Support our troops

The barrage of complaints resulting from last weeks blog was quite hurtful:

I am NOT a kitten abuser

Never have I maltreated kittens. Au contraire, I am quite happy to let small Siamese kittens gambol about on my head. I feed them with small dishes of milk, and when I am informed this gives them diarrhea I provide them with cat food which they munch on causing their bellies to bulge. Mew mew meow they go. They love me! Hat has gone now but I never molested him!

* * *

I shaved the back and sides of my head in the Ocean beach public toilets while eavesdropping on a conference conducted by two men sitting on the floor of a cubicle. I cut behind my ear. In the morning we drove to LA, taking with us two English guys from Dover who we met on the street. They were young pups on their gap year who laughed and smoked cigarettes in the back of the car despite being pressed into a rare form of coal. On the way Ponty died at some traffic lights and wouldn't start up for a couple of minutes. Crawling around under the car surrounded by traffic was slightly humiliating but at least no oil was being spilled.

It's a pleasant life, sleeping on the floor, waking to have Vietnamese food cooked for you and then walking up and down the frisco mission pretending you live there. The sleeping arrangements did get a bit much after four nights of lying coffin-like next to John and having to apologise for interfering with him in the night. We planned a giant road-trip up to Seattle and took our friend Mary with us. Not having enough money for petrol, we bank on taking a rideshare fellow with us from Craigslist.

Craigslist man, John, makes his entrance; black shoes, black trousers, black jacket, hair slightly greying, metal framed rectangular glasses. For conveniences sake I will refer to him as 'Reddy'. He is employed somehow by a perfume company and gives us gifts of little perfume testers. And so we are on our way. Our usual good speed is not achievable - Reddy needs to stop often. Reddy would like to buy a coke. Reddy needs the toilet. Reddy would like to buy some aspirin. Reddy thinks he has left something in the boot. Reddy gets some cheap fruity 11% punch from a petrol station and necks it enthusiastically from a brown paper bag as we speed along, his volume increasing. Hark the 6th flat tire, the most explosive and dramatic yet; the car is filled with a vicious rattling and juddering, John swerves across three lanes, cuts up a lorry and stops on the hard shoulder. I am so used to this process by now it provokes hardly any reaction in me; I feel a grim acceptance that I can sense in John too. We exit the car and Reddy fixes John with earnest drunken intensity, 'John man, jus lemme say thanks for saving our fuckin lives man!' I jack the car up and struggle with the wrench I bought in Mexico - it's slightly too big and is stripping the bolts. I decide to stop but Reddy muscles in and there is a brief power struggle over the wrench which I win. Relinquishing his grip Reddy smiles. 'Two typical guys, hah-HAH!' I end up getting a ride with a guy called Ethan to the next town where I buy a used tire, setting us back by $30 and a couple of hours. We're up and driving again and after half an hour Reddy realises he left his phone on top of the car before we left the lay-by meaning it has most probably been dashed into umpteen pieces on the freeway. He demands we stop and search the boot. Finding nothing he loses his rag: 'Fuck, fuck! I'm a fucking idiot!' Then he sits on a wall and broods over a cigarette. I manage to capture an image of him smoking in the car just as we start off again - he's looking very pissed off. There is an awkward atmosphere to the car.

It's dark now and we stop for food somewhere. I see Reddy eyeing up a mammoth bottle of extra-strong beer. We sit eating in the car and Reddy says he is going for a short walk, after which he returns having obviously drank the beer and the mood cloud from the lost phone evaporates. He forces us into a game of trivial pursuit, meaning he roars a question - all of the questions relate to world war one - and begins shouting immediately over anyone who tries to answer. From the front John adds to the confusion by stiltedly posing a series of inane questions, such as 'what-is-a-good-salad?', which only serves to anger Reddy into bellowing unsophisticated anti-limey insults at us. It is a relief to drop him off. Later on he emails us - he has left his iPod and Jacket in the car. What a prick!

We were adopted in Tacoma by the family of Mary's boyfriend, taken on a memorial day BBQ, and stuffed full of meat. Mary's boyfriend's brother's son, a small Cambodian boy named Desmond, repeatedly chucked a colourful plastic sword in my face. Against all odds this was quite fun. And oh jaysus there's another flat tire but praise the tire lord Jesub there's only a screw in there, only a small screw that must have somehow been standing completely upright on the tarmac like an attentive saboteur.

