The more I travel, the more I find myself wishing that I were a smoker.
Is that a strange thing to wish for? Smokers often profess the desire to quit, but you don’t exactly hear a lot of non-smokers say “ya know, I’m thinking that starting to smoke might be a good habit to pick up.”
Posted in Random Thoughts, Travel
I’ve been trying to like Auckland, really. As cities go, its not a bad one: it’s relatively clean, the people are nice, there’s a decent public transit system (with the notable exception of the lack of a good link between the airport and the CBD).
It’s just… there’s not a hell of a lot to do in Auckland.
Posted in New Zealand, Travel
Last September I found myself in one of my favorite places: Yellowstone National Park. I spent a little over a week there, camping, looking at thermal features, and hiking all over the park.
It had been an interesting summer prior to my arrival: two park visitors had been killed by grizzly bears. The first, apparently, was by a female who was defending her cub. The second, and more disturbing attack, was on a solo hiker, and no one knew the motivation on the bear’s part. Worse, the bear actually fed upon and partially buried the kill, which is unusual as bears are generally more interested in your lunch than you (humans being big, more-calorie-burning prey). Sadly, that bear will be tracked and destroyed.
It was into this country that I went hiking. Solo.
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Sydney, as much as I’m loathe to say it, rather reminds me of Los Angeles: large, spread-out, populous. The people are fashionable, the politics liberal, the public transit…
Well, I can definitely say that the public transit is better.
The skies outside the window of my carriage were steel gray, the same rain-leaden clouds that had been overhead for the past few days, creating brilliantly bright lightening over Melbourne at night. We rolled past fields of dry yellow grasses and bright green ones, pastures filled with cattle and soggy sheep. Here and there were eucalyptus trees, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters, reminding me of the oaks that grow on the grassy hillsides of the Coast Range back in California. All the colors, from the grasses to the dark green eucalyptus trees and their pale tan peeling bark, had been dulled, rendered in that green-gray light that comes with a storm.
I hadn’t really decided beforehand if I was going to get to Sydney by rail or by plane, but I think that going by rail had always been in the back of my mind. I can’t say why; maybe it simply seemed an effective way to see a large amount of the Australian countryside in my limited time. Even then, what I saw was just a small scratch of a huge country; it would be akin to going from Los Angeles to San Francisco and saying that you’d “seen America.”
Some things are universal, though: the train was running 90 minutes late.
Posted in Australia, Random Thoughts, Travel
Bloody hell, it’s hot.
38, in fact. I’m in a metric country now and, because I often wish the U.S. were as well, I’m a’gonna make you, the domestic reader, do the conversion. Who says blogs can’t be educational?
Hawai’i is a land of contrasts. True, their size is relatively small, but despite this differences of even short distances can render dramatic differences.
Take Hawai’i, The Big Island. Where I stayed, at the Hilo Bay Hostel in Hilo, gets over 120 inches of rain a year. The days can change from sunny and humid to rainy and cool and back again in the space of a few minutes. By contrast Kona, on the other side of the island (and a mere 60 miles away) gets only about 10 inches of rain a year, about the same as Los Angeles.
Strange, it is, trying to blog now, after the road trip is done and while I’m still traveling. To a degree, I think its like trying to start a novel in the middle and trying to figure out how to catch up the readers on the hero’s journey, when the hero’s journey is halfway through. Kinda like trying to tell Luke Skywalker’s story by starting in the middle of the trash compactor scene.
But, well, here we go anyway.
Posted in Travel
After a full month, one filled with indecision and an incredible amount of self-doubt, it would seem that I’m finally on the road again.
Well, sort of. I’ve left the truck behind, my constant companion of these past few months, and boarded a plane. Currently I’m typing this post on a small bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone from a hostel in, of all places, Hawai’i. Hilo, on The Big Island, to be exact.
Posted in Travel
Today I’m sitting in the quiet study room in a library near The Parentage’s house, where I’m currently crashing for a short time before the next stage of my journey (whatever it turns out to be) begins. Spread before me is a map of the world. A couple of notebooks lie nearby, messy notes and various attempts at organization (none of which seems to be particularly successful) in them. On the laptop, a half dozen browser windows are open, and within each of them a series of tabs.
I stare at the map, and feel totally, completely overwhelmed.
Posted in Random Thoughts
The GeekHiker 