Sofalust (written for Quench magazine)

What do you get when cross 1.4 million wanderlustful twenty-somethings with a social networking phenomenon, then smother the whole thing in DIY culture? A: Couchsurfing.com. It was inevitable really, and undoubtedly the best thing to come out of the online networking boom we’ve witnessed over the past half-decade. Couchsurfing bears all the hallmarks of a normal networking site - profile pages, flash-bleached party pics, dubious friend requests – but they belie a premise so unique and beautiful the site has reached legendary cult status in the backpacker community and its services are coveted by travellers worldwide. Couchsurfing is a ‘hospitality exchange network’. In other words, as a member you can arrange to stay pretty much anywhere in the world absolutely free of charge. Not only is this perfect for travelling on the cheap, it offers instant cultural immersion. Fancy hanging with Omar Mohammed (‘Male, 23, social activist and youth worker, Definitely Has Couch!’) in the Gaza Strip? Knock yourself out. Or maybe you would prefer a jaunt to the tiny Pacific island state of Nauru to kick it with Ebol Ohirozetn, a man who claims: ‘for diet, I'm particularly interested in trying a beer, I heard it is very tasty. I also like to eat eggs of the most varied types of birds.’ This meeting and befriending of locals is couchsurfing’s major hook – your host is your personal guide, your translator, your new best friend. He or she may ask for something in return, a bar of chocolate, some beers, an authentic cooked meal of your country, or maybe just a hug and a promise that the favour will be returned.

In an attempt to paint a fair picture of the couchsurfing experience I will give two personal accounts, one good and one not so good. Let’s start with the good. Having driven as quickly as possible through the orange dust and army checkpoints of Tijuana, my friend and I arrived in Ensenada where we had arranged to meet one Nancy Salgado, our couchsurfing host. After much confused peering at peeling signs and avoiding giant potholes we finally reached the place: a squat tiled bungalow on a dark street. Dogs were barking everywhere. We knocked on the door and were met by a short man with a moustache wearing a grey t-shirt who looked at us quizzically. Suddenly a wave of recognition came across his face. ‘Nancy!’ he exclaimed and ushered us inside, introducing himself in broken English as Luis. The air was cool inside and there was a leather sofa. We sat on the leather sofa. Luis sat across from us and a small orange Chihuahua with bulging eyes regarded us from the tiled floor. ‘This’, said Luis, holding a hand out to the Chihuahua, ‘is my dog. Polly.’ We acknowledged and smiled. It didn’t seem Nancy was anywhere. After more awkwardness she finally arrived with her mum Carmen, and it transpired Luis was her dad. She admitted it was her first time hosting, and that she didn’t think we would actually show up. We are given our own room, stuffed with burritos, and our clothes washed. Over the next few days Luis chauffeured us to sea caves, secluded beaches and a winery in his little white Suzuki 4x4. After the wine tasting we found a baby bird that had fallen from the nest. Any preconception of Mexican machismo was turned on its head at the sight of Luis cradling the tiny bird and feeding it flour and water with a toothpick. It died later.

On to the bad. I arrive in Salt Lake City with my girlfriend. We set about locating the address of our next host, a guy called James that lives in an anarchist collective calling itself Boing! It’s baking hot in SLC. I sit under a tree to call James and get through to a girl claiming to live at Boing! Our conversation is very stilted. ‘Does a guy called James live with you?’ I venture. ‘Uhh, sometimes,’ comes the reply. After some cajoling we ascertain the whereabouts of this joint and set off. Man it was hot. As we arrive we see this is really an anarchist collective spot. Crust punks sit on the porch, the door hangs permanently open and people mill in and out. Inside is filled with detritus: pieces of bike, random furniture, a mountain of dishes in the sink. Anti capitalist slogans plaster the walls. The lounge has been cleared and the sofas – our likely beds – pushed to the sides of the room. We discover a punk band will be playing a gig there tonight, in between the sofas. I imagine trying to sleep while some guy executes wild guitar chops next to my head, the rest of my body trampled underneath the sleeping bag by nihilistic freeform dancers. We drift away in the direction of the nearest hotel.

That was quite an unusual example of how couchsurfing can go wrong. More typical gripes include breakdowns in communication between host and surfer that can lead to annoying standing around, or even a complete fall-through. The other end of the spectrum is equally unappealing - Stuart, my loveable host in San Francisco, estimated his previous surfer clung on like an annoying barnacle for a month in his tiny bedsit, staking out a little corner of it and parrying any enquiries as to her departure. Sadly, the system is sometimes abused like this. Some attempt to use it as a kind of dating site, and increases in spam messages have raised concerns that the site may be slowly eating itself - becoming so awash with tripe and scammery it will grow too troublesome to use. But something tells me the couchsurfing community is too proud to let this happen. The reference and verification system is so polished that common sense is the only tool you need to conduct safe meet-ups. But it will always remain slightly niche, too unreliable for some, an exciting gamble and cultural eye-opener for the rest.

