Highlights of a long trip

I started this trip on the 10th May 2012 and finished on the 3rd November, just shy of six months. I explored western Canada, the United States, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Chile.

Here are some of the highlights:

Enjoying some great snow skiing in Whistler, Rock climbing in Squamish, discovering dinosaurs in Drumheller and watching the ice melt on Lake Louise. Seeing a film at the home of the Banff film festival in Banff and scaring myself silly walking back through the woods from the hot springs on Sulphur Mountain. Playing Ultimate Frisbee in Vancouver island and discovering Tim Hortons and lovely cycle lanes in Victoria, Vancouver island.

Watching the cranes move across the roof of the Boeing Everett Factory north of Seattle, and seeing the next generation of flight being built in the largest building in the world by volume. American food! Cookie Butter and driving route 101 down the Oregon coast, winding through giant Redwoods and going from 30 degree heat to snow and ice at Crater Lake in a few hours.
Meeting friends old and new in San Francisco, cycling over the Golden Gate bridge and round the entire city and taking an audio tour around Alcatraz.
Arriving at Yosemite National Park for the first time, the most anticipated place of my trip took my breath away, reaching the top of Half Dome with a brilliant group of Californians and celebrating with a bottle of wine at the top from one of the groups family vineyard.

Watching some shows in Las Vegas and taking the Green Tortoise bus tour, wading up the narrows of Zion NP, feeling the heat in Arches and jumping about like kids in a downpour in Bryce. Taking a jeep ride around Monument Valley and walking into the Grand Canyon and watching thunder storms sweep past.

Staying in a lighthouse hostel in Montara, camping for a pittance at Half Moon Bay next to the beach, finding serenity in Santa Cruz and some nice Clam Chowders, and finally seeing the much talked about Big Sur coast line south of Monterrey.

Strengthening bonds with relatives in Chicago and having a Baileys in a Houlihan's bar with my cousin. Riding the subways in New York, eating some wonderful home cooked meals with family friends in Queens and a great brunch at the best spot in Brooklyn with a friend. Walking the length of central park and viewing Manhattan from the Top of the Rock, taking the Staten island ferry past the Statue of Liberty. Looking up at the neon's in Times Square and saying a prayer at Ground Zero.

Being back in the South Downs in Sussex, seeing some old friends in Inverness, having a walk in the Scottish hills and a traditional burger at the Ski'ing Doo resturant in Aviemore. Making the garden look nice again at my little house in Inverness, enjoying a trip to B&Q. Walking and cycling over the Downs, seeing the HMS Warrior and Victory with my Dad in Plymouth and enjoying a spa day at Center Parcs with my Mum. Having a swim in the sea with a good friend and eating as many cream teas as possible.

Taking Gringo Mike's bike tour in San Gil, Colombia and making a great new travel companion, Scuba Diving in Taganga with wonderful new friends. Wreck diving in Cartegena and horse riding next to Calima Lake.
Drinking Pisco Sours in Lima, seeing the mist disperse to reveal the splendor of Machu Picchu, exploring all around it and running back down the steps instead of taking the bus. Wandering through the cobbled streets in Cusco and enjoying some tasty dinners in San Blas. Cycling the World's Most Dangerous Road north of La Paz, Bolivia and crunching over the surreal salt flats thousands of meters up in the Salar De Uyuni. Cycling to Valley of the Moon in San Pedro de Atacama and discovering caves. Getting back to sea level in Chile. Eating lots of nice home cooked meals with new travel companions in La Serena and Valparasio, and enjoying being back in the world of good wine and chocolate.
Walking up San Cristobel hill in Santiago for a great view over the city and the Andes, enjoying the best coffee ever (it really is) with hostel friends at the Original Green Roasters cafe and eating some tasty local dishes at the market before heading home.

...And some low points:

Having a migraine on the first flight to Sydney, my Canadian phone SIM not working just when I really needed it, Calgary. Being scared of being eaten by bears in my tent in Whistler, trying to get out of Portland in my hire car for 5 hours and almost giving up, having a terrifying nightmare camping at Crater Lake about being attacked in my tent by cougars and bears the whole night, trying to find a place to stay in Mt Hood in the pouring rain at night and driving the same stretch of highway 5 times.

Leaving Yosemite. Having a migraine due to turbulence flying into Las Vagas, having heat rash in Arches NP. The first night trying to sleep on the Green Tortoise bus squashed like a sardine. Leaving the Green Tortoise group.

Missing the Sunday bus trying to get back to San Francisco because of out of date timetables, walking 3 miles with my backpack and eventually having to hitch hike. 

Getting lost in Chicago trying to find an address after a metro, 2 delayed flights, another metro and a bus.

Discovering my Lufthansa flight had be cancelled upon trying to check in at Gatwick due to strike action, dashing up to Heathrow after being rerouted onto other carriers, Iberia, who were delayed and Avianca who were also delayed. Getting ripped of by a taxi driver in Bogota and almost not finding the hostel. 

Being bored in Villa De Leyva, food poisoning on Cartegena, getting sunburnt in Calima. 

Having my flight from Cali, Colombia to Lima, Peru cancelled.

Punta Hermosa. Being sick and having the mother of all migraines on The Nasca lines flight due to erratic and stupid flying (everyone in the plane used their sick bags). Disappointed by Puno, losing some things. The altitude of Bolivia. Being delayed again flying back from Santiago, arriving back to a cold and rainy day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol0W1caSNU0

Santiago

People seem to have a dim view of Santiago of being `just another big city', but its really nice, it`s really really nice, I knew it would be. Its probably one of the nicest cities I have visited anywhere, the Andes are surprisingly close with the city being butted right up to the foothills. On my first walk into town from the very nice district of Providencia, I rounded a corner onto the main convergence of roads near the river where the city opens up allowing views of the Andes towering over the city, and almost jumped at the proximity them. My camera didn't really do them justice, but do a quick image search for Santiago Chile and you'll see what I  mean.

 Its a very green city, with avenues of trees everywhere, lots of Universities and a modern subway system. The central shopping area reminded me of central London, and a great vista of the whole city can be had from the top of San Christobal hill next to Bellavista restaurant  tourist district. I walked up the hill with a new friend from my hostel, Sam, who had the same MacPac bag, there was also plenty of mountain bikers enjoying the tracks around the hill and if ones feeling lazy there are taxis and a funicular that go to the top as well. There's also a zoo. We felt very safe walking about the city, even at night, I was in the mood for a cinema movie, so we found a Hoyts cinema and saw the latest Bourne film then walked back to hostel after dark, it`s great to feel safe again.

Anyway the point being Santiago is a very nice place and one I`d like to come back to, furthermore Chile is a nice place and defiantly warrants further investigation, there's also Argentina and Patagonia region, but that will have wait for some other time. For now I`ve reached the end of my trip, its been a long trip, not always easy but always challenging and have met some wonderful people and experienced some of the most wonderful places, some of which I will defiantly return to.

