Those US visit ‘attainment goals’ - the results

Remember those ‘attainment goals’ I set myself when we first landed on US soil back in December? Well here’s the results:

Goal: To meet someone called Chuck or Randy (particularly if their name also includes the suffix ‘Jr’ )

Not met really, though I did hear of many. A friend also knows at least two people called Hank. Who are women.

Goal: To eat a Corndog

Not met. I’m sorry. Friends were happy to chow down on this bizarre hunk of fat on a stick but I just couldn’t do it…

Goal: Visit a High School and look inside the students’ lockers

Not met, and wisely so, given the stories I heard about High Schools.

Go to a live recording of a chat show

Achieved? Yes - visited recording of the Jimmy Kimmel Show in LA. Instantly forgettable. Why did I agree to this in the first place?

Watch an Ice Hockey match

Not met, due to the extortionately high price of a trip to watch the Minnesota Wild. However I did better than this and attended the Roller Derby in St Paul. A great evening out.

Visit a space centre

Not met - Houston had a problem, namely the amount of traffic (and our tight schedule to reach New Orleans).

Get admired for my accent and asked if I'm from 'Scotsland' / Denmark etc

Easily surpassed. Our accents drew attention and often admiration on countless occasions, particularly in the south.

Australian tops the charts as the nationality I was most mistaken for. Others included Irish, Dutch and even more bizarrely, Ukrainian.

Persuade someone I am Prince William’s cousin

Not achieved. But I did persuade someone that the Queen regularly pesters me, inviting me round for tea.

Collect bizarre questions about my home country, e.g: ’Do you still drive a horse and carriage?’

Achieved? Yes plenty, though even more Americans seemed more interested to hear about the present state of the UK’s economy.

Hear some Mississippi blues, preferably on a rickety old porch in the rain

Not achieved exactly, but I like to think I managed far better when I met Frank and his 1932 steel guitar up in the Great Smoky Mountains. I’ve never heard the blues like that before…

Hear something referred to as ‘aloadabaloney’

Sadly not. But I did collect a great deal of interesting new expressions I’d never come across before. “I wouldn’t take you to a dawg fight…”

Eat pizza in ‘Noo York Cidy’

Tick. Pizza in the village - one dollar a slice. However the great Chicago’s deep pan pizza vs. New York thin crust debate has still to be settled.

Buy a ten gallon hat

Not met. But perhaps I went one better, returning home the proud bearer of a genuine mountain man’s hat, a hillbilly headpiece from Civil War days.

Meet a stressed-out, coffee-guzzling cop like the fat one off ‘NYPD Blues’
Not met. They were all too relaxed, somewhat disturbingly. Nor did I get hold of one of the collectible playing cards with their name and face on - something I was told all cops have.

Go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans

Met. And I will return.

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Off with the panama, on with the cowboy hat

Our time in Mexico was running out and Uncle Sam was calling. It was time to start the long journey back up north.

Goodbye to Campeche and the Yucatan. Goodbye to heat, humidity and hungry mosquitoes

We gleefully turfed out items from our overloaded backpacks, kit for the tropics we no longer needed: worn-out swimming trunks, sandals and sun cream, insect repellents and panama.

Our bus took us through the night through the states of Tabasco and Veracruz, sticky, flat and dotted with stubby palms, and back up into the dry, mountainous spine of the country.

Through the thin morning air we passed Mexico's tallest peak, Citlaltepetl (‘Star Mountain’), 5611 metres high, its summit crowned with snow, before sweeping down into Puebla, a city of 1.9 million.

We lunched in the zocalo, a bargain comida corida in one of the many grand old colonial buildings gracing the centre of this city with a reputation as the most conservative, Catholic and ‘Spanish’ city in the country.

In the shade of the square below shoe shiners perched on their high chairs, balloon sellers touted for business and large coaches passed by, the large banners hung on their radiators indicating their passengers were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, clearly gathered here from all over for a convention. Hardly anonymous.

I consulted the map and immediately wished I hadn’t: sixteen hours on a bus and yet we were now even further south and east than when we’d left.

Thanks to the enormous coastline of the Gulf of Mexico we had to head in the opposite direction, skirting around it, before we could head north and west.