Dive for victory! (written for Quench magazine)

I’m standing on a mattress with a torch in my mouth surveying the large plastic bags surrounding my feet. The mattress is covered with a layer of mushy pears; it sits at the bottom of a large industrial dumpster. I lift the bags one by one, testing their weight. The light ones I put aside, the heavy ones I take and lift over the lip of the dumpster, carefully lowering them to the ground. Having amassed the heavy ones I boost back over the edge of the dumpster and drop to the ground. Crouching, I untie the bags. One contains six large tubs of coleslaw. One is comprised entirely of cabbages. Another is filled with yoghurts, loose mushrooms and, sadly, broken glass. A fourth is the bread bag, holding today’s discarded French sticks, almond croissants and small ornate rolls coated in black seeds. The fifth is the money bag: two quiches, three packs of tomatoes, grapes, frozen pizzas, and three packs of Thorntons mini fudge brownies. This is dumpster diving, freeganism, or ‘aggressive recycling’ – the act of entering supermarket bins to retrieve damaged or expired food. For the last month or so I have been largely sustaining myself on ‘dumpstered’ food.

Going through the trash is an age-old practice, from the rag and bone man to private detectives to that bloke on Albany road poking about in a skip. And yet, telling someone about your new hobby (‘Oohh I got a lovely seafood medley from the bin behind Tesco’s last night!’) will usually provoke a response of surprise and disgust. Admittedly, our natural reaction to hearing the words ‘climb, ‘into’, and ‘bin’ in conjunction is not a positive one. Picking out and eating your first found food is, however, very much a case of traversing an irrational hump of distrust. Dumpster diving poses no more of a health risk than, say, rubbing up against an unknown body in Solus, or eating food from City Pizza. We associate bins with dirtiness, but the reality is that supermarket bins are metal containers (sometimes completely spotless metal cages), filled with plastic bags of expired - i.e., still fine for another week - or ‘damaged’ food. Sometimes the packaging is split and food has spilled onto other foods, and it’s down to you whether or not to take the stuff home and clean it off. This gets about as gross as rinsing rogue gravy granules from packs of pasta or selectively removing mouldy tomatoes. That is to say, not very gross. By law, any meat, fish or eggs must be destroyed or made unfit for consumption before being chucked, so you very seldom come across anything truly rancid. Taking the plunge boils down to overcoming a knee-jerk gag response and, perhaps more problematically, overcoming the social inhibition holding us all back from leaping gleefully into the nearest bin. I must admit, I have frozen in embarrassment mid-rifle as a drunken student zombie approaches, then leant against the bin casually, or, if I am already inside, peered furtively over the top like a meerkat. Sometimes it’s best to flip the lid and clamber inside as quickly as possible. Then you can have a rest, get out your torch – an invaluable piece of equipment if you’re stealing in at the dead of night – and examine your winnings out of sight and at your leisure.

Dumpster diving is technically outlawed, but the police consistently turn a blind eye due to the complete worthlessness of the food. I have regularly rummaged through bins in direct view of bored looking security guards. Curiously, the other night a police helicopter hovered directly above me for five minutes, shining a light down as I sat on my haunches happily counting oranges next to a dumpster. They were probably up there chuckling into their microphones. It’s even hassle free to target a bin on a busy pedestrian filled road. I find it helps to go about matters in a businesslike way – embrace and enjoy your practice by maybe whistling a gay tune or offering passers by bread rolls. Witnesses tend to appear bemused or sometimes scared, assuming you’re some hunger-crazed hobo.

Dumpster diving is a case of the pros wildly outweighing the cons. Not to mention the obvious financial gains of foraging, reclaiming food can be viewed as a green endeavour. Put simply, food you take from bins is food saved from the landfill site. Probe even further into the bin bag and you uncover some interesting ethical incentives; dumpstering is viewed by some as a fun and tasty way of sticking it to the man. Mind bogglingly, each year supermarkets send £18 billion worth of food to landfill, and by retrieving this unnecessary waste dumpsterers are highlighting and tackling the inherent symptoms of our culture of excess. Food Not Bombs, a loosely knit group of anti-war collectives who distribute vegetarian and vegan food to those in need, acquire much of their stuff from supermarket trash. Similarly, the radical Christian group the Jesus Christians decrees its members eat only dumpstered food, and this is handed out to the needy too. In interviews the Jesus Christians state they are taking responsibility for the ills of consumerism: ‘It’s not just about making use of the waste from supermarket bins, it’s about a principle far greater and [more] eternal than that - about sharing what we have.’

