Notes from the Golden Gate

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  • Japan 2015

    Day 1 Tokyo

    I had a cunning plan for sleeping on the plane: partially deprive myself of sleep the night before, so that I’ll be super sleepy on the flight. Instead, it just compounded the existing tiredness with an almost sleepless night on a jumbo jet.

    We arrived at the ‘luxury capsule hotel’ near Shijuku station (the busiest station in the world) and immediately began jumping through the various bureaucratic hoops that may allow me to actually sleep tonight.

    (By the way, some may assume that ‘luxury’ and ‘capsule hotel’ are mutually exclusive. They’re not: this one has a spa pool, sauna, massage chairs and all the toiletries you can imagine.)

    I’ve been intrigued by capsule hotels ever since seeing them on Blue Peter sometime in the 90s. Essentially, instead of a room, you get a bunk which you enter head first. There’s enough space to just about sit up, a TV, a tablet computer, air con and a privacy curtain across your feet.

    Anyway, the bureaucratic hoops…

    On arrival, as is apparently traditional in homes and hotels across Japan, we were asked to remove our shoes and put them in a locker, resulting in us receiving a key. Check-in itself was only interrupted by the receptionist insisting we each draw a golf ball out of a cardboard box. Sadly, her English wasn’t fluent enough to explain what prize we’d have won I’d we’d drawn the red ball, but it was exciting enough that the ambient Japanese music was replaced by the Indiana Jones theme for the confusing few seconds that it took to draw the ball.

    We then handed over our shoe locker keys in exchange for a key for a belongings locker, into which could go a small rucksack. This key also contains the barcode for access to the capsule corridor. Our larger rucksacks went behind reception in exchange for a numbered blue plastic chip.

    In order to leave the hotel, we had to exchange our belongings locker key for our shoe locker key, plus a numbered plastic card.

    On return, our shoes go back in a locker, the key for which is combined with the plastic card to get our big locker key back.

    All to sleep in a room no bigger than 1m x 1m x 2m.

    When inside the hotel, it appears to be expected that we wear the brown suit and slippers provided by the hotel. It’s pretty strange to have a uniform for hotel guests, but not as strange as the bathing experience…

    First up, Japan is a very clean and hygienic country. Every toilet has a control panel to produce various well-targetted jets of water or hot air, as well as a ‘scent release’ button and one that produces a poor imitation sound effect of a toilet flush in order to mask the natural sound effects.

    This bashfulness does not extend to getting clean, which is often a communal experience. More on the etiquette of Japanese bathing later, but suffice to say there was a poster with very clear instructions on the various nuances that may be unfamiliar to western travellers.

    However, those instructions were not enough to prevent me going through the wrong door and parading along a public balcony/walkway with only a tiny towel (see later) for company. I fear this may be a significant breach of etiquette. Mercifully we leave for Nara in a few hours and don’t return to Tokyo for over a week, by which time they will hopefully have forgotten my transgression.

    Our first Japanese meal was deep fried (tempura) seafood, served on a bed of rice with some miso soup on the side. All very tasty. This was accompanied by a free glass of some sort of cold coffee, which was a bit revolting. If that stuff turns out to be the secret of Japanese longevity, I’ll pass.

    Day 2: Nara

    We took a Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo to Nara, via Kyoto. Nara was the capital city of Japan for 70 years in the middle ages, so is full of temples and shrines.

    Our hotel for the first night was a 2000¥ (£10) cab journey away, next to a busy dual carriageway and several other hotels. I’d found a bargain on Booking.com: 8800¥ (£44) for two king size rooms with breakfast.

    At first glance it looked a great deal: huge rooms with TV and projector, free WiFi, a huge bath with water jets etc. Even a massage chair. Then the things we found in the rooms started to get seedier, the full details of which will probably be turned into a stand up show, but for a start the minibar was stocked with lingerie.

    This turned out to be a ‘love hotel’, the kind that can be rented by the hour.

    Anyway, we spent as little time there as possible, eating out in central Nara (Matt suspects he ate pig brain) and leaving early in the morning for an altogether more sophisticated establishment.

    Day 3 Nara

    The Wakasa Hotel was an entirely different experience, situated close to the city centre and Nara Park, in which 1300 wild deer roam freely.

    We dropped our bags there and headed straight for the station, where we met a tour guide that Matt had found online. Tani was delighted and relieved when she saw us, as no other tourists had turned up. For 2000¥ (£10) each we had a private walking tour of Nara’s temples and shrines.

    The more elaborate temples were Buddhist, including Toda-ji, which was until recently the world’s largest wooden structure. Inside is the world’s largest bronze Buddha, surrounded by a variety of other statues. For a sense of scale, the Buddha had over 900 curls in his hair, each the size of a human head.

    Tani explained the history of religion in Japan, including how the early emperors (who were themselves Shinto) imported Buddhism from China as a means of uniting Japan.

    Outside a Buddhist shrine we watched a crowd of pilgrims chanting a prayer as part of a 33 shrine pilgrimage of western Japan. The Shinto shrines, nestled up a hill inside a sacred forest, are much simpler. Tani taught us to pray in the Shinto style: two deep bows, two hand claps, a moment of silent reflection, then a final deep bow.

    Shinto is Japan’s national religion and worships human heroes (including Japan’s emperors, who are believed to be descendants of a sun god, or at least were until Hirohito publicly renounced his godliness after WW2) and the spirits of nature and animals. Buddhism and Shintoism are not exclusive in a way that Christianity or Islam are. One person could have a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral.

    After the tour, we sat down to eat local noodles, as recommended by Tani. Both of us ate duck broth with noodles, but I ordered my noodles cold. I’m not sure what the point of this is, as you then reheat them by dipping them in the broth anyway.

    At the hotel check in we were greeted with a cold towel and a glass each of refreshing lemon juice. Our bags had already been taken to our room, which is a traditional Japanese room with no beds: just a low table and a couple of floor chairs on a tatami (woven straw) mat. Later that evening, maids would push the furniture aside and roll out a couple of futon beds.

    We went out for food, but failed to find the restaurant recommended by the man at the hotel. Instead, we ate teppanyaki, where the food is served on a hot plate in the centre of the table. We ate, in order of appearance: a ham salad; thinly-sliced potato topped with cheese; octopus; beef with garlic, mushrooms and asparagus; abalone (a strange-looking sea snail); king prawns with squid; and a slab of cabbage omelette with cinnamon (which is exactly as inedible as it sounds).

    Day 4 Miyajima Island

    Breakfast at the ryokan was exquisite. We both turned up dressed in yukata (summer kimonos), although most people were in normal clothes. Awaiting us at our table were trays filled with 14 different dishes, including broths, an eggy thing, some meats, a tiny stove with hot vegetables on, yoghurt, fruit etc. All of it was finely presented, as though arranged with tweezers. Unfortunately my yukata had no pockets, so I have no photographic evidence of this.

    Speaking of photos… I later checked out of the hotel and was handed a small plastic wallet containing a postcard and a photograph of a young couple, in which the man looked very vaguely like me (a white guy with glasses). We all look the same, clearly! I politely accepted it, although I suspect they spotted their error within seconds when Matt appeared, looking nothing like the blonde lady in the photo.

    We then walked to Nara station and boarded our first of four trains en route to Miyajima island. After settling into our seats, a western couple sat across the aisle. They seemed familiar. I looked at the photo from the ryokan and it was them. They were eastern European, though spoke excellent English, which was convenient because a failure of communication here could have created some weirdness when I handed them a photo of themselves.

    After our fourth train, from Hiroshima to Miyajimaguchi, we boarded a ferry for Miyajima island (also free with our excellent JR rail pass). On exiting the ferry terminal, we spotted a people carrier with the name of our hotel on the side. A man jumped out, loaded our bags and drove us the 10 minute walk up the road to our hotel.

    In Miyajima’s shopping street we found what claims to be the world’s largest rice scoop. It was about five metres long and presumably useless for handling rice. Still, the island is very proud of this claim to fame, so every shop sells (smaller) souvenir rice scoops.

    Also popular in Miyajima’s shops are small chocolate filled cakes and grilled oysters. We ate one of each. I’ve never eaten oyster before. Grilled, they’re basically giant mussels.

    Miyajima was relatively busy because we were visiting on the day of their biggest annual festival, Kangen-Sai. This involves a boat rowing from shrine to shrine around the island, before being greeted by a lantern parade after sunset.

    The festival began with a box being carried by 10 men from a temple to the huge red shrine that stands out on the sand, accompanied by drumming and music. At low tide you can walk around the shrine, but the rest of the time it is surrounded by the sea.

    After sunset, crowds began to gather by a smaller coastal shrine on the other side of the town centre. We were all given paper lanterns, lit by the local fire brigade and then waited for hours for the boats to arrive. It was all very calm and spiritual, but frankly quite dull.

    Day 5 Hiroshima

    The Japanese love to bow. It’s used instead of a handshake and as a general nonverbal greeting, thank you or acknowledgement. Most bows are small, firm nods of the head, though deeper bows are used sometimes, for example at Shinto shrines.

    Leaving the hotel in Miyajima, we were flanked by lines of hotel staff wishing us well and bowing deeply, which felt a little over the top, but is just a small example of how innately polite and respectful people are here.

    We ferried back to Hiroshima and headed straight for the peace park and museum. Until relatively recently, I’d assumed that Hiroshima was basically abandoned after the atomic bombing, and would, like Chernobyl, be too radioactive for humans to spend long there.

    That’s not at all true. The levels of radioactivity were safe within days (not that it hadn’t caused enormous death and suffering in the meantime, much of which wouldn’t be evident for years or decades) and the city is once again a bustling, modern metropolis.

    The peace museum is undergoing heavy refurbishment until 2018, but still provided a moving account of the horrors faced by the local people on that hot August day almost exactly 70 years ago. Many of the exhibits were items of clothing or possessions of the children killed by the bomb. They were often killed while conscripted to demolish buildings to act as firebreaks in case of American fire bombing of the sort that destroyed Tokyo.

    Little Boy instantly released a vast fireball when it exploded 800m above the city, essentially a small star with temperatures to match. This caused heat rays travelling at the speed of light to burn almost every building within a 2km radius. If the hypocenter was Trafalgar Square, every building as far north as Camden Town, as far east as the City and right across the river into south London would be completely destroyed. A few km beyond this area would be partially destroyed.

    140,000 people died by the end of 1945. Many of those burned in the initial explosion took days to die in horrible pain, their skin hanging from their bodies. Others suffered immense injuries when the pressure difference caused by the heat triggered a huge back draft.

    If the initial bomb didn’t kill you, the radioactive ‘black rain’ gave you radiation poisoning that could take weeks, years or decades to manifest itself.

    The UK has 225 nuclear weapons, each many times more powerful than Little Boy. The only purpose for each of them is to kill civilians on an unimaginable scale.

