Fort Warren instead. It's basically a fortress built on a Boston harbour island to defend against the British and such, but the technological advancements in military vehicles made the place pretty much obsolete as soon as it was built. My tour around the place was just me and old people, and the guide took us into this pitch black hall to 'have fun with the acoustics'. What followed was all of us singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' in the dark, and this old bloke broke out into some song from the 1920s and we all listened as it echoed creepily. Weird.

I'll tell you though, it was nice sitting on this island, admiring the view of Boston from afar.

That night, my good friend Jonny arrived at the airport to join me on the remaining leg of my USA journey. The flight company lost his luggage, so we headed to Urban Outfitters to buy him new clothes until his bag caught up with us. We had dinner in Quincy Market, and a beer in the bar from Cheers (where everybody knows your name) to cope with the loss.

The next day things really started to go tits up. We boarded our train to Chicago, knowing we were in for a 21 hour long journey. I'd been told the fields of Ohio and Indiana we're going to be dull, but THAT dull? Oh god. The bit of the journey I wanted to see - Niagara Falls - was in total darkness when we passed, so that wasn't cool. Anyway, this is the slowest train I have ever been on. We were meant to arrive in Chicago at 9:45 this morning, it's currently 18:10 and we're still not there. That's over eight hours late, due to frigging freight trains hogging the tracks. Our train is like a polite person, letting all the big freight trains go past; we've spent more time stationary than we have moving. If I didn't have Jonny with me I'd be a lot more insane right now. Although he keeps singing lines from Frozen, and the conductor is pretty much ready to quit his job. They've told us they'll put us up in a hotel in Chicago seeing as we missed our connection to Seattle a long time ago, so that could be good. I feel like I've dragged Jonny out here, only to get him stranded in the arse-end of Indiana. Ah well, we're staying positive. We even wrote a poem to battle through the boredom. An actual poem, don't ask why.

This wouldn't happen in Britain. I'm sorry for all the times I doubted you, National Rail.

Okay, here we are, two days later. We're on another train, out in the plains of North Dakota, waiting for freight trains again. Amtrak is just bad in general, it seems. Our night in Chicago was needed, after a total delay of 11 hours; the hotel was swanky (even though it was in the dreaded South side of town) and we ordered takeaway sandwiches to eat in the room like kings. We had one day to wander round the city, admiring the amazing city centre, the impressive architecture of the buildings, and ride the ferris wheel down on the pier. I was gutted that the floating interactive zombie haunted house was closed, as I would have definitely dragged Jonny onto it. Chicago seems like a cool city, and it's sad we couldn't spend more time there, as the waffles and pancakes we ate were fantastic.

The current train is full of characters: like the sweaty fat biker who walks past every few minutes to choke us on his BO, and the cowboy with his red neckerchief and leather boots who's lost his disposable camera, or the young Amish guys with bowl haircuts. If we become stranded, it'd make a hell of TV drama as we all struggle to cooperate and survive. Plenty of fatties here to cook and eat if things do turn to cannibalism, though. We're going to take a break from eating crisps and trail mix, by having overpriced dinner in the dining cart later on. Jonny hates poor people too, so here's hoping it gives us a break from the riffraff. Anyway, this wonderful train service doesn't offer wifi, even though the journey is 48 hours long, so I'll post this when I get to Seattle.

Next week, Washington and Oregon. Stay tuned.