In the next post will be a list of highlights, a condensed version of the trip with my favourite places and experiences.
Thanks for reading, hope you found it informative/ interesting/ amusing/ will throw away your guide books because this is so much better. Thanks for all the support along the way from comments on here or via Facebook and words of support in response to my occasional crazed emails to folk when I was fed-up and wanted to go home, they kept me going. A big thanks to everyone who gave my a place to stay along the way not only saving me money, but providing company and a sense of belonging, I won`t forget your generosity and kindness, and not least thanks to those who don`t mind homing me temporarily when I return, it`s a big weight of my mind.
This is Claire Over There`s America`s reconnaissance mission, concluded.

Atacama, La Serena and Valparisio

San Pedro De Atacama is a nice place, a welcome change from the general mess and disorganisation of the previous countries. After eating at the most expensive place in town (not by choice I might add, but by generally blundering about trying to find somewhere quiet in the shade) I bumped into Jade and Luke who I'd first met in Nasca, and again in Aquas Calientes, and then in Bolivia on the Salar de Uyuni tour several times. Meeting them made me feel like there was some sort of order in the world and discovered their hostel was not only much cheaper but much nicer, so I moved to their place.

The guide book says its 17km to Valley De Luna, local operators say its 14km, its actually only 6km to the control point where you buy the ticket, and the area then continues for another 10km ish to the end where you turn around and come back. So facts and figures are some what misleading. Myself and Jade hired some bikes from the internet cafe on the main street for 3500 CLPs for 6 hours, where we were given a badly drawn map with some vague indication of the locality. The area features an exciting cave system, requiring a torch.

Antafagasta

Antafagasta on the coast is 5 hours away, its a big rather dull town on a grid pattern with roads sloping up a hillside. The waterfront area is quite nice and has a massive shopping mall surrounded by a promenade, the Bond film A Quantum of Solace used the town as a base for some filming around the area, including some scenes in hotels, Observatories and scenes in the Atacama. I was pleased to get back to sea level and the sea as the altitude was playing havoc with my sinuses.

La Serena

Further south after one final overnight bus* we arrived at La Serena, a lovely place. A perfect place to relax, most of the time was spent discussing dinner, making food, eating food and drinking coffee. Plus I finally managed to catch up with the remained of series 2 of A Game of Thrones.

Vina Del Mar

Valparaiso

Vina Del Mar and Valparaiso are nice places to wind up the trip, (more dinner planning, preparing and eating and even a game of scrabble, we are getting civilised now) Jade and Luke were heading over to Mendosa in Argentina and for me Santiago's the end of the line.

Notes:

*The bus showed 2 films, both American films but dubbed in Spanish, this is normal, but then at about 10.30pm on came Bobos Fantasy. At first I was quite annoyed by this as the volume was cranked up but ended up watching the whole thing.

• Hostel Florida in San Pedro, El Arbol in La Serena and Jacaranda in Valparaiso were really nice hostels, homely, welcoming and just perfect.

Into Chile

An overnight bus from La Paz later and I´d arrived in Uyuni and straight away booked a tour leaving a few hours later to take me over the Salar de Uyuni salt flats accross 4x4 territory into Chile, where I would transfer at the Bolivian border to San Pedro De Atacama in north Eastern Chile.

The whole town of Uyuni only seem to exisit to sell Salar De Uyuni tours to tourists, and there are a lot of horror stories about various companies and peoples experiences on the internet, and the companies that were most recommended in my guide book had the worst reviews on trip advisor. It was also more expensive to book from La Paz, so I decided just to turn up and campare tours in Uyuni itself. In reality it dosn´t really matter which company you use, as they all seem to run exactly to same tour, with the same menu, staying at similiar places, using the same type of vehicles (mostly Toyota Landcrusiers). One shouldn´t need to pay more than 750 Bovilianos.

In the event my tour was great, I went with Lapiz Tours who were helpful in the office and the driver was great. He did keep opening the door and looking at the front tyres as if they were about to fall off or something, which they didn´t, apart from that the tour exceeded my expectations. Excluding the driver there were 6 of us, a family of 4 from Belgium, a Scottish chap and myself. The tour start of driving over the bright white salt flats West of Uyuni, if you Google map the bottom west of Bolivia, you´ll see them as a big white blob. The first night we stayed in a hostel made of salt, on the edge of the salt flats, lunch was great and invloved some very nice meat, the Dutch didn´t eat any so myself and Michael finished the whole lot of between us. Dinner was a nice soup and a baked chicken dish, yum.

The next day we were up early to make the majority of the distance down to the Chilian border. The roads were sandy gravel tracks accross the mountains, and a lot of it hard going. We stopped at lagoon full of flamingos, cactus oasises, lagoons red with algea and green lagoons, the second night was spent at 4300 meters and aparently reached -10, we finished the tour visiting some amazing geysers with bubbling mud being chucked about and atmospheric mists lit up with the early morning sun, and then a much needed bath at the long awaited hot springs before transfering onto another bus for the short trip into San Pedro De Atacama, a little desert oasis, and a completely different feel from the last few countries and my last country of this trip.

Notes:

• It really dosn't matter what tour company you take for Salar De Uyuni, most of the reviews on the net as usually from people with bad experiences or expecting too much which makes it hard to make a decision. Just arrive at Uyuni and ask around when you get there. We had 6 people not including the driver in our car and it was fine, if people have very long legs they probably won't want to sit in the very back seats though.

The Worlds Most Dangerous Road

Otherwise known as The North Yungas Road, or Corico Road, or the Death Road, its 64km of narrow gravel road snaking down from 4,650 meters to 1,200 meters cut into the side of steep lush mountains. There are a few points where the drop over the side of the road is a sheer drop, and this is what everyone takes their photos of, but otherwise its not as steep like that all the way.

The route starts on a big paved road that descends for about 15km high up in the mountains where it starts very cold and gets warmer and warmer through the descent. Most of the traffic on the Death Road gravel section is one way traffic these days and the majority of that are tourists on bikes tours, but it is still an open public road.

I took a tour with Gravity, they were the first to pioneer the road as a tourist attraction and have the best safety record, they also give you a free T Shirt. Apart from their use of BMX helmets instead of proper mountain bike helmets, the equipment was very good, and being run by people who were not South Americans it mean they actually cared about the quality of their tours and the people on it. The tour lasted a full day with regular stops for people to regroup and for the guide to explain the next section, plenty of snacks and drinks were provided and the tour ended in a nice slightly hippyish nature reserve full of  parrots and monkeys, here we had a very nice buffet lunch and showers. Most of the group survived intact, one guy seemed OK in the morning and on the gravel road for the first few sections but seemed to come down all of a sudden with some kind of fever. He had been in Africa before Bolivia and it was feared he may have a tropical disease. Another girl took a fall early on, on the gravel and was a little concussed for a bit and had cut up her arm and hand, so they spent the rest of the trip in the support van.
On return to La Paz, the guy was taken to a doctors as he didn't seem to be getting any better.

The scenery was wonderful, the mountains could be appreciated more on the way back and some areas on the paved road section back to La Paz reminded me of Scottish hills but with tufts of tall grasses instead of heather's  For me it was a really fun day and so nice to have some self powered adventure again, which apart from Machu Picchu had been missing since Colombia. It was also nice to see some greenery, as a lot of the Altiplano and lower areas of Peru and Bolivia are dry with yellow sparse grasses.