    Around the museum is the Hiroshima peace park. In 1945 this was a bustling urban area, but was almost entirely flattened by the atomic bomb and turned into a memorial park afterwards. Thousands died almost instantly in this area, and a flame now burns here until the day we rid the Earth of nuclear weapons. An eternal flame?

    At the northern end of the park sits the A-bomb dome. It was built in the early 20th century as a prefecture hall, and was just a couple of hundred metres from the hypocenter in August 1945. As the bomb exploded almost above it, most of the blast was directed downwards, allowing the walls to stay intact; it was pretty much the only building in this area not to be flattened. The building stands today (and forever, as decreed by the local government) as a monument to the dead.

    Day 6 Ikuchi-Jima

    We had two nights booked in Hiroshima, but after covering most of Hiroshima’s sights in one day, we decided to travel up the coast for the second day. We took a Shinkansen to Mihara, from where we took a ferry to the island of Ikuchi-jima.

    Ikuchi-Jima is one of several small islands between the mainland of Honshu and the large island of Shikoku. Honshu and Shikoku are now connected by a series of bridges that hop between the small islands, making them far less isolated than they were 20 years ago.

    The ferry to Ikuchi-Jima was a small boat with the interior decor of a 1980s static caravan. Getting the ferry was challenging, as few signs were in romanji (western lettering) and the lady in the terminal spoke little English. Major cities and tourist destinations have English translations on most signs, so this was an indication that we were leaving the normal tourist trail somewhat.

    On the island we hired bikes and cycled the full perimeter (about 23km) before cooling down with some beers in a beach bar that mainly played western 80s music. Ikuchi-jima is a beautiful island and it was nice to leave the foreign tourist trail for a day.

    Day 7 Osaka

    Bathing in Japan is very different from at home. Most hotels have communal single-sex baths, even if the rooms are also en suite. As a westerner reading about these ‘onsen’, I was a little apprehensive.

    Etiquette dictates that you first remove all your clothes and leave them with your bath towel in the changing area. The only thing you take beyond this point is a tiny towel that can (optionally) be used to cover yourself up. The towel is not large enough, however, to wrap fully around your waist, unless you happen to be a petite Japanese man.

    You then sit on a little stool in front of a mirror and shower head, with dispensers for shower gel, shampoo and conditioner. A sit down shower is actually a very satisfactory experience and involves far less dawdling than in a standing shower, as the seated position and mirror make for a very focused wash.

    Only after scrubbing yourself clean and rinsing all the soap are you allowed near the bath. At a traditional onsen, this would be natural hot spring water, but more likely it is hot tap water, maybe with added salts and bubble jets. Here, you relax for a few minutes and avoid eye contact with the other men in your bath.

    Any apprehension quickly disappears during the first visit to an onsen as you learn that it is a very relaxing experience, especially after a long day in the summer sun. Whenever a hotel had an onsen I would make sure to pay it at least one visit. This was why, on our first afternoon in Osaka, we found ourselves at Spa World, which is half onsen and half water park.

    The water park area (where everybody wears swimwear) was a very crowded swimming pool with a couple of big slides, each with a correspondingly long queue. We didn’t stay long, and instead headed for the men’s floor of the onsen, which this month was the ‘European zone’ (men and women alternate monthly between this and the Asian themed baths).

    Essentially, it was a lot of different baths, steam rooms and saunas (including a salt sauna) spread across the 6th floor of the building. The baths varied in temperature from a chilly 18C in the Finnish bath, to 41C in the Roman baths. There was even a row of individual baths which appeared to deliver small electric currents.

    A particularly bizarre experience was when we bought beers in the Germanian foot baths while watching a Japanese TV show about viral YouTube videos. A reminder that, throughout the spa area, the most anybody wears is a tiny towel and many forego even this. Please spare a thought for the barman, if only because it might displace some of the images currently in your brain.

    Squeaky clean and relaxed, that evening we met up with a lady called Yoko outside a railway station Starbucks. She walked us to her apartment where she taught us how to cook Japanese food.

    We ate cold roast wagyu beef (which was very rare and delicious) with salad, aubergine and a tofu dressing. There were meant to be scallops, but Yoko forgot them. This was washed down with a glass of sparkling sake, which was very tasty, mainly because it didn’t taste of sake.

    Japanese people generally get drunk very easily, so this glass of sake led Yoko to take us to a local festival, where a man taught us a Japanese dance not entirely dissimilar to the macarena.

    Day 8 Osaka

    Japanese t-shirts are great. I don’t mean the ones that are in Japanese, as I have no idea what they say. I mean the t-shirts written in English (and occasionally French) that are widely worn in Japan. Many have inappropriate or poorly translated slogans, while others just have random English words. For example, ‘Hypothesis’ and ‘R&D’ were both t-shirts for sale in one shopping mall, along with ‘Pyrex 23’. I bought a ‘Math’ and a ‘With’ t-shirt.

    I mock, but in the English-speaking world we are just as guilty. Our cookery teacher, Yoko, told us that the SuperDry Japan clothing brand is actually British, and the logo is nonsense (literally it translates as “Maximum dry (please do)”).

    Cat cafes are an increasingly popular addition to cities in Japan. These are places where you can go and pet cats if you live in a tiny apartment (as many city dwellers do) that don’t allow cats. We didn’t go to a cat café. We went to an owl café. Here, we were given the opportunity to pet some owls, which we literally seized with both hands.

    Osaka is a vibrant and modern city. We were staying in an AirBnB very close to the Dotonbori area, a glowing strip of restaurants, shops and bars alongside a canal. Halfway along we found a restaurant with low Japanese tables, with little trenches beneath them to dangle your feet in. In the centre of each table was a gas barbecue pit on which we could cook whatever we wanted from a long menu of meat, offal, seafood and vegetables.

    We had had to wait around half an hour for a table, so I left my name at the door while we went for a wander. It is a well-known source of borderline racist humour that Japanese people often mix up L sounds and R sounds when speaking Engrish. According to Wikipedia, there is a complicated linguistic reason for this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers), which explains why my name was written down as ‘Lope’.

    Among other things, we ate chicken fondue (as in, we cooked bits of chicken then dipped it into a bowl of melted cheese) and beef that was cooked in candy floss and soy sauce, before being dipped in raw egg to enhance the flavour. Sweet, salty, umami-y goodness. Delicious.

    Day 9 Kyoto

    About 50km to the north of Osaka is Kyoto, which was Japan’s capital city for over 1000 years. Compared to other large Japanese cities it has a lot of older buildings, due to being largely spared from US bombing during WW2. In fact, it had a narrow escape: it had been the intended target of an atomic bomb, but was spared – apparently due to the US Secretary of War having honeymooned there. Nagasaki was bombed instead.

    Japanese tea ceremonies are strange things. Proper ones can go on for four hours, with little chatting. The host and guests spend this time very slowly and carefully making and drinking tea, with little OCD twists such as rotating the cup a certain number of clockwise turns before sipping. The ceremony we went to was a much briefer affair, but I was still fighting to stay awake. A very calm experience, but I was not at all surprised to learn that the tradition is dying out.

    That evening we found a sushi restaurant with conveyor belts. I’ve never been to Yo Sushi, but I suspect it’s a similar arrangement where you take what you want and pay based on the number of empty dishes you have at the end. Unlike Yo Sushi, the sushi was prepared in front of us by chefs, using some very fresh fish and seafood. Also, I suspect it was a lot cheaper, with each dish costing 180 yen, which is about 90p.

    Day 10 Kyoto

    On day 2 of this holiday I had torn my feet to bits with blisters, due to a poor decision when buying new sandals to replace my pair that had spontaneously fallen apart in the Tokyo heat. Every day since then we’d done quite a lot of walking, so my feet were pretty revolting by this point. This was why we hired some bikes instead of walking along the ‘philosopher’s path’ in Kyoto.

    This path has loads of temples although, to be quite honest, by this stage I had acute temple fatigue. Japan has lots of temples and, though they are all exquisite, they are also all quite similar. Anyway, at the end of this trail sits the so-called silver pavillion of Ginkaku-ji. This was meant to be covered in silver, but its builder had run out of cash. It does have some nice gardens, though, including raked gravel beds.

    From here we cycled west across the city to the golden pavillion of Kinkaku-ji. This actually is covered in gold leaf, making it look like a Premier League footballer’s iPhone. The temple was rebuilt in 1955 as the previous one had burned down. A rather high proportional of all the historical buildings we saw in Japan were actually modern replicas, either due to war or fire (or both).

    The final leg of our cycle ride took us out of the west side of Kyoto to the district of Arashyama, famed for its bamboo forests and monkeys. We didn’t have the time or inclination to enter the monkey park, but we did wander briefly through the bamboo forests.

    We had to rush back to Kyoto (on the train this time), as our second night here was being spent in a traditional ryokan, and this time we had paid for an evening meal. This was served to us in our room on a low table. An endless supply of dishes was brought in, some tasty and some completely revolting (I’m thinking mainly of the bogey-coloured, bogey-textured mysterious blob that came wrapped in its own little inedible pouch).

    The meal was served by the owner of the ryokan, an overwhelmingly friendly lady in a kimono. After a while, her unrelenting helpfulness slipped over the line into just being a bit overbearing. It feels mean to complain about somebody who, on learning that you’ll be heading out shortly, has your shoes neatly laid out for you by the front door, and a range of appropriate leaflets and advice on standby. Perhaps I’m just an ungrateful bastard.

    Anyway, we didn’t take her advice to go to a local festival, instead heading to the bright lights of Kyoto station to book seats on the following day’s shinkansen to Tokyo. On the way back, we passed a raucous sounding bar and decided to pop in. The owner was a quite mad lady who gave us sweets and kept asking us to like the bar on Facebook. She introduced the only man at the bar as a sushi cock [sic] and served us a couple of beers. The raucous sounds were coming from a large group of colleagues doing karaoke at the far end of the bar. One was already fast asleep (although, to his credit, he did get up and do a song before resuming his slumber) and the others were well on their way.

    It’s a stereotype that Asian people can’t take their booze, although it’s not without truth. Up to 50% of Japanese people have inherited a genetic mutation that affects their ability to break down alcohol, causing red skin and drowsiness. There’s a nice summary here:http://www.accessj.com/2012/03/why-are-japanese-such-alcoholic.html

    The bar owner started to make suggestions that we should have a go at the karaoke, but (sadly) the ryokan had a 10pm curfew so we had to dash off to avoid offending our overfamiliar hostess.

    Day 11 Tokyo

    We had purposefully left our main visit to Tokyo until the end of the holiday, and day 11 felt like the start of a short city break, rather than the final days of a longer trip. After checking into a brand new hotel in the Akasaka district in which we had been able to get a room each for only about £45 a night, we headed to Shibuya.

