Category Archives: Life is tough

Life on the road – it’s not just a long holiday. Oh no.

Hotel Review – “Rodney’s House”

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One of the joys of traveling is watching your own expectations shoot rapidly up and down the scale depending on your surroundings. In San Diego “Rodney’s House” would be a cheeky little boutique hotel built around a homely bar, perhaps with occasional winking references to Only Fool’s & Horses to titillate homesick expats. Rooms would be $175 a night and would come complete with retro hairnets in the shower and bangers & mash for breakfast.

On the Sepik, “Rodney’s House” was a house. Built by Rodney. Out of sticks.

We were two days into our trip down the Sepik River, and our guide Josh (whose professionalism was deeply suspect by this point, but whose honesty, charm and enthusiasm was not) was wondering where we might stay the night. Fortunately his mate Rodney had a house nearby, so we slept there. On the floor. It was great!

Dinner was a gourmet feast of eggs (boiled in a kettle) with Kwik-Kook noodles (using water from aforementioned kettle) and tinned tuna. From our experience on the Inca Trail, we were half expecting our (hired and paid for) cook to rustle this up for us. Unfortunately “Cook” was one of many Sepik euphemisms, and there was a comic interlude when we looked at Josh, he looked at us, we looked at him, he looked at Lucy (being a woman and all) and we decided to prepare dinner ourselves.

We had a beautiful view of the river which runs through the centre of the village, with local kids as young as three paddling dugout canoes back and forth. It rained gently, so we read until dusk, at which point we retired to our mosquito net in the corner and pulled our travel towels over us for bedding. The local dugout makers had stopped adzing tree trunks so the village was quiet, other than the local boar-pigs trotting around underneath the house rutting and scuffling into the night. We breakfasted by the river on peanut butter and jam sandwiches, washed in the local waterfall, packed up our motorized dugout with our daypacks and a few local carvings and we headed off upriver.

We loved it. Five stars.

Sydney and the Great(ish) Barrier Reef

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Waving a fond and rather sad farewell to South America, James and I set off for the next stage of our adventure. This next stage really will be pretty adventurous, we’re off to Papua New Guinea, a country where a good proportion of the population was only discovered in the 1930s, and cannibalism was still occasionally practiced up until about 50 years ago.

Which is great and all, but after all of our intrepidness in South America, we were feeling a little adventured out and in need of some good old fashioned civilization. Coffee. Cocktails. Those little luxuries that make the world go round (well, our world anyway). Fortunately, it’s pretty much impossible to connect from Easter Island through to Papua New Guinea without routing via Australia, so civilization was to be had a-plenty. Maybe even enough to last us through our next big adventuring phase. Maybe….

First stop, Sydney. We’ve both visited the city before and love it, especially the main harbour area. However, this time round, Sydney served a far more important function for us. Yep, time to re-stock on toiletries and the all important suntan lotion! Also a chance to FINALLY get my hands on a shiny new Kindle after James accidentally broke my last one in Uyuni (since when, I’ve been relying on his iTouch to read with – which is fine other than the fact the battery lasts less time than my reading activity does!). Also a chance for us to indulge in some good food (sushi!! I’d almost forgotten about sushi!!) and try not to weep at the insanely high prices (Aussie dollar at an all time high) then work it all off again in a properly equipped gym. We even managed to pack in a couple of fantastic cocktails, including this cheeky little number served with its own side dish of saffron infused apricots. NYC bartenders, watch your back!

In short, indulgence of the highest degree.

Next stop, Cairns. This is where most of the flights to PNG leave from and so we figured we’d spend a day or two here and wrap in a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Rude not to, really.

What did we make of the Reef? Well, mixed impressions really. You have to bear in mind that we are both incredibly spoilt when it comes to snorkeling, particularly after our recent trip to the Galapagos. Mere amazing reef and fish life no longer suffice to get the Lucy/James swimometer racing – to really get us excited we need a few rare sea mammals floating around the place also. The Great Barrier Reef is – well – a great reef, with coral quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. But the fish are less spectacular than those elsewhere, and the conditions were pretty awful – cold and windy enough to make the sea choppy and snorkeling a little saltwater-filled.

Definitely worth seeing and lots of fun, but not a trip highlight.

Which perhaps more than anything else in this trip spells out to me just how incredibly lucky we are to be doing this utterly amazing journey.

The Journey Begins…

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A short post: today, perhaps counterintuitively, is the start of our journey.

It turns out that round the world air tickets are significantly cheaper if you start and finish in South America than if you book from the USA (the cheapest are actually from Sudan – go figure!). As such, to date we have been travelling on airmiles, half a cheap LAN South America air pass, local buses and one actual long haul air ticket we actually paid actual full price for. Our official Round The World ticket starts today, with the LAN flight from Easter Island to Santiago de Chile.

Life is tough.

Time Flies

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We have just spent five hours flying East from Los Angeles to Miami. Five hours to go back over one month of driving. It feels simultaneously slightly ridiculous and actually rather awe-inspiring. This country is huge – how people actually managed to make it to the West Coast on foot and on horseback back in the day I have no idea.