We soon got to correct this, heading again further north before quickly becoming sucked into the massive urban vortex that is Mexico City.

It seemed to take hours to cross, battling through thick traffic and choking smog before finally the air cleared as we rose up onto a dry high plateau where the traffic thinned out and parched yellow fields and pale green cacti replaced the dense concrete jungle.

We sped past a long high ridges of rock dusted with snow and blocks of small houses, identical and compact. Each roof was equipped with a squat plastic water tanks, like rows of black wheelie bins.

The scenery became wilder as we climbed up higher. Pine trees grew in the cool mountain air and houses perched precariously on craggy slopes.

The rocks all around us looked hard and unyielding, their sharp edges defying the efforts of man to bend nature to his will.

It seemed an unwise place to build a city but that’s exactly what we found as rounded yet another bend in the road and Guanajuato lay stretched out below us.

Soon we were plunging through the subterranean streets, amazing roads carved out of the rocks under the picturesque city through skills acquired by plundering the rich silver seams in the mountains nearby.

Songs of praise greeted us through the walls of our hostel as the faithful gathered at the church next door, a suitably cleansing soundtrack to my morning ablutions, before we headed up a hill for views over the town.

As the sun set evening shadows crept up over the hillside, gobbling up the little concrete houses, a riot of colours against the dry brown earth.

The road called again and we headed further north, changing at Leon, a city seemingly composed of car showrooms, Pemex stations and American fast food restaurants.

On and on, up onto the bone-dry high plateau of the central highlands, a land of rocky mesas and bluffs where black vultures patrolled the clear skies and the sun beat down relentlessly on the low scrubby bushes.

Aguascalientes hoves into view and our tubby driver stopped to change a tyre and take on some more cargo. A pick-up backed up and three beefy looking blokes hopped out, one of them sporting a splendid, cascading mullet, shining with grease in the bright sunshine.

They unloaded several crates of an undefined product into the bowels of our bus, the driver looking on a little apprehensively. We were back in drug-running country, and checkpoints were becoming more frequent.

At one the heavily armoured soldiers broke with their customary laid-back approach and boarded our bus, insisting on searching all our bags, promptly yours truly to indignantly mutter under his breath about the Magna Carta, the infringement of civil liberties and besides quite what would this skinny English chap be carrying.

I stayed tight-lipped as the soldiers alighted only to be replaced by a gaggle of vendors. They swarmed on board, hawking refrescos and sugary snacks, a poor old-timer in tow, holding out his plastic cowboy hat and begging for change.

This particularly millinery curiosity, is very much back in evidence now we’re back in the north. Though they crop up all over the country, making for ceaselessly tempting photo opportunities they only really come out in numbers where the air is cooler.

There were seven of them last night in our restaurant in Zacatecas, crowded round a table, their owners brooding beneath them, fingering their moustaches and talking earnestly in low voices. It looked an important meeting, perhaps about corn prices.

Or perhaps, as Lara suggested, they were revolutionaries, following in the tradition of Zapata and Villa.

Zacatecas, our last stop in Mexico, is a city which welcomes you, as our guide at the local silver mine put it: ‘with open arms and a heart of silver’.

It seemed to live up to its promise; we found ourselves being frequently greeted politely by complete strangers in the street and cars always seemed to stop for us to cross the road.

It’s a city of grand buildings, great thick slabs of stone with a pinkish hue, many ornately decorated by silver barons who made their fortunes in the surrounding hills.

Again it feels different to further south. There’s no grid-pattered streets of colourful low buildings here - instead it looks a little more like home, with winding streets and tall, elegant buildings where shop names are framed rather than painted on.

More importantly for us we’re back in the land of gorditas (’little fatties‘), delicious little tortillas sliced in the middle and stuffed with cheese, beans and cactus.

Up north once more we are back on high-protein diets and we bid a fond farewell to the tropical fruits which we gorged ourselves on further south.

People up here seem to be bigger; it is uncanny how they seem to increase in bulk the closer we get to the US border, walking manifestations of the strong links we have seen throughout our trip between diet and topography.

Glowing away in our bellies the gorditas warmed us up nicely as we beat a path back to our hostel, shivering in the cold night air, the altitude (the city standing at some 2500 metres) and latitude leaving us struggling to reacclimatise.