ANOTHER flat tire (#7) leads me to compile a list of possible explanations for 'puncture curse'

- We ran over a box of screws and each tire has had a different time-delayed reaction to the screws (or something), meaning just as I think the tire situation has become 'A-OK' another screwtip penetrates another gaseous chamber, sending me into another mindstate of 'what the fuck are we going to do now, we've nearly finished the road trip but we've had seven flat tires in the last 3,000 miles and I don't have any money left'.
- The tires, all being crappy Mexican replacements of varying sizes, have different pressures exerted upon them by the weight of the car and therefore explode prematurely *rhubarb rhubarb*.
- John has engaged in a very cruel and long-running prank whereby he scuppers a tire every 500 miles using a pair of nail scissors and then giggles inwardly every time I kneel down and skin my knuckles jacking the car up.
- I have been cursed by the overlord of the TireWorld, Les Schwab, by snubbing him at the beginning of the trip in favour of Firestone, and am now eternally paying the price through rotten luck, as far as steel ribbed partially inverted circular dinguses are concerned anyhoo.

Wave goodbye to Ponty. Sitting for two days outside 7/11 was too much and he got towed. We can't afford to pay the reclaiming fee. Annoyingly I filled him up with $20 of petrol just before I noticed the flat, and I would never drive him again. We prised off the number plates; the front one was a textured collage of flies and mosqouitoes, the back quite clean and respectable. We flirted with the idea of battering him in with golf clubs but refrained. He will get auctioned off and any money raised will go towards paying off the gargantuan fine (add that to the other gargantuan fines I have racked up over the last 3 months). Tomorrow is the last day of the road trip. We just sang kareoke and I am drunk. PeCE.

We can't say whether it had a wet nose or not

Hello all,

We have now reached Tucson, Arizona. Goodbye off roading, goodbye endless dust, goodbye trash by the roadside, goodbye language barrier, goodbye poverty gap, goodbye stern-faced policemen, goodbye enjoyable restaurants, goodbye unenjoyable restrooms, goodbye endless government owned Pemex petrol stations, hello Shell station (TM), hello Thirst Buster (nothing's cooler), hello stern-faced policemen, hello strange man outside Circle K that won't stop unintelligibly talking to me about his hospital experience and let me go my way.

We stayed with Gail at Barras for around a week in total. Board was earned by digging a deep square hole apiece. The earth was rocky and hard to dig into, then lower down it became clay and finally the sand of the beach. The heat and excursion made my body so sweaty it looked as if I had recently lowered myself fully into a lagoon. As I was digging a trench a kindly man let me know through rudimentary sign language that I was swinging and lodging the pointy end of my pickaxe rather close to where three power cables were buried. Further work was carried out in the nearby city of Mazatlan on a kitten orphanage, naturally. 'Tie those palm leaves on tighter!' bellowed our directors from the ground below, 'we have hurricanes here!' I leant forwards, allowing the sun to hit me square on the shoulders and back, and gingerly tied a palm leaf down while concentrating on not falling forwards and through the flimsy roof of the kitten orphanage.

We decided on a marathon drive from Barras to Tucson which was to take around eight hours behind the wheel each. I gave John odds of 3-1 that we see at least one more mechanic in Mexico. These odds transpired to be idiotically generous; our journey only reached around the half hour mark before another tire submitted to the heat and span ragged and flapping. We hobbled to the hard shoulder - not very wide - and surveyed a gaping hole in the wall of the tire. We were in the middle of nowhere. It seemed our luck had run out. The police stopped and helpfully informed us we had a 'big problem' and poked around in the boot, deaf to my explanations that we had already used the spare, and that by some diabolical practical joke it had been far too small anyway. They said some things in Spanish and drove off, leaving us with the dust and the crickets. The nearest city with an ATM, Culiacan, was 45 minutes away. John applied suncream and sauntered off down the road sticking his thumb out.

There were a few houses nearby, one of which had a nice metal rocking chair painted white and sitting under a tree. I sat in this and read the Great Gatsby. Soon a severe thirst took hold, and after some hopeless foraging I rejoiced to pull out a large can of apple juice from Ponty's boot. Failing to find the can opener in the oven-like car I resorted to striking the can savagely with the wheel wrench. A tiny trickle of juice was made available, but my drinking enjoyment was marred by the discomfort of having to hold the heavy can - now tacky with warm juice and liberally coated with dust and jolly little ants, no doubt the tarring and feathering of the tinned drinks world - high above my head and then having to squeeze it with all the might of my thumbs, causing a stream of juice to fire arbitrarily across my face. As I sat and looked angrily at the misshapen, stubborn can I recollected the scene in Three Men in a Boat where they forget a can-opener and are forced to batter a tin of pineapple with the mast of their boat:

"We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead."

This lifted my spirits a little, and I resumed reading Gatsby in the shade.

