Quick update, some photos + a return date

Since the last post we have done an awful lot of driving and seen a lot of cool things. Nothing hugely interesting or disastrous has happened however and so none of it seemed particularly bloggable. So, what follows is a quick update with photos and comments where appropriate.

Where are we now and when are we coming home?
We're currently hanging out in balmy Palm Springs at a tennis / sports resort. We'll stay here for the next few days and then fly home from LA on Monday arriving Tuesday 6th May. Initial plans include getting fit(tish), never eating burgers/pizza again and finding a couple of soul-nourishing jobs.

Where have we been and what have we been doing?
In short we've driven around 5000 miles in our (disastrous/white/American) rental car and have visited:

• Monument valley
• The Coachella music and arts festival
• Death valley
• Mammoth lakes
• Bodie - a really cool ghost town
  
• Lake Tahoe
• Muir woods
  
• Sausalito
  
• San Francisco - hanging out with old friends
  
• Napa valley- drinking wine and eating too much
  
• The Pacific highway to Santa Barbara

Highlights and photos

Monument valley

Coachella was awesome. 3 days of lying around in 100 degree heat listening to music and drinking lemonade slush puppies. The best bits were:

• Paul McCartney's 2.5 hour set which included lots of Wings / Beatles songs
• Morrissey playing 'How soon is now' (Other than that he was grumpy and complained about the smell of burning animal flesh.)
  
• The Cure set - although Robert Smith doesn't seem to go in for much in the way of audience interaction
• The Killers, Paul Weller, Franz Ferdinand and a scottish guy called Paolo Nutini who was very summer-y.

Paul Weller and special guest Jonny Marr

• Some very cool art installations
  

Other photos

Reena at Death Valley

Bodie - ghost gold mining town

Bodie interior

Reena hugs a tree in Muir Woods

Freezing in Arizona

Well we've now seen snow in each month of our trip. Freak snowfall in London in February, knee-deep snowdrifts in Spain in March and now, bizarrely, snow in Arizona in April. I'm starting to think that we should offer our services to ski resorts. We are currently in Flagstaff, Arizona and the outside temperature is -1 degree C. All of the clothes that we have with us are designed to keep us cool in hot and humid climes and are doing very little at to keep us particularly warm. The issue is exacerbated to some degree by the fact that the, less than luxurious, Highland Motel in Flagstaff is not equipped with a particularly effective heating system. It also happens to be on the side of a 24 hour railroad and so we are not anticipating getting a great deal of sleep this evening. Reena is currently huddled under a duvet muttering that she will be choosing tomorrow night's hotel..

The US itinerary to date: Dallas -> LA -> Las Vegas -> Grand Canyon -> Flagstaff.

Dallas was a welcome break from sightseeing. We hung out with friends who spoilt us with home cooked food, laundry facilities and comfy sofas. They also had a couple of large, friendly dogs who liked to snuggle up with Reena and, for some reason, lick my arms a lot first thing in the morning. (I think I use more soap than she does).

George

Texas is quite a religious place with huge churches and overly large 'Christian Inspiration' sections in bookstores. Other than that, it's very big, everybody drives everywhere and they have cool things like drive-through ATMs and drive-through liquor stores (apart from in the semi-dry religious areas of the town). As to what we actually got up to: A couple of hours were spent trying to solve the JFK assassination mystery with Reena on the grassy knoll, me in the school book depository and our friends driving their open-topped limo around the block repeatedly. I also rode a mechanical bull with limited success and a man with a cowboy hat played the song below when he heard that we were from London.



After Texas we flew to LA - very cool and slightly soulless at the same time. It's no surprise that the vampire series Angel is based there. I can't imagine that anyone would notice if their neighbour was eaten/ turned to the dark side.

View from our hotel room

We then drove to Las Vegas where we visited various glitzy casinos and lost $27 gambling. In our first attempt, I put $7 in a slot machine and, experiencing absolutely no fun at all, the machine ate the money. Mmm. The next night we spoke to a very nice lady who showed us how to play blackjack at one of the tables. Five minutes later we had lost a further $20 but somehow we didn't feel so bad about it as the lady was so nice and, for a second, I thought we were going to win something. The moral of all of this appears to be that gambling is tricky and if you're going to lose money it's best to find a nice lady to help you.



