Internet Problems

As I'm sure you've noticed there has been a distinct dropoff in the number of posts I've put up lately. Turns out Bolivia isn't a very internet-friendly country, and it's been hard to find internet at all. Internet that is fast enough to let me upload pictures is even more challenging. I'll try to finish my record of events, but I'm suspecting it won't be until I get home in 2 weeks. Until then you'll just have to trust that I've gotten pretty good at staying alive by this point, and chances are I'm totally fine!

American Street Art

The United States was one of the first countries to popularize street art, and the two biggest centers for it are in New York City and along the California coast. Here's a sample of the art I encountered around Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix.

El Mac

If you go back to one of my very first posts on the street art tour I did in London you'll see a cowboy portrait by El Mac. The way he makes portraits in stripes makes them feel almost like auras, and the style makes his pieces easy to identify, a trait that I'm beginning to think is almost as important as actual quality and technique in street art. El Mac is from Phoenix, so it was nice to find a mural there by him (the third one). The first two were in Hollywood.

Herakut

I've mentioned Herakut before as well. They are a German duo that are probably my favourite artists, but I had never actually seen their art in person. I knew they'd been around California in the last couple years, so I made an effort to hunt down their pieces that were still standing (and a few locations where they weren't anymore). I'm especially fond of the first two here, which are on the walls of a building in Culver City. The last one is hidden in the back parking lot of a shop in San Francisco. A couple months ago Herakut started a new world tour that has so far had them leaving art around Asia and Australia. I'm a bit disappointed with my timing, since I'm missing out on art and shows they're doing in places I was just in, but I'm happy to see them out spreading their art around the world again.

Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is probably the most famous American street artist, and his art is very design-oriented. I probably saw more art by him, but this large mural from LA is classic Shepard Fairey.

I don't have the time to try to figure out who did all the other stuff right now, but here's an assortment of some more of the art that I liked. Some of them are signed, but some will have to remain mysteries for now.

Los Angeles / Culver City


San Francisco


Phoenix

Days 361-363: Phoenix

Phoenix isn't much of a travel destination, and most of the travellers there are just passing through. I did my best to see the few sights around, going to the main art gallery for a couple hours before switching to my second hostel. Since I was going to be coming back to the first one the next day I left most of my things there and just took a few clothes to the other one. Downtown Phoenix isn't very big, and it only took a couple of hours to look around and stop by the different sports' stadiums. My favourite part of Phoenix was the Art District around Roosevelt Row, which was full of neat little galleries, cafes and alleyways of street art.

On my 3rd day, when I was back at the original hostel, I spent the evening hanging out with the hostel owners and some of the other guests. We played some board games and ended up going to the nearby park to play ultimate frisbee. When I played ultimate frisbee on the beach in New Zealand I was probably the worst player there, but the difference between playing with a group of very fit people who play 3 times a week and a group of fairly out of shape people who haven't played in years is pretty dramatic, and this time I got to be one of the stars. We spent the evening hanging out and drinking, and overall it was a really fun group of people to end my time in the US with.

My plane the last day didn't leave until late at night. I was taking a really budget airline (the only 2-star airline in North America), and they charged a lot extra for extra bags. By this point I have a backpack, my disintegrating messenger bag and another tote, and I really wanted to get that down to 2 items to save about $30 on the flight. I solved the problem by finding a duffel bag at a goodwill store for $4 and using that to combine two of my other bags. The airport I was flying out of wasn't actually in Phoenix, but in nearby Mesa, and I said my goodbyes in the evening and began the streetcar + 2 bus route trip of about 2.5 hours to get to the airport.

Days 359-360: Sidetrips and Leaving Las Vegas

My original plan when I decided to go to the United States for a few weeks included a few days spend at the Grand Canyon, ideally doing a hike across it. Unfortunately the didn't work out. Part of the problem was that I originally planned to spend about 3.5 weeks in the country, but changes to when I left New Zealand and when I booked a flight into South America meant that I only had about 2 weeks, so everything got condensed. The other issue was that about 3 months prior I tried to book a bed at the hotel at the base of the canyon, but it was already completely full. Basically it's just too hard to juggle planning for all the things I want to do, and a few things have to get left out.

