Straight Up The Middle

From Texas the logical and reasonable thing for me to do would have been to hug the southern states up until the coast before heading north to New York, so as to stay in a band of temperate weather for as long as possible. Logic is not my strong suit and so instead I headed, more or less, straight north cutting through the much-neglected Midwest. This large, flat expanse, right in the middle of America, is oft-overlooked by visitors to the country who tend to gravitate to the coasts. for me that was reason enough to visit as I was curious to uncover (if only a small part of) the hidden heart of America.

For many towns around the world 4pm on a Saturday afternoon might be considered the busiest time of the week, but not so in Lufkin, Texas, which resembled a ghost town. In the 2 hours that I walked its streets I literally saw less than a dozen other people walking.

Pyramidal

At Chetumal, on the Mexican side of the border with Belize, I was met by my parents. Although I had seen my father a year ago I hadn't seen my mother in two and a half years ... and well, family is family. So my parents had decided to come out and travel with me for a while, see me and use my services as a tour guide in Mexico. They had already driven down from Mexico City and together we were to drive back up, catching some sights along the way. Of course with a hired car and staying in hotels this was not the sort of travelling I was used to, but I was determined not to let the softness get to me and tried to gently nudge them a little bit towards the edges of their comfort zone.

An advantage of travelling with my parents is that I get to eat far better than I usually do. Here we stopped at a lovely little seafood restaurant on the Caribbean coast in Veracruz.

Cocha Cuisine

Santa Cruz may be a pleasant place to spend a few days, but it's not the "real" Bolivia. The real Bolivia is all about mountains, thin air, pan-pipes, woolly ponchos and llamas. So I left the lowlands and headed westwards and upwards. My intermediate goal was Cochabamba. Not just because the city has one of the best names in the world, but because, sitting at a major transport crossroads in the country it is the most important market town in Bolivia, the gateway between the mountains and the lowlands. At "just" 2500m altitude the weather is mild all the year round, making the surrounding countryside particularly rich and productive, and able to churn out up to three harvests a year. Historically this was also the frontier of the mountain Inca empire, and the valleys leading east to the plains are host to important archaeological sites that protected the kingdom from the jungle barbarians below.

The ruins at Incallajta are the largest Inca-era remains in Bolivia. They're not particularly impressive, but their location in a remote valley that can't be reached by public transport (the nearest you can get is 9km before you have to start walking) make them worth visiting.

It Makes The World Go Round

Almost any article written about Bolivia will mention that it is the poorest country in Latin America (and so here I am perpetuating that trend). Of course, like everywhere, wealth is distributed unevenly. Bolivia's richest region is that of Santa Cruz, in the lowlands in the east of the country, whose prosperity mainly derives from oil and gas that is to be found in the plains. Yet despite being the richest and largest city in the country Santa Cruz looks and feels more like a small town than a metropolis: in the city centre few buildings are more than a couple of stories high and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of large-scale business going on. Nevertheless it is a pleasant place to spend a few days, trawling the used clothes market, where traders sell second-hand clothes that have been donated to charity in the West, for bargains (I picked up a nice fleece jumper for only $2 to replace the one that I had inadvertently left on a bus in Brazil); people-watching in the main square in the evenings where families and lovers congregate and old men play chess; heading out to visit the gorgeous Jesuit mission churches of the Chiquitos; and waiting for the inevitable Bolivian strikes to end so that the road-blocks can be lifted. Many of these aspects form facets of what I want to write about in this post: money.

The sumptuous Jesuit mission church in Conception. OK, it's been seriously restored, but faithfully according to old plans and using traditional methods.

