Addendum

Bill Bryson, having just flown into Cairns during rainy season, writes this on a conversation with the rental car salesman:

"But we were going to drive up towards Cape York."

"Oh, you won't get there in the wet. Not even in a four-wheel drive. Not at this time of year. They had a hundred centimetres of rain at Cape Tribulation last week." I had no very clear idea what a hundred centimetres was, but it was evident from his tone that it was considerable. "You won't get beyond Daintree in anything less than a helicopter."

I sighed again.

"The road to Townsville's been cut off for three days," he added with yet more pride.

I looked at him again. Townsville is south of Cairns - in the opposite direction from Cape York. It appeared we were boxed in. "So where can we go?" I asked.

He spread his hands in cheerful irony. "Anywhere you like in greater Cairns."

(Bill Bryson, Down Under, Black Swan, 2000.)

Let's compare this verbal picture of the road between Townsville and Cairns in, probably, 1999 with this picture of the road between Townsville and Cairns in 2007:

That makes me feel slightly better, that a well-known travel writer encountered a similar problem to us...!

Planes trains and automobiles

I'm now back in the UK, so here are the end of tour stats:

• 15 flights taken
• Best airline - Qantas
• Worst airline - American
• Worst postal service - New Zealand
• Six different cars rented, plus one four wheel drive on Fraser Island
• Just under 4000km driven from Sydney to Cairns
• Just under 4500 km driven in New Zealand
• Worst train line engineering work - bridge replacement in Wagga Wagga
• Best city visited - Sydney
• Best town visited - Townsville(!)
  
• Best wine region based on our small wine tasting sample - Margaret River, Western Australia
• Best large rock seen - Uluru
• Best coral reef seen - Great Barrier Reef
• My favourite day - walking on the Fox Glacier
• Places to see next time - Great Ocean Road, Tasmania, Bay of Islands, Coromandel Peninsula
• Best 'Big Thing' - the Big Pineapple
  
• Hottest place - Uluru
• Coldest place - Buffalo

So that's all from Gaz Man's Big Tour of the World. I'll blog again on my next big tour of the world.

New York, New York

My big tour of the world concluded with three days in New York. That really wasn't enough to see the whole city, but I saw quite a lot by undertaking some speed sightseeing.

Sadly I lost quite a lot of time on Wednesday afternoon, as my flight from Buffalo was delayed by four hours due to snow. Nobody could have foreseen that, what with it still being winter on the East Coast of the States. Then when I did arrive at JFK airport, I had to wait nearly an hour for a subway train to take me to Manhattan. Then when the train did arrive, it took nearly an hour to get to Manhattan. Humph.

So, first thing on Thursday morning I caught the ferry to Liberty Island. I climbed up inside the statue as far as you can get (admittedly not very far, only to the top of the pedestal below the statue). Then I went to Ellis Island and got a quick flavour of what immigrating to the US would have been like. Back to Manahattan where I saw Wall Street, then made my way to 'Ground Zero' to see where the Twin Towers used to be. I took a walk over Brooklyn Bridge and then back again, then made my way to Little Italy for a very nice pizza at Lombardi's. Then I caught a show on Broadway - Avenue Q. It's very funny, and comes recommended if you like musicals and aren't easily offended!

On Friday, I went to the Rockefeller Center and saw the famous outdoor ice rink which is always in movies. Then I walked to Central Park and spent most of the day wandering around the park. Then I went back to town and went up the Empire State Building. I was hoping to catch it at dusk time, so I could see the city in the light and then in the dark. But the queues to get to the top were so long that I only saw the city in the dark. It was very impressive though. After that, I rushed across town to go to Chumley's, a bar which used to be a speakeasy during the prohibition days. As a result of this, the bar doesn't have any signs outside, so the fun comes in trying to find the right door. I'd already walked into five families' houses before I got the right one. They did proper beer inside though, so it was worth waiting for.

And then on Saturday I spent a very rushed four hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at the Greek and Roman art, the Egyptian art, the Cypriot art, the Indian, Chinese and Sri Lankan art, some armour and guns, some Salvador Dali, and then some bizarre modern art. And then I inadvertently got involved in some black American hip hop dancing as I was in the way of two guys doing their act on the subway.

Phew, I'm exhausted. I need a holiday.

Niagara Falls

Well, so much for my attempts to avoid winter this year. Boston was around freezing point, but that wasn't cold enough so I went further north to see what March can get like on the Niagara river.

It was -8 celsius when I arrived - that's 18 degrees fahrenheit for you oldies out there - and it got even colder. I invested in a fetching new woolly hat to help combat the cold.
But the falls were amazing - well worth the discomfort and the loss of feeling in my fingers.

I first went across the border into Canada to see the horseshoe falls (and to get another stamp in my passport!). I wandered along the walkway as close to the banks of the river as I could get, and the falls were an impressive sight. They were pretty noisy too, but maybe not as much as they would have been in the summer. The river at the bottom of the falls was frozen, with the torrents that were cascading down the falls flowing beneath the frozen part. The most impressive thing for me though was the amount of spray and mist coming up from the falls.

