There were some negative comments about the brevity of that last post. So here are more photos with some detail about what we’ve been doing out here. This is Michelle and Ritchie.

Last night we went out for dinner with them. Then to a rubbish pub, where we met Stewart and Dorren. These are just some of our glorious new Sydney friends. They are like English friends but much funnier, more easy-going, more attractive, they smell nicer, they’re much better at ping-pong, they can breath under water and they have shiny, green skin that’s impervious to bullets.

I recently went to New Zealand for three weeks. It was pretty rubbish, because Jen had to stay in Oz. New Zealand looks like this:

But, to be fair, when it doesn’t look like that, it sometimes looks like this:

And this:

Some of the stuff I did can be read about here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/may/25/newzealand.boatingholidays

and listened to here http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Guardian/sponsored/2007/05/31/NewZealandUncovered_TheNorthIsland.mp3 

But it goes on for hours, and isn’t much good unless you’re planning a trip to New Zealand. I based my broadcast on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1984 travelogue of Brazil. Which, if you haven’t seen, you really should treat yourself to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uerFZ2Z42nc

Back in Sydney, we’re leaving our little house tomorrow to move into a big ramshackle warehouse. It used to be a chocolate factory – did I mention that? It’s got cold here and it’s been raining for two days. Our new place is going to be chilly. I may have to quit work so I can spend the winter in bed, watching Colombo DVDs. Jenny has agreed to take a third job to support us if this is the case.

 

In the winter, all the outdoor pools around the city are drained, so the other day we went to the beach and swam in this tidal pool that’s sunk into the rocks. The waves come crashing in over the edge into the pool.

We did leave the city last week and go to the blue mountains for a wander. Ski season is coming up, and there are ideas about heading to the snow parts of the mountains. As part of our move, we sold all our possessions on eBay because the place we’re moving to has everything already. Its remarkable how much stuff we have accumulated in the past six months. All of it is useless. It’s great to have nothing again.

 

More next week – with pictures of the kitten in our new place.

Loads of love from us both xx

Previous Post

This is just a little hello to those who still check this site. Jenny and I are still in Sydney. We’re moving house this weekend, away from our little Surry Hills terrace into an old chocolate factory in Chinatown to live with five others and a kitten. I’ll put the address up here when we have it.

Jude Box, Jenny’s sister, is staying with us at the moment, and recently we saw Kim Ozzie Gehrig, who was in town for a few days.

Agent Foster-Grant

Hello!
Here are some photos of our place in Sydney. This is our overgrown garden. Things with too many legs live at the bottom of it.

This is the view from the balcony in our bedroom.

This is Jen in the kitchen.

This is our bedroom.

We’re having a very peaceful time out here. Jenny’s still childminding this little baby girl and working in a bar.

Nick has changed jobs. He left the Sunday Telegraph for the Sun-Herald, moving from a trashy Murdoch paper to a slightly more worthy, sandals-wearing, knit-your-own muesli liberal rag. This is where he works.

Luckily, he only has to go in three days a week. For the rest of the week he wanders round the neighbourhood picking up litter, talking to strangers at bus stops and re-arranging the shelves in deparment stores.

Last week an Australian MP had to resign because he sent a joke text message about having sex with goats to another MP. All the news that’s fit to print.

We went to an exhibition on the criminal history of Sydney the other day and learnt all about what a lawless place this was in the 1930s and 40s. The focus of the exhibition was a murder that took place in this house in 1942.

A prostitute and three accomplaces robbed a john and then beat him to death, and dumped his body in the street.

All of them were charged and put away. Imagine our surprise when we saw this shot of the pub where the murderers all met to plan the scheme – it’s where Jenny now works.

The other evening I (nick) was walking to the pub. It was midnight and boiling hot. I was wearing regulation flip-flops and cut off tracksuit bottoms.

Up ahead were some fashionable youths, talking about this and that. Just as I passed them, I felt a burst of wetness under my right heel, as if a large drop of tropical rain had fallen out of the sky and somehow managed to land under my foot.

