Canyonlands, San Diego and Los Angeles photos

Just a quick note to say that the last of our photos from our awesome trip around the USA are up on the web. This bumper edition comes to you in the form of not one but two flickr albums!

Canyonlands – Photos from Zion and Bryce national parks in Utah, Grand Canyon national park in Arizona and Joshua Tree national park in California. We really loved Zion and Bryce, and managed to reorganise our schedule a little (dropping Monument Valley, unfortunately) so that we could get to hike into the famous Zion Narrows. The water was only a few degrees, so we had to hire dry suits.

San Diego to LA – After the canyons, we stayed in San Diego for a few days to see the zoo. We also saw the USS Midway, which is an aircraft carrier permanently based there. The tour of the Midway was really interesting! After San Diego, it was off to LA for Disneyland, Universal Studios, scientology, mexican food and a stunning sunset over Malibu. Not to mention the House of Pie.

I might come back and fill in some of the details of our US trip, because looking at these photos is making me nostalgic. It was our favourite section of the whole trip-o-rama, we really loved our time exploring the country.

San Francisco to Vegas photos online

We have uploaded more photos including Big Sur, San Francisco, Napa Valley, Yosemite National Park, Death Valley National Park, and Vegas. :)

east coast photos are online!

Just a quick note to say that our photos from the east coast of America are now on flickr. Hooray! Niall is busy uploading them to Facebook as I type this, so you can also catch them there.

Next up is the rest of the US - and we've already sorted most of them out, so it won't be too much longer. Besides, we're unemployed bums, so we have plenty of time on our hands.

south east asian online driving school

We didn’t want to hire a car while in Asia for fear of actually having to drive on the roads here. That fear was well placed. There are road rules here, but they are generally ignored. People here follow conventions, the rules are irrelevant.

If you want to survive any kind of encounter with the road here, you have to learn these local idioms. So here is what we have observed, purely as outsiders.

vietnam – it’s all about the motor cycle

• Fear is weakness. When you are crossing the road, you must show supreme confidence. You must put in mind that you are more threat to the motor cycles than they are to you. The weak do not cross roads here, they stare longingly at the other side.
• There is no good time to cross the road. There will never be a gap. This actually means that there is no bad time to cross the road – just do it without delay. Part the flow of motor cycles like the red sea and try to subdue your screams as much as possible. Closing your eyes may seem like a good idea, but you have to watch out for cars. They don’t dodge.
• Roads intersect without traffic lights or stop signs. If you’re riding and come to an intersection, honk your horn a lot and ride straight out into the middle of traffic. This is a good time to stop for conversation with the rider next to you. Continue to the other side at your convenience. Sending text messages is a good way to pass time while you’re riding.
• Motorcycles are the best means of transport for bulky goods. Cars will never fit through the traffic. If you have a large fish  tank or twenty live ducks to ship, a motorcycle is what you want.
• Three’s only a crowd on a bike if the fridge you’re carrying is taking up too much seat room.

cambodia – dancing roads abound with music and snow

• Dancing road, noun: A road so riddled with potholes that passengers in vehicles are jiggled around like numbered balls in a lottery globe.
• Cambodian music: Car horns. Cambodians prefer choirs to solo performances, and admire strong voices.
• Cambodian snow: Dust from the dirt roads. After a motor bike trip, the creases in my clothes had left an interesting pattern of clean and filthy on my shirt and shorts. If you need to take a hand off the handholds to remove dust from your eye, leave one hand on the bar.
• If you are interested in becoming a public bus driver in Cambodia, we have a few recommendations. The horn is a sign of your virility. Use it often. Honk anything that moves. Honk anything that looks like it might move. Do not deny your own passengers the joy of your horn – install it backwards so that it honks into the bus. And remember, there is no wrong side of the road. There is only the side all the traffic is on, and the side you are on.

thailand

• Speed ruthlessly, at least 20kph over the limit. If you are a taxi or minivan driver, only deign to go this slow if you spice it up by not having your hands on the wheel. Otherwise kick it up at least another 20kph. Bonus points if you can get air going over bumps in the road.

laos

• The car operates best under either hard braking or hard acceleration. If traffic forces you to maintain a constant speed, approximate this as best you can by quickly alternating between braking and accelerating.
• Cars are like stubborn cattle. Subtlety in steering is lost on them, so herd them around corners with vigorous swings on the steering wheel.
• If you are a minivan driver and attempting a land speed record between Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng, it is crucial to remember that air conditioning is a serious drain on engine power. Refuse steadfastly to turn it on, only relent if a gang of angry Spanish women yell at you. Subdue such rebellions by having as few openable windows in the van as possible – heat makes people lethargic.

