Grand Canyon and its more interesting neighbours

Travelling to far-flung destinations to see famous tourist attractions you´ve known about since primary school is OK, but for me the most thrilling aspect of travelling is happening upon amazing places which, through my ignorance, I´d never heard of. Before arriving in Australia the first time, I had of course seen numerous images of the opera house and harbour bridge. But the destination which blew me away was one I only found out about whilst in Australia - the Pinnacles Desert.

Attempting to maintain a decent level of ignorance before arriving drives Sonia insane, but keeps me excited. Our original road-trip plan was to drive from LA to Vegas, then to the Grand Canyon, perhaps see some other stuff near the Canyon, then head up to San Francisco and then back down to LA. San Francisco will have to wait until next time, because as soon as we arrived at the Grand Canyon it became obvious that the surrounding area in Utah and Arizona was stunning. We wouldn´t even be able to scratch its dusty red surface in our pitiful two weeks. We had entered the spectacular world photographed by Michael Fatali, who has the second-best job in the world (after Jeremy Clarkson). Unlike Clarkson, he doesn´t use his privileged position to drop skips on Maseratis, but instead spends time in the chilled-out villiage of Springdale and produces the most wonderful images of one of the most spectacular parts of the world I´ve ever visited. His compositions look great even on the internet, but to fully appreciate the awesome quality he achieves you need to see one of his big exhibition-size prints in the flesh. There was one in the hotel we stayed in near Zion national park, and it was shockingly good.

The Grand Canyon may be the most famous of the national parks in the area, but as usual it was by no means the most impressive. I think we visited in a good order - Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon, Bryce Canyon (and nearby Red Canyon), then Zion national park. Certainly if we´d done it the other way round the Grand Canyon would have been a disappointment, but as it came first (so benefitted from comparison with Disneyland and Vegas) I loved it.

If you were insisting on saving the best till last, of the places we visited I´d say save Monument Valley, which has a spiritual magnificence to which photos do no justice. You can take your own car inside, on red dirt roads. The Mustang loved them. Surprisingly, despite being a four seater convertible, there was no sign of scuttle-shake whatoever, and not so much as a shudder from the stiff chassis on these rough pot-holed dirt tracks. If only it was so good on tarmac!



With the possible exception of the Grand Canyon, these are all places of extraordinary calm. The vast openness, perfect clarity of air and light, comfortable temperature and almost total silence does for me what a nice beach does for a lot of people, but with the advantage of not having to pick sand out of my crevice afterwards. The best bit is that by the time we realised where they were, we didn´t have time to visit the Canyonlands or Arches national parks, which from a photographic perspective look like the highlight of the region. So we get to go back!

Mustang Road Trip

I love a road trip, and since a particularly ludicrous one in Australia a few years back I´ve been dying to get back behind the wheel for some motoring mayhem. The freedom of the open road with nothing booked ahead appeals more than any other form of travel. No airports, no bus-stations, no robbing taxi drivers, just a nice cruisy motor, the open road, and the unknown.

We left Rarotonga and spent a wet New Year´s eve in Disneyland. With that nonsense out of the way, it was time to get down to the real purpose of the American phase. Sadly we only had two weeks and, unlike Australia, didn´t break down, drive through any floods, share any barbeques with road-train drivers whilst waiting for rivers to subside, rescue broken-down backpackers, strap the transmission together with insulating tape or get any death threats from irate roadhouse owners five hundred miles from civilisation. We did tackle torrential rain, fog, darkness, dirt roads, ice, snow and endless straight tarmac, took our rented black convertible Mustang to meet some real Mustangs in the Navajo Indian reserve at Monument Valley and cruised the strips in LA and Vegas.


First challenge for the trip was to find a Mustang, which I had fancied trying out ever since the new model appeared in UK car mags about a year ago. The way car rental is organised made this difficult, and strikes me as bizarre. You don´t book a Cinema ticket for ¨Harry Potter or similar¨ or order ¨White bread or similar¨ from Tescos online only to end up with a banana. Why, then, do car rental websites only allow you to book a ¨Ford Mustang convertible or similar,¨ leaving the motoring enthusiast open to the horror of paying top dollar for their desired drive only to end up with a VW Beetle (a genuine alternative offered to me at LAX, honest!) I quickly recognised that booking in advance was fruitless. We would have to see what they had at the airport.