Not wanting to draw attention to myself in front of the other youths, I kept on walking, squelching on every other step. You see, a fat cockroach had run up onto my flip-flop when I was in mid-stride.

When I got to the pub, I had to wash the yellow roach goo off my foot in the toilet basin.

The other wildlife we see a lot of in Sydney is the mosquito. Here you can see some interesting examples which we’ve had pressed and mounted on our bedroom wall.

Nick’s sister’s been out to visit so we’ve spent the past two weeks mainly on the beach.

No sharks. Only a couple of jelly fish, but she still didn’t get her knees wet.

We’re going to try to put a little bit of news up on this thing every week from now on, rather than leave it ages and then guff on about nothing. Jen’s said she’ll post something next weekend.

Hope you’re all well and looking on the bright side.

The dudes abide… xx

Previous Post

Look at those snappers, Ralph

lost and found

LIKE SUPERMAN, we have returned. When we left you, we were in Chile, about to get on a cargo ship heading north. After two months lost at sea, we were finally rescued last night by a group of Welsh Boy Scouts on an outward bound week in the South Pacific. Jenny and I were the only ones to survive. The cargo of cows was the first to be eaten. Then the other passengers. In the end, the crew blockaded themselves in the Captain’s cabin, but Jenny squeezed through a porthole during the night and by morning there was nothing left but hair and bones…

I write this on the Welsh Boy Scouts’ explorer ship, a refitted mine sweeper called The Burnished Woggle. There’s plenty to eat - devilled eggs, pork pies. But Jenny has that wild look in her eyes again. She’s tasted flesh, and I fear for the safety of our hosts…

Or so it could have been. But in fact the cargo ship was pretty ordinary. In fact, it was luxurious compared to the conditions we were used to. We had out own cabin – sort of, with a porthole to sick out of when the water was rough. The food was great. But the cargo stank. After a few days it was hard to go out on deck because of the smell from the livestock. There was not a lot to do except sit around reading. Five days. I read many rubbish books. We ate a lot of food and played poker with the other passengers. On the final night I bought in three times and lost everything, $50 or so, which was a lot to us back then. Jenny knocked out two Brits and was left heads-up with a huge American man who was studying International Relations at Harvard. Jenny took him to the cleaners and won back all the money I’d lost, totally enraging him in the meantime. She bluffed consistently, and he knew it, but he couldn’t bring himself to challenge her. It was magic. At the end he grabbed her and said: ‘You made my lip quiver.’ He was huge. About 25 stone.

And so we made our way up through Chile to Santiago. On the way we went back into Argentina, where everything costs a quarter of what it does in Chile. We spent a week on bicycles cycling around the Argentinean wine district, camping out at night. As usual we hadn’t done much planning, and most of the wineries we arrived at saw two dusty, bedraggled cyclists coming and pulled up the drawbridge. But we did find a few little Bodegas where we drank free wine and hung around abusing the hospitality. At one place, we turned up and the owner was showing round two Italians. We tried all the young wines, then lots of dusty bottles came out. After a quiet word with the security guard we found out the Italians were European distributors for the Bodega, and the owner was laying it on thick for them in the hope of upping next year’s order. At the end of the day, we bought the rest of the best bottle of wine they’d opened that day and took it back to our campsite to drink out of tin cups.

Santiago was nice, but we were already steeling ourselves for a return to the English-speaking world. No, neither of us wanted to leave, but at the same time we were ready for it. I think if we had more time we’d have gone back to Argentina, stayed there for as long as we could, because it really is blissful there, and then headed back up the west coast of the continent to Colombia – which everyone says is very safe and crammed with beautiful things – before crossing into Central America and going up to Mexico.

But we needed to put some money back in the bank, so we each swallowed condoms full of cocaine and headed for New Zealand. Joke. We just packed up our ugly, huge backpacks for the last time, took a deep breath and left.

