No More Deaths

We´re reuinted again, in Hermosillo, Mexico.  Tomorrow is Mexican Day of Independance, and in honour of this so far there are some children blowing trumpets under a tree in the main square.  By midnight tonight it's supposed to get more exciting...

This blog is mostly to try and put out some thoughts about our experiences with No More Deaths in Arizona.  Please click the link if you want more background on the organization- its much more comprehensive and succinct than we could be anyway.

We each spent two weeks in a camp about 13 miles from the U.S/Mexico border.  Whilst No More Deaths run dozens of different projects on both sides of the border and work with undocumented people at every stage of their interactions with the state, the day to day routine in camp is one of taking water and food out to various points in the desert, or taking hikes along trails carrying food, water and medical supplies.  The water, food, socks and other supplies from the various 'drops' move as people pass and pick them up,

and the work feels incredibly valuable as, put simply, people die in the desert all the time, thanks to a border policy that has purposefully created this situation in order to control (though not, whatever they may say, to stop) undocumented migration.

13 miles doesn't sound like very far.  In one sense, it isn't.  But the terrain is very hilly which can double the distance walked, and add to that the facts that people travel at night, sick, tired, dehydrated, and that their walk begins long before the border and ends much further north than No More Deaths are camped, and you have a lethal situation.  Before you even begin to introduce drug cartels, competing smugglers, bandits, rape and of course the Border Patrol.

Many people probably don't think of the desert as hilly- or green.  But at the moment, it's monsoon season and its both.

The monsoon brings more water, but its own dangers from flooding or disappearing trails and slippery rocks.  And pretty much all the plants which excitedly start blooming and growing are in some way spiky or sharp.

For us, what this meant was about ten days, with training and discussions either side, in the camp, waking early and spending our days hiking, stocking drops or keeping things running in the camp.

It's hard to draw any general conclusions or thoughts.  It was interesting to experience a totally different border to what we're used to, and to see how the organisation operates.  J would also like some credit for not completely flipping out about having to share a camp with a few of these:

We also met a lot of inspiring and interesting people (and some weird and scary wildlife).  Two weeks felt like just enough time to get your feet on the ground, figure out how things worked and start to get to know people.  But if we'd stayed any longer the temptation to get totally absorbed and stay a LOT longer would be hard to resist.

Anyway, then J said goodbye to everyone and took a bus down to meet C, who has composed a few poems about pelicans but not been eaten by any, and spent his time learning how to make these

out of aluminium cans, using only nail scissors.  A tourist paid 40 pesos for two of them.  If and when we return to the UK, anyone reckon we could make a fortune selling ones made out of Irn Bru cans to Americans and calling them Flowers of Scotland?

Well.  Tone successfully lowered from humanitarian aid work, we're off to explore Mexico.  It´s pretty big.  This morning someone let us use their computer and bought us nommy tacos, so we're hoping thats a good sign.

And now for something completely predictable

With J out in the desert where everything seems able to draw blood, I am left in Mexico and in control of the blog.  We shall probably write something about the desert together when reunited so I shall mull some of my solo ventures in text form

First, I waved farewell to J and went for a stroll through down town L.A. in search of the Greyhound terminal.  Wait, hold that.  First of all the library. L.A. library was very big and had lots of books which of course makes me happy.  However the first thing you see is a library store, there are lots of little ´galleries´for a dozen or so pictures, and everything is reached by escalator.  It kinda felt like a giant, sterile mall.  I´d go further that and say it´s a mall.  Why do airports have galleries and malls have art exhibits anyway? Who are they trying to fool about the bland, soulless nature of their existence?  You can´t install these things and claim the intellectual and poetic credit for them because you squeezed them into one of the identical unit (whose only merit can be described in cubic metres)  between some post-ironic(1) clothing outlet were people pay lots of money to look like they haven´t (it´s called Dereliquet I´m told)  and a stall selling food whose origin is indistinct but can be entirely eaten without having to chew.  They had orchestra halls and galleries in concentration camps.  Incidentally I´ve been reading some of Tadeusz Borowski´s short stories.  Seriously recommend them in all their screwed up horror.