Arriving at LAX, it turned out the usual counters for Budget, Avis, Hertz etc found at most non-third-world airports (and some third-world ones too) were absent, and instead there was a barely audible free telephone with a number of poster advertisements for rental companies. Budget, Avis, Hertz etc either didn´t answer, cut me off, or had no idea whatsoever whether I would get a brand new Mustang, old model Mustang, VW Beetle or a banana. By the time Sonia and I and our baggage had been shuttle-bussed to a rental company, it would be too late to try elsewhere - we would just have to take whatever they had.

Hence I ended up hiring a car from the only agency which knew what cars they had, and definitely had a black, latest model Mustang convertible. They were called Rex Rent- a-Car. I presume the Rex/Wrecks pun was not intended, but was simply advance warning of their level of intelligence. Fortunately we didn´t have any accidents, breakdowns or thefts and delivered the car back in better condition than we found it (having put it through a carwash for photographic purposes!) so we didn´t have to test out whether the insurance we were paying $25 a day for actually existed.

First stop on our itinerary was Las Vegas. Vegas is not big and it´s not clever, but it´s certainly different. As the whole point of travelling is to see different things, Vegas is a must-see destination.

In Vegas the hotels are cheap, but you can´t so much as breathe without haemorraging cash. Much like Disneyland, it´s a little fortress-bubble of fantasy nonsense surrounded by wasteland. We stayed at the Luxor hotel, which has the most amazingly space-wasting design of any building I´ve ever seen. The main part of the hotel takes the shape of a large pyramid, all of which constitutes empty atrium space apart from a tiny bit taken up by actual rooms around the outer walls. We were ¨upgraded¨ to a more spacious ¨tower¨ room, which was largely indistinguishable from any ordinary Holiday Inn/Best Western standard offering. But the rooms are not the point of Vegas hotels. The point appears to be to create a bizarre fantasy land, bringing together world-famous sites such as the Pyramids, New York skyline and the Eiffel Tower, as well as fictional castles and palaces, but keeping any hint of reality out. So far, so Disneyland, except you can´t drink in bars with animatronic leopards at Disneyland. In fact, that is the only real difference I can think of - in Vegas they have added booze, gambling and topless dancing in amongst the taste-free plastic castles, concrete waterfalls, mechanical trees and wooden shows. It´s Disneyland for grown-ups - a magical getaway from all things real.

We ate excellent but expensive steaks and watched a badly executed replica of the London show Mamma Mia. In this production, one actor tried to carry off an upper-class English accent seemingly without any experience of the English or their accents other than studying the character Boycee from Only Fools and Horses. Other actors and actresses mauled their out-of-tune ways through ABBA classics but failed to be as lifelike as the rubber elephants at the bar in the MGM Grand.

With the Mustang standing by and open road ahead, we couldn´t leave quickly enough.

A Christmas Paradise

We spent Sonia´s birthday in New Zealand. Then we flew to Rarotonga and it was the day before Sonia´s birthday. The next day, it was her birthday again. This sort of bizarre temporal paradox explains why they put the date-line around the back end of the world where it doesn´t really matter.

I have been lucky enough to visit a few island paradises. Boracay in the Philippines stands out amongst the genre for its warm crystal-clear water, white powdery sand, and wonderful outrigger sailing boats silhouetted against perfect sunsets.

Personally I´m not a massive island paradise fan, so I´d bend the rules and put Fraser Island in Queensland at the top of my list. It´s not a proper champagne-sipping paradise as it involves camping and soap is banned, but is stunning and unique with its freshwater lakes, beached shipwreck and self-drive Landcruiser treks.



Rarotonga had its unique features too, including sensual traditional dance and amazingly friendly, laid back locals. For example, we missed the last hourly bus on our trip to the supermarket, but the off-duty bus-driver just happened to be passing, heard us talking about the bus, and gave us a lift home in his car. Our beach-front apartment was a bargain (view from our balcony pictured below) and Christmas day was crowned with a spectacular sunset.