In New Zealand we missed South America. Being in a country where everyone understood us was boring. We could buy a newspaper and read it without a dictionary. We could turn on the TV and see English programmes. Consequently, the place didn’t have much edge. Auckland has more backpackers than atomic particles. Every hotel is a hostel. Every shop is an internet café and international call centre.
It’s the law that everyone there must be a transient Israeli or Swede. Everyone has to carry 90kilo packs on their backs at all times and preface every statement with the words: When I was Bungy Zorbing in Mai Lao…

We hired a car and spent two weeks driving around. Out of Auckland, everywhere was a bit like a faded English seaside town, with the weather to go with it.

It was fun, but not very.

We did, however, visit one of the national parks, where things started to get more silly. The weather was atrocious. Constant rain and gales. As we set off to do a three-day walk, we pooh-poohed the wardens’ warnings with tales of our South American feats.

But half way up the volcano on the weather turned angry and attacked. We made it to a hut on the mountain and stayed there for two days with a Canadian called Emile and a park warden. Various people arrived and stayed, including an Australian who told us he was in the SAS. We cooked and ate. Jenny and I had brought wine. Outside, Thor and Zeus battled it out.

On the third day we went up the volcano. To the right of us, the crater opened up into a verdant lake while below the landscape swept off in valleys and craters for hundreds of miles. But we couldn’t see any of it, because visibility was about six inches. I couldn’t even see Jenny. It was very funny. And cold. And wet. And funny. Our improvised survival gear came out again. My feet in plastic bags. Jenny with a coke bottle Sellotaped to her ankle.

We drove back to Auckland not long after that and came to Sydney, which is where we are now.

We’ve rented a house in Surry Hills, which is a leafy suburb full of little terrace houses. Everyone says it’s full of dodgy people – the headquarters of Murdoch’s News Ltd is a few streets away so I suppose they have a point – but it seems very peaceful to us. We have a little garden and a balcony, and lots of mosquitoes to call our own.

Various bar jobs when we got here. Some restaurant work. I scored a career high by working in a Wagamama for two weeks. Now I’m working at the Sunday Telegraph, my first Murdoch paper. Jenny’s doing some child minding, working in a really nice bar and waitressing in a hotel. But most of the time we just wander around looking at the big buildings and boats and seeing a city with fresh eyes.

The plan is to stay here until we’ve got some money together and then head somewhere else, either to Central America or to Asia, to go bungy-zorbing in Mai Pao. Or back home if we miss you guys too much. If anyone wants to visit us, here’s where to come:

72 Sophia Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW 2010
This is Jenny’s number: 0420 397 966
This is mine: 0420 384 824

Just so you know, it’s 40 degrees here.

If we get a camera, we’ll put some shots up of the house and the area. The only ones we’ve got are these, taken by a friend who some of you will know - Amanda Morrow – when we were in the Blue Mountains over Christmas.

DSCN2083

DSCN2101

DSCN2110

DSCN2105Originally uploaded by usblog2.

Squeezing the void

Hola. We´re just back from a week trekking in a national park in Patagonia. Unreal world down here. We walked 85km all in, and some days we hardly saw anyone else. 

The weather was bonkers. Blazing sun for five minutes, then a blizzard of huge snowflakes. Then freezing rain, then sun. As we walked, we`d see avalanches tumbling down the mountains on either side.

 

Nights were Baltic. We had to sleep in all our clothes. Our toes were saved only by ingenious sock-layering techniques. Supplies ran low. When the rice ran out we ate porridge. When the porridge ran out we ate a small Chilean child who had the misfortune to stumble across our path.

Jenny´s feet fell to pieces on the third day. She had bits of plastic bottle tied to her ancles with strips of bin bag in order to protect her blisters and swollen bits. She kept begging me to leave her and save myself. I think she thought she was Joe Simpson off Touching The Void. 