After spending less than three hours in Canada (just enough time for a shop to give me change from an item I'd purchased in US Dollars in Canadian Dollars - that came in useful...!), I went south of the border. On the American side, I had to pay for parking and the American Falls and the Bridal Veil Falls were not as impressive as the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. But the Americans have built an observatory bridge where you can go out and get a decent view of all three
falls.
The falls were great during the day. However, the authorities illuminate them at night, so I went back in the evening to get a sight of this. It was good, but not necessarily worth the return trip!
So I went back to Buffalo and had a traditional American meal - I went to an Indian for a curry. And surprisingly, it was pretty good!

Use of English

Now we all know that Americans say 'elevator' when they mean 'lift', 'trunk' when they mean 'boot', 'truck' when they mean 'lorry', 'sidewalk' when they mean 'pavement' and 'pants' when they mean 'trousers', but I came across a new interpretation of the English language recently.

Imagine my concern while, on the air at Boston airport, the pilot came on the PA system and said that there was just a plane crossing the runway, but that we would 'be in the air momentarily'. Momentarily?! I was hoping that we would be in the air for the full hour and a half of the journey!

Fortunately the journey did last for the scheduled time, but it got me thinking about how strange it was that one country should interpret a word as 'for a moment', while another country should interpret it as 'in a moment'.

More than a Feeling

After an unfortunate incident of having to fly with American Airlines (a terrible airline), then a night in the hotel at JFK airport, followed by an insane dash across New York, I made it to the train to Boston. I had a very pleasant journey along the East Coast despite the grey and miserable skies over Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I was met at Boston by my friend Kakia who very kindly had agreed to put me up (Greek philoxenia in action!).

Boston is a nice and interesting city. I spent some time wandering around Harvard which seems like a pleasant enough university. The sun was shining, but the temperatures there were around freezing. Cities look so much nicer when the sun is out.

I wandered round the city centre with Kakia, Peter and Carolyn. We went along the majority of the Freedom Trail, which takes in all the historic sites of the city. It is the oldest city in the US, and so there are quite a few such sites. I saw the old state house, where the Declaration of Independence was first read back in 1776, Paul Revere's house, the oldest standing house in Boston dating to 1680, Faneuil Hall, which had the old market place on the ground floor and the town hall on the first floor. Then there is the Granary Burying Ground, where Paul Revere and the founder of American beer, Hank Budweiser, I mean Samuel Adams, were buried.

I later made my way to see 'Old Ironsides'. This was not a very old TV detective in a wheelchair, but rather a warship that was involved in the War of Independence. The British called the ship, The USS Constitution, 'Old Ironsides' as none of the cannonballs they shot into its flanks penetrated the wood.

On the following day, we went to Concord just outside the city to see the site of the first battle of the War of Independence, Old North Bridge. We also had a look at Walden Pond, a pleasant site for walking round, which was frozen. The weather was bitterly cold, so we didn't walk round it.

I also had a chance to see Fenway Park, home of the Roston Bed Sox, the second most famous baseball team after the Yankees.

The best part of the weekend in Boston, though, was having the chance to catch up with some old friends. I particularly enjoyed my time at their house, playing with 2 and a half year-old Carolyn. That should help for my time back home, as a lot of my friends are expecting kids very soon... Watch out for Gaz's child-rearing skills coming your way...!

Los Angeles

I have been to LA before to go to Brian and Catherine's wedding. The wedding was great and Santa Monica was a pleasant area, but I didn't have a lot of time for the rest of the city. The city is a huge sprawl and it didn't seem to have a centre.

On this trip, I have had more time to appreciate the city and have decided it's not that bad after all. It's still a big sprawl, and still doesn't really have a centre (there is a downtown area, but it doesn't seem to be that central to the city), but there are good parts to it.

Brian and I spent a fun morning hiking in the hills near his house. From there we could see some great views over the city. The city is famous for its beaches, and we could see some great beaches from the hills.

I really enjoyed the museum district of the city - I visited the La Brea Tar Pits. These are areas where tar seeps up from under the ground, and has done so for thousands of years. Lots of animals have wandered into this in the past and then the tar has hardened so they can't get out. I went round the museum, looking at the skeletons of woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth cats, American lions, dire wolves, vultures, and many more. Immediately next door was the LA County Modern Art museum, which looked great from the outside.

Then there was the Farmers' Market - which used to be a standard fruit, veg, fish and meat market, but now has some more interesting stalls. The French deli had some great produce, and there was a stall selling only hot chilli sauces from every feasible location. I even managed to buy some Scottish ales to remind Brian and me of our days in Edinburgh.

The Getty Center was another impressive location - on top of another hill in the city. I saw a fantastic sunset over the city from there. The center also had a great exhibition, about Byzantine Art from Mount Sinai.

Australia vs New Zealand

Now I'm fully expecting everyone to ask the question, "Which is better, Australia or New Zealand?"