More Than Just Samba

Travelling through the northeast has helped shatter two preconceived, stereotypical images of Brazil, of landscape and culture. Brazil is often viewed as being synonymous with the Amazon rainforest and perhaps, for those who have a penchant for nature documentaries, like myself, with vast wetlands like the Pantanal.  But there is far more to it than that. The wetland theme started off well as I left Belem, almost all the way to São Luís, but as soon as my road turned inland, into the heart of the northeast that soon gave way to the dry savannah of the cerrado and the scruby, caatinga forest of the sertão. This vast, dry hinterland is reminiscent of the American wild west, and the small, dusty towns towns that dot the rolling hills need only a couple of gunslingers to complete the picture. This is cattle country and last year's drought was tough, as evidenced by the verges populated by rotting carcases and their attendant flocks of vultures. Lonely escarpments and odd rock formations dot this forgotten landscape, until you finally approach the coast again and sugar cane plantations take over.

Brazil isn't just the Amazon and Pantanal. There are some incredible landscapes, such as the multitude of crystal-clear pools amongst the white coastal sand dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses national park.

Little Scotland

If Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury plain were founded and settled by Englishmen trying to create a home away from home, then the Otago and Southland regions at the bottom of the South Island were unmistakably colonised by Scots. Not only is Dunedin, the main city in the south, obviously named after Scotland's capital Edinburgh, but it was also designed in its layout and architecture to mirror the austere, neo-Gothic cities of the north (in all my travels I have not seen a place that so closely reminded me of my hometown Aberdeen). But it's not just the city but the whole landscape which evokes images of Alba: the rolling hills battered by the unrelenting wind, enemy of tall trees but friend of the hardy, golden tussock grass that carpets much of the landscape. Perfect sheep country, for which New Zealand is famous.

No Scottish city is complete without a statue of the national poet, Robert Burns, and so it is with Dunedin too.

Riding With The Stockmen

It was of course nice to see my father again after a year and a half and it would be good to spend "quality time" with him. However I would, by necessity, have to change my way of travelling to accommodate him somewhat, as it would be hard to expect someone in their late 60's to hitchhike and sleep rough, which would have been my first resort if left to my own devices, out of necessity if nothing else (Australia was already expensive seven years ago when I was first here, but since then the Aussie dollar has appreciated in value by about 40%, whilst prices have simultaneously gone up too, on the back of a gigantic natural resources boom, so that a simple overnight bus trip now costs more than my entire monthly budget in most Asian countries). The first thing that needed to be decided was transport: how are we going to get about this not insignificant country. Since flying was out of the question some sort of vehicle was in order. We weighed the pros and cons of renting and buying and decided upon buying our own vehicle, judging it might work out a little cheaper and, more importantly, give us more freedom and flexibility. It is a dream of many to buy a van, to be fully self-sufficient, and head off into the wild blue yonder. The reality though was that most of the vans for travellers on sale were either wildly overpriced or in such poor mechanical condition that arrival at our intended destination was akin to a spin of Russian roulette. So after discarding the poor pickings of Darwin's van offerings we expanded our search to estate cars (station wagons) in which it would be possible, at a pinch, to sleep in the back. Here the selection was far greater and of better value as it was aimed towards a more discerning, local market, rather than gullible backpackers. And within a day we had found ourselves a 2001, 4 litre Ford Falcon (a decidedly Aussie model not found anywhere else) that had been converted to run on LPG (thereby hopefully reducing our upcoming running costs).

With our trusty car, just before setting off, that, in flagrant contravention of Aussie backpacker tradition, we have neither painted with flowers nor given a name to.

Village In The Ayer

Brunei is one of those tiny countries that you might have heard of, but aren't really sure about: who lives there? what do the people do? how can such a tiny country be viable? The answer to the last question, of course, is oil. Although small, Brunei sits on substantial reserves of both oil and gas. Indeed, one of the reasons why people may have heard of Brunei is that, up until 1997, the Sultan of Brunei was the richest man in the world and a byword for profligate extravagance. Indeed it was the tiny sultanate's abundance of wealth that led to it refusing to join the Malaysian Federation in the 60's so as not to have their riches siphoned off to Kuala Lumpur (the sultan and his family were adept enough at that already).

A panorama photograph of the old stilt-houses of Kampung Ayer.