    Shibuya is the home of a famously busy pedestrian crossing and the surrounding area is known for its vibrant nightlife. We headed for a bar called The Lockup, which I found on an internet list of quirky things to do in Tokyo. When you enter the bar, you walk along a dark passageway in which various creepy cabinets light up and haunting sounds are piped. At the end we found a woman dressed in a novelty policewoman’s uniform. She spoke to us in Japanese for a while, ignoring our confused expressions, before taking Matt’s wrist and clamping a handcuff around it.

    We were led down another corridor into a small ‘cell’. On the table were menus with pictures and some sort of homemade doorbell. After a while trying to figure out what was happening, we pushed the button and summoned a waiter. We ordered a test tube rack filled with coloured drinks and a cocktail each. My cocktail was served in a measuring cylinder and had to be poured into a glass beaker containing a brain-shaped ice cube. Matt’s drink was served with a side dish of sugary snakes. Although the novelty factor was high, unfortunately all the drinks tasty mostly of undiluted fruit squash.

    Moving on, we decided to track down a karaoke bar. We thought it would be a bit weird if we just hired a booth and sang at each other, so we were looking for one in an open bar. However, this search came to nothing and we found ourselves sitting in a tiny room near our hotel trying to figure out how to make the TV stop showing football and start showing karaoke. Eventually a waiter came and helped us, then we sang badly for a while, drank a bottle of appalling wine (that cost six times more than the karaoke) and left.

    Day 12 Tokyo

    Akihabara is a brightly-lit district in the north east of Tokyo filled with electronics shops, amusement arcades and maid cafes. The area developed a reputation for electronics after the war when shops there began selling spare parts for radios. It’s now the place to go, whether you’re looking to buy a PlayStation or an extension lead.

    Occasionally you’ll come across a shop filled entirely with vending machines, of the sort where you put in a couple of coins, turn a handle a few times and then receive a plastic ball filled with a slightly-randomised item. Matt’s watch was out of action, so he put 300 yen (£1.50) into one of these machines to receive an Adventure Time watch. I was less practical, and instead set out to find the weirdest things sold by vending machine. In the end, I spent a total of 500 yen on a tiny plastic toilet and a plastic model of some sushi, in which the raw fish has been replaced by a cat.

    On the fourth floor of the building across the alleyway from the vending machine emporium was a maid cafe. As you may guess, the waitresses in these cafes are dressed as maids, and they spend your visit doing cutesy things like dancing, offering glowsticks and encouraging customers to wear bunny ears. The other visitors were a bizarre mix of dining families, Japanese lads days out and one solo male having lunch. Almost everything cost money: entry was charged by the hour and we paid 500 yen to have a photo with our maid, the delightful Miaow Miaow (we didn’t have the heart to tell her that her chosen name was also the nickname of mephedrone).

    Since this day had descended into a non-stop rollercoaster of kitsch Japanese pop culture, we headed to Shinjuku for a visit to the Robot Restaurant. This is not a restaurant, it is a stage show that assaults the eyes and ears with a lively, confusing, brightly lit dance performance, featuring robots, giant dinosaurs and dancing girls. Nobody should visit Tokyo without seeing this, though have a couple of beers (ideally from a bar that only serves drinks in plastic horns) first to ease your sense of confusion.

    We then went to karaoke again.

    Day 13 Tokyo

    If day 12 was a day of pop culture, day 13 was to be a day of queuing. After much debate about whether it was appropriate to go to the other side of the world to spend a day in an American theme park, we went to Disneyland Tokyo. If you’re a fan of either queuing or Disney, I highly recommend it. I’m not especially keen on either, but we went on three of the four “thrill” rides, enjoyed them, then headed back to Tokyo mid-afternoon. Top tip: if you don’t care about sitting next to your friends and family, you can bypass almost the entire (3 hour) queue for Splash Mountain by going down the single rider lane.

    For our penultimate evening in Tokyo we found a well regarded sushi restaurant on TripAdvisor, only a couple of minutes from the hotel. In the spirit of Disneyland, we had to queue for around 90 minutes for a seat at the bar. This involved collecting a ticket from a touch panel (written entirely in Japanese) and then waiting for the number to be called (in Japanese). I Googled what 140 is in Japanese, but it didn’t help much. In the end, Matt displayed the ticket in his top pocket and eventually we were called through.

    The sushi was exquisite. It was prepared right in front of us using fish so fresh it was almost wriggling. One or two of the items were not to my taste, such as a weird crunchy yellow fish and a raw prawn, and there was a little too much wasabi on some of them, but otherwise an excellent, clean, refreshing meal.

    Day 14 Tokyo

    The Tokyo Skytree was built in 2012 and is the second tallest structure on the planet (after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai). It has two viewing platforms, one at 350m and the second at 450m. We joined a long Disney-esque queue to ride the lift up to the first platform.

    The views were incredible. Tokyo feels relatively compact when you’re shuttling around from district to district, but from 350m in the air you can appreciate that this is the biggest city in the world (or, more precisely, the most populous metropolitan area). In every direction it stretches out as far as the eye can see, with many high rises adding to the dramatic views.

    On a clear day it’s possible to see Mount Fuji, about 100km away. We had missed seeing it on both train journeys between Tokyo and Kyoto, but sadly it was too hazy to make out anything other than a vague mountain range.

    After a wander through the district of Asakusa (home to many cookware shops, including the places where restaurants buy their fake plastic food from), we headed to the Imperial Palace. This sits in the centre of Tokyo, surrounded by vast gardens. To enter the palace itself you need advance tickets, but the east gardens are free and apparently worth a visit. We’ll never know, as we failed to find them. Either that or they were closed.

    Around the palace are many government buildings, including the National Diet Building. We kept seeing this building marked on tourist maps and on subway exit signs. Was this a building dedicated to dieting? Was it about preserving Japanese cuisine? No, it turns out the Diet is the name of the Japanese parliament.

    For our final meal in Japan we wanted one more taste of their incredible beef. It really is a thing to behold: every cut of beef is so much more marbled than beef in the UK and so full of flavour. We found another self-barbecue restaurant and set about working our way through several trays of beef. A delicious end to an excellent fortnight. Go to Japan, it’s super.

  • Making the Games

    For a few weeks this summer, a city and a country came together in a way that few dared to predict. I was very proud to have been able to play a tiny part in this unforgettable fortnight as one of the 70,000 games makers, and was incredibly lucky to find myself in a role that gave me some amazing stories to tell in the subsequent months. It’s time to write these stories down, before they become so exaggerated that I start claiming I won the 100m gold myself. Unfortunately, brevity is not one of my strengths, so a gold medal to anybody who reads all 3000 words…

    My first games maker shift was a full week into the Olympics on Friday 3rd August, but I didn’t waste those first days. My dad and I watched with disappointment as the anticipated dream start of a Cavendish gold on day 1 failed to materialise, then I saw handball in the Olympic Park on day 2. By the following Thursday I’d watched the rowing at Eton Dorney and cheered Bradley Wiggins towards claiming GB’s second gold medal on the streets of south-west London. I was trying to pack as much in before the volunteering started and I’d be too busy to see more sport.

    My games maker role was as an ‘Olympic Family Assistant’; essentially, a driver and personal assistant to a member of the IOC, head of a sports federation or president of a national committee. I was appointed to be a support OFA, meaning I had no fixed client and would instead be providing cover for absent colleagues. This meant that my first shift began with a two hour wait for an assignment in the ballroom of a Mayfair hotel (transformed for the Olympics into a transport depot). During this wait I heard stories from other  games makers about what the little ‘ALL’ on our accreditations actually meant.

    Eventually an assignment came through for me to take over as OFA to the head of the International Basketball Federation from 8pm. With several hours to kill I jumped on a tube to the Olympic Park and waved my accreditation to get past the security queues. After briefly saying hello to the Lesniak family (in the park to watch basketball), I made a beeline for the velodrome and held my breath as I walked up to the ticket barriers. The games maker on duty took a quick look at the ‘ALL’ on my pass and waved me in. Stepping through the airlock into the warm, sticky confines of the Olympic velodrome, I felt as though I would be kicked out at any moment.

    Over the following hour and a half I wandered around the perimeter in a bit of a daze, occasionally being told off by velodrome-based games makers for taking photographs (“not professional” – umm, I’m a volunteer). Within minutes of me entering, the GB women’s team pursuit had broken the world record during a preliminary round (the following day they would break the world record again as they claimed gold). I then saw the men’s pursuit team smash the world record to win the gold medal in their event. The velodrome has a very low, curved ceiling and a capacity of just 6,000, so the atmosphere is simultaneously intimate and roof-raising. As the team pursuiters pushed through 16 laps the terrific roar of the partisan crowd followed them around and around.

    Next up was the undisputed queen of British cycling, Victoria Pendleton. This was her final competition before retirement and her disqualification in the team sprint the previous evening meant there was plenty of pressure on her to claim gold in the kierin. She did not disappoint, passing her rivals on the final bend to trigger a deafening roar from the delighted crowd. I abandoned any pretence of being a professional and leaped in the air, whooping.

    Within minutes of the medal ceremonies concluding I stepped back out into the Olympic park, my velodrome experience immediately feeling like a hallucination. With half an hour to kill before meeting my client, I tested out the accreditation again by walking straight into the stands of the basketball arena. In the end I spent the next couple of hours sitting on the other side of a thin wall from the arena, waiting for the client to finish watching the match before I drove him back to his hotel.

    Day two began much like day one: waiting in the Marriott ballroom for an assignment. A job did come much more quickly this time, but it came with a five hour wait for the car to be returned before I could drive it back over to the Park to collect my next client: the president of the modern pentathlon union. I cruised along the games lanes and parked up in the fleet depot (the car park of Westfield Stratford). The client did not need collecting for a couple of hours, so I tried my luck again by walking straight to the Olympic Stadium.

    Again, my accreditation did not let me down as I paced around the middle tier of the vast amphitheatre until I could feel the heat from the Olympic flame. I found a spot to stand just in time to see Jessica Ennis win the 800m, and therefore claim heptathlon gold. The atmosphere in the velodrome the previous evening was special, but I have never heard anything that compares to the roar of the 80,000-strong stadium crowd. It’s difficult to describe; I’ve been in football crowds at Old Trafford and Wembley, and to gigs at the latter, but none of them can compete with the unforgettable roar of the London Olympic stadium celebrating a GB gold.

    Erring on the side of caution, I headed back to the car before Mo Farah’s 10,000m gold, also missing Greg Rutherford’s long jump victory. That night is said to have been the greatest in British athletic history, so to have been there when Ennis claimed gold and took her victory lap was incredible.

    I was brought back to Earth with a bump an hour or so later when I managed to scrape one very expensive BMW 5 series against another very expensive BMW 5 series in the depot underneath Hyde Park.