So, I left the mall which posed as a library, and went down town.  This was all fine, though police were on every street corner.  Not in a organised way and nothing was happening it seemed, just lots of cops, including in the disturbing offspring of a police van and a hummer.  I was not allowed to take a picture of it, which is odd because it´s not like the thing was undercover anyway.  Anyway off I went in my Greyhound to Arizona for desert aid with No More Deaths,(2) about which I will say more when J is back from her time there.

So skip two weeks (or a fortnight if you prefer) forward, I meet J for about five hours to catch up and then it is the 1st of September when I have to be out of the Land of the Free(TM).  I am only 100km (signs are back in km here, something which I have no doubt upsets many an right-wing Fox news host.)  from the border which is eminently doable.  Even with distractions (3).  Greyhound may only go to the U.S. border apparently but there is another company will take me all the way to Hermosillo the Sonoran capital and far from the border.  But then it turns out that union fat-cats are trying to get me unceremoniously cast from America by having a public holiday which the treacherous bus company observes. Which seems unfair given the fruit-picking we did we did in Canada (which I say freely since even if the long bright red coated arm of the Canadian law enforcement were to pursue us, well, they´d be Mounties (who aren´t even mounted these days).  In short it´s Labo(u)r Day weekend.  This is no problema (see, Spanish?  Oh yes, for those who don´t know already I have zero (or cero) Spanish.  J has all the language skills, in every language.)  So, I got to the border with the aid of labo(u)r wrath risking Greyhound, which I proceed to cross on foot.  An American asks me what´s in my rucksack.  He further asks me how long I intend to be in Mexico and what my business there is.  I reply that my business with Mexico is between Mexico and myself, that as an American his job today is to thank me for my custom and wish me a good day.  He counters with an investigation of my passport.  It is legal.  However he doesn´t stamp it and I am sent on my way.  He also claims that if I want back into the U.S. I have to stay 30 days in Mexico which is very much NOT(4) what the guards said on the Canadian border coming in.  It´s almost like they don´t know what they are doing.

Through a turnstile was Nogales.  There was no Mexican customs/immigration.  Since I´m now several hundred kilometres past the border and have been so for nearly a week, it is now fair to say I appear to have accidentally entered Mexico illegally.  Which is a lot easier than going the other way across that line.  I´m not even sure who to report this to at this point.

Anyway, unsure of hitching around here, the bus to Hermosillo was very cheap.  It is the capital of the region and features some pretty colonial buildings (Colonial is a style of building here I guess, like Gothic or Victorian, but I still wince when tourist things say how ´wonderfully Colonial´a town is).  The bus that took me there only went north and south so I wandered around a bit as it grew dark, unable to discern where the town centre was. And the people I asked gave different directions.  Eventually I found a hidden corner outside the front of a bank (which given it was Saturday it wouldn´t be open tomorrow) and nestled down.  At one point 7 pick-up trucks with cops went by with sirens wailing.  They have a little frame thing in the back that 3-4 cops can stand holding on to, which makes cost effective and temperature sense i guess, but it did give them a kind of militia look.  Waving their guns around added to that as well.  Other than that it was a quiet if twitchy night and my elbows were bitten some two dozen times by mosquitoes in the night.  The next day I find the centre of town and the tourist info hut, but it didn´t open for several hours which gave me a chance to hang about, enjoy cold, cheap iced tea and chat to street folk.   The tourist info person seemed confused by the idea of the library and all commercial Internet sources were shut as it was Sunday so I just found the bus station and took a bus out west to Bahia Kino.

On an unrelated note, you know those people who leave their estate and money etc.to their pets? Do the pets pay taxes on those things?  Where does that fall into ´No taxation without representation´ arguments?

I arrived and almost immediately people took pity on me and gave me tasty food.  The Gulf of California (which at no point touches the State of California though you can see Baja California across the Gulf when the weather is nice) is near body temperature warm even at night.  I set up the inner part of the tent on the beach as two separate people told me this was fine.  Then a storm hit about 2am.  10cm (that´s 4in for imperialists) of rain fell in two hours .  Everything was soaked and I just slung the remains of my tent and belonging´s in the ¨shelter¨of a villa´s wall and hunkered down till morning beneath the tent fly I had neglected to use.  Though the tent would have simply collapsed in the wind anyway.  The following night I slept under a trailer to protect me from the storm, which never came, but many mosquitoes did.  The following night I went into my tent as soon as it got dark at 7:30pm and sweated so much I think I lost weight.  Sitting on a beach has proven surprisingly difficult and stressful.  Not to mention having to carry all my possessions with me and move each night as several people with enough English to talk to me have warned me that people intend to rob me in the night.  I´m seriously confused as to who chooses a beach vacation at this point.  But I am trying to balance the bugs, heat and storms as beaches are one of the few places I´d feel confident setting up a tent without worrying it´s someone´s land.

