Not Our Best Border Crossing

So far, we've been doing quite well for border crossings. Granted, Zambia was shut, and the lady on the Namibian border broke my gin, but it's all been relatively pain-free. It doesn't take a genius to realise that this is not the proper traveller experience. Luckily, the people at the Peruvian-Bolivian border, whilst they are many things, are not idiots.

We were settled down on another of our overnight buses, of which we are so fond, expecting a mere twelve hour journey. It was cold, yes, but I had my sleeping bag with me as we trundled (or, for a large part of our time, simply sat around for no discernible reason) over the mountain passes towards the border with Bolivia.

At 6:00 am, we stopped. At about 6:15, we moved a few metres. Then we stopped. This continued for a full five and a half hours, until the bus finally forced its way up to the border archway. The reason for the delay soon became clear; anyone crossing the border had to have an injection against H1N1. Thankfully we are too foreign for anyone to worry about, so were let through without being jabbed in the arm. Our other bus companions were not so lucky.

The border was a nightmare. There were stalls everywhere, cars and buses crammed into every space and policemen shouting things. We got waved along with a stream of people, inspected by the men in white face masks and coats, then saw a great big queue going into an official-looking building. However, this was not the building with 'immigration' written on it, so we went to that instead.

It took a long time to get forms, but we're now expert at filling them in. Granted, I did misunderstand a question and listed the country I would visit after leaving Bolivia as 'Bolivia', but that's not too great a worry. The man at the desk had other ideas, though. We hadn't succeeded in signing out of Peru.

This often doesn't matter (see our America-Mexico border crossing), but the man was quite insistent. It seemed that the police had pushed us straight past the Leaving Peru office (which wasn't the one with the big queue!). We forced our way back across the border, having to push past the police who really did think the stupid gringas were going the wrong way, and found an office. We filled in lots of forms. Then we had to go to another office, where we got a stamp. I bought some confetti.

Back in the first office, a new man was very baffled as to why his desk already had my immigration form on it, and why it had been half completed by his colleague. We explained that we were idiots, he looked dubious...and gave me a stamp!

We got outside just in time to be told that our bus, having spent 5h30 getting to the border, could not spare 20 minutes at it to wait for its patrons, and had left, taking our rucksacks and whatnots with it. We looked at the empty road. A person offered to chase the bus for us in their combi van, so we got in.

We were left in Copacabana, our final destination, by a random little car park and told that the bus would be there soon. The man who was helping us then disappeared. We waited. Forty minutes later (we still don't know where it had gone since leaving us and arriving in Copacabana) it rocked on up, and we got hold of our stuff! We didn't leave a tip.

We're now debating which country to enter from Bolivia; the one with the guards who confiscate all the "fake" dollars you carry, or the one where the entrance/exit points are 60km from the actual border in either direction.

Saf - Copacabana, Bolivia

Originally published at Where Is Greg?. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Mummy's been making a blanket, you know, where she sews on cloth patches of the flags from each country she's taken me so far. But I was getting a little worried as of late; in the whole of America, we couldn't find an America flag!

It all turned out okay in the end though; Mexico is full of them.

Mexico City - Greg

Originally published at Where Is Greg?. » Click here « to leave any comments.

The Grand Canyon (which does have a 'D', despite Mummy's insistance for quite some time that it didn't) is a great big hole in the middle of the continent, which is a sod to get round, so we went to look at it. From side to side it is 10 miles as the condor flies, 24 if you walk, and 220 if you drive. We didn't cross it. Here is me next to it.



That's a rather boring picture, though. I wanted something more exciting so got as close as I could to crossing it without breaking every bead in my saggy little body. The National Park people aren't very good at putting up fences, and with a bit of ingenuity, some strong walking boots and a negation of worry about flashing your pants to everyone as you climb, you can get to some really spectacular places.

Here is a picture of Mummy holding me out over the canyon. I'm afraid you can't see me very well, but rest assured that I am there and that many people watched Mummy retrieve me from her cleavage after the climb to get there.



Some Japanese people told Mummy she was "awesome", and some American people took similar photos and said they wanted to use them as their Christmas card this year. They also said it was a shame about the hat, but some people have no taste. It's a great hat. Everyone loves the hat.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

So, we put on our posh frocks and went to Vegas.