Across all countries here remember that using the indicator shows you don’t know what you are doing. Other drivers on the road will lose respect for you and you will find it hard to get where you want to go. Put yourself in their way and force them to slow and avoid you. This also works well for pedestrians.

And here are a couple of photos to help you understand best practice when on the road in the region.

how to cross the road in Hanoi

how not to cross the road in Hanoi

how to transport boxes around the city (you can just see the leg of the rider in front of the boxes)

there’s always room for one more in Ho Chi Minh city

turning left across traffic in a cyclo

you can move anything on a bike

delightful 70s era curtains in the Vang Vieng –> Vientiane “VIP” bus

all VIP buses have air con. On good ones like ours, they even leave the door open the whole way to really get the breeze through.

thanksgiving in vegas

So it’s time to jump way back to late November last year, when we arrived in Vegas after going through Yosemite and Death Valley national parks. Heading towards Death Valley in the pitch black of night, in the middle of nowhere, we could see a glow over the horizon. This was Vegas – 200km away. The roads were so dark and straight that we’d see a car’s headlights and drop the high beam, then wait 5 minutes before we actually passed them. With nothing visible except the road in front of us and the distant glow on the horizon, it felt like we were somehow lost or where we didn’t belong. We drove like this for a few hours, and through it all, Vegas was there, waiting.

As we approached the outskirts of sin city, we could see signs of the impending insanity. The hotels on the strip stand out like sore thumbs, and the light from the Luxor drew us in like moths to a flame.

Lots of our friends have already been here, it’s hardly breaking new ground. But for anyone who hasn’t, the city is insane. Just wandering around the streets at night leaves you boggling a the crazy things you see on each casino. It’s so tacky, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Each casino has it’s theme or central attraction, and I can’t think of anywhere else you could get away with such cheese. Except CSI Miami.

We checked out all the casinos (except for the crap ones!), which is an amusing tour around the place. Most of them have themed decor inside, so the New York New York looks like the streets of NY inside, and a roller coaster through its cityscape on the outside, as well as the Brooklyn Bridge. The Paris has boulangeries and Metro signs, and a giant Eiffel tower. The Venetian has a canal you can take gondola rides on (it’s inside and they have a fake sky). Caesar’s Palace has the Trevi Fountain and the shows are held in the Colosseum. The MGM Grand has a lion enclosure. There’s a Camelot casino which has turrets and towers. The Luxor is a giant glass pyramid with a huge spot light coming out of the top.

And last but not least is where we stayed: The Bellagio. We wanted to go somewhere fun and zany, so it was a toss up between here and Caesar’s Palace. The Bellagio was pretty nice and had a bit of zanity, but we both agree Caesar’s would have been a bit more Vegas. That said, we did have a room with a view of the dancing fountains, and they are really impressive! They also look better from above than from the street level where people gather every 15 minutes to watch the shows. The shows are set to different songs, like Singing in the Rain, Hey Big Spender, Luck Be A Lady, etc. The jets are really powerful – the water got to the height of the Eiffel Tower across the road, and you’d hear a bang when the big jets fired off.

As for luck being a lady for us, well that didn’t happen. We played in the Bellagio, the Paris and Caesar’s Palace. We didn't have any luck in any of them, except for a not bad night on our last night in the Bellagio. The bastard dealer in the Paris chatted us up, enticing us to start playing, then after we sat down and dealing out a hand to me, he asked Daph for ID, even though it was me playing. The supervisor came over and wouldn’t accept her driver’s license, it had to be a passport, which she didn’t have. Meanwhile as we were trying to sort this out, he left me sitting on something like 14 against a face card and proceed to play out the hand for everyone else and took my money off the table when we lost. In short, the guy was a knob. So we don’t really like the guys from the Paris, although the steak in the restaurant there was pretty good.

Daph did have some luck with roulette, which was fun to watch her play.  I have a curse with roulette, so I keep out of it. There was a $300 minimum roulette table near us, and we saw a guy just plonking down thousands of dollars each round all over the table. We saw him on multiple nights, wearing the same clothes, which was a worry. He didn’t seem like he was short of cash though.

We also saw quite a few brides, which was funny to see, but I suppose in the Vegas spirit. They’d come down to the gambling floor in the wedding dress and wander around making bets. We went to the Coyote Ugly bar, which was a bit lacking in energy, but fun for a while.

Lastly, we were there over Thanksgiving. Which was probably lucky, because the place really filled up for the holiday, and if we were anywhere else, we might have had to deal with things being closed down. We looked around for a place to have a traditional thanksgiving dinner and settled on a bar in Caesar’s Palace. It was really tasty! It was the first time I’ve had pumpkin pie, so I’m not sure if it was the real deal, but it was ok. The turkey and stuffing was great, though. Best value expenditure we had in Vegas by far!

