On the dock of the bay

I like San Francisco. There are no two ways about it. The only thing I can come up with that is wrong with the city - it's insanely steep hills - are also something that adds to its character, meaning that the 'fault' is pretty much nullified. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Melbourne. There are the street cars - including an old Melbourne W-class, still in its green and yellow livery from the days of the Met - the enormous expanse of water that fails to yield a single city surf beach, the local love of good food and music, the central shopping strip that is strangely reminiscent of Bourke St, and the glitzy neighbouring city that overshadows it all.

But there is one thing San Francisco has that Melbourne can't even pretend to lay claim to: The Bush Man. Although the name suggests there is only one, apparently, there are a few of them scattered around the city. Some, I've been told, even work in concert. The deal is this: take one homeless man, seated on the ground holding a branch that passes for a bush in front of his face. Place him near an object of street furniture, whether it be a bin, a seat, a light, anything will do as long as it's enough to register the object. To those looking directly at him, he will be obvious and will probably seem a little bit nuts. To those like L, who are absorbed in looking everywhere else, however, he will be invisible, just like all the other homeless beggars on the street who are ignored every day as a matter of survival for many city dwellers. He takes advantage of this invisibility to scare the living crap out of the unsuspecting. He suddenly thrusts aside his "bush" and yells, or simply thrusts the branch into the path of the passersby, having picked his mark carefully as someone who has not seen him, for maximum effect.

The result is hilarious for those who have noticed him (often by being given a fright themselves). It's like a hidden camera exercise. Only the tin beside him, for those who appreciated his efforts to amuse them to give him a little something back, gives away the fact that he is a genuine vagrant, not some actor with make up giving him the bad dentistry and worn out wardrobe of someone living rough. His wide grin suggests that he enjoys his job a lot.

The Bush Man has become a bit of a local celebrity. Tourists can even buy t-shirts that proclaim "I had the $^%£ scared out of me by the Bush Man". But it masks what is a large and growing problem, as far as I can see. Yes, he is doing something to support himself. It's a simple enough ruse that gives enjoyment - and fright - to many. But I have seen as many, if not more, beggars on the streets of American cities than I have seen anywhere else. In one of the world's richest nations, there are many who go without.

That this man is able to hide in plain sight suggests something about the collective consciousness of society when it comes to the down and outs around us. It is too easy to pretend that they are not there. The gratefulness of some beggars when you simply acknowledge their existence by shaking your head when they ask for money can be heartbreaking. I can't - and won't - give money to people begging on the street, if only for the security reasons I had drilled into me when I was younger (never reveal where you keep your cash, how much of it you have, or make it more accessible for someone who may or may not be able to overpower you), but I always feel terrible for walking by people who are obviously in distress. Yet the vast majority of people don't even notice that they're there. So well done to the Bush Man for taking the initiative and calling some attention to himself, if nothing else.

The Man from Independence

There was movement at the restaurant,
For the word had spread around,
That girls from overseas were in town.

The restaurant was in a town called Independence, a slice of southern California quirkiness offering a haven on the west side of Death Valley. That the restaurant was called Hooligans was just a bargain. But whatever the reason, L and I were clearly the biggest show in town, not withstanding the local "talent" occupying the stage with his synthesizer, a laptop, and a microphone. He was interested enough in us to ask from stage for details about us, where we were heading, where we had been. The waitresses came to visit us at regular intervals, even the owner/chef came out, missing front teeth and all, to see how we were going.

It's a strange feeling to find yourself a novelty piece. It was kind of flattering when we were walking from our motel to the restaurant/bar, to have guys literally hanging out of car windows checking us out (that doesn't happen too often these days. In fact, it never happened that often, even back in the day). But by the time the waitress had asked us for the fifteenth time if we were OK, it was getting a little old. Because this isn't a town without the occasional visitor. There's about 3 hotels, enough to accommodate the entire town, I think. There are hiking trails, fishing and hunting all nearby. It's between several major tourist attractions. I can't see any reason for there not being visitors to what seems quite a pretty town, if slightly quirky. My only guess is that we're 2 "girls" travelling alone, and that we're foreign. Either way, as interesting and flattering as it was to have so much attention, I think I'll be looking forward to getting back to being one of the tourist masses tomorrow in Yosemite. I'll just have to keep an eye out for Sam is all.

Troubled times

Approaching the half way point of the epic road trip, there are several problems that have reared their ugly heads. If I'm honest, I should have foreseen at least 2 of them. The rest? Well, nobody has perfect foresight, but hindsight is 20-20. Hopefully, I'll be able to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future. And some of the problems are beyond my control, so I just have to resign myself to dealing with them and moving on.

See, there are few things worse on a road trip - or any long trip, for that matter - than being sick. And so far on this one, I've had a cold that turned me into a travelling snot block between Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. And then, as we pulled into Chicago - snot free at last - I realised that I'd done something to my back. Something that made walking extremely painful. Potentially, something caused by driving through the storm from hell the night before - that's what I'm blaming. It's mostly eased up now, after experiencing Chicago largely by bus rather than the usual method of transport for L and I in cities - foot. But now, every time I have a long drive, every time the bed isn't just perfect, it twinges. I have to be extremely careful carrying my enormous pack, and I hate not being able to just throw it around. But physical impairment pales in comparison to some of the other problems.