Since I wasn't going to be able to do any real hiking at the Grand Canyon, my consolation was to do one of the day trips out of Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon. Most of the day was taken up driving there and back, but we did get in a quick visit at Hoover Dam, and around 2.5 hours at the Canyon. Our drive/guide talked for much of the time, and while he did have some interesting information and good anecdotes it was buried in hours of corny jokes and repetition that left me wanting to smash my head on the window repeatedly.


The Grand Canyon itself was pretty cool. I probably would have been a lot more awed by it a year ago, but the scope of it is still enough to impress me. I've found that for natural things I really react strongest when I can enjoy them on my own, isolated from other people, and that was simply impossible with the 2.5 hours we had. I had been hanging out with a German girl who was in my hostel in Las Vegas, and we took the shuttle bus around to a few of the different view points, but there wasn't enough time to get too far off the main paths so everywhere we went there were more tourists. It was still worth the trip out, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do the hike I want sometime in the future.


The bus got back pretty late in the evening, and I only got a few hours of sleep before I had to get up again around 3am to walk back down Freemont Street to the Greyhound station to get my bus from Las Vegas to Phoenix. I got a little sleep on the bus and spent the rest of the time enjoying the changing landscapes and got into Phoenix early in the afternoon. There are only 2 backpacking hostels in Phoenix, and one was only open for the 1st and 3rd days I'd be there, and the other only on the 2nd day, so I knew there would be a lot of moving back and forth. I checked into the first hostel and spent a bit of time exploring downtown, but mostly just relaxed at the hostel and tried to catch up on sleep.

Day 358: St. Patrick's Day

My St. Patrick's Day in Las Vegas actually turned out to be pretty tame. Travelling by myself in Las Vegas meant that I wasn't willing (or even all that interested) in partying too hard, and it became one of those situations where when everybody is more drunk than you they just seem obnoxious and annoying, and not really all that fun. A good number of the people in Las Vegas are obnoxious and annoying at the best of times, but the St. Patrick's Day festivities just made things worse. I did have a nice lunch buffet at one of the casinos with a Welsh guy staying at my hostel, and through the afternoon and evening I did have a fair number of drinks, but not with the unrestrained abandon of most of the other tourists around. I spent the evening away from the big casinos hanging out around Freemont, and the best part of the day was all the live music and street performers the large crowds brought out.


I didn't stay out all that late, partly for the above reasons and partly because I had to get up about 5:30am the next morning for my final big activity.

Day 357: Walking the Strip

With a full day to spend I decided to head over to the Strip to check out all the things that make Las Vegas famous. I decided to walk there from my hostel, which turned out to be further than expected, but not by enough to be much of a hassle. Through the course of the day I just wandered around heading from one casino to the next, gambling a very small amount (I don't exactly have a lot of money left in my budget to waste by this point) but mostly just checking out the excess and faux luxury Vegas is famous for. The one thing I probably would have rather enjoyed about Las Vegas - the shows, was eventually discared as a possibility because of the cost, although I still suspect it would have been worth it to indulge in at least one.


My basic take on Las Vegas is that it's interesting to see has an emblem of American culture, but that I'd really struggle to spend more than a few days there, especially alone. Despite all the crazy buildings and fantastic shows, it's really a place of experiences, and I feel you really need to be sharing things as part of a group to really get much enjoyment out of it.

Day 356: Freemont Street

My bus got into Las Vegas in the afternoon. Instead of staying on the more recently developed Strip I was downtown on Freemont Street. Freemont Street is the old part of Las Vegas where the original, mob-run casinos were, and now it's largely filled with bars and casinos that are a bit less extreme than the famous Strip ones. The afternoon desert heat was quite nice after the chill of San Francisco and after walking down the street, out far past where anything truly touristy was, to drop off my things at my hostel I explored around downtown a bit more.


Also now on Freemont Street is the (in)famous Heart Attack Grill, where I went for dinner. Heart Attack Grill has become famous on serving some of the most unhealthy food in the world, and making a point to take pride in just how unhealthy it is. If the name wasn't enough of a clue, the staff are dressed as doctors and nurses, and they put a paper hospital gown on your when you step in, just to drive the theme home. There's a scale out front of the restaurant for people to weigh themselves, because the restaurant has a standing offer that if you weigh 350lbs or more, you get to eat for free.