Bahia Kino is a weekend beach for people from Hermosillo and Arizona.  This means that during the week I basically have it to myself.  There are pictures but I can´t get them off the camera here it seems.  I´ll work on that for next time. There´s hills and cliffs as well, with many pelicans and turkey vultures.(5)  While trying to explain to someone that I had seen two vultures eating the washed up corpse of a blue-footed booby, I had a bit of a language fail.  They didn´t understand me saying ´buitre´ which is vulture so I showed them my dictionary and pointed at the word.  Except they read the word underneath and confusion reigned for a surprisingly long time of their belief that I was claiming to have witnessed a blue-footed booby (of which there are none here so that was also difficult) being devoured by two vulva on the beach.                

So I have about another week before J and I are reunited.  I aspire to find some relaxing time (and a laundry place) between now and then. So not much will happen (hopefully), I mean looking at the above not much did happen last week.  But the blog is to be about our journey and I think accurately covers what travelling with me at this time would have been like.  Feel free to email J your condolences/sympathies if you wish.
  
       

Footnotes

(1) I have been wondering about what on earth post-ironic is supposed to mean.  I´ve considered that it exists simply because being ironic is so 90´s, but I am growing to opinion that it in fact means reactionary, conservative, sexist, racist white male who´s too much of a coward to just be a conservative like the non-college educated/living in New York, London, Montreal or Paris reactionary white males would call themselves.

(2) People´s remains found in the desert last year - 183

(3) Sonoran Dogs!  The link explains all.  All except why I eat it.  This cartoon does that.  Which brings up another point.  This is not the first time I have been haunted by the eerie description of my life and inner mental life by Wondermark. It is one of several sources who do this to me.  It is very distressing because you think you are a unique individual, a combination of genetics and experiences that cannot be replicated, that is the proverbial new thing under the sun and that your experience is thus both singular and valuable.  You later discover that not only are your thoughts, feeling, loves, hates and experiences are not only not unique, but are readily predictable and transferable into cartoon format.  Or that Raskolnikov stole your life 150 years before you lived it.  Not that I´ve killed an old lady, but if I did do so, I´d probably be thinking of Napoleon. Or many parts of David Foster Wallace´s writings.  And to top finding your personal thoughts and dreams stolen by people now dead, it is distressing that they are doing it so much better and more articulately and clearer than you could.  Of your own feelings!  I´ve written to David Malki about this and await his reply.  

(4) If you enter the U.S. (even when transiting) any time spent in Canada or Mexico thereafter is counted as time spent in the U.S. If you then return from Canada or Mexico and enter the U.S. again, this does not mean you have another 90 days to use. 

(5) Turkey vultures are a lot like punks it has been explained to me recently. They are great scavengers and never really kill anything.  In fact, their beaks are unable to pierce many animals hide and so they circle around it (since they often spot them first thanks to their good vision) until a hawk or some such shows up to do the lacerating job. They have no real predators, except for other birds of prey that sometimes eat their young.  To help prevent this, turkey vultures make their nests intentionally diusgusting, leaving piles of half-digested rotting meat around it.  If this fails and a predator does land at the nest, the vulture projectile vomits in the face of the attacker. 

Lots of horses later...

... I'm in Tucson.  Between the friend I stayed with and some other friends of hers I got lots of riding and related stuff in last week, and it was great fun.  I learnt new things and enjoyed the gorgeous trails.  Those of you who are interested, and you know who you are, I'm sure we'll chat about it more, but I won't bore everyone else with too many details!

I explored a bit too.  Last Sunday I went for a beautiful bike ride in Long Beach with my host's family, and enjoyed meeting them all.  On Friday we tripped up to the Griffith's Park Observatory, which is actually a really cool place.  For absolutely free, you can look round enough exhibits to last you hours and get lots of info out of the friendly staff.  The shows in the planetarium are not killer expensive either, and we enjoyed the one we went to see a lot.