La Paz itself is far more modern than I imagined, I found plenty of Western style clothes shops as well as all the usual quaint cobbled tourist streets with every shop selling exactly the same things, a great tradition of South American school of economics. There's a bunch of nicely carved churches and the main avenue into town has a central pedestrian walkway with nice flower beds and statues. There's even a chain of Western style coffee shops called Alexander Coffee, where you can buy an overpriced latte that's almost good. It even has a newspaper rack so you can pretend to be an important city person having their coffee in the big city.

My room in La Paz

Notes:

A tour with Gravity cost $107 USD, its about a third more than other operators but from talking to other travelers who did similar tours, the food quality is better with Gravity, they have better instruction during the ride and they have the nicest ending point.

Into Bolivia and a sad day

I took a really cheap and local bus to Puno because it was the only going at the time I got to the bus station. It took 8 hours not 6, and I don´t think the bus had been cleaned since it was first built. Puno has dump like qualities, but I did have a nice tour to the floating islands in the morning on Lake Titicaca which was really nice and was able to escape the same day on bus accross the border to Bolivia and made a horrible discovery. I had left my priceless towel and much treasured Indian scarf that was a present, the scarf was one of those really useful items, a towel, a sarong, a hat, a dust mask, an eye mask, sun protection, cold protection, a pillow case and a bit of history. My towel had travelled around the world with with me several times, and accompanied me on my first big trip. It´s not like me to lose things and it was like loosing some old friends. And as Ford Prefect said "If you want to survive out here, you've got to know where your towel is". Travelling has become a chore rather than a joy through since leaving Colombia, I think its time to go home.

Cusco and Machu Picchu

From Nasca I took an overnight bus to Cusco where most of the interesting things are, I was relieved to see it wasn´t a dump, although beyond the old town touristy nice bits it quickly becomes dump like again. The touristy historic area is very nice, with big plazas and everything is cobbled, the only cars that are good enough to put up with the punishment of Cusco´s roads are 1997 Toyota Corollas, the best cheap car in the world.
I was staying in San Blas area, just up from the main plaza and even nicer with the best food so far in South America, my favourite restaurant was Sumaq II which did a very reasonable set menu for 15 soles that included an aperitif, tea, bread and dips, a soup, a main and a dessert.
Cusco is pretty high up, at 3400m and the historic center of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu is actually lower by about 1000m. I didn´t do the Inca trail as that requires booking months in advance but I did visit Machu Picchu, which isn´t cheap and as a foreigner you have the pleasure of paying the super inflated tourist price for everything. Connecting Cusco to Machu Picchu is an area called the Sacred Valley full of Inca temples, the last section to the town of Aguas Calientes/ Machu Picchu is only possible by train, which is expensive but a nice journey, and makes a change from buses. To reach the site itself requires another insultingly expensive bus, but there is a path so I took the bus up and walked down, which I really recommend as by the time I was leaving there was hundreds of people queuing for either the bus or the toilet, plus its a lovely path and there´s no one on it.

Machu Picchu is really big, and it was a hot day when I visited, you see the same old view of Machu Picchu is every postcard and advert so you don´really appreciate the scale of it until you see it for yourself, plus there are a number of detours and walks you can do to occupy most of a day. I didn´t take a guide as 1, its another expense, and 2, I don´t like being guided and having to move at some one else's pace whose seen it a thousand times and just wants to rush you through and get their money and 3, information overload which I´ll forget most of, I can Wikipedia it later and find out just the things I want to know. Plus I had my trusty Kindle so if I wanted information I just looked it up on that, and there were so many guided tours about I just stood next to one speaking English and then moved on when I´d heard enough or got bored. I was more interested in the construction of the stone walls which to me was the real wonder in the precision of craftsmanship in the stone cutting and shaping that really defined the Inca style. These people must of had a lot of time of their hands. After about 5 hours I´d really had enough, its an amazing place but busy and the sun was strong, to use the loo you have to go back to the entrance, I found an enormous queue and thought not to bother, so instead ran most of the way down the steps back to the base which was really fun and reminded me of the last part of Half Dome when after so much hiking it was easier to run. From the base it was another 30 min walk back to town.

Aguas Calientes is a nice little place, very touristy with the main drag filled with a hundred restaurants all offering the same thing. The most relaxing place I found was a French Boulangerie by the side of the river/ stream that runs through town with proper bakery products and nice cookies and real coffees and run by an actual French person. The day I went to Machu Picchu the kind owner lent me 20 Soles for the bus as the unhelpful bus ticket lady wouldn´t accept bigger bills only exact change, and sometimes the ATM's only give out 100 notes.

I took the train back as far as Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley as there was only availability to there, had a look around the Inca site there, and after being much templed got the bus back to Cusco for one final night until moving onto to Puno.

Notes:

Go to La Boulangerie de Paris in Aquas Calientes for a relaxing drink and pastry.

Into Peru

After our delightful stay at the Colours Hostel in Cali (not), we took the bus in the morning to Darien, the town next to Calima Lake where we were to have our Kite Surfing lessons. The accommodation we were staying in is a house owned by the Kite Surfing school and within a private section of the town accessed through security gates and is home to some of the nicest places in the town. Our room was spacious and to my delight had a very friendly cat on one of the beds. We had 4 days in Darien/Calima, my first lesson involved flying a training kite on land, I´d never been interested in flying kites before and then progressing to some body drag, whereby you fly the kite in the water without a board and let it drag you about. It was OK except I find when you´re learning something new and some one is shouting instructions and corrections constantly after a while I switch off. It was also very windy, I know you need a lot of wind for this sport but even experienced kiter's said it was a hard place to learn. Anyway Sarah loved it, on the last day we had a free horse ride in the hills next to the lake, courtesy of the kiting school, now this was much better, one of our instructors Mary came too and it was good to see her out of her comfort zone!

After Calima Sarah had come to the end of her trip and was flying back home and I was flying to Lima. My flight eventually left hours after the advertised time, the staff never communicated anything. I did find two other Europeans and an ex-pat Colombian who now lives in Switzerland and said how utterly disorganised Colombia was. I finally go to my hostel in Lima at 2am.
The next day I met Laura at breakfast and she said she was going on a walking tour organised by the hostel, so I went too along with more foreigners than I´d seen in the whole of Colombia. Lima is big and dull, it has some nice big buildings in the center, and we visited some fun catacombs tunnels and the Spanish Inquisition. The tour lasted all day and in the evening a smaller group of us from the tour went to the district of Barranco and tried some Pisco Sours in a fancy modern bar, we then had some more cheap versions in a locals pub down the road and found behind the bar a band playing and enjoyed the evening until one of the group, Tim from the states had to get a flight, in all a great first day in Peru.
The next day was not so great, Pisco Sours are very strong, even the ´Simple´(one shot) ones I´d had. When I came downstairs in the morning I found 3 police officers interviewing and filming the staff member on reception, afterwards they covered the front doors of the hostel with massive stickers that said something negative about the hostel. Apparently some old biddy who lives nearby had complained about some noise, it was actually a very quiet hostel, so she must be a curtain twitcher who hears the drop of a pin.