    A recap: in my first two games maker shifts I had witnessed three Team GB gold medals. I was understandably getting quite cocky about just how far I could stretch my accreditation. Conveniently, the men’s 100m final happened to be on my third shift: could I persuade lightning to strike a third time?

    On arriving for the shift in the early afternoon I knew I would have to be selective about which jobs to volunteer for: anything away from the Olympic Park was out for a start. Fortunately, I was assigned to the president of the archery federation, who was ultimately heading to the park to watch the 100m from the hospitality centre. In between, he had business to attend to, including a trip to Lord’s cricket ground (where the archery had been hosted until a few days earlier) and then on to the Olympic Village.

    The Olympic Village was one area I did not have direct accreditation access to, but while the client was at his meeting in the village, I went to security to see if I could get in. By giving them my car keys as collateral, I received an upgrade pass and was free to wander in. It was more of a town than a village, with several large tower blocks housing thousands of athletes from almost every nation; the teams had hung huge national flags over their balconies to mark out their territory. Close to the village entrance was a florist, a post office, a gift shop, a salon and a supermarket, provided exclusively for the convenience of the athletes and officials.

    Next stop, after inevitably getting lost on the approach roads, was the Olympic Park. I dropped the client at the hospitality centre, parked the car in the fleet depot (aka the John Lewis car park) and made a beeline for the Olympic Stadium. As I approached the ticket barriers I saw another games maker being turned away: he didn’t have ‘ALL’ on his badge, but clearly on other evenings he would’ve been nodded through by fellow volunteers; not tonight. I was allowed in and left him bartering for entrance with pin badges (the unofficial currency of the Olympic movement).

    A few moments after entering I saw Bolt and Blake run separately in their respective semi-finals. It was looking doubtful as to whether I would still be in the stadium for the final, as it was scheduled to begin at 9.50pm and my client had asked for a pick-up at 10pm: it was going to take much more than 10 minutes to get back to him. Standing around me were other games makers in similar situations: some dutifully rushed off, while others took their chances. I decided to stay.

    At 9.50pm, 80,000 people fell completely silent. At the far side of the stadium from me, the fastest eight men on Earth – indeed, the fastest humans to have ever lived – took their marks and got set. On the ‘B’ of the ‘BANG’, they exploded out of the blocks and the silence was replaced by an unforgettable wall of noise. A billion people around the planet watched as the sprinters ran from left to right across their TV screens: from my vantage point, the race was run from right to left – a minor difference, but one that I will never forget.

    9.63 seconds later, Usain Bolt crossed the finish line to set a new Olympic record and retain his title. About half a second later, after double-checking with those around me that it was definitely Bolt who had won, I turned and sprinted out of the back of the stadium. As I did so, I was accompanied by a few dozen other games makers and stall holders who had duties to return to. I ran out of the stadium, across the bridges, past the aquatic centre and out of the Olympic Park, turning left down a high-fenced security path to get into the John Lewis car park. I dashed up the three flights of stairs and jumped into the car, pausing for a few seconds to catch a breath and take in what I’d just witnessed.

    At 10.02pm, I picked up the client from outside the hospitality centre. He climbed into my car and informed me that Usain Bolt had won gold in the 100m sprint. I innocently thanked him for the information and drove us back to the west end.

    Three shifts, three ridiculous evenings of “I was there” moments. Sadly, this trend didn’t continue, but I do have a few more silly stories from my week as a games maker.

    My next shift came after a couple of days off, during which I had watched women’s 10m diving in the aquatic centre, and dressed up as a Roman soldier to watch Greco-Roman wrestling. This was my first early shift, so I arrived at 8.30am and was immediately assigned to the president and secretary-general of the Lebanese Olympic Committee. The president had wanted a lift to the Olympic Park, but had panicked that I wouldn’t be there on time and left without me in another vehicle, so I followed him to the Park, just in time to be informed that the secretary-general was in the west end and wanted a lift. He made alternative arrangements, so I parked up and wandered into the Olympic Park to meet up with my mum and dad, who had handball tickets.

    I then drove round to the Village, in the hope of being able to buy some tickets from the athletes’ ticket office. Sadly, they were just as sold out as the public offices, but I then received a call from the secretary-general asking for collection from, coincidentally, the Olympic Village. He didn’t give a timescale, so I ended up sitting in the BMW listening on the car radio as, just on the other side of the fence, Sir Chris Hoy won his record-breaking sixth gold medal in the velodrome. Actually, at the precise moment this happened I was distracted by a Tunisian coach who, not realising my car was occupied, exposed himself and began urinating in my direction.

    I sat in the car park for five hours, spotting retired triple jumper (and Van Mildert alumnus) Jonathan Edwards and GB track cycling gold medallist Philip Hindes as they walked past. Eventually, the client emerged and I drove him to the beach volleyball at Horseguard’s Parade.

    Day four saw me working with a former PE teacher who had risen through the ranks to become head of his Olympic Committee. Other than him wearing a Venezuelan flag shell suit, nothing very exciting happened on this day.

    For my final four days I was allocated to the president of the Ugandan Olympic Committee, accompanied by his wife and baby son. Over the course of these few days it did look like I would return to my jammy form of the previous weekend, but delays meant I actually spent many hours parked on a Woolwich housing estate, rather than witnessing history.

    On the penultimate day of the Games, I drove the client and his son to Wembley Stadium for the men’s football gold medal match between Mexico and Brazil. I dropped them at the Olympic Family entrance, parked up and headed for the staff entrance. Unlike the venues in the Olympic Park, Wembley is mostly staffed by professional stewards. Couple this with the sprawling, maze-like interior of the stadium and it becomes very difficult to surreptitiously get into the stands while trying to look like one has good reason to be there.

    This is my excuse for why, 8 minutes before kick-off, I found myself walking around the perimeter of the pitch, surrounded by a capacity crowd of 90,000 people. Rather than turning back, I decided to march purposefully in the hope of finding a route into the stands. As I reached the section containing the team dug-outs, I was stopped by a couple of games makers as I didn’t have ‘field of play’ accreditation. They helpfully directed me down the tunnel and into a corridor. Eventually, after a detour through some loading bays and past the rooms where the gold medals were being kept, I emerged into a stand.

    I stood at the top of the stand, next to a steward, in the hope of looking official. As the match kicked off, my hopes were dashed when a man in a suit approached. Instead of kicking me out, though, he instead directed me to a vacant seat from where I saw the only goal of the game.

    15 minutes into the match, my client called to say that he and his son had been unable to get into the Olympic Family stand, as it was full, so they wanted to leave. Feeling a little guilty that I had got a seat and they hadn’t, I ran 180° around the outside of Wembley to get back to the car.

    The next day was the final day of the Games and began for me at 10am as I waited to collect the clients from their hotel. I dropped them on Oxford St for a bit of shopping and when they returned they were excited by news that a Ugandan athlete was leading the men’s marathon. I suggested that we may be able to get to the finish line in time, so drove into Hyde Park.

    Hyde Park was mysteriously quiet, which made sense as the actual finish of the marathon was a couple of miles away on The Mall. My cock-up meant that we didn’t get to the finish line in time, instead hearing the result on the car radio. This was Uganda’s only medal of London 2012 and their first gold medal since 1972, so the joy felt by client and his family was incredible. At the time, I said that sharing this moment with them was my most enduring memory of the Games. In hindsight, I don’t think that’s true, but it certainly had a more human dimension than my “I was there” moments from the previous weekend.

    I joined the family as they celebrated victory in the enclosures around the finish line, taking photographs for them as they posed with the medal winner – now transformed into a national hero.

    From a logistical point of view, however, this unexpected victory was a nightmare. The client hadn’t planned to attend the closing ceremony, and had left his suit in a case at his friend’s house back east in Woolwich. After several journeys shuttling around London (and another prolonged wait in a Woolwich car park), eventually I dropped the client at the Olympic Village from where he could march (carrying his young son) into the stadium with Team Uganda.

    As the east end was now in full closing ceremony mode, police waved my Olympic car through red lights and I sailed along the games lanes back to the west end.  I parked for one final time in the subterranean depot, from where I could hear the bass of the concert I had tickets for above me in Hyde Park. The gig (Blur) wasn’t that good anyway.

    I think that’s about it. A truly unforgettable fortnight, followed by the incredible Paralympics a few weeks later, for which I didn’t volunteer but did buy a lot of tickets. By the time the Olympic Park closed for the final time at the end of the Paralympics, it was feeling like a second home.

    I don’t think even the most optimistic supporter of London 2012 could have predicted the huge impact the Olympics and Paralympics had on the nation. I feel very lucky that it happened in my lifetime and in my city, and enormously proud to have been a very small cog in the huge, well-oiled machine that changed the way the world views Britain and the way Britain views itself. To quote Seb Coe: “When our time came, we did it right.”

  • What I did on my holidays (part 5)

    Thursday 6th November
    We woke early to catch a 7am bus to Philadelphia. This was especially difficult for Neil, Mini Matt and Andy who had been in a bar basement until 4am listening to a jazz band who claimed to have a member of the Fugees (although this was debatable).

    The Bolt Bus left from a stop a few blocks north of our hostel to make the hardly-scenic journey through industrial New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Interestingly, the bus somehow managed to conjure up a wifi connection for the whole two hour journey, even when we were underneath the Hudson River in a tunnel.

    We stepped off the bus on the outskirts of the city centre. Actually, it was the outskirts of ‘centre city’, which is how Philadelphians describe the bit that other Americans call ‘downtown’. Looking along the Delaware River we could see the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the distance, better known as the Rocky Steps. I’ve never seen Rocky or any of the sequels, but apparently Sylvester Stallone’s boxer character used the front steps of the museum in lieu of gym equipment in montage scenes in five of the six movies.

    After vaguely reassuring Andy that we may have time to visit the steps later in the day (we didn’t), we walked from 30th Street into the heart of the city. Philadelphia felt a world away from Manhattan. The streets reminded me of the small towns of America that we had spent the majority of our 2007 trip visiting: quiet, low-rise brick buildings lining two-way avenues and streets on which real people went about their daily business.

    Philadelphia plays a pivotal role in any history of the USA. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both signed in the city and it was temporarily the nation’s capital in the late 18th century. The old part of Centre City contains several museums on these themes, particularly paying homage to local heroes Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell.

    The Liberty Bell museum begins with a series of display boards and videos, emphasising the importance of the bell to all Americans. It allegedly rang out to announce the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (although historians politely advise that this is probably bollocks as the bell tower wouldn’t have supported the weight). Since then, it has travelled the country, representing the principles of American freedom.

    In 1846, while chiming for the anniversary of George Washington’s birth, a small crack in the bell turned into a much larger one. The bell hasn’t rung since, although it makes the occasional ‘dunk’ on special occasions.

