Temple climbing
Calukmul Ruins, Mexico
late start to ruins/mosquitos/tallest maya temple/low battery/bugs in resterataunt/fuse problems/
Back in the USA
Day 220
New York, NY
Thankfully felt a lot better after my trouble on the plane and managed to get my bags, onto the train into Penn Station and into a hostel. I didn’t feel like wandering all around Manhattan so looked up a hostel in Starbucks and wandered the few blocks to get to it. $48 for a 4 bed dorm! Might have been better value if I could have gotten up for the breakfast but it didn’t happen. I wandered around for a couple of hours and had an early night.
Next day I packed up my bags and jumped onto the Subway to where I would be spending my second night in NY, the floor of a Daniella‘s hotel room. She was over for a course for a couple of days and generously let me share her room. I dumped my bags and set off on a mission to buy a new camera lens. My 17-55mm was good, great in fact, but I was constantly finding myself wishing for more reach. A 70-300mm would suit the bill perfectly and despite the fact that B&H, the best camera shop in NY, if not the world, was closed for passover the prices were pretty much the same all over the city. I walked up past Union Square, which I didn’t even recognise in the sunshine and walked west along 17th Street to the Camera store of the same name. $400 poorer I could now stalk celebrities! After a lunch of falafels and snapple I decided to wear out some shoe leather and try to find something interesting to snap. Sadly the track of my route will never be published as I had managed to lose my GPS tracker! It was my own stupid fault for attaching it to my belt and then putting on my backpack. Bleh.
I headed east and then south, ending up under the brooklyn bridge and finding I could photograph birds with some success at last!
I also checked out the World Trade Center site again, and although construction has started on the new towers it still looked much the same as it did the last time I was there in 2002. A bloody mess!
It was a nice afternoon walk back up to the hotel, I was absolutly knackered but I had arranged to meet Dani when she got off her bus…. I took my laptop out to the local Starbucks but for some reason didn’t bother checking my mail…. duh!
I sat waiting from 11pm until 1am and she didn’t show up. I tried in vain to call her but just ended up shouting at the stupid phones in frustration. Her bus broke down and she finally turned up at 2am. If I had checked my mail I would have had a nice sleep :p
wander past union/can’t find shop/17th str photo/wander west/photo bridge/WTC/walked north/use net/meet Dani/2am/sleep on floor.
Tags: set, gps, sleep, sun, falafel, lunch, brooklyn bridge, last time, photos, backpack, daniella, photograph, blog, couple of days, starbucks, sunshine, rainPanic at the gay disco
Day 133
San Diego, Ca
We had been invited to a brunch after the CS party but didn’t quite make it for 11am, if I wasn’t getting the full 3 hours of all you can drink champagne I wasn’t interested :p Carrisa was there with her boyfriend, as well as Lilia (who I had requested a couch with the week before) and I her surfer, Ant, a Swiss German or German Swiss guy who was travelling around the states for a few weeks. I instantly hated him, since he makes his money from Photography and Paragliding, but I soon warmed up 
Joan and Sheena had some food but I stuck to the coffee, almost as if I knew I would need the room. It was highly prescient as we then went right to a place called Extraordinary Desserts for $8 cake! It was rather nice though, and a good a place as any to splurge before Mexico. Ant showed us his photography portfolio which was nice, I might have to get one sorted myself. I guess I better take some good photos first :p
Brunch with Sheena and Joan
We were invited to a BBQ later on but the girls wanted to dance. We took Ant back to Joan’s for a while since Lilia was at her grandma’s for the afternoon and I took the chance to take a dip in the pool and hot tub before we went out. I sat there reading on my phone as the rain started to fall and the night moved in. It wasn’t as bad as the Wednesday night but it was just getting started. Still, give me slightly warm rain over freezing snow any day; I was glad to be back on the West coast. Earlier at the supermarket I had bought 12 bottles of beer for the road but Sheena had got herself a bargain, a 1.8l bottle of vodka for only $10 or something… She set about drinking it as quickly as possible. She employed her usual plan for getting drunk, decant it into a plastic bottle and drink for cheap all night. I didn’t want to tell her the night that got my brother in to trouble at the pub but there is a different rule for girls.