It’s only going to get colder from now on as we head further north. Time to break out that nice warm cowboy hat once more...

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Burgers to burritos: from the US into Mexico

Mexico. What’s all the fuss about? Or rather should I say what is all the concern about?


One week in to our trip and we haven’t been mugged or kidnapped, robbed at gunpoint or fallen foul of the drug gangs.
Nor have we been smashed to smithereens in a bus crash, stranded at the bottom of a remote ravine or abandoned in the desert, left to the jackals.

We haven’t even been stricken by food poisoning, overcome by urban smog or ripped off by one of the millions of the mythical, duplicitous Mexicans who supposedly live here and prey on unsuspecting gringos.

Nothing. Nada. None of the terrible fates of which many of the folk back in the United States predicted for us once we‘d left the protective mantle of Uncle Sam‘s realm.

On the the contrary, it’s all gone quite well. Mexico, this land of supposed barbarous savages, is - whisper it - actually rather a nice place.

I’m almost disappointed. I’d half expected to be shooting it out with bandoliered bandits besieging our train or at least making an appearance on the news, a grainy image of the two of us entering some shadowy pickup, the last known whereabouts of the most recent gringos to go missing in this dangerous nation.

I’d anticipated perhaps even a reunion with my old mucker Michael Buerk on 999. I could imagine him relating our mishap, his voice full of tension, “It was a decision which proved near fatal…”

So what on earth were all those Americans we met talking about?

(I should stop and correct myself here: by ‘American’ I mean of course US citizens; Mexicans are rightly sensitive about this, as the graffiti on a wall in Mazatlan pointed out “From Canada to Argentina we are all Americans”).

It’s early days into our visit here but this country seems wonderful. It’s warm and sunny, colourful and lively, the locals are fun and friendly, the food new and tasty and a welcome change to the predictable, plastic fare north of the border.

There’s fantastic colonial architecture, squat men in cream plastic cowboy hats, strange-looking Tarahumara Indians and more bushy moustaches than a Handlebar Club convention.

Despite the worries which were stoked up in us by our American friends, this country seems far more relaxed and enjoyable. We have encountered few of the up-tight neuroses which we did in the US, the buttoned-up paranoia which seemed to pervade our week there.

Like a conversation with the folks back home much of the talk in the US seemed full of financial worries, forecasts laden with doom, people fearing for the future.

The golden grins and confident swagger I experienced during my previous visit there seven years ago have been replaced by furrowed brows and TV channels full of adverts and advice on how to cope with the credit ‘crisis’.

The unimpeachable confidence of the CEOs has been punctured, the car companies crawling to the Capitol with their begging bowls in their hands.

Some even now openly fret that the tides are changing and the US supertanker is sinking as other vessels hove into sight over the horizon.

Can a change of captain set them back on course? We’ll find out when we return in February.
By contrast the people of Mexico, not a country which has by any means escaped the ravages of the ‘global financial crisis’ seem happier than their neighbours to the north.

Is this due to the different social makeup, where life is more family-oriented and less atomistic? Is it something to do with the differences in the ethnic makeup, cold-blooded Anglo-Saxons as opposed to warm-blooded latinos? Or is it because they’ve got less (in terms of material possessions) to lose?

Whatever it is, it’s been fascinating to witness these contrasts as they emerge and watch the atmosphere change as we’ve headed south, approaching and finally hopping, over the Mexican border.

Back in Los Angeles, from the minute we stepped off the boat, we saw strong hints about what was to come, from the food and the language, to the buildings and the people.

We passed through former Mexican territories in the South-West of the US, from California, through Arizona and New Mexico to Texas, areas which were often so hispanic in character one could be forgiven for thinking one had already crossed the border.

Combined with the powerful US political and economic influence in Mexico itself, this makes for an interesting cultural mix.

Dodge Rams and decaying old buses, Madonna and Mariachi, burgers and burritos, desperate poverty and opulent affluence.

This is born from a fascinating history between the two countries, full of friction and fury, exploitation and expropriation, revulsion and revolution.

Mexico is the only country which has fought on US soil; the US-baiting exploits of legendary revolutionary Pancho Villa is lovingly documented in his old stomping ground of Chihuahua.