    We paid homage to the bell itself, cordoned off as it was and protected by a Ranger from the National Park Service, then wandered down to the riverside for a visit to the Independence Seaport Museum. This consisted of two dry-docked boats of the US Navy: the USS Becuna and the USS Olympia.

    The Becuna is a submarine from World War II which was built in Philadelphia and launched in 1944. More than 70 submariners would somehow live in the tiny, cramped conditions as it patrolled the Pacific looking for Japanese ships. In the final room of the self-guided tour we met an ancient old man who had been one of those submariners.

    The veteran told us that he was responsible for the problems currently facing America. He went onto explain that this was because his boat had rescued George HW Bush during WW2; if they hadn’t, then Dubya would never have been born. The old man even produced a signed photograph of the former President that was sent to the rescuers upon Bush taking office in 1989.

    After touring the Olympia, a 19th century cruiser, we played on the interactive exhibits in the nearby museum before getting a cab to the railway station. From there we boarded a train to Atlantic City, New Jersey for an evening of James Bond-style glamour among cocktail-sipping high rollers. Except, of course, real life casinos are nothing like 007 would have you believe.

    Atlantic City used to be a thriving seaside resort (still immortalised as the setting of the US version of Monopoly), but by the 1960s it had sunk into the kind of decline familiar to Blackpool and other English resorts. In 1976, voters agreed to legalise casinos in an effort to revitalise their city by creating an east coast Las Vegas.

    Economically this worked, but at the cost of removing the soul of the city and replacing it with a sink hole of seedy despair. We visited Caesar’s Palace, an enormous casino beside the beach which stank of stale cigar smoke (despite a smoking ban). It consisted of several levels of almost identical floors, filled with slot machines and card tables as far as the eye could see.

    The cheapest blackjack and poker tables had a minimum stake of $10 per hand, so instead we took to the more budget option of 25¢ fruit machines and video poker screens. Several hours later we left the casino; I was the only one of our group to leave without a small hole in my pocket, having found a knack for video poker which turned my $20 bet into $42.

    We took the Greyhound back to NYC from a bus station full of the kind of shouty weirdos that normally frequent Camden Town in London. The bus was much less comfortable than the Bolt Bus we had taken to Philadelphia and it was almost impossible to find a sleeping position that didn’t lead to a very sore neck. Occasionally, we awoke to find the bus attempting a three-point turn across the highway; it turned out to be the driver’s first day and he was somehow struggling to find New York City. At around 2am, we finally arrived back at the Port Authority Bus Station.

  • What I did on my holidays (part 4)

    Wednesday 5th November

    Despite Fox’s kind offer of a free breakfast, a 7.30am start at the filming of their Morning Show did not appeal after the late night in Times Square. Instead, we got out of bed an hour or so later and I headed out to the local store to pick up a copy of the New York Times. To my dismay, the news stand was empty of everything but the New York Post (the local equivalent of the Sun, a copy of which I purchased in 2007 when their headline described the Manhattan steam pipe explosion as a “Midtown Volcano!”).

    I tried another store, but to no avail. It soon became apparent that we weren’t the only people who thought that a copy of the New York Times on the morning after America elected its first black President might be a nice keepsake. Fortunately, we had noticed the day before that the New York Times had its headquarters just a few blocks to the north on 8th Avenue, so we headed there in the hope that there would be some copies lying around.

    We were greeted with the sight of scores of people snaking around the corner of the block, waiting in line to buy a newspaper. In Britain we seem to have an instinct that drives us toward cynicism on occasions when Americans would react with optimism. It’s what makes us good at satire and Americans good at inventing stuff. We have Ian Hislop, they have Google.

    Obama’s victory, at least here on the liberal streets of New York, had awakened an optimism that Bush, Cheney and co had worked hard to suppress. This was embodied by the multicoloured queue forming along 40th Street to buy a $1.50 copy of the New York Times on this historic morning. We joined the back of the queue, which moved remarkably quickly, and bought several copies each.

    The Matts and I headed north towards the Ed Sullivan Theatre on 53rd and Broadway, where we were to spend a good chunk of the afternoon as audience members for a filming of the Late Show with David Letterman. As we queued outside in the torrential rain, a man came outside and made us practice laughing. He also ran through the rules, which included no high pitched noises and that we should always err on the side of laughter if we’re unsure about whether a joke is funny or not.

    This was a useful policy for them, as Letterman is not very funny. Actually, that’s not fair; David Letterman himself is occasionally funny in the kind of way that might ordinariliy make you smile but probably wouldn’t make you laugh out loud. His guests, on the other hand, were both poor for very different reasons. The first, Tom Brokaw, is a highly-respected journalist who chaired the second Presidential debate and was the interviewer when Colin Powell endorsed Obama. However, these facts are not enough to make the man interesting in himself.

    The second guest was Vera Farmiga who had recently starred in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. She was heavily pregnant and, by her own admission, a little hormonal.  She was absolutely bonkers and I think they may have cut her interview short, such was her instability,

    The rest of the show was made up of the kind of humorous clips that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show does much better, and a bizarre sketch involving planted audience members, during which we were briefly caught on camera.

    I think it’s fair to say the British and American senses of humour are quite different. Cutting edge late night satire shouldn’t need a drum roll every time a joke is told; nor should it need an audience indoctrinated to laugh regardless of whether they even got the joke.

    I gathered back in Times Square with Neil, John, LJ and Andy. The plan for the evening was to pick up some Broadway tickets from the half price ticket booth built into the back of the tiered seating we had sat on the previous evening. Matt and Matt, meanwhile, would be watching ‘Christmas on Mars’, a film by psychedelic alt rock band The Flaming Lips.

    Rather than going to a traditional Broadway show, John had recommended a piece of postmodern theatre he’d seen in Edinburgh called Fuerza Bruta.  It was about as far removed from Les Mis as is possible; for a start, the theatre had no seats and no stage.

    We gathered in a dark room with black walls, floor and ceiling alongside perhaps a hundred other people. Loud trance music kicked in and the crowd was parted by stage hands as a giant treadmill rolled into the middle of us. A man in a white jump suit and a ceiling harness swung onto the treadmill and began sprinting. Walls would swing into him and shatter, and at least twice he got shot by an unseen gunman.

    That’s how it started. It’s almost impossible to adequately describe the experience, other than to say that about an hour later it had caused scores of sober theatre-goers to rave fully-clothed under a heavy shower of water. At the time, this felt like the absolutely sensible thing to be doing, but only a few minutes later we found ourselves sitting in the bar dripping and shivering. Fortunately, the theatre was on hand to cash-in on our stupidity, selling us promotional tee shirts to delay the onset of our hyperthermia.

  • What I did on my holidays (part 3 – election night special)

    Tuesday 4th November

    Since our arrival in New York there had been a low frequency buzz on the streets about the election. It seemed like every conversation we tuned into on the crowded sidewalks contained snippets of “Obama”, “McCain” or “Palin” (poor Biden). It’s difficult to imagine an election in the UK creating such a level of interest, although I suspect this is no ordinary US election.

    Despite this level of public interest, there was actually very little in the way of election publicity in the city. New York is one of the most reliably Democratic states on the electoral map, so neither candidate saw the need to waste money on posters or adverts. A good number of people , though, were walking about with Obama-Biden badges on their lapels (almost nobody had McCain-Palin badges).

    One source of these badges revealed itself on our way to Macy’s (the world’s largest department store). A middle-aged black woman had set up a table on a 7th Avenue corner with an enormous selection of pro-Obama merchandise. She was so excited about the prospect of an Obama victory that she told us how she had voted at 6.30am; the Democratic campaign’s message of hope and change had genuinely become ingrained in the desires of people like her.

    We bought some badges and headed to Macy’s. It’s basically just a big John Lewis, but it’s worth a visit just to ride the ancient wooden escalators on the upper floors. OK, it’s maybe not worth a visit just for that, but if you happen to be there you should at least take a look.

    Realising that we didn’t really have any shopping to do, the Matts and I parted company with Neil, Andy, John and LJ. We headed towards the Rockefeller Center to check out the planned NBC election night party taking place around the ice rink. We’d been tipped off about the party by a news bulletin on one of the LCD screens that have been fitted into the back of apparently every taxi cab in the city.

    A map of the country had been drawn onto the ice, which they would somehow illuminate state-by-state in either red or blue as the election results rolled in. NBC had set up a temporary studio next to where we were standing that appeared to be broadcasting live on the big screens above us. On our way out of the plaza, a man with a Blackberry stopped us and said he was looking for good looking young people to sit on the front rows of the following morning’s Fox Morning Show. Clearly, there was a shortage of good looking young people, so he handed the tickets to us; we’d have to be there at 7.30am, but breakfast would be free.

    Another option for election night festivities was in Times Square where CNN had set up a big screen in front of the tiered seating that forms the roof of the half-price ticket booth. It was still mid-afternoon, but we took some seats and watched some CNN. They were showing off an artist’s impression that they had commissioned of what the candidates would look like if McCain were black and Obama white. McCain looked a bit like Bill Crosby, whereas Obama looked like a used car salesman.

    While sitting in Times Square, a young man approached us with a clipboard and asked if we wanted to watch the Late Show with David Letterman being filmed the following afternoon. We said yes, and he said they were ours if we could answer two “simple” trivia questions. I cracked my Itbox-playing fingers, only to realise seconds later that the trivia was Letterman-related. Despite none of us having ever really watched it, the Matts were able to answer a question each to win us the tickets (for future reference, the bald band leader plays the keyboards and Letterman likes to throw his pen).

    Later that afternoon we returned to our vantage point in Times Square and settled down for election night. As the clock ticked towards the first polling stations closing, the steps and the square below filled and the atmosphere began to crackle with anticipation. At 7pm, America reached the beginning of the end of this epic two-year long election when Vermont and Kentucky were called for Obama and McCain respectively. Not a single vote had been counted in either state (the polls had been closed for just a few seconds), but CNN used exit polls and common sense to put the first electoral college votes on the boards: McCain leads by eight votes to three.

    Despite McCain’s early advantage, things were looking good for Obama who was neck-and-neck with McCain in Indiana (where votes had started being counted at 6pm), which had not voted for a Democrat in decades. At 8pm, ten more states were called without bothering to count any votes, eight of them for Obama, but it was the Pennsylvania result about half an hour later that reassured the crowd that they’d be going home happy.

    McCain’s chance of victory was dealt a huge blow by Pennsylvania staying Democratic, but the celebrations couldn’t formally begin for some time yet. Times Square went wild when New York was called, and indeed every time the CNN coverage switched to our crowd. Ohio also fell to the Obama surge, meaning that it was now just a matter of the world politely waiting for the solidly-Democratic west coast states to close their polling stations so that the networks could push Obama over the magic 270.