Tarted up in the lift
First we went over to Lilia’s cousins house for the BBQ which we had pretty much missed. There were quite a few people there but the rain had started up again and most people cancelled. Carisa and her boyfriend turned up though, her night out was put off and there would be no bonfire for Brad due to the terrible weather. We didn’t need blackened meat though as we’d been to Whole Foods and spent a fortune on organic chips and dips. The girls were determined to dance in a gay club and they persuaded some other people in the house to come too which was good.
The first place we went to was nice but no one was dancing, and since there were no girls to pull what else was there to do. We stood in the covered garden part where the music was playing but it wasn’t loud enough, it was just full of fat lazy gay men chatting to each other. Apparently we needed more action, so without even pausing to get a drink (and my bottom felt like one guy we were with, at the bar) we headed down through the pouring rain to another more happening club. This one was $10 to get it, and they didn’t give a straight discount but what was I going to do? I paid up and we went dancing!
I feel rather ambivalent about gay clubs, it would have been better if there were at least a few girls in the place but there weren’t. Sheena and Joan loved it though and were soon flirting (uselessly) with the guys dancing in small briefs on the two podiums. At least the music was good enough to get down and boogie, we mostly stayed in our little straight group with an occasional gay interloper but Sheena and Joan were off dancing with everyone in the place. Poor girls, surrounded by beautiful men and they were all as bent as a dogs back leg :p I shared their frustration, who wants to dance with a load of blokes? Well, other gay men I guess… I danced and danced and then I was bored with it and they started playing really crappy music, but at least the night was nearly over. Sheena came over to sit down, now rather worse for wear from the vodka she had been throwing down her neck all night and miserably complained that she had been ‘molested’ by some guy. I really didn’t know whether to console her or tell her I wasn’t surprised :p She had at least finally convinced me that she was a party animal, but if she only liked gay clubs we might have a conflict of interests…
 The girls loved the erotic dancers |
 Sheena pulled the winner of the gay fancy dress! |
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 0.9l of Vodka later, poor Sheena was feeling not so hot…. |
Yet another Couchsurfing party!
Day 137 San Diego, Ca
Joan had a voucher for $30 for a Indian Buffet place which she hadn’t cashed in 3 years and we decided it was time to use it or lose it. It was miles away though but this was America and driving for 20 minutes for food was a normal thing to do :p I just didn’t have an appetite though, I must have been ill or something but after some soup and nan I was nearly full! It was up to the girls to get their moneys worth since I was such a lightweight. Why did I eat breakfast!?! Joan took us on a round about tour of the beaches but she had to work and abandoned Sheena and I to our own devices for the afternoon. We had a CS pot luck party to attend too and after throwing a few ideas for food around decided the best option was to buy a big pie and ice cream and claim traveller immunity from cooking. We were on the road dammit!
San Diego rain
Day 135
Los Angeles
| Somehow I managed to get to the place Sheena was staying at for noon exactly. I warned her not to expect this ever again, although I had spent 15 minutes around the corner tidying up all my junk. She wasn’t completely ready anyway so I didn’t need to hurry. She wanted to see Venice Beach and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had seen it the day before. The weather was just as crappy as the previous day and we wandered around, took a few photos and then went into Santa Monica to get some food before heading south. |  Even the palm trees have Graffiti in LA. |
Sheena was nursing a slight hangover and professed to be something of a party animal, something I was eager to test out! :p However it was too early for that and San Diego was too far away. She had arranged a place for us to surf with a girl called Joan and after huddling outside Panera Bread trying to keep our lunch dry we set off into a rain shower down the highway towards Mexico. I discovered she had nice taste in music which is good and that she wasn’t getting enough sleep as she nodded off halfway down. There wasn’t anything to see except the highway which I’d already seen and we arrived in San Diego after a uneventful couple of hours.