It's also a pretty building and there's some nice views from up there:

We also did some film watching at home and it was apparently a week to discover a bunch of very cool women, in various ways.  I hadn't seen Rabbit Proof Fence or The Hunger Games before and they're both really good, not least because of the strong, moral girls who star- both the actresses and characters are amazing role models.  Obviously they're totally different films, one being based on a gritty true story about colonialism and good ol' social services, and the other a fantastical action, but they should both be compulsory viewing nonetheless (and both contain themes about what big sisters will do for their little ones, which as everyone knows is a lot :D).  And I'd never even heard of Temple Grandin, let alone known there was a film about her.  She (unless I'm the only one who didn't know!) is an autistic woman famous for her work in animal rights and in changing the US slaughter industry, and later for her autism advocacy.  She's quite something, but the film about her is worth watching just for the incredible piece of character acting from Clare Danes who plays her.

When we went to view a horse for a friend of my host's, the woman selling him turned out to be pretty interesting too- she works as a weapons trainer and in medieval combat productions.  She's also friends with one of my favourite authours from when I was younger, who wrote books about lady Knights!  And now I've met one, or the closest you get these days, who knows her.  It was fun.

More fun than what happened the morning before I left, anyway, which was both my host's dogs getting skunked and then merrily careering around the house spreading the smell.  We had to hose them and scrub them with a hydrogen peroxide mix, this all being at 6am whilst needing to leave for a show.  I take it all back about enjoying North American wildlife.

The smell was pretty faint by that evening, and we said goodbye over chocolate wine and then yesterday morning I took a bus to Tucson (hitching is not only illegal in Arizona but seems to actually be enforced that way, and I also had no clue how I was going to escape the mass that is LA), through desert and rising heat and lightning storms at sunset.  My Couch Surf host here is lovely, and has even cut my hair for me!

So far, I like Tucson (based on one day wandering around).  It has some pretty buildings although overall its quite functional, nice diverse restaurants and shops, easy to use buses, and a very friendly library (back in one again!).  Also, cacti:

I've seen these exact leaves in the supermarket- haven't tried them yet but I'm sure it will come up.

It is hot, though.  But that probably goes without saying.

Los Angeles

For the next two weeks, you're only hearing from J.  Due to that very bald and angry guard giving me extra time in the US, but the organisation we wanted to volunteer for in Arizona having very limited resources/space at the end of August (because we were late applying, natch), C and I are going to be spending two weeks each with No More Deaths, but at different times.  On the 1st of September he has to leave the country and I'll be joining him in Mexico a fortnight later.

So I have to amuse myself in Southern California for a while.  C having left me alone for the proverbial five minutes, no one will be surprised to learn I've found some horses.

After our last post, we spent one more night star and shooting-star gazing, sleeping out by the roadside near the top of a hill off Route 1.  It was completely magical, amazingly warm, and we woke up here:

Right above that famous pacific coast fog- felt like you could have stepped onto it.

Then we hitched south, and arrived in LA that evening- in this:

which is a 1962 Chevy Station wagon with all the original lowest option insides.  A proper rattly old American roadtripmobile.  It was great.

We spent a day mostly in our hostel, swimming in the pool and eating and drinking all the free stuff they handed out- including champagne though it was not unlimited!  For such a cheap place you really did get a lot, even if it was basic and tacky (tacky'n'proud, I think, and we were in LA after all so thoroughly enjoyed it).  One theory is that the downside was the area it was in, where apparently we'd get shot if we set foot.  While we were there (notably unshot) they told us not to go Downtown or we'd get eaten alive.  Downtown had their own bogey-district.... and so on.

I don't think I'm a reckless person.  I'm also well aware that I'm visibly a tourist and as such easy pickings, and also that people really do get caught in the cross fire of random shootings in LA.  But not every day, right?  And thousands of people actually call this city home and spend every day here.  At times in my life I've realised that I've wandered down the wrong alley- so I've wandered out again. sharpish.  I'm not saying bad things don't happen and that they aren't sometimes concentrated in a few places, and that its worth having a bit of common sense and being aware when you are a potential invitation to all kinds of things.   But a lot of people seem to have got a lot of fear from somewhere, and be suffering more from that than from anything happening.  And they're rarely the people who are actually in danger.  And terrible things can happen absolutely anywhere, you cannot completely protect yourself no matter what districts you avoid.