    That moment came at 11pm EST. The giant CNN screen moved from one of its many commercial breaks to one of their now-hourly countdowns to the closure of the next polls. The crowd in Times Square counted the last ten seconds out loud and, instead of calling any individual states, CNN immediately projected that Barack Obama had been elected the next President of the United States.

    To say that the crowd went a bit wild would be like saying that Sarah Palin is a bit thick. All around us was cheering, crying and hugging; if there were any Republicans in the crowd at the start of the evening, they’d either slipped off or converted to Obamania by eleven o’clock. It was beyond anything I’ve ever seen at a football match or a rock concert, this was absolute elation among people who genuinely believed that things would now be different.

    Cars around Times Square began honking their horns even more than usual, with Obama-Biden signs held out through their sunroofs. Eventually, the big screen cut to Arizona and John McCain’s concession speech. McCain’s audience looked uniformly unpleasant, a bunch of handlebar moustachioed rednecks and not a single non-white face to be seen.  The speech itself was gracious and humble, reminding the world of the McCain that used to command cross-party respect before he lowered himself to the level of the very worst elements of the GOP. These elements, however, were alive and well in his bigoted crowd who booed every mention of President-elect Obama.

    Other than a few initial boos, McCain’s speech was well received in Times Square, receiving the applause it deserved. We did not show the same respect to his running mate: when Sarah Palin’s face filled the big screen, the boos echoed off the skyscrapers. We can only hope that she fades back into the obscurity that she emerged from in August, but I fear we haven’t seen the last of Palin and her brand of anti-intellectualism.

     After what felt like forever, the CNN coverage switched to the massive gathering in Grant Park, Chicago where Barack Obama and Joe Biden walked onto the stage accompanied by the new first and second families of the United States. 800 miles away in New York, our crowd was again going wild, anticipating a fine speech by a great orator. Sadly someone had alternative plans for our evening and as Obama opened his mouth to speak the CNN screen went dead. Thousands of people strained their eyes towards the Fox screen at the far end of the Square, but the subtitles were too small to read.

    After several minutes, police began clearing our tiered seating, telling us to go home as the party was over. We followed the deflated crowds down the steps, but as we reached the bottom the screen flashed back into life and we were treated to the final five minutes of a great speech. When the 44th President left his Chicago stage the applause continued in Times Square for several minutes, as much of the crowd blinked tears from their eyes.

    Our walk back towards our hostel was slow as we moved through the dense crowds. People were literally dancing in the streets; we saw spontaneous hip hop dancing on a street corner and a man moonwalk across a pedestrian crossing. It remains to be seen whether the world changed on 4th November 2008, but it was certainly a night we’ll never forget.

  • What I did on my holidays (part 2)

    Monday 3rd November

    After an overdue lie-in, we headed out into Manhattan in search of a hearty bagel and John’s friend LJ. LJ had survived the marathon on Sunday and would be transferring to our hostel for her last few days in New York.

    Filled up with eggy, cheesy, Canadian hammy, bagely goodness, we once again made the long walk to the southern tip of Manhattan, this time to Castle Clinton in Battery Park. The fort was built in the early 19thcentury to defend New York from the British during the war of 1812, although now it is a ticket booth for the Ellis Island Ferry.

    The ferry takes a bizarre route into the Hudson river between Battery Park, Liberty Island and Ellis Island, spiralling about in the process to allow the passengers a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skylines.

    We had arrived too late in the day to be able to take the ferry to both Liberty and Ellis Islands, but through experience in 2007 I was aware that there is little to do on Liberty Island except pose for photographs in the stance of Lady Liberty. Had we been really early birds and got to Battery Park by 8am we could’ve booked tickets to actually climb the statue, a novelty that until recent months had been forbidden as an anti-terror precaution.

    While the majority of the tourists disembarked on Liberty, we stayed aboard for a few minutes more as the boat spiralled into the dock at Ellis Island. Last year, we visited the immigration museum here, but I somehow entirely failed to find the upper levels of the museum, thus limiting my experience to essentially just the entrance lobby. This time I was determined to actually see some exhibits.

    First things first, though; five hungry boys needed a snack. We headed into the cafeteria and the smarter kids bought punnets of fries. The fools among us, myself included, ordered cheesey fries. Americans don’t do cheese. We were reminded of this fact as we saw the caterer use a ladle to scoop his liquefied yellow gloop from a vat and onto the unfortunate flesh of our innocent fries.

    They were inedible and the foul taste lingered in our mouths right through the hurried visit to the immigration museum. On this occasion I successfully visited the second floor exhibits too, which is certainly an improvement on the last time, but it seems I’ll have to return once more if I ever want to visit the third and final level.

    As we queued for the last ferry back to Manhattan the sun dropped below the horizon, allowing the glittering skyscrapers of Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey to cycle through our field of vision as the boat drunkenly looped back to Battery Park.

    Legs still swaying, we walked up the east coast of lower Manhattan towards the Brooklyn Bridge. When it was completed in 1883 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at 1.825km long. It may not hold that record any more, but a night-time walk across it remains a must-do for visitors to New York. Looking at that glittery cityscape never gets boring and, alongside the Empire State Building and the Ellis Island ferry, the Brooklyn Bridge is just about the best place to see it from.

    We took the subway back from Brooklyn to what we hoped was Little Italy. Unfortunately, we were thwarted by the New York underground’s system of Express and Local trains, ending up about ten blocks north of where we planned. Never mind, a good walk would drum up some hunger, we thought.

    Little Italy is a Little Disappointing. If there was one thing you’d expect it would be some Italian restaurants, but they appeared few and far between. Eventually we found one in the blurry area between Little Italy and Chinatown, where Chinese banners hang across pizza restaurants. The food was OK, perhaps a little too rich, but certainly not what we’d hoped for in the most Italian city outside of Italy (don’t quote me on that fact, I just made it up).

  • What I did on my holidays (part 1)

    Saturday 1st November 2008

    At an eyeball-achingly early time, Andy, John, Matt, Matt and I dragged ourselves to Heathrow Airport via seemingly half the tube network. We’d checked in for our flight online the previous evening and only had hand luggage, so were afforded the luxury of minimal queues to board Virgin Atlantic flight V003, bound for New York JFK.

    The flight was actually the most comfortable I’ve ever experienced; the food was more than edible (starter, main, bread roll, dessert, wine and even a cheese course), there was actually leg-room and the back of the seat in front contained a wonderful media player. On demand, we could watch movies, TV shows, play battleships with our neighbours and even send abusive messages to John.

    We took the impatiently long subway train from JFK right into the heart of Manhattan at Times Square. I had arranged for us to meet Neil outside the neon-signed NYPD station at 4pm. After a journey of 3500 miles, we arrived just 10 minutes late. Neil, however, had given up waiting and gone back to the suite in the Hilton that he’d rented for the previous night. Two phone calls and 15 minutes later we were all reunited under the dazzling lights of Times Square.

    We walked a dozen blocks south to find our hostel on 8th Avenue and 30th Street. It appeared to be a little seedy outside, situated as it was above a Subway (the sandwich chain store, not the NYC underground system) and an apparently 24-hour florists. Regardless, the hostel was clean, secure, delightfully cheap and, importantly, very central.

    After dropping our bags, we headed directly along 33rd Street towards the Rockefeller Center. Or rather that’s what I thought it was, instead of the Empire State Building which it actually was.  The fact that I (a buildings engineer) had failed to correctly identify perhaps the most famous skyscraper in the world proved to be an endless well of ridicule for my travel companions over the next week. In my defence, it does look a lot different from the photographs when you’re standing at the bottom of it looking east (although I have been up it before, so really should have known better).

    We ate in a restaurant at the bottom that Andy, Neil and I had remembered to be very tasty from our previous visit to New York. Unfortunately it appeared that more than two weeks of American food in 2007 had done something to our taste buds that couldn’t be replicated after 8 hours of Virgin Atlantic in 2008; on this occasion the food wasn’t all that great. Never mind.

    Up we went in the great elevators of the Empire State Building. I recommend that any visitors to New York save this particular rite until the sun has set; the Big Apple is as beautiful by night as it is loud and grubby by day. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but in my view there are many more attractive cities in the world than New York, but at night it turns into a magnificent array of lights that simply refuse to be ignored. There’s only one downside to looking at this metropolis from the top of the Empire State Building, and that is that you can’t see the Empire State Building.

     

    Sunday 2nd November 2008

    After a night of jet-lag recovery, we decided to walk from our hostel down to the financial district. Although we were staying on 30th Street, it turns out the numbering doesn’t begin from the sourthernmost tip of Manhattan, so we were barely halfway there after covering the 30 blocks to 1st Street.

    We walked passed a terrifying Orwellian skyscraper with no windows; in fact, the only break in the smooth concrete surface was for a row of enormous ventilation grills about halfway up. Later research established that this was the AT&T Switching Center, filled with equipment that would prefer not to receive daylight and workers who presumably wished that they did.

    We visited Ground Zero, the former site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is now a bustling building site for the Freedom Tower which is due to rise from the ashes by 2013. We called into the nearby St Paul’s Church which became a refuge for recovery workers in the days and months after the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001. It is now treated as a memorial site to those who died.

    From here we headed down Wall Street and to the stock exchange. The turmoil that this area had both caused and suffered over the last few months was absent on this quiet Sunday morning. The area was silent but for the chattering of tourists and the clicking of their cameras. After making appropriately abusive gestures towards these cathedrals of greed, we stepped down into the subway and headed north to Times Square to watch some F1.

    We settled down in the enormous ESPN bar and took a table close to screen number two of the twelve on the video wall. Our table had a small LCD screen on it too, so we turned off the American football and tuned it into the Brazilian Grand Prix. Perfect.

    Unfortunately, the waiting staff weren’t quite so happy with our seating arrangements. It turned out we were meant to have been seated by one of them, so we had therefore jumped a queue by just sitting down. This was rubbish, as there was no queue and several empty tables. Nevertheless, they actively ignored us until we almost literally waved in their faces. Eventually we were served, on the condition that we spend at least $10 per person per hour; this wasn’t a problem considering the price of the beer.

    We watched Lewis Hamilton win the Formula 1 World Championship on the very last corner of the final lap of the final race of the season, cheering happily in a cavern full of oblivious NFL fans. On a high and with a couple of tall beers inside us we marched up 6th Avenue towards Central Park in order to see the New York Marathon. On the way, we successfully adapted the lyrics of almost every Broadway musical to be about the 2008 Presidential election. Some examples included “Obama Mia” and “Hakuna Obama”. The album will be out in time for Christmas.

    We stood at the half-mile to go marker of the marathon and were appalled by the lack of excitement being exhibited by the crowd compared to the London marathon earlier in the year. We attempted to make up for this by cheering the names emblazoned on every running vest that crawled, limped and jogged past us. It roused a few smiles just in time for the bank of press cameras a few metres further along the course.