But I don’t purport to dumpster dive as a way of single handedly bringing down the ugly goliath that is consumer culture. On the contrary, I carefully remove my swatch before going on forays and listen happily to my shiny iPod while frolicking in the bins. Each time I set off on an urban forage I hope no one has discovered and cleaned out my fruitful spot, and all the food I like the look of is taken home and eaten chiefly by me. That is to say, my motives for rummaging through the trash are fundamentally selfish and go directly against the more lofty ‘principles’ of dumpster diving. Having said that, the thought of so much food going to waste each night does pain me. I was determined for this not to turn into a sermon, so will leave it there. Scoff if you will.

Naknek

I’m getting behind. I’m home now and it feels like this happened a long time ago, but I had to get it down.

We flew on a chartered jet into King Salmon. Alaska is cold and grey, we see nothing of its supposed beauty and I never do. The state is twice the size of Texas and full of mountains and glaciers, but all I see is the inside of King Salmon airport in all its tininess. There were fake fish stuck to the walls like trophies. All of the people were gradually trickling away in taxis; it was cold and desolate outside. We arrived at the cannery. It’s made up of old wooden buildings that look like they were about to fall down. They tell us not to be deceived by the shabbiness - we run a tight operation here and soon we'll be running 24 hours. Our names were called out and our photos taken. We were told where we will sleep. I will sleep in the Waldorf Hysteria, choice pick of the pun-heavy dorm names. I am to room up with a man called John from Hawaii. Our room was tiny and thin and locked with a combination padlock, my bed an ancient metal latticework affair and the light next to my bed long broken. The window was blacked out with card; we had arrived near the solstice, meaning it was light 23.5 hours a day.

I left the room to see Emily and Kamille and we hitched into town to look at the general store. Everything in Alaska is flown in and therefore 3 times as expensive as anywhere else in the states (we returned to town later, on Emily’s birthday, and bought a $30 pizza). Naknek town is pretty much three bars and a pack of stray dogs. One of the dogs, an old black one with a grey muzzle, follows us as we spend some time on the beach, squelching through deep black mud and dead bloated fish. One year a dead wale washed up there and the cannery girls took its teeth out with pliers and made them into necklaces. We walked under a long dark pier, stooping our heads under wooden beams saturated with bay water, peering up through the slats at the machinery clanking overhead.

Later, when I laid my head down on the foam mattress and tried to ignore the light seeping in from behind the blackout card, words floated through the darkness of the room towards me. It was John and he wouldn’t stop talking. My English politeness damned me again as I felt forced to ‘hmm’ and ‘oh!’ at every one of his boring anecdotes. John didn’t need the money of course; he could make $8,000 by selling just one swimming pool cover. Why is it that you always meet these rich masochists in factories?? The measurements are very precise you know, every swimming pool is unique (‘mmm!’). Oh no, I don’t need the money, rather I’m doing it for the experience. John went on to explain how he spent some months in Hawaii sleeping under a building just for the heck of it. He planned to compile his learnings in a book entitled 'Living the dream'. On the cover it would say living the dream, but in, like, a mirror image, y'know? So it was, like, am I really living the dream, or am I living what I think is the dream when really ... y'know? It's so Plato's cave.

The next day everyone was still in a state of confusion, milling about waiting for the word to begin work. Finally our placements and shifts were announced, everybody crowding around the noticeboard. I was pleased to learn I was working in the cannery rather than 'The Freezer' - the dreaded place down the hill where people sat picking fish bones out of fillets with tweezers 16 hours a day. The freezer was also home to the Slime Line. The unlucky few installed here were to sit with a spoon and scrape out the guts of one salmon per second. This meant true blood line explosion over your face. This meant possible repetitive strain injury. Occasionally, if you were walking down the boardwalk towards the bay to watch the birds or smoke a cheap cigarette, you would see a slime line worker emerge from the freezer - someone so sprayed and splattered with salmon fragments, guts and blood, that his face would be deadened and gait made awkward by the sheer disgustingness of the contact with his own clothes. I once saw a guy, probably having worked for 8 hours or so on the Slime Line, starving and exhausted, simply being turned away from the cafeteria for being too caked in fish. In sum, I was happy not to be on the Slime Line.

It's my first day of work in the cannery and I'm nervous. We arrive and are shown how to sign in with our electronic cards and put on our aprons, hairnets, rubber gauntlets, and rubber gloves with cotton liners. We are then led through a mosquito curtain that blasts cold air downwards, along a walkway and through a gate into the cannery itself. I lower my gloved hands into the hand dip and enter the cannery. The noise is tremendous even with ear-plugs, and it is warm - clouds of steam issue from various machines. Empty cans rattle down from upstairs through little holes in the ceiling, they clink together as they race along little tracks that twist and wind around the machines. Upstairs is called the ting-ting room. I stand stupidly among the machines and conveyor belts laden with speeding cans of orangey-red salmon. Ladies with stony faces stand at the conveyor belts, poking down the salmon with scissors to ensure the cans get a good seal. Cans are snatched from the line, weighed, adjusted and sent back on their course, careering towards the lidding machine where they are pressurised, then shot through the wall to the next room where they are amassed and cooked in the huge ovens. The floor is literally covered with chunks of salmon. A few taciturn old men have been employed solely to spray the floor all day with hoses, shepherding the pools of salmon into gutters than run through the middle of the cannery. A man walks around with a magnetised rod, picking up the bent and crushed cans that have jammed in machines and fallen to the ground. The smell doesn't hit me as the salmon is so fresh; I'm more taken aback by the noise. Each machine operates at its own frequency, and the hissing and clunking, the falling of pistons and whirring of the conveyor belts layer to form a roaring relentless medley. In the chaos, if you close your eyes and concentrate on the sound, you can still pick out an overall beat, a slow deep WHOMP, WHOMP, WHOMP. The heartbeat of the cannery.