I booked 2 nights at a surf camp on the coast in a town called Punta Hermosa, in brief it was a total dump, the ´surf camp´did not have my booking and the owner was apparently out dirt biking with his friends, another guest showed me to a free room, which had not been cleaned and there was no bedding on the bed, the view was of a builders yard, which summarised the aesthetic of most of the town. I went out to have lunch and found another hotel next to the beach so I moved there to a nice room overlooking the beach with a restaurant underneath. I had planned on some surf lessons but the place didn´t look particularly nice or safe for learning, so the next day I left for Nasca.
The bus only went as far as Ica, 2.5 hours short of Nasca, it was dark so I stopped there for the night and went to the nearby village of Huachchina. I had no reservations and the hostel said they didn´t give beds to people without reservations, I asked where else can I go and strangely they found a bed, what a surprise, in a dorm, ugh, it was only for one night so it would serve. Thankfully it was quiet and the next morning I found a place inside a storybook. A real desert oasis, the tiny village surrounded a small lagoon, and encompassed by massive sand dunes, I hiked up one to take in the views. This place is depicted on the 50 sole note, I walked around trying to find the same view point.

Back to Ica and continued my journey to Nasca, a pretty town and feels very safe, my hostel lovely and quiet. I took a flight over the lines the next day, I didn´t see the lines except the first two because I had my eyes shut the whole time just trying to survive till the blasted thing landed. On a scale of discomfort out of 10, it was 10. It was worst than the worst migraine I´d ever had and it was all I could do to avoid a full migraine and explaining I was temporarily blind and deaf was beyond my Spanish  instead I had a sensation of paralysis and felt wiped out for the rest of the day. I don´t recommend flying over the Nasca lines, except if you charter a private plane and fly it yourself.
Besides crop circles are much better and far more ingenious.

Notes:

Crop circles are way better than Nasca lines.

To the coast

It´s been a while since the last update, and now I am in an internet cafe made for people with no knees.

After a long bus trip with new friend Sara from Switzerland we finally got to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, we stayed a night The Dreamer hostel where the only beds left were in an 8 bed dorm. The dreamer is full of typical backpackers lazing about next to the pool in hammocks, it´s OK but not my cup of tea these days so we headed over to nearby Taganga to check out scuba diving places and accommodation for the next few days, we found both at Tayrona Dive Center where the very friendly but forgetful reception lady Sofia made us feel welcome. Sara wanted to do her open water diving course and I wanted to continue with rescue diver course, for taking a course we got the accommodation 33% cheaper. Santa Marta´s a dump, the best thing about it is the Bueno Vista shopping mal as it has a proper coffee at Juan Valdez, which is also 5 mins walk from The Dreamer.

Taganga in contrast is a nice little fishing village just over the hill from Santa Marta, everything is walking distance and there are lots of nice restaurants on the beach with the days catch on the menu. Our room at Tayrona Dive Center was very nice, big and clean plus en-suite  My friend Emma from Bogota was coming down also at the weekend to do some diving and on our first days diving we met Ruben from Belgium also doing his Open Water and staying at the dive center, so it was shaping up to be an enjoyable week with lots of new friends. The dive center has no training pool, so Sara´s first ever diving experience was in the open water with minimal instruction, I also has not been diving for quite a while and had asked for a refresher course, but it was more a case of looking how the equipment went together and then straight into the water. Ok, this is diving Colombian style. Emma had booked a different dive center - Posieden, as we had originally looked into that one but when myself and Sara checked it out in person the girl on the counter didn´t seem to know much about diving. Later though it would appear they were a bit more professional than Tayrona and they did have a training pool but the accommodation was a bit basic.
Still there was a lovely restaurant right upstairs from our accommodation that was rather like an Asterix hut and very nicely made for something in Colombia.
Emma did a night dive and some fun dives and after 3 days Sara and Ruben had their open water certifications and I had my Rescue Diver certification. The Rescue course is not fun as such as its mostly about techniques for helping other divers in trouble in the surface or during a dive, so lots of drills and not much actual diving and one whole day in the classroom doing an EFR, which is a first aid course.
It was sad to see Emma go back to Bogota and Ruben go as well, but also so nice to have Sara to travel with for a while.

After Taganga we went to Tayrona NP, which is a nice beach area, and the place on the front of the guide book for Colombia my Mum got out from the library. It´s a nice unspoiled place, the beaches are nice but the currents are strong and some beaches are dangerous for swimming due to steep drop offs and waves. The accommodation inside the park is either cheap hammocks or camping, or expensive Cabanas for hundreds of dollars a night. The thing is after 5.30pm its dark and there are a million mosquitoes  plus its very hot and everyone wants a shower at the same time. So we didn´t stay in the park but visited for a day and stayed just outside in a very nice Cabana called Yuluka hostel with a pool and restaurant for a fraction of the equivilant inside the park, the owner was very helpful and drove us to the park entrance after we had eaten lunch. Plus that evening there was a massive thunder storm so I think our Cabana with AC and en-suite was much better than a hammock and 10 other people.

The next day we took the bus to Cartegena, a pretty walled city, where we wanted to do some more diving. Diving is much more expensive in Cartegena, a third to half as much as you´d pay in Taganga. The place the guide books all talk about is Isla Rosario, but apparently you can´t dive there anymore because it´s been spoilt, but its actually part of a chain of islands just of the coast, we were taken to one called Isla Baru which was fantastic. The first dive was a wreck dive with 2 wrecks, the first wreck you descended into the bowels of the ship and up into an air pocket, where you took your regulator out and breathed air 15 m below the surface, you then continued to the next wreck, where we went into the wreck and then through a dark narrow corridor before coming out of the other end of the wreck.

Unfortunately some time that afternoon I ate something that didn´t agree with me and had food poisoning which lasted all the night and the next day, of course we had to travel the next day and I couldn´t eat anything, I eventually managed to eat some dry crackers before we caught our flight to Cali where Sara had convinced me to go Kite Surfing on Calima lake. I was pathetically weak like one is after a bout of food poisoning  but was very thankful to have a friend with me to carry my bag and generally look after me. At the Airport Sara went to get some cash out and found both her cards didn´t work, verdammta toeff!!! We arrived in Cali and had to stay one night in a shitty hostel and than had to argue over the price and the room was one bed less than the booking, but I did manage to book a flight out of Colombia to Lima. Sara leaves on the 27th, I will be so sad without my Swiss travel buddy, still at least I have a new friend in Europe I can go skiing with.

Notes:

• More information on Tayrona Dive Center and Posieden in Taganga, and Cartegena Divers.
• The Spanish word for scuba diving is Buceo.
• We had Kite Surfing lessons at Calima Kitesurf School.