The walk ended up at a glacier that spilled down between two mountain ranges. We stayed above it in a deserted camp site, just us and a couple of mates. It was pretty special. Camera´s still broken, but here are some shots off t`internet. 

After having no contact with the outside world for a week it´s depressing to come back and read the news, which seems unbearably grim. After the peace of that park, surrounded by chunks of rock and ice that are bigger than anything man has ever built and older than our species, I feel ashamed when I read that 50 people were killed yesterday in Iraq, and I feel sick when I see that it warranted almost no coverage in the media.

Tonight we`re getting on that container ship that will take us into northern Chile via the Pacific Ocean. It´s already delayed because of storm warnings, so it may be a rough passage.  But if anything´s going to make me spew I´d rather it was a choppy ocean than what I read in the news.

Perito-moreno-glacier

Jenny’s mucky snood

We’ve been dropped at the end of the earth and it’s freezing. After a month in Buenos Aires – during which time we fulfilled personal goals by consuming an entire cow each and drinking our bodyweights three times in red wine – we have flown down to Patagonia.

The only flights we could get were business class, so we spent all our remaining money, and we now have to live in a second-hand tent for the next three weeks. Jenny is over the moon. She loves camping. Show her a bent tent peg and her eyes mist over. She’s dusted off her snood and each night she keeps me up with stories (apocryphal, I suspect) of her days as a Brown Owl.

I keep thinking about the things we’ve left behind – the baking weather, the beautiful girls, Pacha, clubbing outdoors at seven in the morning as the sun rises over the ocean, tango, steaks for 25p. Tonight we will be eating spaghetti and sauce warmed over a butane flame. We’ll eat it fast, before we really taste it, and then put on all our clothes and go to bed.

Of course this place is not soooooo bad. Today we visited a glacier. Took a boat out to the face of it and watched vast chunks of ice crack off and plunge into freezing electric blue water. The camera is broken so we have no pictures, but the best way I can describe is to say it looked like the place Superman lives in Superman 1. OK, wait, here’s a picture off google.

Tomorrow we go to Chile on a bus, where we’ll head to a national park and live there for a week. Then we have plans to get on a cargo ship which sails to the Chilean lake district via the Pacific Ocean.

Time’s running out for this bit of our year-long holiday. We have to get to Australia in time to get festive jobs – making turkey sandwiches at Subway and ushering little Oz kids on and off Santa’s knees.

Until then or whenever, hope everyone back home is fantasticlly well and enjoying all the things we’re missing so much. Think of us when you turn the heating on. xx

From the jungle to the city

After El Pauji we made our way to the Caribbean Coast to search for the out-of-the-way beaches everyone we´d met in Venezuela, had told us about.

First we stopped at Santa Fe – a fishing village where there seemed to be a lot of out of work fisherman getting drunk and a terrible smell of rotten fish. So we didn´t stay long. After that we headed to Archimedes’ pousada – we´d been told about his place by some hippy friends of his in El Pauji – A Swiss named Rita who was married to English Tony. They had taken us in and fed us Irish coffee one afternoon when we had nowhere else to go. We arrived on his doorstep unsure what to expect and were invited to have dinner with him and the other guests that night. Then we strung our hammocks on his porch. We stayed with Archimedes for four nights and helped with the cooking for the other guests and the cleaning. This way we were given the tasty leftovers for us tea and really cheap rent.

We left there and went north to the Caribbean coast. Pui Pui and Medina beaches – San Juan was the last stop and here the road ended. There was no public transport to speak of, sometimes a collectivo – communal pick-up truck – was going our way, and we´d ride with locals, getting strange looks. On one occasion we were forced to journey with a family who were moving house.  Other times we either managed to flag a lift on the back of a truck full of yuka or the back of a pickup with workmen, fishermen, or an occasional car or truck. But there wasn’t much traffic, it was really remote, so often we just had to walk. Most of this area was classified a national park and was lush green jungle so walking was fun along the winding roads with occasional villages dotted along the way. The locals thought we were crazy walking in that heat. But we were traveling light – we left most of our stuff in Santa Elena to collect on the way back to Argentina: I only had one pair of flip flops, one kini, two Ts, a pair of shorts and jeans, a sleeping bag and hammock. 