    For the evening we found a southern-style BBQ house a couple of blocks from our hostel. For $22 they offered all-you-can-eat ribs and all-you-can-drink Bud Lite, with a time limit of two hours. It turns out this is made profitable due to an apparent allergy of the waiting staff to serving customers their ribs and their beer. Their incompetency, however, was ultimately to our advantage, as they failed to notice that only three of our party had ordered the all-you-can-drink, yet none of us ever seemed to have an empty glass…

  • The final blog

    So, we’ve arrived. The cyclists left the motel relatively early, at about 8am, with no complaints or grumbles about the hour or what lay ahead for the day. They all knew that the 48 mile journey from Marathon to Key West would be the last time they would cycle on this trip. About an hour later, I set off along Route 1, counting down the mile markers as I gradually approached zero and stopping only to pick up a bottle of champagne from a liquor store along the way.

    I hadn’t passed any of the cyclists along the route, so when I arrived at the Southernmost Point, I had expected to find the cyclists already there. As it happens, they were still some distance away, so I loaded my change into a parking meter, abandoned the monster truck and set off in search of a beachwear shop so that I could finally buy some replacement swimming shorts. Finally, I managed to buy some – from a pharmacy of all places.

    The Southernmost Point is a brightly painted bollard indicating that the long queue of tourists waiting to be photographed next to it are at the most southern point of the USA and only 90 miles from Cuba. The fact that one can clearly see other points that are further south did not deter the tourists, nor did it deter us from making this symbolic place the end point of the cycle ride.

    I waited by the bollard for the cyclists. Eventually, Andy and Alex arrived in their trip tee-shirts (kindly provided by Armstrong UK), shortly followed by Neil and Leo. Leo’s leg was alarmingly wrapped in bandages, but thankfully it was just a spot of sunburn and not a final day cycling injury.

    With everyone now dressed in the trip tee-shirts, I popped open the bottle of bubbly and poured it into some disposable Holiday Inn plastic cups. This attracted some attention from the queue of tourists, so before long we had a rapt audience listening to our tales and taking photos of us beside the Southernmost Point.

    When the champagne was drained and the plaudits were subsiding, we sought out a beach on which to spend the afternoon. Most of the ones marked on the map appeared to have been replaced by building sites (presumably to turn them into private beaches for the guests at the expensive seafront hotels), but eventually we found one further to the east. Compared to the wonderful beaches at Myrtle Beach and Daytona Beach, this one was frankly a bit disappointing. The sand smelt of rotting seaweed and the sea itself was murky and shallow. Still, we splashed about for a while before checking into our motel at the east end of the island.

    In the evening, we arrived in the main town centre of Key West moments too late to see the famous sunset. We dined at a seafood buffet restaurant where nutcrackers were provided to crack open the crab legs. Neil tentatively attempted to overcome his seafood phobia with mixed results, but found happiness in the ice cream section of the buffet.

    On Tuesday we spent a day on another beach which was closer to the town centre, but still not particularly nice as far as beaches go. Determined to see the sunset, we headed to a bar on the north side of the island where the cyclists (i.e. not the designated driver) drank effeminate-looking cocktails. According to the Lonely Planet guide, 40% of Key West is gay, though we’re not sure if this includes the naval base. Even the taxis on this island are pink.

    Annoyingly, cloud obscured any view of the sunset, so we moved on to an alleyway claiming to be the smallest bar in Key West. It really was tiny; the drinkers were a combination of people like us who had been lured in off the street and people who had been in there all day. One of the regulars bizarrely warned us to “never get caught pissing on a skunk”, which is unarguably a sound piece of advice.

    The following day, it was my turn to see what all the cyclists were making a fuss about. In order that we could leave the car at the free parking of our motel, I dropped the others in town, drove back to the motel and then cycled the three miles or so back in. I don’t know what the big deal was; cycling is easy!

    Andy and Alex had signed up for a scuba dive outing, while Neil, Leo and I had paid about a third of the price for a snorkelling trip off the same boat. The scuba divers had spent the morning in the swimming pool and were given detailed instructions and a mountain of equipment on the boat, whereas the snorkelers (the three of us, plus a young Dutch boy and his mother) were simply given a mask, snorkel and flippers and told to jump off the back of the boat. This was fine by us, as it meant we were allowed to swim freely around the reefs for a couple of hours, while the scuba divers had to follow their instructors around.

    Apart from a couple of panicky moments when we saw a red jellyfish bobbing towards us, the snorkelling was great. We saw huge shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming only inches away from us; it was just a pity that the overcast weather reduced visibility slightly.

    In 1982 the federal government decided it was time to do something about all the drugs and illegal immigrants that were entering Florida via the Keys. They built a roadblock at Homestead and checked every vehicle leaving or entering the Keys, causing severe delays and inconvenience for the residents. In response, the PR-savvy mayor of Key West, Dennis Wardlow, issued a Declaration of Independence, announcing the secession of the Keys from the USA. The Conch Republic was formed with Wardlow as its new Prime Minister, and it immediately declared war on the US, surrendering one minute later. They then applied for $1 billion in aid from the USA which, unsurprisingly, they are still waiting for.

    Of course, the Conch Republic was never intended to be anything more than a PR stunt to boost tourism to the Keys, although they did briefly repel a US military island invasion practice with water cannons. More than 20 years later, the Conch Republic and its pink shell symbol live on as a camp tourism trap. The best bit, though, is their motto: “We seceded where others failed”.

    On Thursday morning we lay in and missed breakfast, so we went to the Waffle House that was connected to our motel. The waitress warned us as she took our drinks order that they were out of both waffles and orange juice; this made Leo irate. The service was crappy, the food was rough (the hash brown was essentially almost-raw grated potato) and the officially non-existent waffle batter was being splashed across the floor by the staff. In the end, however, it was OK because our waitress was so inattentive that she entirely failed to bill us for one of our meals; she got a $5 tip for this.

    We had intended to ride the Conch Train (a guided tourist road train) around Key West, but it turned out to be $27 per person. Instead, we split into two groups: Neil and Leo went off to some pirate museum, while Alex, Andy and I visited Truman’s Little White House. The Little White House was President Truman’s retreat away from the formalities of Washington DC. Even in the face of press criticism, he spent 10% of his Presidency in Key West between 1945 and 1953. Apparently, he got more work done there than he did in Washington, perhaps because of the relaxed atmosphere and the loud shirt competition he forced upon his staff. The tour of the Little White House was given by a woman from London who had a bizarre habit of doing dreadful Churchill impressions occasionally.

    Moving along the road, we visited Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home, where the writer had lived during the 1930s. Having never acquainted myself with “Papa’s” work, almost everything the entertaining tour guide told us was news. Interestingly, the house is a home to around 50 cats and, even more interestingly, half of them have six toes per paw. They are all descendents of a mouser that was given to Hemingway by some sailors.

    Cultured to the brim, our next museum was the Key West branch of a chain that I’d been pleading to visit for weeks. Ripley’s Believe it or Not began as a series of newspaper cartoons in 1918, featuring weird and unbelievable facts; the museums of the same name feature exhibits and images to illustrate some of these facts. We bought our tickets with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, but left hours later, grinning. Almost to our disappointment, Ripley’s Believe it or Not is actually, genuinely quite good.

    Yet again, we tried to watch Key West’s famous sunset, but unfortunately it was once again obscured by the only clouds in the sky. Nevertheless, it was pretty impressive and we watched it until the sky’s darkening was accelerated by storm clouds rolling over. We ate at a Jamaican restaurant where the food was distinctly average, but perhaps we should have considered that the owners of a restaurant called Jamaican Me Crazy may have actually thought of the name-pun before they thought about whether they could cook Jamaican cuisine.

    On Friday morning we packed up to leave Key West, stopping only to buy Key Lime Pie (a local delicacy and absolutely delicious) and for Neil to buy Key Lime Wine (a less well-known local delicacy which is apparently “surprisingly nice”). On the way along the Keys we walked a trail in search of the endangered Key Deer; we saw a few through the undergrowth. Our journey was bizarre for two reasons: firstly, we were travelling north for the first time since we reached Toronto six weeks ago. Secondly, we were retracing steps that I had previously driven and the cyclists had already ridden. This was the beginning of the end of our adventure.

    Hours later we arrived at the final motel of our trip, just south of Miami in Florida City. We couldn’t get settled for long, though, as we had an appointment in Miami. The previous evening I had checked the baseball listings to find that finally our visit to a city coincided with a game. In this case, it was the Florida Marlins at home to the San Francisco Giants.
    After a little confusion as to where the stadium was, we paid our $16 (how cheap is that?) and took our seats in the empty stands at the start of the third innings of a total of nine. Baseball is a strange game; it is even slower than test cricket, but with those awkward quiet moments filled with cheerleaders, mascots and co-ordinated crowd sing-a-longs of unwieldy club songs to prevent any problems with the audience’s attention span.

    As far as I could tell, baseball is essentially a complicated version of the British schoolgirl’s favourite, rounders, except a run is scored perhaps only two or three times in three hours. A frequent American criticism of football/soccer is that it is too low scoring; I think maybe they need to look again at baseball.

    Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy the game and I’m sure it can have the same hypnotic appeal as test cricket, but even the atmosphere was a little disappointing. Considering the crowd has literally minutes between moments of excitement, they have done a pretty poor job of spending this time productively by coming up with amusing songs or chants. In fact, they have just one chant: “Let’s go Marlins”, which is shouted repeatedly until eventually three batters have been outed on each team nine times, then everyone goes home without caring all that much about the final score. The following evening the same players repeat the match, and then again the next night and the night after that.

    This morning we awoke to the news that Hurricane Dean was unlikely to come close to Florida, but was predicted to strike Jamaica full-on. The newscasters seemed far more concerned about whether Jamaica would take the bite out of the storm before it hits Texas than they did about what would actually happen to Jamaica and its people. I also noticed that despite it being a big island right in the middle of the on-screen map, Cuba is never ever mentioned by weather forecasters or reporters. Dean might well be about to hit southern Cuba, but as far as the US networks are concerned, it doesn’t exist. It’s as though an enormous Communist elephant is sitting off the Florida coast, but nobody wants to admit it.

    Andy, Alex and I set off into the Everglades (Neil had been bitten by insects all night, so decided that stepping into a mosquito’s den for the day was not a good idea). At the visitor centre in Flamingo (a town with no flamingos at the far western end of the Everglades road), we saw a rare sight: a saltwater crocodile swimming around the marina. Alligators are very common in the Everglades, but their skinnier, greener cousins are quite rare here, although it is the only place in the world where both live side by side.