Given the amount we have crammed into a month, it feels like we have been on the road for ages. However, given we decided to start our trip with a drive across the States, there was no Big Moment Of Arrival in a foreign country and hence no real feeling of departure. As a result, time has been playing little tricks on us: in Washington DC it felt like we were away for a long weekend. In Kentucky it felt like we had taken a week’s holiday. In Texas it felt like we had managed to sneak in a rare two week holiday (although the concept of an actual, untrashed two week holiday without being interrupted every single day by work emails and calls is completely unfamiliar to both of us). Only once we got into the canyonlands after two-plus weeks did it start to feel like something longer. Like gardening leave, perhaps? Who knows.

 

A hippie interlude if I may (Lucy has them occasionally, so why can’t I?). I honestly can’t remember a time in my life when I have been outside at night in the countryside for a long enough period of time to be aware of the moon waxing and waning.

But, like, dude, what does it meeeeeaan? Well, it’s been four weeks and I need a haircut – that’s what it means.

Through the Keyhole

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[A Glimpse into the Lives of the American Rich and Famous]

Whilst James’ and my trip across the States has devoted much time to achieving (and even more time to relaying) a sense of what the kind might call the intrepid (the less kind the down’n’dirty), we have also tried to make room in our travels to witness that fulcrum of the American dream: the super super rich. This is a nation that has established its own definition of wealth (Beckingham Palace won’t cut it here) – what’s needed is something sufficiently vast, sufficently magical in scale and potency, to drive the engine of American morality. Any man [woman or child] can make it good here. Any inequalities in access to….well, basic healthcare or access to any type of schooling not primarily based on gun control, just serve to winnow out the weak. After all, weren’t we all immigrants once?

Thus far we’ve borne witness to two epic bastions of the American dream: the Vanderbilt family with their legendary legacy of shipping and railroad wealth. And Elvis. Uh huh huh.

Both disappointed just a little. We were hoping for sensational tackiness. Gold bidets. Diamond encrusted serving staff. Hot and cold running Cristal.

We got luxury for sure. Biltmore, the Vanderbilt’s “little summer place” could sleep about 50 guests, with entertainments ranging from the usual country pursuits to an indoor swimming pool (including underwater electric lighting at a time that most people in the US had not yet witnessed the miracle of electricity) and bowling alley (pins set up by the servants between each round). I’m presuming the women were slightly less enthusiastic participants in these pursuits given each one required its own costume, with associated 30-60 minutes changing time. And Vanderbilt certainly pushed the envelope in a few places (takes a brave man to combine gold leaf AND embossed leather on the wall of his own bedroom … ROOOAAAARRRR … I sense had he seen the robes from our DC hotel he’d have been right on ’em). All in though, the place was rather (depressingly) lovely and, given that these guys were the Michael Jackson cum Madonna cum Posh Spice of their age, sufficiently remote to categorically ensure the privacy of the family (even the most determined paparazzi would find it tricky to sneak past the estate’s 1,800 employees).

Not quite next stop (but hey who’s going to grudge me that?) was Graceland, famed home of Elvis Presley. Now I’d love to say that this too, was absolutely comme il faut, but the poor guy had a certain handicap here (beyond the obvious addiction to prescription drugs and squirrel meat, that is). He last redecorated the place at the height of the decade that fashion forgot. Yep, the seventies. Now, even my beloved ma and pa, creatures of style and taste that they otherwise are, installed acreages of purple shagpile in that decade. So I think we all need to put on our retro disco glasses and look with a little love on the green shagpile coverings (floor, wall AND ceiling) of the Jungle Room and the exuberant African wrappings (floor, wall and ceiling all kind of combine here) of their basement pool room. After all, a King lived here and who would deny him a little nylon-based splendour?

So y’all, I guess the moral of the story is that with true American wealth comes taste, brilliance and the true friends with whom to enjoy your richly earned rewards.

The true American dream.

Uh huh huh.

It’s REAL Rustic

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It must be something to do with my accent. Whenever I telephone to book accommodation I seem to throw whoever it is at the other end into a fit of utter panic.

I like to think I sound reasonably normal. But now we are in North Carolina, and we have been in Virginia, and we are going to Kentucky. Whereas most accents involve the occasional mispronunciation of a vowel or two, in this part of the world entire new syllables and grammatical forms are invented round the campfire on long winter nights. As a result, perhaps, Lucy and I are most definitely not from round these here parts (y’all).

We have been staying in a series of beautiful countryside cabins and campsites, yet whenever I call to make a reservation I get a long speech as if the Queen was coming to stay:

It’s rustic (nervous) no, it’s really rustic … it was built in the 1930s (panicked) you have to walk ten yards to the bathroom … wifi only works near the main lodge (really panicked) you may have to run the hot tap a little before it heats up … the fridge is only small … (desperate sounding) the cooker runs on gas … your cellphone might (pause) not WORK!

Despite the physical hardship, we are sleeping ten hours a night. Life is tough.