We enjoyed our time at Vegas, but probably could have spent a day less there. We already chopped one day off to add to Yosemite, which was a great idea. Should have taken another day to add to something else and it would have been perfect. Luckily hotels in the US seem to have very liberal cancellation/alteration policies, so you can pretty much make whatever changes you want.

The Paris with the Bellagio fountains

The Trevi Fountain in Caesar’s Palace

Good food was never hard to find

  Blackjack tables at Caesar’s Palace

Canal inside the Venetian

 

The Bellagio fountains

doing the funky gibbon

Well I guess we’ve fallen off the blogging wagon for a while, so what goes up here now might be a bit random and out of order, but I don’t think that will make much difference. We’ve been travelling for almost 5 months now, which is a loooong time. We’re actually almost completely finished which is simultaneously a scary and welcome thought. So hopefully I can get some of the highlights up on here as much to help us remember as to share it with the ever expanding readership.

One of the biggest focuses for us on this whole trip has been trying to plan getting onto the Gibbon Experience. I have to say that looking back over everything we’ve done since the first day, it has been the hardest thing to organise by far. Contact with the people is difficult, it’s in the middle of nowhere, it takes at least 4 days to get into and out of on either side of the gibbon trip itself, it’s expensive, often booked out, and you have to pay with the devil's own online payment system, which of course won’t work, so you’ll have to tell them you’ll pay in cash when you arrive and hope they hold your place. Everything after our Intrepid trip (which was great, by the way) revolved around these three days.

It’s certainly not a comfort trip – you stay in tree houses about 20 metres off the ground. That sounds great until you start running into travellers who have been and tell you about the giant spiders, rats, and last but definitely not least, the bees’ nest under the toilet. It’s really hot during the day and you get very sweaty and dusty from hiking all over the place. Twenty-five percent of our group had dreadlocks. I hope you’re starting to get the idea of what kind of trip this is.

So it’s lucky it was a great experience. The idea of the trip is to take you into the jungle hills of Bokeo Province, Laos (which is supposedly prime Malaria habitat) and spend time in the tree tops surrounded by nothing but nature. Black gibbons live here, hence the name of the trip, and you can hear them every morning around 6am calling out through the forest. If you’re lucky, you can get to see them during an insane sprint over uneven ground with a crazy Lao guide. We weren’t lucky, so the second morning we decided to be a bit more calm and watch from our private tree house. We still didn’t see any, but it was nice to sit there and listen to them.

The other component of the trip is that moving around the reserve is done by a combination of hiking and zip lining (ie flying foxes). The zip lines can be over a hundred metres from the valley floor and several hundred metres long. Before arriving, but after booking, we read stories of people who were unable to jump from the platforms, which made us a bit nervous. I’m definitely not good with heights, but I can say that for the most part it was fine. Some bits were a bit hairy, but I never felt in danger, just very cautious while hanging over the canopy so high up.

The zip lining is lots of fun, as well as a bit scary. The feeling of pushing off your starting place is exhilarating, as well as relieving, as usually the take off is the worst part. There was an observation platform in a huge tree about 50 metres off the ground which was a half way point between two long and very high zip lines. This  was one of the more nerve wracking parts, as you’re really high up, the platform is very narrow, and you have to unhook yourself from the incoming line and clip onto the outgoing one. You should keep your safety clip in the middle while moving your rollers from incoming to outgoing. At one point I got the order of operations wrong and was temporarily completely unattached to the tree. That was not a good thing to do, but hey I’m here now! I also knocked my glasses off into the canopy below when pulling myself in after not reaching the end of a cable. Luckily Daphne found them for me.

Tree house 1 had a log book with a list of fastest times around a section of three zip lines called “The Golden Triangle”. These cables were really fun, and you had to actually transit through the first tree house, literally jumping off out of the middle of their home in order to head towards our  place – tree house 2.

Our tree house was the honeymoon suite, built for only two people. It was a pretty nice place, once we negotiated a truce with the swarm of bees that invaded the showering platform on the first afternoon. Without going into too much detail, the toilet here is open straight to the trees below. It’s also open straight to the bees below. They like to come up. In numbers. At bad times. At least there were no rats or spiders. Apparently the rats like to nest in the thatched roofs of the tree houses, but ours has a slightly less romantic green cast iron roof which the rats don’t like. Other houses had rats nibbling through shoes and bags, so I’m happy with our roof.

Our bathroom was communal. Not that everyone could use it, but everyone could see it. We were right near the start of a major cable back to tree house 1, and the paths around this point had a pretty good view of whoever happened to be using the shower or toilet. For those that couldn’t see everything from where they were standing, they could still marvel at the fluids dripping from the tree house. This was a popular spot for the guides to hang out and talk and eat our stolen fruit.