Because whilst driving through some of the flattest, dullest scenery that America has to off in its northern states - thanks Iowa and Nebraska - L has become sulky. She's bored. And this has uncovered a fundamental difference in our travelling philosophies that was masked while we were jetting around Europe. She's all about the destination. And I mean ALL. The journey itself? Well to her, that's just the prelude where you plan what you're going to do when you get there, so anything that takes longer than reading the Lonely Planet is just wasted. Whereas I - the instigator of the road trip - am quite well able to cope with long stretches where there is very little to see. I'm not sure if it was my early training, taking long car journeys up through Australia's eastern seaboard, or if I'm just taking the Baroque view of things, where the journey is almost more important than the destination, but either way, I cope better. And by the end of a long day, where I have done the bulk of the planning and almost all of the navigation, since L struggles with map reading on the go, we're both niggly. And things get said. Like the bit where, after the longest day on the road that we will have, we were pulling into a budget hotel in Sioux City.

It was getting dark quickly, we'd missed a couple of turns and had to back track. All day I had been asked questions that I didn't know that answers to, that I couldn't know the answers to, never having been to any of the places before. And when she cruised into the car park - or what we thought was the car park - and asked what I thought was an idiotic question before accelerating so I couldn't see where to navigate her (because I have to tell her where to go, she not being used to or comfortable in unfamiliar places), I snapped. I told her to slow down, to stop asking me things I couldn't know, to take a look for herself. And we barely talked for the rest of the night. We unpacked the car in complete silence, she threw her stuff onto the bed (always the best bed...I don't know how she does it), and we went to dinner without her doing more than nodding. Last night was hardly better when I informed her that spending an hour at Mt Rushmore (which I knew would turn into 2 hours if I agreed to 1 - I know her photographic habits too well to rely on estimates of time to see places), at the expense of a couple of places further down that I really wanted to see, on a day when we will be spending around 8 hours in a car, that just so happens to be my 30th birthday, is not something I'm prepared to do. Sure, we'll be stopping there. We will see it. But she knew going in that this wasn't going to be an easy trip. And I think she underestimated just how much road time we'd be logging, and just how unprepared for long boring stretches she would be.

But not all of the problems relate to her (although her tendency to open the curtains before we're fully dressed, regardless of the outlook - or in-look - has caused me some anxious moments, as has her drifting and abrupt driving style). Perhaps the biggest problem is that I am fast running out of money. Boston and Washington DC sucked up too much of my cash and I'm now in the unenviable position of looking like I'm barely going to make it into the 3rd week of the trip before it's all gone. And when it's gone, there is no more. I have no resources to tap into. So how I'm going to pay my share of the car extras is beyond me. Although part of that is also caused by L and her insistence that she be put on as an extra driver, even though she refuses to drive in any of the cities and only does a few hours in the morning when we're in the country, or the evening when we've left a city that morning. Bam, there goes $145 of my carefully planned budget.

That's not to say that I'm not enjoying the trip, though. As I type this, I'm sitting in Custer, with a view of the Black Hills on the other side of town. Today sees us heading through the Wild West, towards Cody, and then Yellowstone. I'm loving what I've seen so far. I just wish there weren't niggles and worries to get in the way. And I've resolved never to do a road trip with L ever again.

Washington Burning

I've been in the US for almost a week now, and I've never seen such extremes. The rich and poor are pretty sharply divided here, and it's not by geography. If nothing else, it's the levels of bitterness that seem to mark them out. And as a white woman travelling here, I seem to come in for my share of the bitterness. Because the poor are predominantly black or Latino. In the course of three days in Washington, I have been abused because I didn't respond to being called "white girl" by someone in a wheel chair who, I realised a few seconds too late, was asking me to open the door. I might have felt a whole lot worse about that had I not been laden with around 30kg of bags at the time, and barely able to walk myself. The other time was when L and I were walking through the apparently safe, upper class streets of Foggy Bottom, where we were yelled at across the street by a down and out drunk, who screamed that we were "white hos".

It's not restricted to race, or even locals though. Wandering the paths of Arlington Cemetery, a beautiful peaceful place the sheer scale of which is overwhelming, we came across a group of French teenagers on a school trip. I thought it was a strange place to take a school group, but as a way of getting across the nature of America's militarism, and the respect in which they hold the armed forces here, I guess there are few better places to go than a monument to the fallen that not only overlooks the national capital (not to mention the Capitol), but is within the grounds of a vanquished foe of the Union from the civil war. some of the French boys had outpaced their teachers and, when they didn't get a response to their question (in French) asking if we understood them, proceeded to follow us along the path with the continuous stream of filthy gutter slang that would have had their mothers washing their mouths out with soap, if not cuffing them across the back of the head. Because we do understand French, we just didn't realise they were talking to us when they asked.

But there you have Washington in summary; beautiful monuments and stunning settings, with the constant background hum that something isn't quite as full of pomp and circumstance as the politicians and public servants would like to believe. I guess it's like Canberra, but on a grander scale. And so are the social problems. Because everything in America is bigger than it is anywhere else, it stands to reason that the social and racial divides should be no different.

Of course

It had to happen, really. And the timing is probably better than it ought to have been. The inevitable on-the-road cold has struck, laying me low at a point when I'm not doing the driving, thankfully, but annoyingly, right when I have to lug my ridiculously heavy bags to and from buses, since getting around on the cheap has its cost in physical pain.

But either way, I'm on the road, and have loved my road trip to date. Boston was gorgeous, even with the unseasonably cold weather of the second day, when we were in coats, scarves, and longing for hats. Just to contrast, today's arrival in Philadelphia was warm and temporarily sunny. We got to the hostel just in time to avoid a spectacular thunder storm, though, and too late to get into any of the sights. So we snuck around outside, checking out the Liberty Bell (I'm still tempted to call it the Taco Bell), and a few buildings. Now I'm staving off the cold with whatever drugs I had to hand - nothing terribly efficient, it has to be said - and sharing the love with the other people in what has to be the biggest hostel dorm in history - 28 beds, thankfully only half of them occupied. I can see I'm going to be popular here in a few days...