This tension continues to this day, the US irate at Mexico’s seeming inability to police its borders, powerless to prevent the drug barons and people smugglers slipping over into US territory, Mexico fuming at US ‘imperialism’ and bullying tactics.

Yet both countries need each other: the US provides jobs, Mexico the workforce.

Without Mexico states such as California and Arizona would struggle to operate, few of their citizens wishing to carry out the menial work undertaken by many impoverished Mexicans.

Without the US, the income of millions of Mexicans would take a massive dive.

We travelled with thousands of Mexicans heading home from the US for Christmas. Passing through the state of Michoacà n we learnt that half of the population had emigrated north, the emigrants sending home some $2bn every year.

Despite this awkward relationship, one in which we found citizens of both countries needed little encouragement to condemn the other, both countries are inextricably bound to each other, condemned to dance an uncomfortable tango towards greater equality.

And like many awkward relationships there is a third party here, one from a very different part of the world - Spain.

Though the colonists left a long time ago their legacy remains. I was surprised at how quite how strong this legacy is, the visible reminders of the old colonial ruler far greater than those in other former European colonies we’ve visited such as Hong Kong (formerly British) or Vietnam (formerly French).

This was apparent from our very first port of call in Mexico, Chihuahua, a dusty city up in the dry mountains of the far North.

We found it a stark contrast to the US: grand colonial edifices, carefully laid-out plazas, streets designed for walking, not driving.

Though the architecture is impressive it is perhaps something else that the Spanish introduced that sets our new location apart from our previous - religion.

As a deeply Catholic country Mexico is crazy for Jesus and Mary. Their images and icons are everywhere: in shops and restaurants, in homes and hostels, on buses and trains, placed in tiny roadside shrines and daubed on huge mountains.

At this time of the year these are accompanied by Christmas bling. Lots of it.

Massive Christmas trees dominate town centres, their boughs laden down with garish decorations and garish lights twinkle from every building; parents stagger along pavements, weaving past elaborate nativity scenes, their arms laden with mountains of presents.

The beautiful ornate churches we visit seem to be permanently in the middle of one service or another, the masses drawn to prayer in the build up to the big day.

Jesus’s birthday is clearly A VERY BIG THING. I’m looking forward to it and seeing how Mexicans celebrate Christmas.

That’s if we aren’t blown up by a cracker, or knocked out by a falling piñata, or poisoned by an undercooked turkey, or crushed by a falling Christmas tree or….

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Into Russia (with parsnips)

In Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (or 'Parsnip', in Russian) refers to the Russian custom that before a journey people sit down for a few moments for good luck. Waiting for the train in Helsinki station we sat on our backpacks and pondered what lay in store for us at the other end of the line in Moscow.

We were leaving Finland, with its endless trees and lakes, double windows and ladders on roofs, markets selling berries and peas and kids swigging strong cider in parks, and now heading east to travel the length of its enormous neighbour - Russia.

The Moscow sleeper passes through St Petersburg, tracing the footsteps of Vladimir Illich Ulanov, AKA Lenin, and like everyone’s favourite bearded revolutionary , I enter Russia with excitement mixed with no small measure of trepidation.

This is partly due to my last visit to Russia (a rather miserable affair: cold; wet; the street in which the ‘hotel’ stood was in the process of being demolished; the staff refused to believe we had a vacancy) but also perhaps thanks to the reputation which often precedes this enormous nation.

Ivan the Terrible…the Politburo…food queues…goose-stepping red guards in front of the Kremlin…nuclear Armageddon….the cold war…cabbage soup…

This is a fascinating time to visit Russia; have all these negative images finally been buried? Or does Russia’s new-found wealth (thanks to its enormous oil and gas reserves) pose new concerns to the rest of the world. A resurgent Russia, strong, powerful and keen to flex its muscles.

The mind boggles at how much change people must have seen over the last 15 years or so. Have they really managed to shake off the bad old ways of the past whilst not sacrificing the many wonderful and unique elements of their culture which enrich the rest of the world?

We wait to find out. In the meantime we have certainly noticed that we are entering a very different place from ‘the West’: the Cyrillic alphabet poses new language challenges to us (does this button set off the emergency alarm or flush the toilet?) and the guards’ hats just seem to get better the further east we head - you could eat a Sunday Roast off the top of them, complete with pasternaks.
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