Getting into and out of our tree house was done via two cables. The cables are all one direction only, which sounded weird at first, but if you ask yourself how you can gain altitude on a free falling cable, it makes sense. So you always have to climb up somewhere so you can take a cable across and down. The cable out of our house was a bit dodgy at the start. There wasn’t much room to get yourself set, and a tree right where you wanted to stand. To take off, you have to walk forward while attached to the cable till the gap between cable and ground increases enough to make the cable start taking your weight. This point was about 5mm from the edge of our take off platform. I’ll post a video of Daph leaving our tree house for the last time.

On the second day we took a long hike out to see tree house 5, which is where people doing the more active style of trip stay on the first night. It’s a really nice tree house suspended high in the air, looking over the valley. It also has a massive swarm of bees in it and you have to take a bit of a drop off the step when you take the exit cable.

Food was brought to us by a guide who would zip line in like a maniac, so hard that our tree would actually be rocking. It wasn’t too bad – rice and various dishes, mostly vegetable based. They would usually grab something from our rat proof food storage bin while they were there, and very often while we were out. Our supply of peanut candy seemed to dwindle very quickly. After dinner, Daph and I would light the candles and sit around playing cards or scrabble, listening to the sounds of the jungle.

We really did have a great time, it’s something completely different. It does take a lot of effort and patience, so be forewarned!

So, let me try putting some photos and videos on this post.

 

Map of the area near our tree house (Ikos). Dotted lines are cables.

Tree house 1

Tree house 2 – home sweet home

Tree house 5

View from our tree house

Holding on carefully on the observation platform

incoming cable to the observation platform, about 100m high

These are a couple of videos I plucked off youtube that show things pretty well.

This cable runs from just under our tree house to the observation platform. The person doesn’t quite make it to the end, but there’s a crash pad there on the tree because normally you do.

This is the long run in to tree house 5. I think it’s the longest cable we did, about 400m or so long.

Well these videos show it pretty well. We have a couple which are giving me grief right now, so I might try to get them onto youtube when I feel less frustrated with the whole thing. Not helpful when my little Canon takes a 2 minute video and turns it into 150MB. Uploading that in Laos will take a few days.

We had a great time, it was certainly unique!

fully sick

This is just a short rant. A rant about getting sick. I hate catching a cold, a good one takes weeks to fully get rid of. I am currently incubating my third of the trip. That’s three colds in seven weeks. I had a cold in London that lasted for almost seven weeks, that was pretty bad. This isn’t so bad but it’s really getting my goat.

I want my goat back.

did the earth move for you too?

We're currently in the town of Twentynine Palms, just outside the border of Joshua Tree National Park.  At 20:18, there we were, enjoying a dinner at the 29 Palms Inn with a groovy local band entertaining the crowd, when ... zomg... there was a (very tiny, please don't worry mum, we're fine) EARTHQUAKE!!!

It wasn't very strong. We were sitting down at the time, and I thought that it must be a train travelling through (very stealthily and rather close by).  Niall thought that it was someone trying to walk behind our chairs and not doing a very good job. Then, the band stopped playing mid-song and announced "hey, it's an earthquake!"

I have to admit, that's not a phrase I expect to hear being yelled out in a jovial manner. They must get them all the time here, because nobody freaked out. People started cheering and clapping, and the band resumed their song. About 5 minutes later one of the other diners had checked it up on the internet and announced that it was an aftershock from an earthquake in 1999 measuring 5.5 on the richter scale.

:-O

So of course, after we got back to the motel we had to read all about it on the internet, and we discovered how organised all these Californians are. If you go to http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/ they have current data on any earthquake that's happened in California and Nevada in the last week. The big blue square in the image below is what I will affectionately call "our quake".

You can also report your experience of the quake online which is collated and added to that earthquake's report.

SO AWESOME. Most definitely a unique and interesting Californian experience!

tickets, tickets everywhere!

It's 2:20am in Arizona, and we've specifically woken up to buy tickets to Britney Spears and Porcupine Tree concerts which were being released this morning at 9am... London time. Bloody time zones.

Happily, we've managed to purchase tickets to both events (woohoo!) and I guess we should be thankful that they were released on the same day, so that we didn't have to get up at 2am twice. 

I'll let you guess who wanted to go to which concert. :)

sigh.

Every time I type this into google, it hurts.

If there's only one thing I've learned, it's this: if you're planning to travel during a worldwide financial industry meltdown, buy some traveller's cheques for your target currency a few months before you leave - ideally when the exchange rate is at a 26 year high - before your local market dives like an Italian football player.