straight outta compton (well sort of)
for someone bought up on cliches of america as a place of excess, la is definitely the place to start. it's a city designed for cars, meaning that it's intersected by scores of huge, eight lane roads, bigger than our motorways, densely populated with cars the size of planets: all a bit much for someone used to the tranquility of the south pacific.
wilde wasn't wrong when he said that england and america were two countries separated by a common language, and i soon discovered that communication here was to be more tricky then any backwater i had visited so far: these guys live such an insular life, any foreign accent (i am not australian!) and they are completely flummoxed. having arrived tired and hungry, floydie and i sauntered into a local fast food mexican place. having ordered, the server asked me 'fur'er'? what? 'fur'er'?! what? she kept shouting this at me as i got progressively more perplexed... i thought she was asking me if i wanted four burritos, so i kept replying, perfectly reasonably i thought, that one would do for starters. eventually her colleague turned round and asked me 'are you high'? to which i could only reply 'no, i'm english'. confusing times: she was actually asking if i wanted the food for here, a simple question apart from to jet lagged brits.
noone really has much good to say about la but i actually had quite a good time there, living out my boyz'n'da'hood fantasies, constantly ducking behind trees to avoid fictional drivebys, meandering through venice beach and hollywood, and having much jolly japery with the guys in the hostel. it was nice to have floydie around, and dre, mel, and marie were also an absolute pleasure: so much so that i didn't make it to bed before 4am on either of my nights there, the first night because of an impromptu game of black jack to prepare us for vegas, and the second because of sheer alcoholic silliness.
the second night's excess was a bit of a budget decision as we were heading to vegas the next day, and as floydie still can't drive i had eight hours behind the wheel. when we picked up the rental car, the friendly man upgraded us from compact to mid size: our dodge stratus was the size of a tank! the sheer size of the vehicle, coupled with a mild hangover and the fact that the yanks drive on the wrong side of the road (same as the french, it can't be good) meant that the first few miles were a bit sketchy. once i got used to motion, la entrapped us in it's suburban fly trap, as we moved from traffic snarl to pile up whilst i nervously peeked up at the gargantuan suvs and pick up trucks that surrounded my already huge car.
still, we made it out ok, and, after a brief stop for lunch at the oc (if tv wanted to truly depict newport beach, they should have less beautiful people and more freakishly large sea gulls), began the cruise to vegas. the thing about the us is that it's huge: even steaming along at x miles an hour, most journies in this mountainous, barren, hinterland take hours. the trip was not aided by the fact that us radio is diabolical: it's all hispanic (noise) or country (bad noise). you could tell you were getting close to vegas however when the adverts became more and more preposterous... my personal favourite was for 'buckwild', an erotic western. yee ha. 'erocktica' sounded pretty good too.
as night set we were driving in virtual darkness through the vast uninhabited plains. every now and then a couple of casinos would appear in the distance, like beacons in the night... nothing could prepare us for vegas however. it's the luminescense it generates that's amazing: it lights up the clouds in the night sky. as we drove through the strip, the glorious tackiness of vegas was evident everywhere: it's a monument to bad taste, awash with fake pyramids and eiffel towers. we arrived quite late and had a brief wander, but saved our vegas experience for the following day, to top off the arduous return drive to the grand canyon.
homeland security
the yanks have gone crazy. starting with the opening and searching of each individual piece of luggage at papeete, it was clear that security measures to get into the land of the free were going to be fairly stringent. this paranoia reached ludicrous levels on the flight, where we were informed of a new directive that forbade us from 'congregrating around the restrooms': cue machievellian scheming and numerous games of aisleway chicken when rushing to any available toilet.
sadly, the best security theory can be let down by application. we were required to fill out a form giving our specific address on our first night in the states: when i said i had absolutely no idea other than somewhere in la, the chap started getting very flustered and started berating me in french. so, i had a bit of bluesky think, and dashed down newport beach, orange county... not only did this dupe the guy in tahiti, it got waved through in la too! god bless the ubiquity of american tv: not only does the oc bring us marissa, it's also a passport into the motherland.
at least the immigration staff were friendlier than i'd heard. the dude who checked my passport looked me up and down and asked me if i'd been on hij. hij, i replied, thinking this was some kind of secret test. hij he repeated, as i looked more and more perplexed and worried about the prospect of a spell at guantanamo. i finally worked out that he meant haj: he'd looked up, seen brown, assumed muslim, and was just trying to be friendly! ignorant, but well meaning, it was pretty much an adumbration of many of the americans i was to run into.
i was however perturbed by the fact that you have to give your fingerprints to enter the states... i'm no fan of liberty and their ilk, but this did strike me as a gross invasion of my civil liberties: we have no way of knowing how long the prints will be kept, and who they will be accessible to: nor do you have any hope of refusing, unless you want to get straight on an outbound flight.