I am gestured over by the supervisor Rudy. Rudy is a Pilipino guy who can hardly speak English, he tells people what to do with swift and confusing gesticulations instead. It's too loud to talk anyway. Rudy spends most of his time leaning against a railing high above everyone else, his mouth buried deep in the web of his thumb like a chess player. On breaks he would burst onto the scene like a flamenco dancer to tell us our time was up. He ushers me out of the cannery, away from the machines, back under the mosquito curtain and into the fresh daylight. We go around the corner to a medium sized room with one wall completely exposed to the outside so fork lift trucks can enter. This room feels like a freezer. There is a hole in the wall and a conveyor belt leading back into the cannery. My job is to feed salmon fillets onto the conveyor belt which takes them up to 3 ‘feeders’ who post them into the canning machine. For the first day I do this for 17.5 hours. The salmon arrives by forklift and is never-ending. I am amazed by the sheer number of fillets we process. Someone tells us it is somewhere near 1,000,000 pounds of fish a day. I lift heavy boxes out of large bins and pour them onto the conveyor belt with a guy named Rickey from Sacramento. I soon become very used to the sight of the fillets; they are just under a foot long and just under an inch thick, shiny and slippery and a fresh organic red. They feel silky smooth under my rubber gloves and, when things are not too rushed, it is amusing to toss them playfully onto the conveyor belt and see them be taken up and away. Every half an hour a sullen Quality Control girl dressed in a white apron and hairnet comes to inspect a handful of salmon and leaves again.

It only took a few shifts for my body to start protesting against the work. My eyes stang and my back hurt from the lifting. I was scared of the back pain but more scared of being moved into the cannery proper where people stood still every day, their eyes fixed on never-ending lines of speeding cans. At least I got to move about and chat with Rickey. But the joints in my fingers swelled up, my wrists felt like I’d taken a hard fall on concrete, I twanged something in my shoulder lifting a box and the soles of my feet felt as if they had been battered all day with hockey sticks . My big toes became permanently numb. It was so cold I had to wear three jumpers and dance to keep from stiffening up and shivering. Despite this I was able to carry on in not too much discomfort. Rickey’s roommate, Phoenix, had a hole in his boot and managed to contract actual trench foot, sending him home. Other people had to leave with serious backs problems, and lots soldiered on with bandages covering their crushed hands and inflamed ankles. Rickey and I devised ways of working so as to minimise our pain. We perfected the box lift, the tip, the sharing out of duties. We got hold of a high stool and when work slowed down we took turns to sit on it, hidden from view, and snooze. We called it the throne.

I quickly began to feel like a salmon connoisseur. I took great handfuls of fillets and held them up high, as if a fishmonger weighing a glistening ruby squid, before throwing them to the conveyor belt. I would pick an especially fine looking piece of fish - large, clean-cut, dark red and smooth - and hold it in both hands, resting my elbows onto the table to study it. After the first few shifts though I became hardened and mechanical and desensitised to the sight of the salmon. It was like when a word is repeated so many times and it starts to sound alien and unfamiliar. My mind was being so relentlessly battered with these images of fillets it started to disassociate them from their ... salmon-ness. For a few days I couldn't escape the idea that I was handling cows' tongues. And they did look like cows' tongues! Long, pointy, red, veined and moist. I would pour hundreds of cow tongues onto the conveyor belt when it was stationary and, as my job demanded, slowly and methodically run my hands across them as the belt started up again, spreading them out so they didn't set off the metal detector. It was a surreal feeling, having a velvety river of cow tongues pass under ones hands. Another time the fillets wouldn’t stop resembling great, half-cooked beef steaks, the one grey side from which the scales were stripped showing where each one had been momentarily pan-fried. Another day they looked like fleshy, thick 70s ties.