Octopus's Garden

Most of my travels are of the cultural (cities, museums, ruins, monuments, etc.) or outdoorsy (hiking, mountains, forests and national parks) kind. I don't really do "fun" stuff. Whilst in Sabah I decided to change that state of affairs. The seas of southeast Asia are home to some of the most pristine tropical coral reefs in the world. Snorkelling among them is my favourite thing to do whilst visiting beach destinations. But with snorkelling you are limited by your lungs to just the uppermost corals and only for as long as you can hold your breath. Obviously the glimpses you get of the myriad multi-coloured fish, urchins, invertebrates, polyps, nudibranches and other strangely-named organisms are only enough to pique your interest. To truly see the underwater world you need to go scuba diving.

All kitted up in my wetsuit, air tank and sundry other paraphernalia and about to roll back out of the boat (something I had always wanted to do). Diving is a truly incredible sensation and one I hope, for my wallet's sake, I don't get too addicted to.

Making A Molehill Out Of A Mountain (Of Costs)

As I stood on the deck of my ferry, carrying me from Zamboanga to Sandakan in East Malaysia, in the still night, watching the rippling wake reach behind us through the mirror-smooth Sulu Sea, I found it hard to believe that this is one of the most notorious stretches of water in the world. From Mindanao to Borneo there stretch several island groups -  Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi - that form the heartland of the current Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. Piracy is not unheard of around here and only two months ago a couple of European tourists were kidnapped on Tawi-Tawi whilst taking wildlife photographs. These are certainly not places to travel to thoughtlessly, although peering at the soundlessly calm expanse around me when I awoke in the middle of the night, with only a small glow on the horizon indicating a mini flotilla of sardine boats, it was hard for me to equate the view in front of me with any sort of danger. And indeed there was none to be had as we arrived in Sandakan without a hitch (except for the 9-hour wait in Zamboanga as the 300 passengers cleared the customs inspection that was manned by only two officers - although there were about a dozen soldiers milling around doing little else than motioning the queue to shuffle along every now and again).

A suburban cul-de-sac in Sandakan that reminded me of middle-class suburban neighbourhoods in the UK.

Bright Lights And Big Bets

At the mouth of the Pearl River, on either side of the estuary, lie Macau and Hong Kong, former colonies of Portugal and Great Britain respectively. And although they were returned to China (in 1997 in the case of Hong Kong and 1999 for Macau) they still remain administratively and politically separate from mainland China under the "one country two systems" policy and are classified as Special Administrative Regions. They are free of the all-pervasive Chinese censorship; travelling abroad is far easier; they tend to speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin; and use traditional Chinese characters to write rather than simplified characters. In fact in some ways they are more Chinese than their mainland brothers as they have retained some traditions that were purged during the tumultuous years of Mao's China. The ex-colonies are also easier to visit for foreigners than for ordinary Chinese who need a special permit to visit the SARs.

A small shrine outside a shop where incense is burnt and often a food offering (e.g. an apple or an orange) is left is a common sight in Macau and Hong Kong, but almost extinct in mainland China.

Land Of The Rising Yen

There are a number of eclectic skills that you pick up as a long-term traveller: you learn to memorise your passport number and issue date for filling out endless visa and immigration forms; you become adept at noticing good spots for sleeping rough, even when you don't need to; and your long multiplication, which is essential for currency conversions, greatly improves. The latter (as well as the sleeping rough one to a certain degree) was certainly needed in Japan. One pound is currently worth 120 yen. A relatively easy number to calculate with, but not one I particularly like. Only four years ago a pound would get you 250 yen, and the lowest the pound has been against the yen in the past 13 years (the furthest back I could get data easily) was less than a month before I arrived, at 117 to the pound - having lost more than half of its relative value in a very short space of time! The sharp appreciation in the value of the yen has been across the board against other currencies and is somewhat strange as the Japanese economy is not doing particularly well itself and hasn't been for many years now. Nevertheless international investors see it as a safe bet and keep buying yen, which is causing a great headache for the country's export-oriented economy. Needless to say I was not happy either, and neither was my bank account. Japan has always been an expensive country to travel in, but with the exchange rate skewed so heavily against me, every purchase, no matter how minor, was taking a significant bite out of my budget and I had to use every trick in the book to save money.