With C gone (at least, he headed towards the Greyhound station.  Who knows if I'll ever see him again?! :p) I headed up to Glendale to meet an old friend and trainer of one of my room-mates and co-students from when I lived in Maryland.  She (the roomie) is not in California any more, though she is making lots of art you can look at here if you like pretty stylised ponies :).  But she has very kindly set me up with an amazing lady who runs a stables out here and I spent yesterday riding and meeting all the people and horses.

Today I dutifully explored Hollywood, with that sensation of ticking something off a list.  It was ok, but getting around LA without a car is time consuming and difficult which doesn't encourage aimless exploring- it really is a massive, sprawling place.

Back to the ponies tomorrow, I think!

San Francisco and some of Route 1....

and Sore Knees.  Or to be more exact, just one knee, J's right one.  Nothing to panic about (hopefully), but during hiking or heavy bag carrying something has tweaked and going up or down steep hills is a bit tricky.  We mention this only because it's limited things we've been up to in the last wee while- especially with volunteering in Arizona coming up and hoping to actually rest and get better rather than just not get any worse.

(And I've been REALLY GOOD.  I AM RESTING THE HELL OUT OF THIS KNEE.  SO THERE TO EVERYONE WHO THINKS I DON'T LOOK AFTER MYSELF- J

Saying nothin'...- C)

This in mind, we breakfasted on Dim Sum (otherwise known as Nom Nom) and went for a slow, leisurely explore of a couple of districts of San Francisco on Tuesday- mainly Mission and Haight.  Lots of Spanish to practise in Mission, and Haight was pretty but mostly just a street of shops.  If you know the right people, it could well still be the hotbed of alternative culture it was in the 60s, but to walk through it mostly just makes you think of the wisdom of Danny.

Continuing the Withnail and I theme, that night's Couch Surf host's band were named after a famous scene- and are well worth a listen.  He also found us some cheap and tasty Thai dinner, and C explored China Town's markets more the next day while J rested her knee and typed bits of novels and emails that might as well have been.

China Towns are interesting.  They're so much more samey all over the world than other emigrant-gathered areas.  But there must be differences between them.  And is there something about East Asian culture that has caused people to so often set up that way?  Or is there something about Western Culture that provides the niche?  Can someone recommend a book to answer these questions?

That evening we went to a Mission district political resource centre to see a documentary about education in Arizona.  It is a very interesting film, inspiring and depressing in equal measure, and well worth a watch even if you never intend to visit Arizona.

On Thursday we went to the Beat Museum, once again getting Student Rate to an attraction because we are young and scruffy and hardly going to refuse it when it's offered.  We both enjoyed it a lot, maybe more than we were expecting to- and does everyone know On The Road is a movie now?  Everyone who cares anyway?  Yep?  Just those of us who've been hitching for two months surprised by this?  OK.  And looks like it might actually be pretty good, judging by the director.

What is also out now in movie format is Dr Seuss' The Lorax.  This was not in the Beat museum, however there has been a few Lorax related things on our travels, from people's tattoos, to being in various children's sections of the bookstores we always end up in, to large sand sculptures in the centre of downtown Portland.  We cannot vouch for the movie but if you haven't read the book it is really good and has a pretty cool message.  Suppose that goes for On The Road as well but you know...

On Thursday evening we moved over to another Couch Surf host in Oakland.  We got on really well, and had a couple of lovely evenings with comedy shows, political chats and amazing food (a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of cookies and cakes and other baked marvels).  Also local beers and California's famous $2 "Two Buck Chuck" wine (Not as bad as you might think.  Got a real cork and everything.)

We stayed an extra night with our Oakland friends, as we had nowhere else worked out and they are lovely people.  But on Saturday, still with nowhere to stay and J's knee still not great, we decided to hit the road sooner than planned*.

That crazy old woman in Aberdeenshire was right, and when you leap into something, things do work out.  The first night of our travels on the completely spectacular Route 1,

 a friendly local from Half Moon Bay let us camp on his field.  The next, we went swimming on a beach south of Santa Cruz, where a boat made of concrete ran aground (perhaps unsurprisingly?) on its maiden voyage

and then later, a hitch drove us to meet a friend of his and we all ended up in a nearby campsite with some traveling surfers watching shooting stars in a bottomless sky and communing with a raccoon family who were deeply irked we'd intruded so near their own personal tree which they use for peaking out of like the adorable cartoon characters they definitely aren't.