I often saw faces looking at me from the salmon. The flaky nature of the meat lends itself well to faces. Usually I would spot them as they travelled up and away from me on the belt, faces of horror as the machines rushed louder and louder and they realised they were about to be diced and canned. Once there was a truly remarkable face. As they did sometimes, a piece of salmon had become lodged at the side of the conveyor belt. They would remain there wiggling until you poked them free. I was noticing this mini-event when I realised the piece of salmon resembled a most brilliantly intricate face. It stared at me with two perfect teardrop eyeholes and cried out of a Jim Henson style mouth formed by a hanging chunk of flesh. It was a cross between Munch's Scream and Kermit the Frog and it looked very distressed. It was clearly begging to be released and allowed to travel along the belt with the rest of its number, but its snagging meant it had to endure the anticipation of a mincing indefinitely. I stood there staring at it for a good 5 minutes, transfixed and absent mindedly stroking a fillet, enjoying its silkiness through my gloves. The face lay there moaning and rippling over the corrugations of the belt that passed under it. It's dignity was further trampled when I tipped the carcasses of his fellows on top of him (I had to, it was my job), which slithered all over one another and up towards the feeders, revealing him still underneath and wedged, still protesting and a little more roughed up for his ordeal. As time went by the face became more ragged and delirious looking; the hanging mouth waggled up and down on its hinge as if the face was babbling to itself. Eventually it was smashed and erased.

Every once in a while the drainage hole where we threw the bones and fins and pieces of skin we could be bothered to peel off the fillets became blocked and one of us would spend half an hour unblocking it with a plunger. If it was really bad our room would gradually fill up and we would slosh about in rancid salmon water, making work pretty difficult and revolting. Sometimes a guy came with what looked like a drill, the end of which was a tremendously long and lithe twirling wire which he inserted into our drain and span about a bit. Eventually we decided to stop putting fillets that had touched the floor down the drain, instead chucking them through the window onto the floor of the cannery. A man would routinely come to collect them and put them back on the conveyor belt. I’m sure there are countless more disgusting contamination stories from the cannery. One amusing one I recall was when Emily, suffering a cold as we all were at that point, took some miscreant comfort in observing that her nose was dripping onto the procession of open cans she was examining. Having said that, as soon as we got home we had salmon sandwiches and they were delicious! I kept a tin for a paperweight too.

I didn't end up seeing much of John as our shifts were different. When I left in the morning he would be somewhere in the cannery, surrounded by steam and the rattling of cans, sitting on a chair with a river of cans running towards him which he swept into a huge wheeled basket. When I got home from work he would have finished, gone to bed and was just waking up again, sitting on the edge of the bed with bleary red eyes, obsessively updating the excel spreadsheet of his hours. The first few nights it was hard to sleep; my body was struggling to adjust to this new turn of events and light invaded my room at the edges of the blacked out windows. You could hear voices in the room – voices of workers and of those in the building. The walls were so paper thin I could hear the man next door snoring. Outside there were noises of generators chugging and fork-lift trucks reversing over gravel. I got about 3 hours of sleep before our first real shift. After that there was no problem in sleeping. I peeled off my clothes and lay down and closed my eyes. There were brief visions of the salmon - fillets, tumbling and slithering over one another and being taken away by the conveyor belt - then I was out. You don't dream in the cannery because your body is recovering, repairing itself. Instead you just got a blackness. I and the other workers used to complain about this - it always left you feeling cheated, as if you’d only had a short nap (we knew it really was the beginning of the end when we were sent home early one night and the next day our supervisor, Jason, told us triumphantly that he had experienced a dream). As time went on and my body got more accustomed to the routine I managed to stay up and read a little before bed. I laid on the bed and read my two copies of the New Yorker over and over, savouring the rare moments of freedom until my eyes began to swim. The sound of my alarm started to terrorise me. A few weeks after the whole thing I heard it again, Emily’s phone alarm, a chirpy little melody, and I almost jumped. I’d been completely Pavlovised.

The mess hall had long tables and the food is served on plastic trays. It was a bit like saved by the bell only you weren't sitting with AC, you were sitting across from a tall stern man with a receding hairline, silently munching on his defrosted hashbrowns and thin flat oily bacon strips and powdered scrambled egg and french toast and sipping his cherry juice drink. The atmosphere was often euphoric in the mess hall. Girls sat with shadows under there eyes, flecked with salmon, in hysterics over trays of hamburgers and tacos. I often felt elated too, and would frequent the softserve ice cream machine to make concoctions with peanut butter and almonds. Incidentally, I shoved an ice cream into Emily's face as the coup de grace in a long running prank war. Terrifyingly I found out later that she was planning to somehow acquire a bucket of fish guts and pour it over my head in retaliation. I thank my lucky crab’s legs this never happened. The meals were flipping huge but my appetite shrank during my time in the cannery, I never knew quite why. For a time I ate only bowls of cereal and oranges. I think it was the smell that you got used to and never really noticed, but was always there humming along in the background, keeping me in a perpetual state of minor nausea.