Joan was fretting over us finding her place but we got right up to the door thanks to my GPS, Mexico will require me to reacquaint myself with paper maps! Joan was fun, never shut up, talked all the time like a maniac. We decided to go out for dinner up in the “gay-berhood”. Not knowing each other very well and with no one wanting to take charge we wandered around 5 Asian places in the rain before I got made the decider and we went for Thai. Well I wasn’t going to eat American junk was I? As we sat eating noodles and curry the rain really started to come down. You could see all the drains overflowing outside in the street and then all the emergency services seemed to be driving past us every few minutes. San Diego gets rain, special report…
Tags: palm trees, lunch, crap, angel, wanderings, disco, maps, tent, party animal, gps mexico, sleep, paper maps, decider, weather, set, graffitiBank holiday monday….
Day 133
Los Angeles
My car was safe out on the street for another entire day since it was a holiday and the traffic wardens were all presumably on the beach enjoying themselves. Bonnie had to return something to a sports store and on the way back she took me to a small Korean restaurant where, for $10, we ate a fantastic meal.
The stone bowl kept it hot until I had eaten it all and it was augmented by strange side dishes of vege’s and dried fish. Quite delicious. Afterwards we bought pastries from the cake shop around the corner and went shopping in a crazy Korean supermarket. To watch those housewives go mental over cheap Satsuma’s was fun but everything in the store was strange and Asian apart from a small western section. Bonnie was leaving on a trip on Wednesday to Kansas so elected to spend the night at Marsellus’, her boyfriend, so I had another evening to hang out and do my own thing. I rang and spoke to Sheena again and we arranged to meet on Wednesday at noon for the trip down to San Diego. I was slightly surprised she didn’t want to meet up with me before hand, and slightly disappointed as I was bored :p but at least I wouldn’t have to face Mexico on my own.
Tags: eve, dried fish, ko, heap, dishes, shop around the corner, angel, side dishes, sports store, traffic wardens, housewivesLocked in
Day 132 LA
After the party I woke late, really late, in fact I only woke up when Bonnie and Suki went out the front door trapping me in the apartment. She left me a note and a key though but I could only use it to open the door to the apartment, I couldn’t get into the lobby or operate the lift. If I wanted to go out I would have to wait for someone to come into the building and hope they were so unconscious of security that they would let me in. I thought it best not to risk it and just hung out in the apartment all day, writing my blog, surfing, relaxing and watching movies on my new laptop. The latest harry potter movie was devoured and enjoyed and I managed 70% of Transformers before I had to turn it off. Simply awful nonsense!
Tags: harry potter, laptop, Travel, transformers, apartment, blog, suki, sim, nonsense, potJapanese weirdness and an illegal party in the Porn Studio
Day 131 LA
I managed to get up and moved my car before I was collared by the parking wardens and soon after Bonnie’s friend Susie turned up and we went for a walk. We went through the Mexican area on the way up to Little Tokyo and by then my hunger was building. The plan was to go and see some kind of art exhibition but first we needed to eat and sat in a cute little Japanese place and ate fish. I was served a mound of fresh soy beans which i took an age to shell, but they were something I had seemingly never had before. We got to the queue for the exhibition but it was 100 meters long, filled mostly with Asians who were desperate to see this show by Murakami. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wait but Susie didn’t have another chance, and surely if 500 people were happy to wait to get in it would be good. Eventually we got to the front of the queue and got in and I was amazed and confused.
Bonnie and Susie try to enjoy the huge queue.
The paintings were simply astounding, it was Japanese pop culture at its weirdest with tiny icons and cute creatures jumping about the very bizarre worlds they lived in. The same themes were evident in most of the paintings and they were weird variations on the same images. It’s kind of hard to explain. Not only were there paintings but huge sculpture of amazing creatures, the size of a room. I couldn’t take any photographs which was tragic as I could have snapped away all day. He didn’t just create sculptures of imaginary creatures but had a more adult edge too. His ‘My lonesome cowboy’ was a full sized naked manga character, erect penis in hand ejaculating his semen in a laughing whirlwind of potency around his upper torso, next to him a naked woman squeezed milk from her breasts as if in a bizarre dance.