San Gil

About 4 hours further north from Villa De Leyva is San Gil, a nice small town in the Colombian highlands packed with adventure activites, and a big backpacker draw because of this. I had booked 2 nights at the Macondo hostel as I had it had a very helpful Australian owner who knew all about the local activities but when I first arrived I spoke to the Colombian staff about the activites and they said, yes you can do most of these activities everyday...but you need 4 people for that and 5 for this, etc, to which I thought it was going to be another dull couple of days. I was just looking at fights out of Colombia to somewhere interesting when the owner, Sean, came by to ask if there was anything I needed to know, so I asked about the activites again, in particular an all day bike ride that went through the picturesque town of Barichara and he straight away phoned up ´Gringo Mikes´- to verify how many people were going, they had 3 other people so I signed up for the 55km ride for the next day. I spent the rest of the evening watching Andy Murrey win the US open on TV.
I put the fact it was 55ks to the back of my mind, and offroad on full suspension mountain bikes, we started off with a delicious and very large breakfast at Gringo Mike´s resturant, and then a fairly short drive to the start in the nearby hills with the first 15ks all downhill, the tour wasn´t cheap but we had 2 guides, new Kona bikes and the 4x4 support landrover following at a distance behind in case we couldn´t make it all the way. The bikes were set up to each persons height and weight, and then we set off, I´ve never bicyled down anything so fast with so much confidence and now I know the joy of a good quality full suspension bike and what a difference it makes.We went through Barichara which is actually a really rich town, a place where celebs buy property, in fact it would appear Colombia is far from being one of the cheapest south American countries, its actually now one of the most expensive, so all those people who travelled in Colombia several years ago probably found it quite cheap, but now it is not the case. It is the 3rd most expensive country, they even have great cycle lanes like I saw in America and Canada so they can´t be too hard up.After a rest stop we carried on up through the town and descended on the only bit of actual road into another valley, a superb 4km of winding tarmac, a two wheeled dream. From there the landrover took us up to the lunch location where we had the delicious pack lunch prepared by Gringo Mikes resturant overlooking Suarez Canyon. We still weren´t even half way through the distance and the next bit involved about 15kms of up hill and down dale, but mostly up hill, which became a gruelling battle of mind over matter and came very close to getting into the back up vehicle but didn´t and pushed on through to the end for a reward of cold beers as the sun went down. A long day, an tiring day but an excellent day and four new friends.

That evening the biking group met up for dinner and three of them were also getting the same bus to Santa Marta/ Taganga the next night. The next day I went to some nearby waterfalls with Sarah from the bike tour and that evening got the night bus to Santa Marta. It was certainly nice to eat out with other people in a proper resturants and not feel like a loney no friends loser.

Santa Marta sounds nice but it´s just a dirty boring town but has a nice shopping mall where I had a Colombian version of an Irish coffee.

Notes:

Gringo Mike's bike tours is one of the best activities I did on the whole trip.

Villa De Leyva

Is a little cobbled quaint place 4 hours north of Bogota. Supposedly a relaxed dreamy place with nothing doing kind of atmosphere with a big plaza with steps outside the church where one can admire the sheer cobbledness of it all.
Except for the weekend I arrived, there was an international film festival going on with cameras and green screens set up in the plaza and people posing about, and I thought it was some random casting, but it was just being being filmed in a very wobbly mannor in front of a green screen. The next day was a kite flying festival which went on all day, with people showing off their nice colourful kites, I enjoyed this for a while whilst eating what might have been a nice dish in another country. That evening more hulabaloo with dancing and some band in the plaza, it all happens here it seems, or at least for this weekend. I was trying to get away from hustle and bustle, I must have walked around the town 10 times and then got bored.
The next day I got the bus to San Gil, what is reported to be an adventure hotspot, the journey was typical ´minibus style stuff as many people and more into´ and that was OK, up until the little boy travelling with his Grandmother next to me was silently sick and then sick a bit more into a bag. A while later I thought to pick my day bag up from the floor and of course it had been absorbing the little fellows chunder. Luckily it didnt smell much, but I will have to give it a sponge bath none the less.

Ps; There are a number of symbols on these Spanish keyboards that I have no idea who to access, some I need to Google like the @ (I just pasted that from Google) so please forgive all the bad spelling and lack of punctuation marks.

Bogota

Some people like Bogota, 8 million like it enough to live here all the time, but I suppose some of those don´t have much choice. Even more strangely some people from nice places like England choose to live here too, personally there are a couple of 4 letter words I can think of to describe it.

The Candelaria is the old town area which generally gets the hype and has cobbled roads in some areas and old buildings in spanish colonial style and lots of musuems and churches.

I thought it was over rated as an area but the musuems and churches are very good, I first went to the Carmen Church, actually I found several names for it but it´s a stripey church in maroon and white inside and out and one of the loveliest churches ever, it was light and colourful inside which made it nice to be in, I was just enjoying the peace and quite sitting on one of the pews when midday mass started, so I stayed, thankfully I didn´t get a migraine*.
The next day I visited the Gold Museum which has lots of Gold things in it, mostly flattened bits of Gold to make jewellery for fancy chiefs people and very finely made small objects and now they have a musuem full of it. Also the Botero Museum, named after an artist who likes to paint things fatter and rounder than they actually are, the Botero is set in a lovely colonial building with courtyard gardens but has the effect of an MC Esher drawing in terms of navigating. The best room for me was the Impressionists room, in which I spent most of the time.
Bogota also has modern bus system for some routes which works more like a subway in the way you buy a ticket and go through a turnstile and catch one that goes in the direction you want and generally find they never actually stop at the place you want to get off, and have to get another bus back in the other direction and so on until you get close enough to your destination, a bit like Mornington Crescent** only with buses. There is of course the older constrasting ramshackle busettas mini bus things that wizz about going God knows where.

*Situations in which I am most likely to experience a migraine; churches, planes, biology lessons. Which makes me a bit wary of churches, planes and biology lessons.
**An improv game on BBC radio 4, in which the panelists try to get to Mornington Crescent (an underground station) by announcing other tube stations and landmarks, they discuss each players choice which regards to various ´rules´ but there are in fact no rules and the game is completely incomprehensible and eventually somebody says "Mornington Crescent" and the rest of panel groan and then they all go off to have a cup of tea.

It´s a long way to Bogota

Just when I thought I´d managed to get an international flight out of the UK without having to go to Heathrow, Lufthansa´s flight attendants went on strike so my flight was cancelled and had to go to Heathrow anyway, bother. The first thing I knew about this was whilst waiting in the check-in queue, a Lufthansa check in assitant was going down the line saying ´as you know, the flights been cancelled, hmmm´.
She asked where I was going and gave a sort of grimace when I said I was going to Bogota. Each person required about 10 minutes to be sorted out as everyone had to be rerouted with other airlines, most people were just going to Europe, but me and one other family were heading to Bogota. When it was finally my turn, the poor check in guy was quite stressed as he was having to deal with a useless person on the end of the phone, I then had to get the National Express coach to Heathrow anyway ASAP and fly to Milan and then Bogota with two airlines I had never heard of. I´m pretty sure one was on the ´avoid´ list of Spanish carriers I´d researched. Still I did get a £4 ´dinner´!?´voucher, wow! I very much doubted I´d have time to use that, I had 3 hours to get to Heathrow and it rush hour on a week day, on the M25. People in the UK will know what that can mean, but some miracle the coach did get to Terminal 5 in time and I was checked in and through security in 10 minutes, which must be a record. Further joy and happiness I was able to use my £4 voucher, so I bought a Boots meal deal. T5 dispite being the new terminal at Heathrow is just as crowded and cramped as all the other terminals.
My new Milan* flight was then delayed half an hour or so and then further delayed before landing because of Spaniards playing tiddlywinks or something, the next flight was also delayed a further 30 mins or so before finally getting on a plane that was to take me to Bogota, of course everyone was Spanish, and the only menu item I could understand was chicken and rice, which was exactly what I didn´t want but took it out of ease.
I got to Bogota 2 hours later than intinally planned, got a taxi which went up a number of streets backwards before finally reaching La Pinta, my accomodation, which was I was most relieved to see, a nice place.