As dusk came I retired to the car and stared sullenly at the horizon. John had been gone for about six hours. Soon I was startled by a man knocking on the window and saying 'comeh, comeh!', meaning 'eat'. It seemed I had been observed throughout the day, stalking around and frowning to myself. It was true that I hadn't eaten much, the car now being virtually devoid of snacks. The hundreds of unwanted Nutrigrain bars - now capable of prompting a irresistable nauseaus reaction in me - were taken out and given to Gail to distribute around Barras. I digress. It appeared this fellow was offering me supper, so I followed him to a house made out of corrugated iron and other assorted materials. It was very dimly lit. I sat meekly on a chair and was regarded by five or six small children from hammocks and other chairs. Then I was ushered into a kitchen area and seated down at a table where a solitary bulb dangled very close to my face, blinding me at first and then giving the impression I was on stage. The crowd of small timid brown faces had followed me and was waiting for my delivery, my great monologue. An English-Spanish dictionary and tacos were plonked down in front of me.

John arrived later that night, he had been riding around in several different police trucks. Unforunately he hadn't been able to get hold of any cash and, stupidly, I hadn't given him my card, so he came back empty handed. We slept in the car and in the morning chose to both hitch-hike with the defunct wheel. We were picked up very quickly by an old man driving an almost equally old pick-up truck. We sat in the back and enjoyed the hair-whipping again. Every so often the man would stop at a petrol station and fill up the radiator with water, causing clouds of steam to issue from the engine. One breakdown lasted for half an hour. 'Piquito problemo!' smiled the old man. I inspected the engine and saw the radiator was coming loose and water flowing freely onto the ground. I squealed in pain as the radiator spluttered and shot a jet of steam onto my bare leg.

Once we reached town it wasn't hard to acquire two new tires - one spare - and reccomence our slog. I tried to sleep while John drove for six hours, then I took the helm, aided by the imbibement of sugary drinks. At a roadside diner we found a very small kitten and abducted him, calling him Carlos. Carlos refused to stay in the house we made for him out of a cardboard box, instead roaming the inside of the car, eating a burrito I offered him and pissing here and there. At the border we stuffed him into a box and tossed in a burrito and t-shirt to entertain him. When asked if I was 'bringing anything back with' me an inner, self-destructive proclivity took charge, demanding I elongate and add Australian inflection to my answer - 'Noooo?' -, making it sound as suspicious as possible. Luckily Carlos had shut up for a while and we were allowed through.

Soon we were in Tucson, very nearly the hottest place in the world. Woe betide he who attempts to walk barefoot along any surface in Tucson that has been exposed to the sun within the last 72 hours, or, even more unfairly, he who attempts to operate a brass doorhandle exposed to the sun without first donning an oven glove. Our hosts Micah and Zach were beyond welcoming and generous. Attending the local 80s night was an unexpected pleasure. The drive to San Diego was easy and quicker than I expected. Carlos was something of a nuisance, having become larger and more energetic since we captured him. During the drive he refused to sit silently in his box, and when the meowing became too annoying and we set him free he began cavorting about the car, attacking us and pissing on the floor.

We have found ourselves back in Ocean beach. A hobo called Boston James has become rather attached to Carlos, although he insists on calling him 'hat'. Yesterday as Boston was playing with hat a lady called Denise came along and offered to house him (hat, not Boston James), and a sort of bidding war ensued. Meanwhile I scrubbed the car with disinfectant and shampoo in desperate attempts to eradicate the piss stench hat had left behind. This among other recent crumblings (fog light has fallen off leaving a sad, hanging wire; large cracks have appeared in windscreen following forceful gesticulating with a beer bottle) will severely affect Ponty's going rate when we try and flog him, I expect.
Diea Carpum!

'chard.

Big Pelicans Abound

Hello all,

We have reached mainland Mexico and are now mainly concerned with avoiding the deadly swine flu. Strapping iodine-dipped masks to our faces we sought out the smallest, most secluded village we could find and began laying low and watching Sub standard Billy-Bob Thornton films while the pandemic passes over.

Allow me to fill in the gaps between then and now. Arriving in La Paz we rejoiced at completing the Mexican Highway 1 which, according to Diane, our one time hostess and owner of the orphanage, is the 19th most dangerous road in the world. This is not surprising given its windiness, elevation and the calibre of the crazy drivers that go along it. Regularly will you see people overtaking on blind corners and hills. Almost as regularly you will encounter roadside shrines for drivers departed of this realm. One dedicated to 'Hector' sticks in my mind. His name spelt out in flowers, ornaments and trinkets, a cross and a virgin of Guadaloupe, and a model of a truck all decorated the side of the road where Hector had plunged off, the ragged gap in the barrier still unfixed. Driving in Mexico leads to you driving slightly madly also. You will very quickly stop indicating for it is a sign of weakness, and instead you will smile vindictively as you repeatedly cut up middle-aged couples on your way to the beach. Horn tooting frequency will increase to the point where you know not what constitutes a just horn toot, and simply deliver one at every stop sign and traffic light. Motorists will either be completely po-faced or laugh and shout as they meet you careering erroneously down poorly signed one-way streets.

