Day 355: 22 July 2010 - Home

Just ten days short of a year after I left England, I fly back on an overnight flight from Barbados. As the plane flies over the green pastures of the southwest counties in the dawn hours of the morning, I feel a sense of excitement about arriving back home and catching up with friends.

However, this sense quickly dissipates on the taxi ride home. Over the past year, almost everyday has offered a new experience, and I feel that my world has completely changed, but as the taxi turns into the high street of the village where I spent my formative years and where my parents still live, it seems odd to me that everything should look exactly as I left it. It was like a time warp, as if the past year had never happened, and I realised then that my re-integration into a ‘normal’ life would not be an easy one.

Days 343 to 354: 10 July to 21 July 2010: Bequia, and places Mick Jagger has been

Peak season in Bequia is during the winter months, so the island is fairly quiet at this time of year. This being the tropics, this is not so much because it is too hot, but because it is the rainy season, when the houses in Bequia collect rain in their tanks that serve as the year round water supply. This is not to say that my stay here was marred by the weather, and I had a couple of glorious days taking boat rides and snorkelling the reef at the end of Princess Margaret Beach below the house.

The Friendship Rose is a Bequia built schooner that is captained by one of the brothers that built the boat about fourty years ago. It takes me and about twenty other passengers on a day cruise to Tobago Quays, a serene uninhabited archipelago of fantastical beaches and perfect snorkelling. There are Reef Sharks here, though I don’t see any, but I do get to swim along with a couple of large sea turtles – if these were around Bequia they would probably end up on somebody’s dinner table.

During my stay, my mother takes me on a tour of the local bars and restaurants, and in most of she tells me of the time it was visited by Mick Jagger, who lives on the nearby Mustique. The story always seems to end with him leaving after being approached by autograph hunters. A couple we meet in one of the restaurants tells us of the time they once had dinner with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston there, when they were the Hollywood couple de jour.

So Bequia is a bit of an unknown getaway for the rich and famous on yachts. This is not to say that the local people are wealthy, but it is a community where everybody knows everyone else and people seem generally happy. Willie, who can be found most days on Princess Margaret Beach selling trinkets and offering beach BBQs of fresh lobster, has an eight foot row boat which he takes to the harbour each morning and which he says he wouldn’t sell for a million dollars.

Once upon a time, Bequia used have a whaling station. Indeed whales are sometimes hunted still, the capture of one being a cause of great excitement among the local population. Bequia’s other main product was Bananas, but this faded away with the advent of ‘fair trade’ - Bequia’s banana farms did not qualify for some reason. Most of the Banana growers decided they were better off growing marijuana instead.

the view from 'A Shade of Blues'

 

on the Friendship Rose

Tobago Quays

lunch?

 

whale bones...

Bequia in Pictures (click)

Day 342 – Laid Back LIAT

I find that having not paid an ‘all-inclusive’ rate, I am charged $BB 40 (about £13) nullifying any feelings that I had found a bargain hotel in Barbados.

I have to check in for my flight two hours in advance, though the airtime to St Vincent is only forty minutes. In the waiting room, our flight time comes and passes as various small to medium passenger planes rest on the runway. This is Caribbean time after all, but the relaxed attitude is countered by the fact that LIAT (Leeward Islands Air Transport) is the first airline in the seven flights I have taken on my round the world trip so far to charge me extra for carrying my guitar. Eventually, about an hour after the planned departure time, we are asked to board.

The plane is a Bombadier Dash 8 Q300, a propeller powered aircraft that carries about fifty passengers. Being a nervous flyer, I am not that keen on these old fashioned looking engines, though the interior is comfortable and clean. However, the smiling and languid lone stewardess somehow makes me feel more relaxed, though there are several turns in the air on the way to St Vincent. How many times should a plane need to deviate from its course on a forty minute flight?

After a taxi ride to the ferry port, a couple of hours wait and a heavily oscillating ferry ride of an hour or so, again under grey wet skies, I arrive in Bequia after the last of the sunlight has disappeared. I ask a taxi driver to take me to ‘the new house by Jack’s Bar’ and he knows exactly where to go. A quick five minutes over roads more potholes than tarmac or concrete, I arrive at the gates of my parents house. Darkness has descended by now and when the taxi driver shouts up to the house ‘I have a guest for you’, my own mother fails to recognise me. ‘Oh, whoever it is, he’s brought a guitar....’

arriving at Bequia on the ferry

Day 341 – 08 July 2010: Killing pre-flight nerves at the sushi bar

At SF airport, I find it full of cops. There is an ‘orange’ status alert, but the police are not saying anything. They don’t seem to be doing much either, as if orange alerts are common place.

Post 9/11, US airports are not a great place for a nervous flyer. I remember thinking when I arrived about six weeks ago that if I didn’t have a US passport, my greeting here would involve having a finger print scan and being questioned by disdainful immigration officials as if I was a potential suspect.