Wham! lied; drinks are not free in Club Tropicana. There is, however, enough fun and sunshine for everyone.* Rather a lot of sunshine, in fact. 38 degrees celsius most days. Las Vegas sits like a mirage in the middle of an enormous, hot, dusty desert, and suddenly pops out at you like a brightly-coloured painting when you turn a corner.

But it's wonderful, so very wonderful. Yes, tacky, with a fake Eiffel Tower next to the fake Statue of Liberty by the fake Luxor Temple, but it's all so big and shiny! I really did think I'd hate it, but now I am utterly convinced that there is no better place to go to party.

We arrived at lunchtime and staggered down the Strip (the famous bit with the best clubs in) ducking in and out of casinos to try get some water. The road is bizarre; you have to try really hard to go down it in a straight line. To get across some bits you need to enter a casino and follow the walkways. We'd heard that they hid the exits in the casinos, but thought we'd manage. We were wrong. Once inside, there are no clear walkways, just enormous foyers full of machines and bars and no sense of direction or daylight whatsoever. It took us over 4 hours to get to the other end, and many instances of desperately asking someone the way out.

There's plenty to see on the way. There are those big famous fountains, which are incredibly loud as they shoot water high into the air, a volcano with a good amount of kerosene, and a pirate ship fight where one lifesize ships sails up from somewhere else, there is a huge and very hot battle and it sinks. There were also semi-naked women, but I think they had to be scantily clad to survive the fireballs. Encroyable!

Even better than that, though, I made money. I sit here now as living proof that the house does not always win, with my 600% profit. Okay, so it was one $2, but still I'm rather pleased. Here's a picture of me and Greg holding our winning voucher (you don't get money out of the machines, but a ticket you can either put into other machines or cash. The machines still make the noise of coins clattering when they pay out, though, even though you are only able to put notes in), looking rather hot:



See photos section for other tacky ones.

* ^{Yes, I know they're talking about Ibiza, but after seeing Club Tropicana no one could stop singing the song for days.}

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Hello everyone! It's a Hollywood-style zebra here, enjoying the glitz and glamour and lights of stardom!

Or not, as the case may be. Hollywood turns out to be tiny and entirely underwhelming. If you want, go to the photo section to see a shot of me in front of the big Hollywood sign on a cloudy day. It took a long time to drive there, and was about as exciting as it looks. The best bit about the whole venture out there was meeting a man who had a pet wolf, which we got to pet. It made Mummy very allergic, but it was gorgeous.

Central Hollywood was about the same. There's only really one street, which is short and covered in tourists looking at what is frankly not very much. And they really have no standards! Despite the fact that I am non-mobile, in the few hours I was there I ended up with my own star and concrete footprints outside of Graumann's Chinese Theatre (they mean 'cinema'):





That was still rather disappointing, though. The best moment was in Starbucks (we went in so Mummy could wash her hair in the toilets), where a man came in, got a coffee, and proceeded to atrociously and inaccurately recite an audition piece to his friend for a movie he was trying to be in. He then rang his mum to read her a poem he had written in acting class. I had to stuff my (cement-y) hooves into my mouth to stop myself laughing too much.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Los Angeles, City of Angels, does indeed have bridges which we have sat under (but not taken any drugs). You might not think it to look at them, but the inhabitants of that fair city are indeed angels. That is to say, they are angels in the Dogma sense of never having to go to the toilet.

Two hours on the streets, trying to find a public toilet. Tried the malls; nothing. Tried the supermarkets; nothing. Tried the police station; nothing. Tried to buy something in a coffee house to use their restroom; wasn't one. Nowhere, but nowhere, were there any sodding toilets. I should end this by giving would-be travellers advice on exactly where these mythical things are hidden, but I really can't. In the end, I just wee-ed on a grass verge in Beverly Hills. That'll teach 'em.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Yes, no one thought it would actually ever be done, it may have taken 17 hours of driving and $60 of 'gasoline', she may have turned up at a high school exhausted and stinking from less than 4 hours sleep in a hot car, but Mummy got her cheerleading competition after all!

It was certainly worth it. The cheerleading was actually the start to a whole day of dance competitions in a place called Hemet, CA, which is a no-horse-but-many-car-showrooms kind of town near Los Angeles. I was very excited to be seeing the cheerleading, and not just because of the tiny skirts. The competing teams were actually realy quite good and did all the impressive tricks, such as throwing each other a long way into the air and landing without shattering any bones. Big burly men acted as backstops in case things went wrong then.