On the other hand, the food was largely mediocre, the fine sand was mostly washed away by a series of storms last year and the island has the worst supermarket I´ve ever seen. Nevertheless, we chilled nicely for most of the week we were there.



Sadly we spent some of our time on the continuing quest to persuade Varig airlines to sell us one of their valuable and closely-guarded airline tickets. After several days of email silence (we couldn´t phone them as they only gave out 1-800 numbers which don´t work outside the USA), they emailed at midnight on Christas Eve. They demanded that we sent them a fax within 24 hours (ie zero working days) of copies of passports and a credit card, otherwise our flights would be cancelled. Fortunately we received this email in Rarotonga´s premier communications centre, the only place on the island with proper email access, international telephones and a fax machine. Unfortunately, they didn´t have a photocopier. After two hours driving our Nissan Micra convertible around every establishment on the island which looked open, it became clear that there wasn´t a single photocopier on the whole frikkin island. We began to consider ¨brass-rubbing¨ techniques. Evenutally we did find a photocopier, but by then the only fax machine at the communications centre had broken down. I leave the Varig saga there, as it only gets more tedious, but Sonia would be happy to relay the full story to anyone with five or six hours to spare.

Auckland Adventures

We stopped off in Auckland for just long enough to remind ourselves that the weather and prices in London are wonderful. Perhaps that is Auckland´s only role as a world travel destination (I had been labouring under the illusion that London fulfilled that feel-good role for the rest of the world).

The prices of a loaf of bread, piece of cheese or bottle of New Zealand wine in an Auckland supermarket were enough to convince me that London is not the rip-off it is made out to be. It was the middle of their summer, but for the whole three days we were there it was cloudy, cold, raining and miserable. As the only two local man-made structures of note are both in Australia, we weren´t expecing much excitement on the building front, but we were astonished by a 30 foot high semi-mechanical papier-mache Santa Claus clamped to the side of a high street department store. It was motionless apart from its left eye (which winked) and left index finger which curled menacingly. The overall impression was of a child terrifier from a made-for-TV Stephen King horror.

We spent most of our time in Auckland trying to find someone who worked for Varig airlines who was awake, had a working braincell and a working computer system. We failed.

Sonia did succeed in being crowned ¨miss backpacker 2005¨ in the dodgy hostel bar after we were lured there with promises of free New Zealand beer (which is actually very good). Two Brazilian girls dropped out because they couldn´t drink an alcopop in under 24 hours, so Sonia stepped in to wow the crowds with her chocolate-eating abilities.

Down Under Again

From Kuala Lumpur we flew to Sydney, which is starting to feel like a home away from home for me. The sun shone, the people smiled, and the only two man-made structures of any interest in the whole of Australasia still shone like beacons in the harbour. Flies still buzzed around our heads and there still weren´t any decent restaurants. Yes, this was definitely Sydney.

I revisited two mediocre old friends for the third time - the Central YHA backbackers hostel and the Blue Mountains. Whilst there is no excuse for revisiting the dreadful and overpriced Central YHA, last time I felt the Blue Mountains deserved a second chance after my first visit had been plagued by catestrophic torrential rain. The second time back, they failed to blow me away. Third time unlucky, as they were still rubbish. Fortunately I hadn´t been to Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon or Zion national park at the time, or I would have been less impressed. Nevertheless, the Blue Mountains area is huge and I´ve seen something new each time, including a couple of pretty waterfalls on this visit.



We relaxed for ten minutes on Manly beach, which was long enough for me to get horribly sunburned (although Sonia was fine). We drank wines in the Hunter Valley (although Sonia was more interested in the chocolate) and I spent ages trying to find a PC that worked in an internet cafe. It turned out that the only places in central Sydney with computers made this millenium are in chinatown, where the rooms are filled with local gamers of asian descent rather than the usual motley crew of foreign backpackers. All the menus were in chinese, but if you could guess the right character for ¨publish blog¨ instead of ¨delete all¨, it all worked quite decently.