The car has been performing well. On a desert road in the night I slowed to walking pace and looked intently as the milometer reached and passed 222,222.2 miles. Since the cowboy welding job there has been a prevailing smell of oil in the car which, strangely, peaks as we traverse speedbumps. Transmission fluid drips slowly from the point where it was dry-welded. In a moment of foolishness I attempted to seal it once and for all with some chewing gum and duct tape. The chewing gum melted on the hot engine and spread itself all over me as I lay supine under the car. The motorway also brought a tire bursting incident which is worth mentioning. I confidently began rooting around in the boot, bought out the jack and jacked the car up, then produced the spare wheel which appeared to be for an entirely different car. It was much smaller and thinner, like that of a clowns car. When attached it made the car look very odd, and from the inside you could actually see the tilt of the dashboard where the car was leaning down to the left. This wheel held up bravely for a few miles before exploding with a modest pop. I don't know why it was in there.



At La Paz we applied for our tourist visas. The atmosphere in the Immigration Office was what could be described as 'relaxed' - staff with feet up on tables, calmly and openly watching soap operas. After being overcharged for our visas we found they had been printed on scrap paper, meaning that on the back of mine I had a fine photocopy of a Mr. Ralph Peschman's passport. Don't worry about that said the immigration officer, drawing a lazy line across the image. John found later that he had all of Ralph's personal details on the back of his visa. The standard of professionalism here is shocking, quite shocking I have to say.

The next available ferry being three days away we decided to go to Cabo St. Lucas where we couchsurfed with an architect named Marco. Marco's flat was impeccably clean and he served us a chicken curry. Come the night we visited the local gringo bar drolly named Squid Roe. It is difficult to tell whether Squid Roe's pithy moniker pulls in such large crowds or if it has something to do with the shameless booty-dancing American girls there and their legions of drooling admirers. Probably both. We didn't stay long.

The ferry took five hours. I repeatedly purchased choco milk from a vending machine. There was piped mexican music - piercing, warbling trumpets and oom-pa-pa bass - playing relentlessly at extreme volume. A girl working in a gift shop wore her swine-flu mask and played solitaire for the entire journey. I can think of nothing else remarkable to say about this ferry journey.

On the mainland we drove to Mazatlan, and then on to a small fishing village of 450 people called Barras de Piaxtla where we had arranged to stay with the mom of my friend Peter, and that is where we are now. The village is small and dusty but beautiful. There is usually some sort of building works going on somewhere so the noise of an angle grinder or an intermittent banging melds with the cockadoodling of roosters who converse with one another throughout the day. I didn't know such emotion could be conveyed in a cock crow, but the ones patrolling the path are very proud, as they should be, and I once heard a depressed sounding rooster under a bush.

Half of the residents here are Jehova's Witnesses, and all of the rich people are somehow associated with drug smuggling. The village's one bar, or cantina, doubles up as a brothel. The proprietor himself is a prostitute, and yet he is one of the few men who regularly attends sermons at the catholic church. This is perhaps something to do with the fact that he identifies more as a woman. The brothel is within spitting distance of the church and the doctors surgery. So, one can stumble quickly from the whorehouse into confession, or the clinic, depending on the urgency of matters.

There are other gringos in Barras; surfer dudes who pay $1000 a week to come down from California. They are given as much pot as they can handle and then driven in motor boats to some nearby point break. Pleasingly as I cross them on the path they acknowledge me with an Ola. Yes I have abandoned the moustache plan but the tan and a surly visage seem to do the trick! Perhaps I was a daring drug runner, back from a 6 day trip up the Sea of Cortez, or an honest fisherman's son? Or, rather, a clueless British tourist flip-flopping his way around town, an object of mirth for small children, just back from the lighthouse which he tried to go up but was scared by the sound of shuffling feet somewhere halfway up the very narrow spiral staircase, and so instead walked around the side and stood on an awkwardly shaped black rock for a while looking at where some straw in between two rocks was flattened down, maybe a bird had made a nest there.

So we're sweaty and bitten here, and kinda looking forward to returning to San Francisco, which we will do within two weeks. I hope you are all well. Tell people about the blog if you think they will enjoy it.

chard x

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