Breaks almost felt hysterical. They came every 4 hours and there would be a large selection of donuts, hot drinks and some kind of nasty savoury food like a corndog or dubious burritos. It turns out sleep deprivation, monotonous work and severe hunger turns everyone into a bastard – there was pushing and shoving, people taking more than there fair share meaning those at the back got none, etc. etc. Everyone became addicted to sugar, and without the donuts and sugary coffee I don’t think I would have been able to carry on. People literally devoured the food to get back on the sugar high. The hotdogs caused me to have the shits. I quickly got fed up of the break area, the jostling, the raised voices and crass jokes. Wisely, Rickey usually slept in the freezer room during breaktime. Sometimes I would take a donut and go to the dock, or sit alone in a corner somewhere. There was untold pleasure in those donuts.

The end of a shift was when people really went mad with happiness. I have only seen such mood polarisation before in the mentally ill. Previously grim faces were now overjoyed, singing dancing and whiskey swigging. The most merry-making came on Independence Day when a large group of us marched out to a lake and sat on a large industrial pipe. To get there we squished through a marsh and batted away a thousand mosquitoes. Kamille played some mournful notes on a harmonica and everyone swigged whiskey. Someone set off some fireworks which were barely visible in the bright daylight. I wandered down the pipe which turned into a kind of jetty made of pallets. There was an old rowboat moored up there surrounded by grass, and then the lake itself. I took off my boots and paddled a bit; the bottom was a very spongy feeling mud. There was this long floaty grass everywhere. I launched myself into the water and it was wonderful. It felt like I was swimming away from the cannery. My aches and pains, and the mosquito bites were gone as I forged a path through the strange floating grass, it catching in between my fingers giving me green tassels.

The cannery was rife with rumours, gossip, sexual tension and bitching. The fishermen had burnt down the sauna. A disembodied bear’s head was found behind the freezer (or was it a decapitated bear’s body?). All of the students would go home first. All of the blonde girls would stay on longest (this one turned out to be sort of true). A machinist and a QC girl had sex in the QC office. The gap toothed man who wore a baseball cap, couldn’t speak a word of English and helped me clean the giant fish bins was, in fact, a paedophile. Information on when the salmon was going to dry up was purposefully withheld from us and, consequently, most of the rumours revolved around this topic. Towards the end people became nigh on obsessed with how much time was remaining. A girl from the can shop wrote poems about it in thick felt tip pen on the brown cannery paper and showed them to me. One was entitled ‘cans’. I heard people comparing the speed of the work and dates with previous years in attempts to calculate when we would be released. A boy in the mess hall claimed the high temperatures were a signal that the salmon would move on earlier than usual. One of the QCs told me you could tell we were near the end because the quality of the fish was deteriorating (the older salmon are, the more beat-up they become, hence the image of salmon literally falling to bits upon reaching their final resting place: the shallow stream where they were spawned). This led me to fixatedly examining the fish for a couple of days. I managed to convince myself they weren’t as deep red and glassy as they were in the beginning but paler orange and fluffy like mashed potato. One of the machinists managed to convince a young girl that there was one huge red salmon lurking at the bottom of the bay and we were waiting until he was caught before we could go home.

There was an uncomfortable mix of young attractive girls and leering middle aged men in the cannery, and the overbearing air of sexual tension was often discussed. At our first group meeting we were told a certain number of people get sent home each year for sexual harassment. It was certainly a working environment from which there was no escaping, and a harasser could make your life a living hell. Sure enough there was pestering and indecent remarks. There was creepy and suggestive graffiti, including, in a toilet I frequented, a very carefully etched stick lady surrounded by 5 stick men, all pointing towards her. As seedy as the whole situation was I didn’t expect anything serious to happen … then it did. A friend was woken in the night by a man in her room, hooded and crouching next to her bed, stroking her exposed upper thigh! He ran off and she gave chase, but they never caught him. They say Alaska is a haven for criminals and ex-cons, having the highest proportion of any state. There is little police force to speak of out in the sticks, and Red Salmon certainly didn’t run a background check on me. I found out about halfway through that all the Mexicans were in some sort of gang. A large number of them always wore some item of red clothing which, Rickey explained to me, meant they were part of the Bloods. Rickey also pointed out gang graffiti in the toilets, another gang name I can’t remember.

Inspecting the fish one day Kamille joked that it would be funny to find a lone crab buried under the piles of salmon, or something more scandalous like a condom or a razor blade. This was the scope of our humour: fish related. It was hard to tear our minds away from something that occupied it 16 hours a day. Later she decided it wouldn’t be funny if a crab emerged from the salmon, ‘it would be like you or me crawling out from under piles of chimpanzee flesh!’ Another day she had a great epiphany - the fish eggs cast to the factory floor! The terrible waste, and the perversity of it all! Thinking about it, it was very hard to justify what we were doing there. It reminded me of Mac cunningly trapping the frogs in Cannery Row. The salmon had no way of preparing themselves for this large scale harvesting. If old school rod and tackle tactics were fair game then this was a merciless reaping. It was a wonder any fish were left to go on up the river and spawn the next bunch. And was the whole process humane anyway? At what point did the salmon actually die? How do you humanely kill a fish?? (If this has set off any ethical antenna twitching, I point you in the direction of David Foster Wallace’s most excellent article, Consider The Lobster: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster ).