Standard budget food whilst travelling on a budget in Japan: super noodles. To make them even cheaper you should get the simple packets without a pot or bowl and procure your own receptacle. In this case it was a discarded cardboard coffee cup that surprisingly lasted for 3 days before I threw it away.

Farewell To A Faithful Companion

I said goodbye to an old friend in Seoul. I had bought my scruffy tent in West Jerusalem back in early 2007 for just 100 shekels (around £10 at the time) in a small shop just off Yaffo Street. It was the cheapest one I could find yet she served me well through my various trips since then. I had called her home in over 25 countries on 100 different occasions (to get an idea of how useful a tent can be check out my free-camping map for this trip - it helps if you initially zoom out a little), but it was now time to part ways as I will have little opportunity to use a tent in the next 7-9 months and 2kg is a lot of extra weight to carry around. I left her with my host and hopefully she will get passed on to another traveller who will be able to make use of her. My week in Seoul passed by very quickly and was certainly not enough to see it fully, but I had to keep moving. The call of the road is unrelenting.

One of the many picturesque valleys in Seoraksan national park.

Trust Fund

At the Mongolian border the asphalt stops. Some would say it's the end of the road, whereas other, more optimistic souls, would say that the road just got wider: the broad, grassy valleys of the high mountain steppe that slope gently up and down from one pass to another are the spiritual home of the off-roaders whose only boundary is the capability of their cars. Often a single track crosses a pass only for it to split into half a dozen or more a hundred metres later as drivers continually strive to find a smoother ride free of corrugations. It's a tough country for cars, nevertheless the backbone of the vehicular population are old Soviet UAZ jeeps and vans, many of which are older than I am. And they aren't treated with kid gloves either, but hurtle along bumpy roads often overladen with twice as many passengers as they were designed for plus luggage and perhaps a sheep as well for good measure.

Lake and mountains in Altai-Tavan Bogd national park. On the other side of the mountains lies China, just 10km away.

Pamir Travel Travails

From Langar the road follows the Pamir river slowly upwards. The mountains recede to the distance, hanbitations disappear as do the trees and the fields as you leave the valleys of Badakhshan behind and enter the high, desolate, windswept Pamir plateau. The land is parched and the driving wind coats everything in a fine layer of dust in an instant, seemingly forcing it into your very pores. There are few inhabitants except for Kyrgyz herders driving their flocks of sheep and goats from one sparse pasture to another, and a handful of settlements servicing them and the Chinese truckers importing cheap, shoddy goods (it's not just Westerners who complain about the quality of Chinese manufacturing, or lack thereof). But for the most part the plateau is an intensely inhospitable place, a fact noted by Marco Polo over seven centuries ago. The floor of the plateau rarely descends below 3500m and I could feel the effects of the altitude on my first day whilst crossing the pass from the Wakhan at 4300m - a shortness of breath and slight pounding of blood in my head.



The Pamir plateau is beautiful yet barren. Very little can grow at such high altitudes and with such little water and the winters are bitterly cold.



Numbers

I like to consider myself as a scientist. More specifically a biologist. Not just because I studied it at university and have an inordinate fondness not just for beetles, but for creepy crawlies in general, but because biologists like counting. Unlike their chemist and physicist brethren who can conduct very specific and experiments to look at individual atoms and particles, the living world is for too complex for such experiments, and so biologists are forced to count things, and to put them in categories, to further their knowledge of the world. They like counting. A lot. So here, in no particular order or importance, are some figures from my trip so far.*

Days on the road		289
Distance travelled (according to Google maps)		c. 28,500km
Number of people couchsurfed with		82
Number of nights spent	with hosts	231
	camping (or sleeping rough)	35
	in paid accommodation	13
	in transport	10
Number of people who picked me up when I was hitching (I'm quite proud that I managed to hitch in every single country I travelled through)		180
Number of pictures taken		10,816
Average pictures per day		37.5
Total money spent		£2925
Average spend per day		£10.12

I’m particularly pleased that I have managed to stay well under budget (I don’t have a very definite budget, but I guess it’s around £17-18 a day) without compromising on the things I wanted to do and see (e.g. the tour to Chernobyl which cost about £73). It gives me some room for manoeuvre should anything extraordinary come up, and also shows that you don't need a lot of money to travel.