There were also a set of 3 sculptures with a robot girl, impossibly perfect, transforming into a jet plane. I asked one of the guards if they had joints and he thought I wanted to know if I could smoke a joint :p My accent gets me into funny places sometimes
On a loop next to the sculpture of 2 small naked cyber boys, one white, one black, ran a series of ‘adverts’ which people stood watching in bemusement, shock and fascination. Click the clip below. Why anyone would want to purchase a perverted robot that feels love, albeit just like any other small child, I couldn’t explain, but the 3 clips made me feel good in that I had found something weird to freak out my friends.
Afterwards Bonnie took us out for Mexican food which she slavered with Chili sauce.
We said goodbye to Susie and went to buy wine for the evening party we would be attending later on. We then settled into wait until we could arrive at a fashionable time, Marsellus turned up and eventually a girl called Suki, but she protested her fatigue and I didn’t think she would last long…. We went back over to the Korean Area of town and found the party was taking place over a Korean Bakery, we went upstairs and happily found we were all on the guest list, saving a nice $20. The party didn’t have a liquor license so the procedure was to take your bottles of booze over to the ‘bar’ where some girls would help you pour it into a cup. We took cheap wine and I’ve no idea if we touched our bottles all night. The bar was full of booze though and you could have pretty much anything you liked, since they didn’t know what you had brought. Sweet. The music was distinctly funky in sound and I spent most of the night dancing by the two guys that reinforced the funkiness by playing drums and percussion. The club was called ‘Funky in the middle’ and this was their first anniversary. And many happy returns to them. The place was busy but not so full as you couldn’t dance and the layout of the place was kind of weird. The band were set up in a ‘corner’ that was white, with curved floors and ceiling, obviously a place to take photos. But the other parts of the studio had fake walls, fake windows and a few beds. I was partying in a porn studio!
Suki lasted about an hour before she spent most of the evening asleep.
 2 Fluffers fighting over their stud |
 When I came to leave I couldn’t find my coat, this lightweight was sleeping on it! |
California knows how to party!
Day 130 Los Angeles
| I finally had a chance to wear my sandals and shorts again. I drove over to the beach area and sat in the sun. It was still pretty cold but at least the temperature had seemed to increase by 15 degrees in a day. It didn’t seem like SD was going to happen for me though and rather than fight it I decided to text Bonnie in Los Angeles as a backup to the mail I had sent her through Couchsurfing the previous day. It was a good job I texted as my mail was still in transit and she was happy to put me up for a while while I decided on my plan. That morning I spotted a post on the Couchsurfing site from a girl called Sheena who was in San Fransisco and looking for a lift down to Mexico. Seemed like good timing since she was heading to LA after the weekend. Hopefully I wouldn’t be driving all the way south on my own…. LA was supposedly a couple of hours away and it was 1am by the time I set off. The freeways were suddenly busy after all the empty ones in the south and gas prices were pretty crazy now. $3.40 a gallon was not uncommon, but my green girl was thirsty and thats what I had to pay. Not wanting another ticket I drove with my main beam on and hoped I wouldn’t get busted for that. The traffic was simply awful and I had no chance of getting into LA before sunset. The interstate seemed endless and the traffic was stop and go for two hours. I finally got to the cause which was a 3 car pileup in the car pool lane and then I could finally speed up the last 5 miles into the downtown area. |  |
The Pacific!