*The best bit about this whole thing was the airport internal bus ride from the first flight into Milan to the next departures area, it went underneath the whole airport which was rather unusal, the sort of place Mr Bond might have a high speed chase in.

Bye Bye England

I'm off to South America now where I plan to do as little travelling as possible, mainly because it seems like a nice place to sit on a beach and go diving and drink nice fruity yogurty drinks. Arriving into Bogota in Colombia first and then planning to going to the Carribean coast.

A tale of Two Teas

I got a groupon deal  whilst still in New York for high tea* for two at the Thistle Hotel in Brighton for less than half price, so I bought it. Almost a month later I wanted to book the tea but I had forgotten what site I bought it from, so I checked all my bank statements and found it was Groupon, but not before forgetting my mastercard login details and having to jump through a few hoops to reset those, that was fairly straightforward. I tried to log in to Groupon but none of my emails were accepted, I phoned them up and found I had logged in with Facebook when I made the order, I still couldn't log in, then remembered I had since changed my Facebook login email. I finally logged in a got my voucher and then tried to print the PDF which said it was corrupted, after a combined 3 hours of pissing around and then reading a review saying it was rubbish anyway, I finally had the tea booked and down we went to Brighton.
It was a splendid afternoon tea in fact, even after all the palaver, the Thistle hotel is on the waterfront across from the pier, there was hardly anyone else there and the edibles were very nice.

*High Tea is a cream tea with the addition of sandwiches and small cakes as well served on a three tiered silver tray with a choice of tea or coffee served in a pot enough for several cups.

Portsmouth

My Dad wanted to see HMS Warrior, the largest, fastest and most heavily armed and armoured the world had seen at that time now stationed at Portsmouth harbour, apparently he'd wanted to see this for while. It was part of Portsmouth historic dockyard which encompassed a number of other attractions, this was a good thing as the recommended viewing time to allow for The Warrior was 1 hour, but Dad managed to spend about 3.5 hours on it.

Deck of The Warrior

The Warrior was build in 1860 and has been restored now to it's original splendor, it had originally been built as a deterrent to ward off the French and must have been so frightful to behold at the time as it never needed to fire a shot in anger. It had a whole deck of guns including 36 cannons, a room full of riffles and hand guns, and close actions weapons like swords and dirks (I don't know what they were exactly, I'm just trying to sound learned). Each cannon required 18 men in areas called Messes where they ate, slept and relaxed, the Mess seemed to be a big bench table between each cannon, Mesa is Spanish for table but in old French it meant 'portion of food', anyway it probably ended up a mess with  that many people. In contrast the officers had their own cabins with writing table, for updating their blogs, raised beds with storage cupboards underneath all in one nice piece of furniture. The officers had a dinner hall with decorations that really shouldn't be in a boat, as all the port and sherry would most likely crash onto the floor, the captain has the whole rear end of the boat surrounded by windows and seats far away from the 10 boilers, 40 furnaces and massive 5468 horsepower engine room.
Warrior underwent a number of name changes and uses ending up as Oil Storage Hulk C77, how dull, the Navy decided to sell her off, but due to a downturn in demand for scrap iron no one wanted to buy her, poor old thing.
50 years went by and having refueled about 5000 ships, she was saved from scraping by The Maritime Trust who restored her to her initial glory as The Warrior.

HMS Victory

Also at the dockyard was HMS Victory, another wonderful old battleship launched in 1765 for the Royal Navy, the ceilings were much lower on the Victory and seemed like a tardis inside, interestingly the top rear deck that go up some steps on old ships was called a Poop deck, it forms the roof of the captains cabin, again it comes from the French word for stern - La Poupe.

Officers quarters on HMS Warrior

Cakes and Pies

Here is what one might find on a typical day in my Nans kitchen: 32 pies, 2 batches of rock cakes, 2 chocolate cakes, and some funny things with cherry's on top. She doesn't eat all these bakery products herself but gives them away. Some may remember the famous long distant chocolate cake that my Nan sent all the way to where I was living  in New Zealand, and even after a week in transit still tasted pretty good so imagine what these things taste like fresh, best cakes in the world clearly.

My brother and his family came down for a visit so my Mum put in an order for some rock cakes, you can not past through my Nan's house without gaining a few pies. The pies are the best pies on the world, they're all dessert pies - apricot pies, apple pies, blackberry pies, redcurrant pies, apple and blackberry pies...
Best enjoyed hot with single cream poured over them. New Zealand only seems to have one type of cream worth bothering with called 'Cream', in England you can get Clotted cream, double cream, extra-thick double cream, whipping cream, whipped cream, single cream and sour cream. Squirty cream doesn't really count, unless you're making Biscuit Wow and then it's perfect.

My lovely sister in law enjoyed a well deserved piece of Nan's chocolate cake, nom nom!

Dorset

Lulworth Cove

Lulworth Cove is a nice circular cove in Dorset, I used to cycle around places like this when I was at University in nearby Bournemouth, I would generally get the train somewhere with my bike and take a OS map of the area and then cycle around, get a bit lost and then try to get back to Bournemouth. I remember coming down the hill into Lulworth Cove and going 48mph - almost as fast as a Subaru! My bicycle started wobbling so I had to slow down, it was also a 30mph zone, bicycle power! On another occasion I took the train to Weymouth, (the location for this years Olympic sailing events) and cycled back along the coast as far as Wool, which is a place as well as a material, at one point the path had slipped into the sea and I had to cycle round a herd of cows, I didn't think anything of it until I looked around and saw them all following me, I cycled a bit faster and glanced around to see the herd stampeding after me. The ground was very rough and lumpy and I just about kept control, but I had to hide in a thorny hedge for 2 hours with now way out covered in cow pats, in the end I fought my way through the dense spiky hedge through to the next field. 

This time wasn't so terrifying, we had a cream tea instead, we rated it 6/10, and this was mainly because the jam lacked flavour and the scones tasted a bit weird. The picture below is the not the cove, but the other direction as I find it more interesting, I went to the view point of where I had taken a photo the time I had come by bicycle and later had made into a painting. So I went to see if much had changed. Not much had except the trees had grown a bit. 

The other side of the cove

My painting of the cove, painted whilst at Uni, still need to sign it.