*Since leaving London to arriving in Tehran, but excluding the 5 days spent for Yann's wedding.

Low Season

Nobody would ever mistake Macedonia for a top, international, tourist destination. It's only tourist draw of any note is the town of Ohrid and its eponymous lake. The town was once the capital of the Bulgarian empire under Tsar Samuil (although, in true Balkan fashion, official Macedonian texts are highly nationalistic and make no reference to Bulgaria and call him the emperor of Macedonia) and there are many old churches dotted around, some dating back as far as the 4th or 5th centuries. Unfortunately the town, which has tons of potential, on the shores of an azure lake, with windy, cobbled streets hugging hilly contours, but the historic centre has been (perhaps irrevocably) blighted by concrete and the lack of building regulations (or at least their enforcement). Most houses in the old town have been rebuilt extensively in neo-concrete style, and the few that have the original wooden structure are on the verge of collapse with no-one seeming to care.

Winter on lake Ohrid isn't necessarily pleasant, but the moody weather has its own charm. I loved watching the waves crash onto the walkways along the shore.

The Country Where I Quite Want To Be

I have now reached Helsinki, which marks the end of the western Europe leg of my trip and in a couple of days I will head across the Baltic Sea to Estonia. This first stage has been a relatively gentle start to get me warmed up with no major difficulties: everybody speaks good English; the culture shock is, at most, mild; and things, generally, work. The biggest challenge was keeping costs down (which is working out better than expected - so far I've spent an average of £12.50 per day, all included). That's not to say that it has been boring or mundane, but it is time to move on to pastures new and push myself a little more.

Evening on on of Finland's many lakes.

Cape Fear

Nordkapp (North Cape). The famed northernmost point of Europe. Even the name sounds foreboding. The ultimate goal for many who venture into these far-flung lands - the End of the Earth. Never mind that there's a good tarmac road that leads all the way there (€22 toll for the tunnel per car ... each way); never mind that there are petrol stations, supermarkets and hotels in almost every town along the way; never mind that the visitors' centre with the multimedia show that you have to go through (€25 entrance fee) to reach the majestic, 300m cliffs, with dominating views of unending Arctic sea as far as the eye can see: east, north, west ... hey, wait a minute! What's that land doing there? Indeed. Norway's premier tourist attraction pulls in visitors from far and wide, and charges them a pretty penny for it, so that they can go to the edge of the cliff and say "no-one in Europe is further north than I am now". Let's for a minute forget pedantic nit-picking that place Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya and Franz-Josef Land much further north, but far closer, the next headland in fact, separated by only a 2km bay, is 1.5km further north. Nordkapp's notoriety is based on fraud, but it's a fraud that most visitors want to believe because they would rather just take the car than have to hike the 18km round trip; because Knivskjellodden is not as easy to pronounce (or as flagrantly obvious) as Nordkapp; and because you can buy a postcard and a cup of coffee there.

Looking south (OK, actually east southeast) at the cliffs of Nordkapp, not Europe's most northerly point.

Something Fishy In Norway

Norway is a big country. Or at least it is a long country. Many Norwegians I have met have regaled me with the factoid that if Norway were flipped over, using its southern point as the axis, the northern end would hit Barcelona ... or Rome, or Morocco, or some other impressively distant southern point. The accuracy isn't too important, but suffice to say it's a long way to the top. A lot of my time spent since Trondheim has been in the pursuit of bridging the gap to the north. Such is the size of the country that in Norway (and Sweden) when people talk of distances they talk in miles (mil), but not our paltry 1.6km miles, no, Scandinavian miles are each 10km long; so beware if a Norwegian tells you that something is only a few miles away, it may be further than you think!

I spent quite some time hitching in the north of Norway. It's quite a boring way to pass the day and so any amusement, howeverlame, is always welcome. Like the sign in Mo-i Rana.