I had to drop the car off before midday, but my flight is not until six o’clock, so I pass the time and kill my pre-flight nerves by chatting to guy at the sushi bar and ordering successive mini bottles of wine. ‘Be careful’, he tells me after ordering my fifth. However, I find that I have drunk just enough wine, because once on the plane I zonk out, waking hours later unsure whether we were in the air or not.

I am not going home though. This flight is the first of a five leg journey (including four flights) to Bequia, an island of six square miles in St Vincent and the Grenadines. The final leg of my journey will be a surprise visit to my parents who are staying there for a few months.

My next flight is from JFK airport to Barbados. This second flight is another four hours plus, but seems to take much longer as I had settled into thinking that four hours doesn’t take that long having woken up half way across the USA on my first flight. When we land in Barbados, it’s raining.

I am staying overnight in a hotel a half hour’s taxi from the airport. It’s one of those ‘all-inclusive’ resort hotels by the beach. It is not in one of the more celebrated parts of Barbados, which is why it is quite cheap, and it is populated largely by young Brits abroad drinking cocktails at the pool side bar, despite the grey skies. However, I am far too tired to join them, despite my room’s patio opening onto poolside, and I doze the rest of the day away.

Days 339 & 340 – 06/07 July 2010: Silicon Valley

During my day of more scenic driving, I get a text from Petra, one of my Salt Lake City ‘brides’ from the Green Tortoise trip. She works as a nanny in Cupertino, a small town to the west of San José at the heart of Silicon Valley. Cupertino is home to Apple amongst others, while the nearby Mountain View has a Google Avenue.

Being the home of the IT giants of the world, and with a good public (state) school in the area, house prices are eye watering. The house that Petra lives and works in has been valued at $4m, even though it is an indistinct American suburb house, perhaps slightly larger than average. There is nothing overtly appealing about the town, a kind of typical shopping plaza suburbia. In fact, when I join Petra in the evening, the shopping plaza nearest my motel didn’t even have a restaurant that didn’t serve drinks in paper cups. Eventually, we drive to one of the more upmarket plazas and have a pizza in a popular bar restaurant.

The next day, I meet up with Petra again to take a walk up a trail overlooking Mountain View and some of Silicon Valley’s more palatial homes hidden away in the hills.

After our walk, I go on to Santa Cruz on Petra’s recommendation. This is a popular tourist resort and surfer’s area, but I don’t arrive until the end of the afternoon. As I am flying out tomorrow, I don’t have very much energy left for exploring, though I do walk down to the pier for dinner. With sea otters circling below the pier scavenging leftovers, there is a line of expensive seafood restaurants on the pier. However, from the one I choose, I am served a fish that seems less than fresh, an anti-climatic end to my stay in the good old USA...

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Palaces

Google Avenue

Some of California in Pictures...Click Here 

Days 338 – 05 July 2010: Biting the Bullet

At breakfast, I chat for a while with the Native American bass player from the camp band. Improbably, he is called Gordon McQuirrie, so perhaps there was some integration with Scottish settlers in his ancestry. He works at the camp fulltime and when I mention that I will have to find work when I get home, he says that they are always looking for people at Kamp Klamath. I am sure that the pay isn’t great, but I am beginning to see my life as a choice between wealth and fun. Gordon is hoping to buy land to build on some day, but I have my doubts that his Kamp Klamath salary will ever be enough for him to buy anything in this part of California.

Also on the patio at breakfast is a family from Oregon with two teenage girls. The eldest of the two, who may be 15 or 16, spent much of last night screaming hysterically and sparking some angry complaints from neighbouring campers. It was something to do with her boyfriend in Oregon apparently. This morning though, she seems perfectly cheery.

I overhear the family talking about doing the jet boat ride and wondering what it is. Explaining what little I know about the water propulsion system that a jet boat uses, recommending the Klamath trip I had done, while mentioning that jet boats are especially popular in New Zealand. This leads me onto other things in New Zealand, like my stop at the Hobbiton set from the Lord of the Rings films. ‘Are hobbits real?’, asks last night’s hysterical screamer. She then tells me that I have a nice smile, which pretty much puts an end to the conversation as I am taken aback by being flirted with by a teenage girl in front of her parents. I am not sure if the parents were in any way embarrassed, or if it’s not unusual in these here parts.

Leaving Kamp Klamath, my Sat Nav directs me to cross a bridge that was washed away by the river in 1964 and is now just a bridge head monument. I am going to drive through Six Rivers Forest National Park, but this is a more direct route than I planned.

Driving the valley roads overlooking the rivers is another dangerous drive, not because of any shear drops, but because there are so many places where I want to stop. I have fallen in love a little with north California.

I will be leaving the US in a few days, having given up on the idea of going from coast to coast as I only had funds for six weeks in the US and haven’t even managed to leave the west coast. I start heading back to San Francisco. 

I stay in Weaverville, a historic gold rush town, and the county seat of Trinity County. However, first impressions are that it is now a town of lodges and motels, being conveniently placed for visitors to the forests and rivers nearby.