Longleat and Center Parcs

Center Parcs

Every time I visit the UK I suggest some random spur-of-the-moment activity to my mum and see what she says, this time I suggested a spa day at Centre Parcs near Longleat, and because it's so near to Longleat house and safari why not go there too. She said yes, she normally does so we booked a day spa at the Aqua Sana Spa in Center Parcs.
I'd always wanted to visit Center Parcs, it was a place other children always went on holiday to when I was at school and seemed like a magical place but I had no idea it had a spa until Cathy, who I'd met on the Green Tortoise canyons tour said she'd had a lovely spa day there, I thought this was a fantastic idea to spent a day doing zero.
The spa had 18 different steam, sauna and relaxation rooms plus a pool/Jacuzzi. Although I found I wasn't very good at doing zero, so while most people were drifting of to sleep or into some form of meditation in the relaxation rooms, after a few minutes I wanted to go to the next room to see what it was like. To properly relax I needed my book but all my books are on my Kindle which isn't ideal for steamy wet rooms. Anyway, all rooms were wonderfully decorated with intriguing names like Balinese Multi-Steam Bath, Japanese Salt Steam Bath, Tyrolean Sauna, Turkish Hamman and Tepidarium, plus a load more, our favourite was the Greek Herbal Bath which had three different herbs in three separate piles on a gauze heated plate above which was a bucket and every 12 minutes the bucket rotated upside-down and squirted water onto one of the herb piles to infuse the smell, it rotated round each three herbs. Initially I imagined the bucket full of water and would cause a deluge over the herbs and wash them all away.
There was also a Pensive, like the one in Harry Potter, unfortunately it was out of order and they had called it the Ice Fountain instead.

Aqua Sana Spa at Center Parcs

Longleat House and Safari Park

Longleat House is a big ol stately home that rich people live in and gets past down through the male family line, due to the hefty death duties that apply to such a big country pile, one inspired heir- Henry Frederick Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath, decided to open the house to the public in 1947 order for Longleat to survive. The idea for a safari park came in the 60's but Henry didn't like the idea of caged animals, his adviser said "we won't cage the animals, we'll cage the people", and so it was, in 1966 the drive through safari park opened and the animals wandered freely. It was the first safari park outside Africa.

We got there before the house officially opened but they were offering a look behind the scenes into the private rooms of the current 7th Marquess of Bath -Alexander Thynn, to the modest group of people who had got there early. The 7th Marquess is known for his lively jumpers and decorating style, as the house is now looking after itself rather well, he didn't really have to worry about much so spent a good deal of time repainting his part of the house in bright primary colours, creating murals all about the place, collecting art  and having relations with 'wifelets', his wife apparently doesn't mind this, probably because the estate is worth $157 million now. They don't tell you the last bit about the wifelets on the tour, but do speak highly of his painting 'style' which are akin to children's drawings. 

In 2010 he past management of Longleat to his son who now apparently intends to evict the wifelets from their estate cottages, and possibly even remove his Lordship's murals. 

The good thing a Longleat Charitable Trust was set up in 1966, which has helped to relieve poverty amongst people living around the Longleat Estate and Cheddar Gorge area, supporting pensioners and providing grants to local institutions. 

There is also an excellent hedge maze.

England

England is full of nice things, like Great Britain doing well in the Olympics and proper cream teas with clotted cream, and people who know what a cream tea is in the first place, the problem is you have to come to England to find clotted cream and a decent selection of teas. I was disappointed that the T shop in Wellington didn't have Darjeeling, how can a shop selling only tea, not have Darjeeling? I loved American food but the few occasions I found myself at a buffet, I would always heap several spoonfuls of cream onto my bowl only to find it sweetened and destroying its natural creamy flavour. 

Another nice thing about England are old things, old buildings, old vehicles and old villages. Old things are nice because they have some history, they can also break down and fall down, but this adds to their charm. Thankfully there are plenty of people who enjoy restoring and fixing all these old things, and a large group of these people had amassed at Beaulieu National Motor Museum and gardens for the 50th Graham Walker Memorial Run, (father of Murray Walker, the Formula 1 commentator). The run wound around 48 miles of the New Forest area and villages and then back to the motor museum. Each participant had a list of navigation instructions consisting of things like 'Cross Cattle Grid, then T.R S/P Sowley 1 quarter mile (M,A)' and 'T.R Grass Island with Oak Tree' and so on until one either broke down, got lost or reached the end of the run. The Morgan was excellent and despite my Fathers lack of faith in my ability to read instructions, we didn't get lost or break down. 

As the run took place from the motor museum, we had access to all the exhibits, one being The World of Top Gear, of course being Top Gear, the cars on display weren't cars as such anymore, but experimentation's, pushing the boundaries of what the car can be. Cars on display included the TGV12 'sports train', the indestructible Toyota pick up, the Snowbine, the Reliant Robin Rocket, a caravan airship, the Hammerhead i-Eagle Thrust, a fine selection of 'motorhomes', the reasonable priced car, double decker cars and Anne Hathaway's cottage. Plus a whole load more, my favourite being the Cottage.

The Top Gear Cottage

Inverness, Scotland

I flew back from Newark in New York to Heathrow in England, and then back out of Gatwick the same day to Scotland. Finally I'd made it back to the highlands, in particular to my garden in Inverness that I had been looking forward to weeding for some time. The garden does has a house attached to it which is nice and will have some new tenants moving in shortly, but it was nice to stay in for a few days to remind myself I did actually own, or at least part of it.Apart from weeding the garden and disguising the resulting bald patches in purple slate to give the impression of a well tended garden, I visited some friends I hadn't seen for a long time and went to our favourite restaurant in Aviemore; The Skiing Doo, which specializes in burgers and relish, the relish is the most important part.
New York to Inverness is quite a contrast, but to be honest, I prefer Inverness, it's an outdoor place for outdoor people, it's hard to find a crowd there. Mind you the New York in Breakfast at Tiffanys I watched on the plane, had almost no one in it, so that was probably quite nice.
I spent most of the next day being a zombie, whilst jet lag and  travelling caught up with me, one more flight  back to England again, the last flight for a while until South America. The next day I had a funeral which is why I had such a short time in Scotland, then I could finally have a nice long sleep, read my book and do nothing.

New York

New York is massive, it's so bewilderingly big it takes over an hour to get from outer Queens to Manhattan.
Brooklyn alone has 2.5 million people and the most populous borough of New York. Most of the population explosions in New York happened between 1771 and 1910, with 126% growth in 1790, by 1860 the city had over a million people with the total figure in 2011 being around 8.2 million.
Why New York is called 'The Big Apple' seems lost in history somewhat, apparently the earliest citation is in a book in 1909 where the author Martin Wayfarer writes "Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city. . . . It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap".
 There are a number of variations on this quote including:

• "'the big apple,' gets a disproportionate share of the sap from the country's tree of wealth which is rooted in the Mississippi Valley."
• "New York [was] merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other....[But] the big apple [New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap."

The term was later popularized by a sporting journalist when writing about horse racing in New York in the 20's, he kept repeating it and so it stuck. 

New York is very different from York, York has cobbled stones, castles walls and bits of grass about the place, New York put all the grass in one location and has lots of things stacked up high.

It was first called New Amsterdam, probably because it's so flat then the English came and decided that was silly name and called it New York after King Charles II gave it to his brother, the Duke of York, he did this because there were no hills big enough to put castles on top of.

There you go, everything you need to know about New York.

Chicago

I mostly went to Chicago to visit relatives, my cousins Therese, Kathleen, Mary and John.