But as an avid fan of Bring It On (and the sequels; Here It Is and It's Been Brought), I expected all that. What was really exciting was the Spirit. Now, this concept took me a little while to grasp, but luckily some nice cheerleaders adopted us and explained it all.

Spirit is best translated as 'good karma', but in a more tabulated way. It comes in points. A squad will get Spirit Points if they do something good; cheering on a rival team, showing good sportmanship, having well-behaved family members in the audience, and whatnot. At first, it seems like a bit of a hollow concept introduced solely to stop over excited young girls getting stroppy and trying to balls things up for other teams, but there's more to it than that.

A team will also get Spirit Points (for which there are a range of trophies at the end) if they convince their fans and affiliated audience members to get involved. What better way than to annex three English girls and strongly encourage them to take part in the Audience Show, where audience members learn a routine in 30 minutes and perform it for everyone else during an interval. Turns out you get a lot of spirit points for that. It also turns out that years of CULES teach the skills of learning to approximate a dance very quickly, and to assume that you can pull of moves which normally require training simply by being enthusiastic enough.

But I'm making the cheerleaders sound very self-centred here, in their collection of Spirit. They were actually very nice people, and as a reward for being foreign but having a damn good go anyway, the 'girls from London' were each awarded a Spirit Stick by the judges. A Spirit Stick appears to be a tube of beads that you shake to generate Spirit in the area around you. It must never touch the floor, or all the spirit will get out. L has already dropped hers. But anyway, in the hope that a little bit of feel-good Spirit will rub off on you, here's a picture of me, a cheerleader, and my new Spirit Stick!

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Today, I listened to a radio programme called Savage Nation, where a man called Mark Savage was generally a bit racist and talked a lot about how crap Britain is, but I didn't really understand.

Also, I looked at some redwoods and ran over a tortoise.

Having failed to see any moose whatsoever in Canada, we have been making a concerted effort to see as many other large mammals as possible. Sadly, although the area is famous for its killer whales we're not in the right season for them, but the Olympic National Park seemed like a promising place. We went elk hunting, in a park covered in warnings about elk charging people who got too close.

Six hours of walking later, we had seen precisely one elk. It was very dead indeed, and festering. No living elk. What we did find, though, was moss. Moss? you say. Why should anyone care about that? You get moss everywhere.

Oh yes, but not moss anything like what we found. In the Hoh rain forest, moss drips from trees in huge clumps. Every horizontal surface is covered in it, dangling and diffusing the light until everything is covered in an eerie green. It's beautiful, and otherworldly in the creepy sense. No good faeries would live in that forest.

We spent hours among the moss, feeling it slowly advancing upon us, ready to grab at a foot and rush up our bodies until we were just another moss-covered miscellaneous forest item. I bet that's where all the elk were.

All expect that lone one, stood right in the middle of the road, which we finally saw on the drive out of the park. I can't show you a picture of that one; I was at the wheel. Bastard elk.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

The United States are more full of free stuff than Canada! No coffee, sadly, but a wonderful market in Seattle called Pike Place Market, which prides itself on being the home of all those boats in Deadliest Catch, among other things. Whilst simply walking through, we got free salmon jerky, many types of beef jerky, chili pepper jams, real jams, hazelnuts covered in flavoured dusts, almonds in flavoured dusts, lots of honey, dried fruits and soap. That was enough food to last a whole day!



P.S. Apologies to LJ users, for whom the Wordpress upgrade has resulted in a botch in cross-posting time delays from the original Where is Greg? site. I'm trying to sort it.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

We got it! It took a bit of faff and a lot of reading the manual before we were able to leave the car park, but behold our nice, new(ish) car, kitchen and house for the next 5 weeks:



Big, isn't it? Not *quite* big enough to make sleeping in the bitter cold of the Seattle streets bearable, but near enough. I'm sure it'll get warmer the further south we go, then there's only the falling-between-the-seats problem to worry about.

It turns out to be very easy to wash one's hair in the sinks at McDonalds, which is a blessing indeed.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

By the time you read this, we should all have landed in Seattle, picked up the enormous hire car and be partway through spending our first night sleeping in it at the side of the road. Hello America!