We stuck with our companion today, and got breakfast at Denny's, making J ridiculously excited as its not only a very Americana thing to do but a line in a song by her favourite Reggae band (details upon request).  We then and returned to our original hitch's house, where this is posted from.  It's full of welcome and good conversation, and also a rabbit called Death Ray- look:

We'll camp again tonight and hope for more meteorites, and then carry on the road tomorrow.  The guy currently hosting us mentioned at one stage that he was driving us past several towns on our way and we might 'miss them'.  We were genuinely a bit confused.  We're not here for the towns- it's the highway that's famous right?



     *For anyone who does not know, hitch-hiking is a lot easier on a pulled ligament than you might imagine.  The 'hiking' part is minimal and the sitting in cars or on bags inventively insulting people who won't pick us up part is quite large.

We're officially 'drifters' now...

This week has been even more up and down than usual.  Breakfast at golf clubs one minute and homeless in Berkeley watching films about brain transplants the next (haven't we all been at that stage in life, right?).

It all begins (well, since last time we wrote but that sounds less dramatic) when some very wonderful friends of C's family came to pick us up from the motel in Sacramento.  We were whisked straight off to explore the beautiful Lake Tahoe-

 it really is so gorgeous and clear you just want to dive straight in, but sadly you're not allowed to because there's speedboats everywhere and you'd end up getting smacked in the head like a manatee.  Mutter grumble from J, who thinks swimming should be proritised everywhere, not stuck in little corners.

After a lovely drive around the lake we went back to our friends' house and were treated to an amazing meal followed by a trip to a yogurt place, where you get to fill your yogurt pot from very exciting squirty things on the wall and then cover it in fruit or brownies or other exciting things.  In the morning, post tasty breakfast at the nearby club, we bent our host's ear off about politics so much that he dumped us by the side of the road pointing towards Yosemite national park.  Figuring we weren't doing much for the next few days we thumbed a lift into the valley there.

Yosemite is beautiful.  Although hitch hiking is pretty normal, without a car you are a bit more limited to hikes you can get to from the central valley.  We did a couple of these after luckily managing to find a campsite, sweating profusely in the heat but it was well worth it for the views.



The valley is a strange place to be though.  There's stores, a luxury hotel, a swimming pool, a creche (why would you take your kids out somewhere like that and then pay someone else to spend time with them?!).  One company has monopoly on all these things so they're pretty expensive too.  And its interesting how many people don't actually venture out of the valley and on any hikes- even though lots of them are not very hard work.

We camped with some lovely people though, a father and son on the son's first camping trip and a tiny person from Cleveland, Ohio (Despite us being from another continent, people seem more startled to meet her).  Having had nothing but success with tiny people from Cleveland before, we invited her to join us in hitching out when we found out she'd been stuck in Yosemite for three weeks and seemed to have a hairline fracture in her foot.

With three people and between us huge amounts of luggage there was a good chance hitching was going to go slower- but a guardian angel soon descended and drove us all the way to his hometown of Stockton.

Stockton, CA, is not recommended as a tourist destination.  It used to be the murder capital of America but now does not even have that claim to fame is just very high in murders, along with unemployment and general social decay.  Also, if you go there you keep having this interaction.

Stockton resident: "WHY IN GOD'S NAME ARE YOU HERE?  LEAVE!  LEAVE!  THE FREEWAY IS THAT WAY!"

You: "Is it really that bad?"

Resident (calls across parking lot to someone not previously involved) "Dude, would you live here if you had any choice?!"

Resident 2: "Hell no!  No one in their right mind would!"

and so on and so forth.

In fairness, we only heard gunshots ('Stockton crickets') once in the whole couple of hours we were stood chatting with our lift's friends outside a store.

And in contrast to its reputation, thanks to our lovely lift, we had a great time in Stockton!  Good company, a nice dinner, and then he took us out to his friend's very nice house a bit out of town to stay the night in style*.  We may even meet the folk from Stockton again in Mexico, and indeed the lovely I. from Ohio has promised us she will be there, and now it's on the internet so she can't go back on it :p.

The next day it was off to Berkeley where I. had a lift share in the morning to get her on the way home.  This is where we ended up wandering the streets and watching a film about a mad scientist and women and cats and things that was being projected in a parking lot.  Such is life (which is a famous saying amongst bush rangers).