The city itself is quite Gothic and batman like, indeed The Dark Knight was filmed in various locations in Chicago. The Blues Brothers was also filmed here, so I had an image in mind of a dark gritty place with lots of underpasses. It's also very flat, but there are no cyclists, probably because they have no cycle lanes. It was very hot when I was there, Vegas desert heat, so the day I had in the city center I headed for the planetarium, for some silly reason I walked there in there 100 + degree heat, but it was worth it. There's also a splendid big park between the city and the lake front, surrounded by big roads of course, but makes the whole place much less of a Dark City.
They also had the Blue Man Group in Chicago for about half the price of Vegas, which makes me wonder if Vegas bumps up the price of shows. I didn't have time to see the Blue Men but might be able to catch some more shows in the Big Apple, where I was headed next.

Alcatraz

I went there, dangerous people were stored there, but not any more. Got too expensive to keep them on their own island, plus they had no sewage system. It was smaller than I was expecting.

Californian Coast

After the heat of the desert I headed to the coast south of San Francisco to cool off. I had booked to stay   in Santa Cruz, Monterey and Montara and one night which was a ? and I was going to get there (dramatic pause Jeremy Clarkson style) by local trains and buses, they said it couldn't be done, you must hire a car they cry, no I say; have legs, can walk. Have maps, can locate. But best of all have the power of Google.
Not with me all the time I might add, that would be too easy, no, before leaving a place that has Wifi I use Google map directions to the next place and click on the little bus icon, Google then describes the entire route which I write down in my scrappy notebook, it's marvelous, all I need to do then is follow the instructions I've written down.

First I took a bus, a train and then an express bus to Santa Cruz taking around 3.5 hours. Santa Cruz is a lovely little seaside town with a pier and a boardwalk with a fairground on it next to the beach, it reminded me of Brighton, but with much colder water and surprisingly not as fantastically hot as the TV may have you think about California. Quite mild in fact and chilly in the evening, plus a bit windy, so next time you're complaining about the pathetic summers in Wellington and England, think that it's not that great here. Still Santa Cruz was probably the nicest place I'd visited so far, and a place I could live quite happily, I wanted to book a surf lesson and another myth - there's always surf everywhere in California, well there was no surf till that Friday but which time I would be long gone. Lyall Bay is more reliable.

From Santa Cruz I took 4 buses to Monterey, which is another lovely seaside town. It used to have a big industry for canning sardines until they fished them all out of the water and had to stop and rethink. They still do it but in much reduced quantities. The Aquarium had been recommended to me by Kath and Andrew so I went there first, it was a splendid aquarium, the highlights for me being the big octopus sprawling over the glass and turning from red to white when it was at rest, and the big kelp forests which you could view over 2 stories, plus the sea otters cleaning themselves in buckets and with what looks like soap in the shape of kelp leaves.

Monterey's Cannery row is very quaint and touristy, with lots of nice seafood restaurants and cheesy little souvenir shops. Back at the hostel I asked about good places for dinner nearby and was given a flyer for a nice looking restaurant which $12 three course specials, great, but I'd look a bit of a sad case on my own, hmm, will probably feel more comfortable getting take away or a cafe. Back in the room, I met another girl from England called Hattie and before long I had someone to have dinner with, great. We ordered a bottle of wine to enjoy the restaurant dinning experience with and the seafood was very tasty. Hattie had hired a car from San Francisco and was travelling down towards LA, and the next day would be going through Carmel and Big Sur and asked if I wanted to join her, this was perfect as I had wanted to see Big Sur area and there was a bus that went there but it's a stretch of coast land with lots of interest points along it and having a car meant I could explore more of it. So the next day we went via the 17 mile drive which hugs the coast and past the $500 a day golf course to Carmel, a super quaint village for the rich with a white sandy beach. It was much like a nice little English village but for the lack of cream teas and the abundance of little dogs in pink vests trotted or carried along by their sunglass and 'tennis shoe'* wearing owners.
I was a bit hungry so while Hattie did some souvenir shopping I went to a bakery and stuffed my face with pastries. After Carmel we visited the Carmel Mission, a lovely Spanish church and gardens, a very peaceful place, the gift shop looked like a place Priests buy their supplies from, the was indeed a Priest in there, only I couldn't see any communion wafers, I like those.
Onto Big Sur, I don't know why it's called this, it's actually rather like Cornwall or Devon, both Hattie and myself thought so when we saw it. Everyone raves about Big Sur so I had to see what the big deal was all about. It's very nice, with lots of nice peninsulas was walking about on, with day parking areas that charge $9 to go and park there, we parked on the roadside and walked in and saved ourselves the $9 and the queue. We carried on this way until reaching the end of the line for the bus back to Monterey where I left Hattie, and she continued on her way, but I noticed a bulge in one of the tyres on her hire car, so she went back to the garage and they swapped it for the spare. She got to her destination safely. Luckily I got a lift straight back to Monterey from a lady in an open top sports car who had asked us if we needed directions when we stopped, what luck!

The next day I headed up to Montara which involved an express bus to San Jose, train and another bus to Montara lighthouse where there was a HI hostel. The hostel was picture perfect on an outcrop above a beach, such a lovely location. I wandered around the area and found harbour seals warming themselves on the beach and a rock pool area where I crouched and watched hermit crabs crawl over anenomies for a few hours before seeking some dinner. The only thing here was having to cross the Highway which wasn't nice but I did find a nice low key little place with some friendly cats where I ordered fish and chips.
The next day I planned to camp at the nearby State Beach camp ground at half moon bay, I took the weekend bus service down and walked to the campground and was finally able to take advantage of being a hiker, so saved $20 on the camping fees. The campground was very nice, right next to the beach, albeit a bit windy. That night I heard some fighting between some dogs and local wildlife which I think were racoons or something, I peaked through the tent and saw something the size of a well padded cat run towards the long grasses.

Sunday Service no 17

I had to take the Sunday bus service out of Half Moon Bay to Pacifica, then another bus to Daly City and then a metro service to San Francisco the next day, and the first bus was at 8:45am according to the Schedule I had picked up off the bus previously, I needed to get this bus as I had to be at Pier 33 in San Fran for my Alcatraz tour departure at 2.50pm. I packed up and was out of the campsite by 7.45am, I got to the stop early and waited, the departure time came and went, after 15 mins and a bit of muttered cursing it was apparent no bus was coming so I started to walk, the 12 miles to Pacific with about 12kgs on my back. I went past the next stop and saw the bus going in the other direction so went to ask why no bus had arrived at my stop, it turned out my schedule was 2 years out of date, and the next bus wasn't due for a few hours. Thanks Samtrans service 17, great job.
The chances of getting my Alcatraz tour was dwindling fast, I had to book ahead 2 weeks to get a spot due to popularity, so I walked for 3 miles and was feeling good until I saw a map and found I had far more to go than I thought, at which point all my energy went, and with no other options I made my way back to the Highway and tried my luck hitch hiking. I waited there with my thumb out for 10, 15 minutes or so, until about 100 cars had passed, I sighed I had just started to walk to where ever the nearest stop was, which was somewhere at least a mile away when a smart white SUV came back from the other direction and made a U turn to where I was. The guy had passed me and then thought twice and came back to get me, he took me all the way to San Francisco and dropped me at the bus stop that took me all the rest of the way into town. Thanks fly fishing guy! I was back at the hostel shortly after noon, quicker than I would have on the buses, had Samtrans put the right schedule on board.**
And thats why I always pick up hitchhikers.


*Trainers
**What happens when you don't use Google