Day 129 San Diego CA
God I need help! Why can’t I get up at a reasonable time? Still, I only had a few miles to the CA border and San Diego was pretty close. This was the area of the real desert, like huge sand dunes and passes through the hills strewn with millions of huge boulders. My stupid cruise control stopped working too but at least I knew how to quickly fix it now and happily I finally got a call from Tamara. She had missed all her mails being forwarded from her Couchsurfing account and hence didn’t know I was in Tucson. She was now in the middle of Mexico after sitting on a bus for a whole day and miles away from me. I was glad she was ok but now I was 2 hours outside of San Diego and thinking about visiting my other surfing friend Bonnie in LA, since I was so close. As I came into SD it got nice and warm as I hoped it would. The Pacific was keeping the chill off the land and I was desperate to get away from the near freezing conditions I had endured for the last month. I found a Starbucks to get my coffee and Internet fix and pondered my next move.
Tags: boulders, stupidity, desert, carissa, couchsurfer, san diego ca, internet connection, surfing friendCaught by the fuzz
Day 128 Yuma AZ
Staying up until 3 in the morning is never conducive an early start and it wasn’t in this case either. Reluctantly I packed up my gear into my car and said goodbye to Lashel and Grace. I had a great time in Tucson and I shouldn’t have even been there! Tamara was dead or lying in a Mexican ditch somewhere which was a shame, although I suspected the problems on the Couchsurfing website had something to do with it. I had 2 choices, south or west and hope to pick up a passenger on the west coast. It would be nice to see my old stomping grounds in LA too, and San Diego was only 5 hours away. I chose to go west and waving to the girls put the address in my GPS and set off back into the desert…
Tags: mexican ditch, borders, beds, shame, girls, stomping grounds, second time, insurance, tamara, mexico, working in mexico, waves, great time, mirrorTravel scrabble??
Day 127 Tucson AZ
I spent most of the day installing Ubuntu on my laptop which worked without a problem but getting it to connect to the Internet wasn’t happening. The wireless drivers for this Aspire 5520 don’t work natively and I couldn’t get the madwifi drivers to work or ndiswrapper. No sound either but I got the graphics to work ok, it looks good in 1280×800. I ended up downloading the 64-bit version of Ubuntu and switching to that, not that it made any difference. I was semi scared of messing with the hard drives since I have XP set up nicely now and didn’t want to screw it but it was ok. The laptop comes with a 10gb partition for recovering the system but I had not compunction wiping that for Linux. I should be able to connect through my other laptop to the Internet if I can figure out how to fix the wireless problem. A laptop that can’t connect to the net is neither use nor ornament.
Lashel was out to Uni for a while but when she came back she volunteered to try to show me some of Tucson’s more wacky sights, specifically some kind of crazy welded truck out in the suburbs somewhere but we couldn’t find it. When I found out Tucson has a Govindas restaurant I was so there! I love those places and we sat on the floor cushions filing our faces with yummy curry and salads chatting about Lashel’s forthcoming trip to India. I’m guessing she’s going to be having a great time! I decided I should probably leave the next day and hence we wouldn’t be drinking, well, only coffee. The three of us went out to Coffee X Change with a scrabble board for a game. I haven’t played it since I was a kid but Grace didn’t kick my ass too much, at least I didn’t come last! :p I protested weakly back at the house and got my guitar out to see if I could remember any songs. The girls were a gracious audience but my voice was a mess, all gravely and uneven. At least I wasn’t so horribly embarrassed and coerced like I was at the ski resort. They forced me to play until 3am, so much for an early night eh? :p
Tags: hard drives, salads, natively, india, board, screws, audienceKind of exploring Tucson a bit more, at least the 80′s disco bars….