My disconnection from outside world was complete and day melding began to set in. This was compounded by Michael Jackson’s death holding complete news dominance for two weeks straight. Not only was any useful news from the real world blotted out, but it made me feel like I was re-living the same day over and over again. Things weren’t helped by the utter shoddiness of the mosquito ridden, garbage filled internet shack which contained one PC boasting a connection speed circa 1993. It was all I could do to sit munching on my Cheerios in between shifts, staring at regurgitated footage of Jackson like a perturbed Bill Murray until my disappointing pay check arrived. And then we were gone! They told us when our flight home was half a day before it left, presumably to keep us working hard up until the very end. It ended up being 19 consecutive days work I think, 16 hours a day.

I was sad I never saw the beautiful side of Alaska. When we got home we realised just how bad we actually smelled. Some pieces of clothing were beyond de-salmoning: no matter how many times they were boiled, tumbled and hung out in a stiff Washington breeze the stench of dead fish wouldn't bugger off. And so we had to throw them away. I even had to throw away my shoes. And yet, in the cannery my face, hair, hands and every item of clothing I had were more or less encrusted with salmon all the time and I hardly cared. After a recovery period Emily and I drove to Texas where she started her new job. I bought a flight home with the Alaska money and proceeded to get the date wrong like a fool and miss it. So, 240,000 thrown fish for nothing! I am now back in the good ol’ U.K. and about to embark on a Masters course at Cardiff in Music, Politics and Culture. Prepare for this blog to become that little bit more boring.

charizard.

The Mining Congress Journal

HELLO Sorry about the gap - a moose chewed through my Ethernet Cable. Ask Joe Coope.

I traveled from Seattle to Battle Ground on the haunches of my trusty Greyhound. There I stayed with my friend Emily. We went hiking up the nearby Mt. Dog, during which we saw a black bear cross the path 50ft in front of us. He didn't see us. Later we caught a ride to Twin Falls (a town in Idaho, sort of in the middle of nowhere) with a friend, Sarah, who was starting a new job there, looking after a 'historic' house full of stuff from the 1800s - old furniture, ancient clothing including a top hat and awesome buffalo fur coat which weighed a ton, loads of old photos, an old organ and, incredibly, a Stradivarius violin which Sarah's gentleman friend, Richard, decided to tune much to my anxiousness, as I could see it exploding. All the old crap and the strange noises the house made lent it a creepy atmosphere (the owner had even made a sign outside by threading straw through a wire fence, reading: 'STRICKER HOUSE YOU ALL COME IN', to our horror). In order to 'dispel' any ghosts and ensure Sarah future good nights' sleep we held a seance. Nothing happened. We also went on a hike and saw a rattlesnake. Sorry about the short desription - it was a rattlesnake, it was curled up, it didn't spring out and bite anyone on the face. It didn't even rattle. There.

Emily and I decided to hitch to Yellowstone; home of Yogi the bear and Bobo. We had giant packs with us. Our most notable ride was probably with a guy called Gerald, an ex meth addict who aproached Emily while I was in the toilets when she wasn't even holding up a sign. Hmm! We had been stranded at a trucker stop for 2 hours so we rode with Gerald to Pocatello and he turned out to be fine, apart from walking in a 'wiggly' way and talking rather fast. I had my blade on me anyway and knew could stick him at any time*. We then got in a strange series of mini-rides, each one inching us closer to Yellowstone by about 30 miles, so it ended up taking all day. The last ride, with an old couple from South Carolina called Martha and Jim, was comfortable and excellent in every way. It was like getting a lift from your grandparents (I imagine). When we got into the park they gave us a tour and Martha got all excited pointing out each animal and then referring us to her diagram of all the animals.

Yellowstone national park is fun. My bowels, having only recently recovered from the gastronomic tribulations of Mexico, were again thrown into disarray by the sheer fear of the animals romaing around the place. This park feels like safari - everyone is driving around and the beasts roam free; there are no fences. Add to the mix that these beasts range from innocuous - a bluebird here and there, maybe a chipmunk - to life threateningly savage - the Bison, the Moose, the Bears - and hitch-hiking becomes a bit more scary. Posters warning of the dangers of Bison show bovine lovers beaing tossed through the air like rag-dolls. Being repeatedly pressed to purchase 'Bear Spray' did nought to calm my nerves. You'll definitely need some.

* * *

Camping In Yelowstone Hints & Tips!

