Dave in America

Albuquerque was lots of fun. The town itself isn't that exciting, but the surrounding landscape is very impressive. We hired a car and drove around visiting extinct volcanoes surrounded by huge craggy lava flows full of caves, we saw a soda dam which is a great big rock formation made out of calcium carbonate bubbling up out of a natural spring, and we also saw a lot of the native american sites that are dotted around this area. The landscape is really impressive, some of it is rocky and dessert-like, some is full of pine forests, and all of it is almost completely deserted.

Whenever I have met Americans on this trip and told them I waa going to be travelling around the states on the Greyhound busses, they have looked kind of horrified and asked me why on earth I would want to do that. I think I might now understand why...

We were trying to get from Austin, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which involved a pretty horrific 16 hour journey with changes in Dallas and Amarillo. The busses, as per usual, were late, and me and Mike ended up on a different bus to Matt and Beth. Matt and Beth's bus left about 5 minutes before ours, but in between the two there was an accident on the interstate, and whilst the other two made the connection at Dallas, me and Mike got held up for an hour and missed it. On arrival at Dallas we were told that we had a 5 hour wait for the next bus, which would get us in to Amarillo in the early hours of the morning, and then involve another 5 hour wait for the connecting bus to Albuquerque. We wouldn't be arriving until late afternoon the next day, and would be pretty much wiped out for the next day as well after an epic 24 hour journey. Fortunately we had met a Buddist monk on the journey from Austin, who was up for sharing a taxi to Fort Worth. He also happened to have the number for a couple of airline companies, so me and Mike decided to ditch the Greyhound and fly to Albuquerque! The flight, fortunately, passed without major incident, and we got to the hostel at 11:15 that night. Unfortunately, we had not been able to get through to the hostel on the phone to let them know we were coming, and they had closed at 11:00, so we were left in a kind of dodgey looking area of town, with nowhere to stay! We ended up checking into a motel, which was just like in the movies, and was a very random way to end the oddest journey of my trip so far!

Austin was cool, a friendly, attractive city with lots of fun stuff to do. A highlight was heading down to the river a sunset to see 1.5 million Mexican Free Tailed bats fly out from under a bridge to go hunting for the night, a truely impressive sight. Spent a fun day on Saturday at Barton Springs which is a huge natural pool in which you can swim, do crazy dives off a spring board, and generally chill out in the sun. We achieved the impressive feat of passing a ball between ourselves 30 times without it falling in the water, it only took us about 2 hours! Also got a bit of cultural stuff in visiting the Capitol building, which is very impressive, similar to the one in Washington and actually taller. They have portraits of all the former govenors of Texas there, including of course, George W. Bush, who now wears attractive purple glasses and a green moustache thanks to a bit of subtle graffiti! Had a couple of cool nights out in Austin too- me and Mike saw a very good Country/Soul band. The only bad point of Austin was the hostel which was run with alarming similarity to a prison camp- we were locked out of our rooms for most of the day- some crazy woman had the gall to come in and try and wake me up before 10:00 every day. Its meant to be a hotel for goodness sake!

On Sunday arrived in New Orleans to begin the North American section of the trip. Met up with Matt and Beth in the hostel, was great to see them, and catch up on all the news from home. As much as I enjoyed travelling on my own, it makes a nice change to have people around I've known for more than a couple of days.

New Orleans is a really cool city. Most stuff goes on in the French Quarter, which is old and elegent, colourful wooden houses with iron balconies covered in flowers. Music here is brilliant, loads of proper fat old jazz men playing trumpets in tons of bars, and in the days there are loads of cool performers on the streets. It was Independence day on Monday, went down to the banks of the Mississippi to watch a firwork display then headed onto Bourbon Street to visit a few bars. Bourbon Street is crazy, full of neon signs and little kiosks selling cheep beers and disgustingly sweet cocktails of dangerous looking colours. As well as being the home of jazz, New Orleans is also the home of voodoo, and today we did an interesting walking tour to a historic Catholic cemetry, and met a practising voodoo preistess who talked untintelligably for a few minutes and made Beth inhale something from an umarked bottle. We are still waiting to see what effect this will have.

Back in Buenos Aires, still having tons of fun. Have had a lot of good nights out, there seems to be an inexhaustable range of places to go in the evenings, restaurants, bars, clubs, live music. Consequently I am very tired and I spend my mornings sleeping. Still managing to see the sights though, its a great city for wandering around in, loads of really distinctive areas, some very rich, some very poor. Its especially fun on the weekends, when there are loads of open air markets and street performers. Also been making the most of the galleries and museums, and on sunday I went to see ballet at the Teatro Colon which was brilliant. When I'm not out and about doing such cultural things, I spend a lot of time at the hostel making the most of the free ping pong and pool tables!