We left Vegas this morning and drove to the Hoover Dam (very big with art deco toilets) and on to the Grand Canyon. Other than the fact that the canyon was enormous, the surprising thing was the temperature. The southern rim of the canyon is 8000ft above sea level and, in April at least, is extremely cold. We parked the car, had a quick look at the canyon and then as the snowfall became heavier we decided to drive to equally freezing Flagstaff.

That's it for now. You are completely up to date. There will be a quiz on the contents of this blog when we return in May.

S&R.

Costa Rica update

Costa Rica is a beautiful country full of lush green rainforests, dramatic waterfalls and an incredible variety of birds and animals. Unfortunately it is also super expensive and overrun with American tourists. You can see why CR is the perfect place for US tourists:

• It is a beautiful country full of lush green rainforests, etc. etc. (as previously mentioned)
• The culture is almost exactly the same as that of the US - so not too scary but slightly exotic feeling
  
• There's no need to change currency or speak another language (for the most part anyway)
• Most restaurants have a good selection of burgers, steaks and pasta
  
• Each hotel has a(n identical?) menu of tours ad excursions - rain forest walk, zip line, coffee tour and butterfly farm visit etc. The tours are relatively expensive ($80 per person typically) but you can sign up for a few of them and fill up a short vacation with fun things to do.
  

Unfortunately, all of this leaves Costa Rica feeling like a very large, tropical version of Disneyland (staffed only with Hispanic staff). Tourism was so slick and controlled that there wasn't much left that could be done independently, e.g. a non-descript walk to a waterfall would often have a ticket kiosk at the start of the trail or would be marked as closed unless followed as part of a guided tour. So, beautiful, yes, but also soulless, commericalised and disastrous value for money.

So, what did we do in our week in CR:

Corcovado National Park
Our first stop was Corcovado National Park in the south of the country. This is the most remote rainforest in Costa Rica and according to National Geographic, one of the most biologically intense places in the world. As I mentioned in the previous post, it was something of an arduous journey to get there and so we were a little surprised to find that the main town (Bahia Drake) had a number of luxury resorts dotted around the bay. A little more research revealed the presence of a (newly built?) airstrip 5kms away that allowed 20 minute flights to the capital San Jose. Oh well, at least we would have an easier journey on the way back!

The area around the bay was stunning with primary rainforest, jade green seas and dark grey beaches. The resorts were for the most part hidden as the trees of the rainforest grew right down to the water's edge and so the impression was that of a remote bay with a few huts on the shore. We took a couple of tours here - one further into the national park to see some wild animals and a snorkelling trip. The snorkeling was pretty good - we saw stingrays, sharks and puffer fish for example, but it was the guided national park trip that was the real highlight.

Walking through a remote part of the forest we saw three types of monkeys (howler, squirrel, spider) , a herd of very smelly wild boars, a toucan, a couple of small crocodiles lying in the mud and, after much hunting around, a 300lb baby tapir. It was very cool to be so close to the animals.



Volcano
The other cool thing we saw was the Volcano Arenal in the centre of the country. We stayed in the swoofy hotel nearest the volcano and had a room with floor to ceiling uninterrupted views of the peak. We heard and saw a small eruption in the afternoon. At night it was pretty cloudy so although we could hear eruptions and bubbling lava from our balcony the most we saw was a few lava rocks rolling down the mountain. It was an awesome experience made even better with the abundant wildlife off the balcony including fireflies, hummingbirds and toucans.

Plans for the next few weeks
As you may have noticed (dear reader) we are not keen on sticking to any one plan for very long and so we are now in Dallas (visiting friends and the Ewings) and are planning to spend the next month in the US. We'll fly from Dallas to LA, head to the Coachella music festival to see the Orb, the Cure, the Killers... and drive generally north visiting friends, taking some tennis lessons, and spending a few days in a yoga retreat. Once we get to Vancouver we'll stop and then either head directly back to London or fly back to Guatemala for more rainforest-based entertainment. Stay tuned - you never know we may be in China next time we write...