- Pick every individual spilled oat from the crevices in your bag (FOOD AND FOOD ODOURS ATTRACT BEAR) only to find in the morning that you left the orange peel and condensed milk (incidentally every bear's second favourite food, refer to picture) in the side pocket.

- Try using your folded up cut-offs as a handy and portable pillow!

- After three nights of using your folded up cut-offs as a handy and portable pillow they will become damp and soggy. Think of this as training and imagine your unbridled joy when you can put your head on a plump, dry, substantial pillow again!

- Be prepared for your initial enthusiasm for camping to sour and erode. This is normal. Maybe you will reach your breaking point after the condiment sachets you stole from the cafeteria explode inside your bag, coating everything around them with a liquidised blue cheese.

- When (and this will definitely happen) you are woken by a bear's paw protruding into your tent, gently patting down your sleeping bag and inching closer and closer towards the last of the peanut butter, begin slashing at it with your knife! That's what you brought the knife for isn't it?? Slash away! Now get up and run, slowing the beast by tossing the condensed milk into his path if needs be. Run to the nearest Recreational Vehicle and issue a phrase (it's best to steer clear of good proper English, i.e., 'sound the alarm! An ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!', for this will simply not compute with these rural holidaymakers. Instead, try: 'Aaarrggh! Goodam bear tryd'a kill me!'). Repeat if required.

* * *

On the second day we took on a huge hike. I had been wondering why everyone had a car and whenever staff found out we were Hiker Bikers they looked surprised and almost ... sympathetic. Turns out hiking around Yellowstone is sheer insanity. Our hike, from one camping area to the next, was 15 miles and involved: stomping through piles of snow, squishing through marshland, being attacked by clouds of gnats, climbing over innumerable felled trees, wading and jumping over rivers and streams, walking along balancing beam-style logs over fast moving rivers, slipping on wet mud and stones, getting lost, and feeling the need to be talking or singing constantly to ward of bears, moose, bison and the like. This was still a lot of fun, but at the end there was an extreme sense of relief. The whole next day was spent recovering.

We were picked up by an elderly brusque man named Bob on our way our of Yellowstone. Bob claimed to have climbed to the summit of Mt. Hood at the age of 14, where he secured a job with the Park Service taking loads of stuff from base to summit 100 lbs at a time. I say 'claimed', but it was hard to doubt Bob, even when his tales became quite incredible. He told us he had once earned money by entering Bears' places of hibernation - I like to imagine a nice dank cave - and recording their temperatures with a rectal thermometer. If this is true - which I believe it is (Bob's descriptions were very casual and had a certain abruptness which somehow leant them credibility) - then it not only shows Bob has balls of pure woven titanium, but also that there is a certain demand for information specifically regarding the subtle fluctuations of temperature in hibernating Bears' rectums. I talk as if I know a bit about unconscious bear-butt temperatures. I don't; for all I know they could fluctuate wildly. You'll just have to accept I'm winging it on this one. Bob turned out to be a bit of a legend, letting us stay at his fishing lodge and feeding us barbecued chicken.

The hitch-hike from West Yellowstone (the town on the outskirts of the park) was more straightforward than on the way in. Most of the ride was spent with a lovely Mormon guy called Brandon who resembled mid 90s era Bruce Willis. He grew up in a town of 400-odd people, had four little boys and was a cherry and apple farmer. Despite this seeming bumpkin-ish-ness he was very well informed about, well, everything. At the age of 18 he went on a Mormon evangelical mission to S. Korea where he learned Korean from scratch and went around door-stepping people for TWO YEARS. I found this flabbergasting. As I listened to him I am almost ashamed to admit his positivity and soothing conversation lulled me into what I can only describe as a 'spiritually calm place' (/mystical stupour), almost as if he had been delivering a sermon ingeniously disguised as a methodical rundown on the ins and outs and technicalities of modern-day apple farming. We stopped talking and I looked out at the Idaho countryside for a while, which is quite pretty by the way. Endless lush green potato fields give way to sagebrush and wild antelope as you drive north. There is a dormant volcano and large interesting clouds which are apparently a permanent feature. I saw a big dog cloud that looked like Snowy from Tintin, slowly deforming, which led me to thinking of the recent marmite Jesus sighting in south Wales (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8071865.stm), which led me to thinking about scores of crumpets and slices of buttered toast with intricate burn marks and drips of butter depicting (in divine realism) images of Jesus, Mary, Joe Smith, Vishnu, Thor, maybe even God himself, or any other saints, deities or heavenly messangers you could care to think of, sitting on tables and in toasters, waiting patiently to be discovered, only to be swiftly and blindly ruined by a few masticatory motions of a hungry schoolboy or somebody.

I go to Alaska in a few days to work for the first time in 6 months. I'm scared. I hear there are unlimited free donuts.

The Happy Ignoramus.

*Joke. Well, I did have a knife, for the camping an'all.

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