    Crocodiles and alligators are tough, primitive creatures. They have evolved little since dinosaurs existed more than 65 million years ago, making them just about the closest things to them alive today. It is an indicator of how perfectly evolved they are that they have barely changed in a period of time 250 times longer than humans have existed for.
    After being harangued by mosquitoes on a few forested trails, we took to the boardwalks back at the eastern end of the Everglades. In the surrounding marshes we saw several alligators and I was alarmed to see that the source of a loud squawking was a pair of large vultures sitting on the branch above my head.

    We returned to the motel to begin the solemn task of emptying the monster truck of six weeks of accumulated crap. After vacuuming and washing the car, we went for our final evening meal in the USA at a seafood and steak house down the road. I ordered surf and turf again, and this time it was perfect. I now do see why people make such a fuss about lobster. To round things off, we ordered five slices of Key Lime Pie.

    So that’s about it. Tomorrow evening, we board flights IB6120 and IB3164 (for the benefit of our parents), arriving in Heathrow at 2.45pm on Monday. Six weeks is a long time and we’ve seen so much since stepping off that plane in Chicago back in early July. We’ve witnessed one of the planet’s greatest natural wonders in Niagara Falls, and one of mankind’s greatest ever achievements at the shuttle launch in Florida. Along the way, we witnessed a tragedy unfold as a steam pipe exploded in New York City, enjoyed the theme parks of Orlando and were treated as a novelty in the Deep South, simply for being English.

    By the time we reach Miami Airport tomorrow, I’ll have driven my monster truck almost exactly 5000 miles. If you were to drive in a straight line from London, that sort of mileage would take you to Zimbabwe, Brazil or almost to North Korea.
    It is a very long way, but it is nothing compared to the 1600 miles or so that the cyclists have pushed and pulled themselves through to get from Niagara to Key West. Every one of them has put themselves through a personal hell at one time or another in order to drag that bike up a hill or along a scorching hot road, so my first thank you is to them for allowing me to tag along on their adventure with minimal discomfort of my own.

    Secondly, thank you to our kind sponsors, Armstrong UK, who provided us with free clothing for the trip. Also a thank you to my other college son (the one I didn’t run into in Orlando), Andrew Goodchild, who I believe built the http://www.unihouse.co.uk website, which has certainly made the financial side of the trip so much easier to handle. If you live in a student house, you really should give it a try.

    Thanks to everyone who has opened their wallet and sponsored one of our five good causes: your money is going directly where it is needed. Through donations to my nominated charity, Wateraid, there are at least ten people in the developing world who now have access to a lasting supply of clean water. Those ten people would probably be dead without your generosity.

    I’d also like to thank everyone who has followed our trip on this website and everyone who has offered us support over the last month and a half. The number of people visiting every day (close to 150) has been way beyond what any of us could have expected. People that we met once along our travels and even people we have never met have been logging on, so thank you for giving all of us an incentive to blog our experiences.

    Finally, I’d like to thank America for having us. This country has been surprisingly… surprising. It is easy to feel that one already knows the country, having been bombarded by its culture back in the UK. In fact, it has provided the unexpected at almost every turn, which has made the blog more interesting if nothing else.

    Thanks for reading my glorified holiday diary. I’m off to London to get a job and pay off this trip.

    Rob

  • The story in Alex’s words…

    The story so far in Alex’s words…So after being sat on a bike for 84.5 hours we have finally made it to Key West and I decided it was time that I wrote something for the website. Arriving was very surreal – we stopped 5 miles outside of the town to change from our rather sweaty lycra into our very stylish Team America T-Shirts so everyone knew what we had done and for a bit of self promotion. The final few miles were slightly hairy as the roads were a little busier, the hard shoulder had disappeared and Andy was trying to film us reaching the finishing post. The plan was to head to Mile 0 on Route 1 before turning left to go to the Southernmost Point of Continental America; we didn’t find Mile 0 as it was further north than we thought and we ended up in a housing estate feeling a little confused so we headed for the sea and found Rob perched on a flowerbed waiting for us by the large red and yellow bollard and queue of tourists that marks the Southernmost point.


     For the first time in our 23 days on the bikes Neil and Leo had left without a mobile phone, this was not going to be a problem as we were going to meet them for breakfast just before the 7 mile bridge however they never turned up because they got puncture and decided to push on to get breakfast further down the road. This meant we couldn’t contact them to find out how far from Key West they were so we waited for them to show up hoping they had not broken down or been mowed down! Fortunately they showed up 45 minutes later and we joined the queue to get our picture taken by the bollard whilst Rob nipped back to the car to collect T-shirts for Neil and Leo. He reappeared with their T-shirts and our cooler which contained a bottle of champagne on ice. What a legend! We toasted our success and soon had a crowd taking our picture and quizzing us on our trip. I felt a little bit like a minor celebrity as everyone wanted to know what we had done and what it was like. Very weird considering it had started as a random pipe dream in the bar one night never really believing that it would actually happen. Overall it was just a feeling of massive relief and joy that we had reached our destination and completed the trip.

    The trip itself has been fantastic; much better than I thought it would be. The cycling has been incredibly tough – the mountains in the north were long and steep and the days in the south were like cycling through an oven. But we have got to see some beautiful parts of the country and meet some fantastic people. We have had our scary moments as well – dodging trucks on our way into New York, avoiding dogs in the south and trying to distinguish the live snakes from the assorted debris that litters the side of the roads.

    I now must say a few thank yous; firstly to Rob who has been amazing throughout the trip. He has done most of organising and booking motel and has not complained once when he has had to go out of his way to pick one of us up or drop something off for the cyclist. Without him we would not have made it and he has put up with the smell of 4 peoples very sweaty kit that has not been washed as often as it should without complaint.

    Secondly to all of the people we have met along the way that have been so friendly and supportive. We have been given a lot of free gifts that have helped us along the way; from the person who pulled into the side of the road to offer us some ice cold bottles of water to the lady who gave us a towel after we had been caught in a thunderstorm. All have been massively appreciated and most of them will not know about this website or the journey we have undertaken. I will also take this opportunity to thank all the people who have sponsored us, I know it has meant a lot to Andy, Neil and Leo when they have been on the bikes and helped them to continue cycling towards the finish line.

    Finally I must say thanks to the other riders especially Andy who has helped me keep going through some of the tougher parts of the trip. This support has been crucial to keep me going through the tougher days even when he sets off at 23 mph in 100°F claiming it to be gentle pace.

    I’m now looking forward to putting my feet up in Key West and not getting on the bike for a few days before heading home. It’s going to be a bit of a culture shock when we get back to the UK but am looking forward to getting a curry.

    Alex

  • The End is Nigh

    On Saturday morning the cyclists and I joined US Route 1, the final road of the trip. Route 1 runs from Key West right the way up to the Canadian border in Maine over 2,300 miles away, so this was not the first time we’d come across this particular highway. Before long, we had crossed the small channel between mainland USA and the first of the Florida Keys: Key Largo.

    I arrived a few hours before the cyclists, so headed to a water-side park/marina to write postcards in the sun. When the cyclists joined me, we all headed to a local laundromat and properly washed our clothes (including the disgusting-smelling cycling lycra) for the first time since Atlantic City THREE WEEKS EARLIER.

    Afterwards, we decided to figure out what Key Largo had on offer. From the highway, it looked disappointingly like the usual identikit strip of motels, restaurants and stores, so we turned off down a side-road in search of the sea. Immediately, we found ourselves among large swimming-pooled houses, private beaches and gated communities. Key Largo is not a place to go on holiday unless you are wealthy enough to either own or hire a beach.

    We stopped briefly to look at a bird sanctuary by the sea, then headed to a Cuban restaurant opposite the motel. The customers were entertained while eating by Cuban musicians singing such cultural classics as Pretty Woman and Hot, Hot, Hot. I ordered my favourite Wetherspoon’s cuisine: surf and turf, but with the classy (and presumably more traditional) touch of replacing the scampi with lobster. My first impressions of lobster are that it is nice enough, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

    The restaurant’s music (despite the choice of songs) was enough to give me a sudden urge to go to Cuba. After all, once we reach Key West we’ll only be 90 miles away – significantly closer to Cuba than to Miami – yet there are no ferries or even planes that would take us there. In fact, it is effectively illegal for a US citizen to even visit their little Communist neighbours thanks to the various embargos that have been imposed on Castro’s Cuba since the 1960s. Quite why the world’s only superpower is still afraid of a harmless island in the Caribbean nearly 20 years after the Cold War is beyond me.

    Coincidentally, we woke this morning to find a film on the TV called Thirteen Days, which depicts JFK’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I had to check out of the motel before I could see its conclusion, but I assume it ends well because I was able to be born a couple of decades later.

    The drive from Key Largo to Marathon was more pleasant than the previous day’s, and for the first time I was able to see the sea on both sides of the road. To my left was the Atlantic Ocean and to my right the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the proximity of two different bodies of water, Marathon is surprisingly sparse when it comes to swimwear shops where I might have been able to buy another set of replacement swimming shorts. As it’s a Sunday, the ones that did exist were closed or only catered for women, so I tried a K-Mart (which Bill Bryson’s Lost Continent had warned me about; it sounded like a large Kwik-Save).

    K-Mart was as crappy a supermarket chain as it had been when the Lost Continent was written 20 years ago. When I finally found the swimming shorts on a randomly placed rack in the middle of the clothing department, I discovered that the only sizes they had left were XL and XL+3. I was so fed up of searching that I picked up the first minimally tasteful shorts, checked they had a draw string and took them to the counter.

    Five minutes later, after struggling to try the shorts on behind the blacked-out rear windows of the monster truck, I returned them to K-Mart. The drawstring appeared to be for show and served virtually no useful purpose, though it wasn’t a wasted trip as I made a $2 profit from being refunded a tax that I hadn’t paid on the original purchase.

    By this time, the cyclists had also arrived in Marathon, so we ate lunch and decided to come up with as many hilarious place names featuring the word ‘Key’ as possible. There are literally dozens of possibilities, and even hours later we were still coming up with new ones. My personal favourites were Key Pyupee and Hokeyko Key.

    Tomorrow we reach Key West and the cyclists can finally hang up their clip-on shoes. It’s been a long journey down from Canada over the last five and half weeks. It’s difficult to imagine, but it’s actually four weeks since we arrived in New York City and three since Washington. Since picking up the car in Chicago, I have driven over 4,500 miles and the cyclists have pedalled further than I can comprehend, through searing heat and pouring rain, over the Appalachian mountains and across the flatlands of Florida. It’s been the trip of a lifetime for every one of us (not forgetting the contributions of the support car’s support passenger, Ed, who kept us insane through those early weeks), and we’ve got about a week left here in the Keys and the Everglades to relax once the hard work for the cyclists is over.

    I’ll blog more in a few days time, but in the meantime I’m going to go all Bob Geldof on you. We haven’t cycled/written thousands of miles/words just for our own wellbeing. If you haven’t already sponsored one of our supported charities, please consider donating whatever you can afford to whichever charity you fancy by clicking here.