Medina was really something but a bit high-class for our budget – we got a lift a bit of the way there on the back of a fish truck having walked most of the way – you weren´t allowed to camp there or sling your hammock so we had to find a way to get to Pui Pui before the day was over. We managed to get a cheap lift on a boat captained by this really irate dude who spent the whole trip shouting at his two-man crew. At one point the ratty guy hurt his knee and told one of them to rub it for him, they refused so he looked at me and ordered me to rub it. I declined. We were dropped off on the shores of Pui Pui a bit drenched and the rest of that day was interesting to say the least. We had some guy try to rip us off three times – in the end we had to give him money just to leave us alone but this guy was really tormenting and as gorgeous as the beach was we left early next morning. After a few hours of walking we hitched a lift to a local chocolate factory to lift our spirits.These pictures were on the wall of a shack in one little village.

   

We spent a day and a night some natural thermal spring things. We hitched there and then sat in muddy pools, looking silly. 

We also stopped to look around a huge cave where thousands of blind birds live. Like bats, they navigate by echoes, the only birds in the world to do this. We only had us flipflops and the ground was deep slimey bird poo, so we got mucky again.  

Next was Cuidad Guyana, further south, away from the coast, quite a big city where we stayed at this crazy Germans house for a couple of nights. The town reminded us a bit of LA – fast food drive-ins (auto Macs) and massive shopping malls. In the evenings we´d sit around trying to learn the rules for ´Skat´, a German card game, but we couldn´t grasp it and when they tried to explain the rules all they could say was that ‘it was a German thing´. Claro!

Also staying at the house was a legendary metaller dude from Dresden who was on his third trip around the world and had won the money to come away on a game show. He told us stories about living with Native Americans and hanging out with Bruce Dickenson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden.

Near this house there was a massive park with monkeys roaming the walkways – they loved sour cream ruffles, we found out. This is a movie of them eating crisps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkW2E2jFZXg

 

Then we were on our way back to Argentina. We flew over Brazil and ended up in Montevideo in Uruguay. Having been in a jungle only a few days before, suddenly we were in what could have been a stately European city. Except everything was so cheap. Amazing hotel for less than a fiver a night. It was like a big old house in the middle of the old town. We used to visit the market everyday for their amazing parrilla (like an indoor Barbecue) where we ate the best steaks, big salads and black sausage – which were better than Barnsley’s best. Muy rico.    

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Now we’re in Argentina – Buenos Aries. We could really imagine living here. So we thought we would, for one month anyway. We rented this  amazing flat in San Telmo. This is where we are now. Taking life easy after roughing it for a few months. I’m doing some voluntary work with kids in a bad neighbourhood. Nick is sitting around scratching himself. In a month we’re leaving South America.

   

pics from the past couple of weeks

We`ve finally had time to put some more pictures up. So, in no particular order, here are some things we`ve been doing in Venezuela.

  The view from the truck we hitched in on our way to the Brazilian/Venezuelan border, after our bus had broken down

This is the Roraima tepui trek.

We found this under our tent at base camp.  

The view from base camp.

This big spider lives under a rock on the top of this tepui (a type of mountain).

We slept in a cave that night on the top of the tepui and in the morning we were taken to a jacuzzi but I don`t think anyone told Nick this one wasn`t heated.

The road to El Pauji, a tiny hippy village.

 

This is Ivan and his daughter, Altar, at their homemade house.

This is Paulista, from El Pauji. He`s such a hippy he even makes his own incense. We helped. Sorry. 

And this is his kitchen. 

This was where we spent one night, in a sleeping bag at the top of the Altar 

Juan`s waterfall. We slung our hammocks at his hut one night and in the morning had a wash here

 

And Mega Big Cola.