still, i swallowed my annoyance and made it through, settling down in lax to wait for floydie's flight to arrive. during the hours i was there i heard numerous announcements warning people not to give money to solicitors, but to be honest no one was even offering me any... maybe when i start work proper i'll be in line for free handouts at airports. sweet!
french polynesia
when you think of polynesia, of tahiti and its environs, you think of amazing beaches, beautiful women, gauguin, and a host of other impossibly exotic fantasies. amazingly, the line between imagination and reality becomes beautifully blurred here, thanks both to the splendour of the scenery and also the demeanour, and appearance, of the inhabitants.
tahiti itself is actually the administrative hub of the islands, and i'd been told to escape as soon as feasible. even landing at papeete airport however proved to be something of an experience, as before even making it to immigration we had been handed flowers to put behind our ears, and serenaded by a rather jovial band belting out top polynesian ditties. sadly, i didn't cover myself in glory going through the entrance formalities: as tahiti is technically a part of france, eu passport holders are just waved through... so it was that i found myself actually requesting a stamp for my passport. i think i may once have described myself as a travel snob: travel geek may be more appropriate.
despite the revelry on our arrival, we had actually landed at just past eleven at night. as such i headed straight to chez fifi, a tiny pension overlooking the airport, pausing only to get my maths completely wrong and draw out $300, rather than the $30 i was aiming for. chez fifi is an interesting place: essentially an overpriced shithole surrounded by semi rabid dogs and the deafening screech of aircraft, it does a roaring trade due to the fact that all the international flights coming into and out of papeete are from 11pm to 2am, and desperation and fatigue regularly overcome accommodation quality control. i didn't meet anyone who stayed for more than a night, although in my short time there i did wangle myself some free swordfish from a rather lovely french couple who dished it out as a sympathy gesture for my comedic efforts at speaking french.
the next day i got the ferry to the neighbouring island of moorea. if tahiti is all black sand and pollution, moorea is where the postcards are shot. the entire island is fringed by a reef, which means that it is surrounded by lagoons. it's hard to explain just how beautiful water can be, but the shimmering incandescence of the blue green south pacific is totally hypnotic. i found myself a bed in a place just by the beach, that was incidentally cheaper than anywhere i'd stayed in nz, and spent the entire day intoxicated by the white sand and, most of all, the sheer clarity of the water; you can wade out a few hundred metres and still only be waist deep; you don't need a snorkel, you just look down and see fish darting round your body. a good book, a place on the sand, and a few paddles in the ocean, and i was set for the day.
moorea's colonial past means it attracts numerous french tourists, so i was forced to get my rusty a level linguistic skills out: i think i did ok, but constantly talking in a foreign language is so, so tiring! i have a new found respect for all the people whose english i've taken for granted in the last few months.
the following day i hired a bike to do a 50km ride around the island. there is only one road that skirts the perimeter, which means that if you look to one side you have the looming green hills of a volcanic island, and if you glance to the other you have nothing but perfect, often totally isolated, bays. i was riding out to a viewpoint where you can see one side of moorea, with the lagoon ending at the reef, which crashes into the sea, and the whole of tahiti in the distance. the view was spectacular, but the real delight was stopping off at various secluded beaches: there is possibly no more splendid isolation then that on a perfect bay looking out onto the shimmering pacific. i also ran a scientific experiment to see if brown folk can get sunburn: we can, and i peeled in the states, but frankly i can't see what all the whining is about!
that night i just lay outside on the beach, looking up at the stars: it was a strange moment, as i realised that after this it was all big cities, then home. this was my last tranquil night under a star kissed sky, and i made the most of it.
the ferry back to tahiti was pretty rough, as the weather was atrocious. papeete is actually a fairly grotty place, more like a mini asian metropolis than a picture of polynesian bliss. i made my mandatory trip to mcdonalds (croque mcdo anyone?), before catching the last hilux to the airport. my flight was at 2am, so it was going to be a long wait.
i was pretty unhappy about my 7 hours at the terminal, but it was actually quite interesting. the first thing you notice is the extraordinary ethnic diversity of polynesia: ethnic polynesians, french, and chinese all mix freely, leading to a number of demis, people of mixed race, who are uniformly stunning. the other thing that is surprising is that the cliches are true: they do wear flowers behind their ears and hand out garlands to each other, it's not just a tourist gig for incoming package flights. a more general observation was how much sadness there is at airports: people were leaving their loved ones, usually returning to france, for however long it takes to collate another airfare. behind the forced smiles and the kisses there is an aura of unhappiness that collects around an airport when long haul flights are leaving, and people and memories are left, helpless, behind.
french polynesia was utterly amazing, and i wish i'd spent more time there: there were so many other islands i could have gone to, and it's that perfect combination of things to walk up and beaches to recuperate on. the views, the scenery, it's all unbelievable: get off tahiti, and you find yourself on genuine island paradises, straight off gauguin canvases or somerset maugham pages. incredible stuff.