Day 126 Tucson Az
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Lashel agreed to take me out to see more of the center of the city and we ended up going for lunch on 6th street at The Casbah, a lovely vegetarian organic cafe with a middle eastern flavour. I ended up ordering far too much food but it was all really delicious, if a little slow in coming. Lashel is a doctor in waiting and instead of studying for her exams was letting me distract her from her important studies, but I was happy to have the company, she’s great fun even if she does think she’s insulting me all the time and apologising. That certainly makes a change We wandered around the shopping street and you can tell you’re in a cool student town from all the crusties with dogs on string and tattoo parlors. I had heard nothing from Tamara and was now wondering what I should do, head to Mexico alone or maybe go to California for a while. I suddenly remembered that I wanted a tattoo and San Diego was the place to do it… |
Another Couchsurfing Party
Day 125 Tucson AZ
Happy that I didn’t wake with a hangover I hung out on the couch for a few hours taking advantage of the girls Internet connection until their friend Patrick came over and suggested a late lunch. Leshel was mortally ill in bed and couldn’t get up so just the three of us went out for a great curry at a nearby Indian Restaurant called Gandhi’s. Patrick is a funny guy and when given a good foil like Grace even better. I learned later that they had sadly toned down their conversation for my benefit. I want the uncensored version dammit! Back at the house we learned that Leshel felt much better and was up for going to the Couchsurfing gathering that was already taking place in Tucson. I was happy I wasn’t going to have to go on my own and we even dragged Patrick along. We had hardly gotten through the door before we were engaged in a circular introduction that went on for 20 minutes, the place was pretty full and they even had some surfers instead of the usual 95% hosts and just me. We got there quite late and stayed until 9pm which is when it was due to finish. I forgot to suggest we all go to the karaoke afterwards :p We headed over to the local video place called Casa Video which was simply awesome and the only place I have seen that could fill out my missing movie knowledge. We ended up renting Crash which Patrick and Grace hadn‘t seen before crashing on the sofa for the night….
Tags: video place, gandhi, couch s, friend patrick, surfer, internet connection, benefit, karaoke, funny guySurfing in the Desert
day 124 Tucson AZ
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I made a couple of Couchsurfing requests the previous night and when I pulled up to Starbucks the following morning I got a call from Lashel, one of the girls I had asked to stay with. She wasn’t 100% sure it was cool since her sister was still in bed and would probably want consulting but she said we could still hang out even if I didn’t stay, she needed something to help her to avoid studying :p I said I would come over later and sat drinking coffee |
for a while and chatting to my old UK friend Tim over Skype. I learned he was once more due to become a father. News to me! I was still waiting on my site to be indexed by Google properly but checking it every 10 minutes didn’t help, it was going to take days… I finished my coffee and drove over to Lashel and Graces place where I was hoping I could stay over the weekend. Grace had finally got up and given her approval so everything was hunky-dory. After apologising multiple times for the state of their house (which was only slightly untidy) Lashel offered to show me the Desert Museum near Tucson so we set off in Graces car to do some touristy stuff…
Tags: couchsurfer, multiple times, coffee, mexicans, girls, one of the girls, cool placeStuck in Tucson
Day 122 Tucson Az
Well after the excitement of yesterday I was reasonably pleased to sit in Starbucks updating my blog and messing about with my website all day. I also wasted a few happy hours playing Portal which runs ok on the new laptop I am pleased to report. I was expecting/hoping to hear from Tamara who is a fellow Couchsurfer and also on her way to Mexico but the site was down yesterday and she hasn’t logged on for a week. If I don’t hear from her tomorrow I’ll be thinking I went through all that shit for nothing. The silver cloud is that it looks like there will be a CS party on Sunday so maybe it wont be a total waste. I discovered my site hasn’t been visible to the Google bots since August last year so most of my hilarious blog posts are wont be searchable on Google. Hopefully I have sorted that out and I was adding tags to my posts last week so eventually people should start coming across my stuff on random searches as long as the tags are relevant. I’m a bit annoyed at myself for this but I know it will take a while before I become a notorious blogger :p
I also attempted to replace my front light that hasn’t worked for a couple of days. It was a bit of a pain doing it without much in the way of tools but I replaced it with a new one I bought in Nogales and it still doesn’t work! I guess I’d better check the original one was ok first before I draw any conclusions but I think tomorrow I’ll be checking all the fuses out.
Tags: blog, mexico, laptop, silver cloud, couple of days, random searches, happy hours, nogales, cs party, logs, fuses, starbucks, conclusions, google