Road-tripping is partly fantastic, because we get to go basically wherever the mood takes us. It is also crap for just the same reason. With only 36 days of car, how on earth can we decide what we want to do with our time?

Luckily, Mummy et al have spent a nice long time making a list of all the things that must be done in America, compiled from cool things and typical American life they have seen on TV:

1. Watch a cheer-leading competition (cheer leaders at other sporting events do not count)

2. Go to a frat party.

3. Go to a self-help/improvement lecture (Get Rich Quick, How to Attract Women in 10 Easy Steps, etc)

4. Find Bigfoot/see geysers.

5. See World's Largest Ball of String.

6. See site of World's Biggest Cheese (now gone).

7. Go to a Vegas Casino.

8. Go to a rodeo.

9. Secretly be spies/witches in spare time, with hilarious consequences.

10. Storm-Chasing.

11. Alligator-Hunting.

12. Eat some steak.

13. Go to a yard sale (and buy something).

14. Correct their spelling.

15. Mutilate bodies (choice between piercing, tattoo or cosmetic surgery).

16. Comic Book/Star Trek/similar convention (in costume).

17. LAN party.

18. Drive-In Movie.

19. One of those big sand competitions in the desert.

20. Walk in Memphis.

21. Spend at least one night in California.

22. Watch NASA launch a rocket.

23. Go to a service station and be very British to get free stuff. Also, shower.

24. Graceland/Dollywood.

25. Hide and seek in huge mall.

26. Eat hotdog on street whilst shouting at someone for no good reason.

27. Find someone who thinks they have been abducted by aliens (extra points for successfully carrying off a date with them).

28. Man carving enormous rock thing, possibly man? (S to clarify)

29. See a beauty contest (ideally not children).

30. Watch filming of Jerry Springer/Oprah.

31. Sit under a bridge in Los Angeles and contemplate life.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Hello everyone!

Today, Mummy took me to the Ontario Science Centre, which was great! There were lots of kids there, but I managed to stay out of harm's way and Mummy only got barged out of the way once or twice.

I really like science museums, and this one had plenty of hands on things to do. Some of it seemed too incredible to believe, but it didn't take me long to discover why...

Me Learning the Secrets of Science*

It's a bit fast I'm afraid, because Mummy fails a bit.

* Available for 30 days only

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Happy St George's Day!

After our fantastic experience in the Morrocan Pub in Zambia with the fake Irish-folk band (fake folk, not fake Irish) on St Patrick's Day, today was a great day to find a similar experience in one of the many English pubs in Toronto!

British pubs, you say? You must mean Irish pubs. They're everywhere. Well yes, they are, but so are English ones over here! And probably provide the same insight into English culture as Irish pubs do to Irish culture.

Mummy's current favourite is the Village Idiot Pub, which has excelled itself in bringing across four beers and one cider from England! Yep, you can't escape from Boddington's Cream Ale here, nor from Marston's ever-present Pedigree. And they have Blackthorn. Yummy, yummy Blackthorn.

But what do English people eat? Fish and chips, it seems. Only it's served with "fries" over here. And for some reason they've decided to make the batter using Steam Whistle, the minging lager of Canadian choice. Oh, and Shepherd's Pie (served with fries). Many many fries to be had.

A lovely, traditional English pub experience. Oh, but don't get carried away with your trans-Atlantic customs. Should you find yourself standing at the bar, ready to order a round, turn around and flee! Your actions will forever break the billing system, confuse the waitresses and cause the greater part of the patrons to stare. And there's nothing so humiliating as having an Irishman have to explain to you how to use a pub correctly.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

I'm in Canada! It's a bit nippy up here, especially coming just after Africa! Mummy et al keep being mistaken for Australians because they "look too tanned to be from England", and I am trying to grow a nice thick winter coat. A few photos of Canada should have appeared by now, too.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.

Oh dear, I left it rather a whle before updating didn't I? Sorry people! I have no excuse really, apart from rushing about in the UK trying to sort out all my jobs before fleeing the country again.

It was very nice to be back in Britain for a bit, to be able to find what I wanted in shops I knew provided said items at the best prie, and to communicate with people and have some sort of idea what they were going on about. At least Canada will be less of a culture shock, right?

Apologies again - better updates soon.

Originally published at Where Is Greg?. » Click here « to leave any comments.