We camped out and in the morning it was time for us to split with our new friend and bother some more upstanding members of society- this time old friends of J's parents.  We had a great day with them, eating lovely food, bookstore exploring, and setting the world to rights.  They even dropped us off on the doorstep of a Hostelling International hostel where we spent last night.

The Wharf and Pier 39 are a big thing in San Francisco, so we wandered down there yesterday evening and ate clam chowder out of bowels made of sourdough (the real challenge is can you eat the bowl as well, we being as tight as anyone raised in Scotland were determined to succeed but a lot of people seemed to be abandoning half a loaf, making you wonder why they don't just get a normal bowl).  Apart from this, and the sea lions that gather near Pier 39, there's not huge amounts to recommend from the area.  You kind of have to go there to see what its like, but its madly crowded and busy and everything is expensive or kitsch.  The sea lions, though, are actually pretty special.

This is Professor Snugglesworth.  He and his team are conducting important research into whether or not humans are intelligent.  Results so far are poor.  Humans show no ability to scratch any part of their body with their back flippers, and rather than language seem only capable of making 'ooo' and 'ahh' noises.  Perhaps with patience they could manage simple tasks such as giving Professor Snugglesworth fish.

In our defence, the researcher and his team were pretty adorable.

The hostel had no space tonight so we are hoping the magic of Couch Surfing will help us out, whilst San Francisco seems to be just as hot as anywhere else the state, not the cold and fog we were promised- hopefully it'll start soon because J was quite looking forward to a respite from constant sun cream and sweating five minutes after showering.

-------------


*NB: This came about after a phonecall he made whilst we were all in the car, not telling his friend he was on speakerphone.  It went like this:

Driver: "Hey man.  I'm on my way back to Stockton, and I have a favour to ask you."

Friend, sounding long-suffering: "You picked up a drifter didn't you?"

Driver (pause, then):  "I didn't pick up 'A' drifter... I picked up three."

Long and dusty roads

Turns out Boise is a lot of fun!  It was also horribly hot.  We spent our first day there exploring- alleys covered in local artists' projects, live music in the main square after five, a basque quarter... where it turns out you can get two large sangrias for $4.  Anyone who's had the dubious honour of observing us in such a situation can fill in the blanks and anyone who hasn't doesn't need to start now.

Boise's got nice local ales- we had a few during our stay and also found local Huckleberry Wine.  C hardly got any of the wine though, because he was horribly ill by that point due to a severe case of foolishness.  More on that later.

One of the 'Boise' things to do is float down the river in a hired raft or big tube with a sealed base.  It's not too expensive and it was horribly hot, so we trotted down there happily on Thursday morning, having left behind everything we didn't want soaked, including C's shoes.  Turns out in order to hire one of the tubes you need photo ID and a credit card, not something we'd bothered to stuff into the little plastic bag of money in J's bra.

But you can BUY inner tubes there, in cash.  Only obviously it's twice as expensive.  But not if you have the frankly genius idea of just buying one tube and somehow fitting you both into it.

So this is how we came to be bobbing down the river for a couple of hours, sipping a homebrewed beer from a friend of our host, chilled in the river, scraping C's butt off rocks on several occasions, soaked to the skin and looking a bit shabby compared to the raft and paddles outfits everyone else had.  We only capsized once though and it was lots of fun :).

And having worked up an appetite we'd planned to get a burger later.  I had a nice bbq veggie burger.  Slowly.  It was good- J

But...

I wanted to visit the Midwest or generally non-coastal States for many reasons.  Primarily, people told me not to.  Also this;

which I'm pretty sure is not a direct quote.  Another reason was the snobby coasts always say nothing is happening out here, but as you can see they were wrong.  Another is to easily find the food we think of when we think of 'American';

This is at Big Jud's.  It's a 1lb burger, with 1lb of tater tots and a litre of soda (good ol' crime against nature and trading standards Mountain Dew in this case).  You have to eat it all within 30 minutes.  Why?  Because you can.  Then they put your photo on the wall as a cautionary tale to children.  There's a 2lb burger challenge, which if completed, gets you a bigger picture, a T-shirt, the burger for free and a place among the eating-disorded 'elite'.