The quadruple-bypass burger has a world record for the most calories in a burger - about 10,000. Even worse, in the menu there's an 8-layer octo-bypass burger. If you get the burgers with bacon they add 5 strips per level, so that's 40 pieces of bacon just added on top. I kept things reasonable by only getting a double-bypass burger, without bacon, and a coke instead of their butterfat shake. I've probably regressed somewhat in health since leaving Asia, but I'm not looking to reverse a year of constant exercise quite so easily. It was delicious, but I'm glad the restaurant is in a place that I won't be visiting often.

Days 354-355: Leaving San Fran

On my next day I explored further south in the city, mainly around the Mission and Castro Districts. There isn't much in the way of big sights around here, but there were a lot of cool little shops, and in the Mission District especially, lots of art. I also spent a chunk of the afternoon back downtown. I visited a small cartoon museum, which wasn't really as good as I'd hoped. I was hoping for more comic art, but it was largely either art from newspaper comics or from Bugs Bunny.

I had most of a day in the city the next day as well, since the bus I was taking out was a night one. There were no rides at this time of year directly through the mountains to Las Vegas, so instead I had to go all the way back to Los Angeles then transfer to a bus heading up into Nevada. I booked my ticket a few days in advance this time, so I at least got to go with Greyhound. The weather in the city was cold and cloudy before I had to leave, and I didn't really feel like walking around after spending the last 3 days walking almost non-stop. Instead I popped over to the San Francisco Public Library, picked out a book somebody had recommended that I'd been meaning to read, and just read through it all. To my amusement the book (which was an urban fantasy mystery, for lack of a closer genre) was set in San Francisco, so all the major locations in the book were places I'd visited in the last couple days. When I was finished the book I headed back to the hostel to get my bags out of storage and walked to the Greyhound station and eventually got on my bus.

Day 353: West Coast Trail

Based on a suggestion from some random German guy I met I decided to walk along the West Coast Trail which runs up the west side of the city. I made my one public transit trip in the city to head out to Lake Merced and start walking north. The trail wasn't clearly marked in many places, so in the end I basically just tried to follow whatever trail/path/beach/sidewalk I could find to keep heading north. The morning was really foggy, which kind of spoiled the coastal view but contributed a special atmosphere of its own.


At some point around Land's End the sky started clearing up and visibility got a lot better.


I continued on until the Golden Gate Bridge, then headed southwest through Presideio.


I eventually got out of Presidio and slowly worked my way back to the hostel zig-zagging down different blocks. This is a pretty brief description of the walk, but it actually took the bulk of the day since it was ultimately probably 15-20km. In the evening I got some dinner with an Uruguayan in my room and played a little late night pool before calling it a day.

Day 352: San Francisco

San Francisco is another of those American cities full of famous things - some of which I feel deserve the fame more than others. San Francisco also has a lot of art and culture, and that immediately made it more appealing for me than Los Angeles was. Because San Francisco is contained by the Bay, it's not all sprawled out like a lot of cities, and I can walk around everywhere pretty easily, and I tended to cover a lot of ground. I started off by heading south-east a bit to check out a specific street art murtal I wanted to see, then turned north-east and followed Mission St. up towards the harbor. Along the way I stopped at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I've expressed my mixed feelings about modern art before, but this is one of the most famous modern art galleries in the world, so I was curious to see what it would be like. Half the gallery was closed down as new installations were going up, but because of that the tickets were half price. It was a pretty cool gallery. The permanent collection had some things I liked and some I didn't. They had one exhibit up of Lebbeus Wood works that I really liked. He's an architect/artist, but a lot of his drawings and sculptures look like futuristic, sci-fi architecture.


When I reached the water I just followed it past all the piers until I got to Fisherman's Wharf, stopping to check out all the harbor seals and Alcatraz. There are lots of ferry tours out to Alcatraz, and I probably would have found it interesting, but it's one of those things where I feel it's reputation probably exceeds it's real interest to me, and I'm trying to save money, so I skipped it.


I stopped for lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, going to one of the famous In-N-Out Burgers. I've had multiple people from California that I've met tell me it's amazing, but I honestly don't really get what the hype is about. It was good, but no better than a lot of other burger chains around. I got some icecream afterwards and walked up the nearby hill to Lombard Street, which is known for being the crookedest street.


That was pretty much it for the day. I walked back towards the hostel from there, stopping to hang out in a park for a bit and cutting through China Town before wandering through the financial district and finally back to the hostel.