Because let's be clear about this, these challenges are symptomatic of a seriously bizarre attitude to eating.  It's not fun.  You don't savour or even enjoy the food you're eating.  It's analogous (though not nearly as awesome) as the attitude of some of the broncho riders we met up in William's Lake at the Stampede, who weren't working with the horses as part of a team, the phrase they used was 'fighting a horse'.  This is fighting a burger.  There are issues with corporations telling us it's manly to eat certain food, but they aren't as relevant or upsetting as the general issue of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and idea of 'food'.  Food isn't about moral issues, with "tempting treats" and "good" or "bad" food, nor is food something to be conquered and 'defeated'.  Speed eating 3lbs of food is fighting not only the food but your own body and hormones when they say things like 'Stop...STOP!'  I would also make clear this isn't a problem of the central States, it's everywhere in the West, like the end of Easy Rider taking place in the South, (if you haven't seen it, do) it's a geographical coincidence I was here.

All this said: I am not often compared to Julius Caesar; he was a tactical genius who plucked out all his body hair with tweezers and precipitated the change of a decaying republic into a dictatorial empire.  I am none of these things (yet... I might get some body hair soon).  BUT...I veni-d, I vidi-d and I totally vici-d that burger.  Yes, I am being hypocritical right now, but I paid for it in feeling very ill. -C

We spent a nice evening with some of the Boise Couchsurfing crowd and set off early Friday morning for California.  Well, Winnemucca was the goal of the day (and if you've heard of Winnemucca, you either live there or have heard the Johnny Cash song 'I've been everywhere', there is no other good reason to have).  We got picked up by a really friendly rancher near the Idaho-Oregon border who took us quite a distance, explaining the history and locals of the area (the least densely populated county in the lower 48, apparently).  He showed us his farm, complete with Sweetcheeks the free-range yard pig (natch),

He kills rattlesnakes... 

   and a hike up a hill that gave us a beautiful view of the surrounding desert.

And then we hit the road again.  And that desert went on and on and on.  Hours of driving with nothing but sage brush.  Highly flammable sage brush- we passed half a million acres of blackened ground from a recent wildfire.  Nothing but scorched ground, ash and dust devils as far as you could see.  Tom Petty kept us good company until our next lift's cd player broke, and by then we were in Nevada and casinos had leapt out of the ground all around us.

Our lift was headed to California himself, stopping in Reno for the night- so we got a lot further than we'd thought.  Then we got to Reno and discovered that camping is prohibited ANYWHERE within city limits (with a tent.  Not an RV, of course), including in campsites (we also discovered that if we did shoot a man in Reno, we'd have been doing him a favour - C).  We'd have been a bit stuck but our lift thought this was as ridiculous as us and we just drove into the mountains (Donner Pass, with all its great camping heritage, famous for pioneer cannibalism, obviously a great choice)  for a while and camped in a quiet spot.

In the morning he brought us to Sacramento, over the pass.

There's not a huge amount here (and that's according to people we met from here), like a lot of official State Capitals.  But we had an explore of the Old West preserved bit of town, known as Old Sac (heh), and spent a day in parks reading and talking to a lot of street people.  It's scary to see how little of a safety net there is for people here.  Not that anywhere is great, certainly not what we're used to.  But talking to people about the laws and support here it really feels like it would be pretty easy to get stuck in a horrible situation.  For instance, if you've ever had a drugs conviction (ever.  That's everything from really vulnerable recovering addicts to people caught with weed when they were young) you don't get any form of social security.  Being in mind you do if you're just out of jail for murder, this seems a bit tough and also unconstructive.  We met a lot of people while we were sitting outside the library which was closed due to staff furloughs- this is where they give them compulsory unpaid leave because it's a form of cutbacks the unions apparently can't fight.  Somehow they still had the money to send 90 cars of riot cops against about half a dozen Occupiers last month.

In our lift's car we'd seen a very cheap coupon for a motel here, and yesterday when we learnt we couldn't meet up with nearby friends until Tuesday we decided to look it up online, and for about $20 each we are spending a couple of nights with a real bed and air conditioning and stuff.  The guy who owns the place is very nice.  He's loaned us his laptop and took a reduced deposit based on the money we had at the time.  It's nice to have some time to just relax but without being in someone else's house or hot sun.

To anyone who made it to the end of this one, well done!  Sorry, there's no prize.  But at least you don't feel sick from eating a pound of meat and far too many tater tots.