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it's very silly, but here are a few things I have noticed whilst in the two countries:

• Australians are very good at abbreviating, especially the double abbreviation of the Melbourne Cricket Ground via 'MCG' to 'The G'.
• New Zealand has the craziest rule on the road ever invented - if you are approaching a crossroads and want to turn right, and there is a car coming towards you which wants to turn left, they have to let you go first. Providing, of course, there isn't another car coming towards you which is going straight on, and providing that the car turning left isn't another foreigner who doesn't know the rule.
• New Zealand scenery is beautiful. Australia's isn't too bad either.
• Townsville in Northern Queensland is not a very interesting place.
• Public transport in cities in Australia is very good - buses in Brisbane and Perth, trams/buses in Melbourne, trains / underground/ ferries /buses in Sydney. New Zealand public transport is pretty much non-existent.
• New Zealand likes to have large city boundaries for its cities. Dunedin is apparently the fifth biggest city in the world by area (Wikipedia has it down in 27th place, which is still fairly impressive), even though its city centre is far smaller than most cities I've ever been to. This is mainly because we passed a sign saying that we were entering the city about an hour before we got to the centre. And Auckland has the same area as Greater London.
• Australia has a fine collection of big things - the Big Pineapple was the best. New Zealand also has big things scattered throughout the countryside, but it just doesn't advertise them as widely.
• Australia is beginning to understand 'soccer', and the fans even sang a few songs (all of them taken from English chants). They rarely sang anything at the cricket. The Kiwis did not even get excited during the rugby match we saw.
• Australian beer is generally terrible. They pride themselves on serving it 'ice cold', but this is mainly so they can't taste it. James Squire was nice enough, and the Lord Nelson in Sydney served some proper beers, but that was it. New Zealand on the other hand has some very good ales, some of which were served at almost the right temperature.
• Aussies think that outdoor gas hotplates constitute barbeques. So do Kiwis.
• We had some very good meals in Oz, especially in Sydney. New Zealand probably does have nice restaurants, we just didn't find many. That was mainly because we were in the pubs instead, sampling the decent beer. NZ does however serve proper curries, which Oz doesn't do. This could be because Australia doesn't have many Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.
  
• Kiwis invented rolling down a hill inside an inflatable ball with water in it.
• I wish we'd been in Oz when they lost to England in the one-day internationals. I get the impression they're fairly bad losers!
• Both Australia and New Zealand have very good wines. The Margaret River area in Western Australia was my favourite.
• Australia has a number of animals which can kill you. Fortunately we didn't meet any of them - the crocodile, the snake or the redback spider, but we did meet all sorts of insects which wanted to bite us and cause us to come up with lumps and boils and spots. New Zealand doesn't have anything nasty at all.
• Australia also has a large number of bizarre animals which couldn't have evolved anywhere else - the kangaroo, the koala, the quokka, the duck-billed platypus. New Zealand has the kiwi, which is pretty weird. Other than that, it's got lots of sheep.

Day one or day two?

I managed to have two separate 26th Februaries this year, due to the very weird phenomenon of the International Date Line.

Day one started in Auckland. It was a quiet day - I slept in, I used the internet, I went to a food hall for lunch, I bought a new jumper, I went to catch a plane to LA. As Paul and I had to take the rental car back at a certain time, that meant we had 4 hours at the airport before the plane was due to leave. But even though we checked in so early, the only seats available were the middle two seats of a block of four. This meant misery for someone with fairly long legs, a dodgy knee and an equally dodgy bladder. Fortunately, I was fine though...! I discovered later that the reason there are no aisle seats is because some inconsiderate people like the man on my left book two aisle seats (for him and his wife), rather than them sitting together. However, I discovered this much later, as the plane was an hour late in leaving. An hour we spent standing up, as there weren't enough seats in the gate lounge for all the people. The day ended with me, rather surprisingly, falling asleep on public transport (with my knees somewhere around my ears). It must have been the delicious evening meal I had. The frequent turbulence hardly disturbed me at all.

So the second 26th February opened with me still on the plane. Sadly, the on-demand video system had given up the ghost much earlier in the flight, meaning a breakfast with no TV accompaniment. We touched down in Los Angeles at 1130 local time. The plane didn't pick up any time as we crossed the Pacific. Our bags were the last out of the carousel 45 minutes or so later, meaning that the last time I saw Paul, he was rushing to make his connecting flight to Denver, fifteen minutes before the flight was due to leave. Would he make it?

The delay also affected me, as I was due to be meeting my friend Brian at the airport - but he was supposed to be working at 1 on the other side of town. Thinking he'd already gone, I gave him a call, but his job had been cancelled and so he was waiting outside for me. After a lengthy wait in the car rental place, as the printer kept on chewing up paper, I eventually found myself in an unfamiliar vehicle. Unfamiliar firstly because the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, but unfamiliar also because the indicators were on the left-hand side on the steering wheel. This has become unfamiliar even though this is the same side as in the UK, because in Australia and New Zealand they have their indicators on the right-hand side. Which I'd just got used to. So as I pulled out of the rental place on the wrong side of the road (well, almost), I saluted Brian as he disappeared to work with an accidental wipe of the windscreen wipers. From that point, the day was similarly quiet to the morning in Auckland, apart from a trip to a Thai restaurant with Brian and his wife Catherine.

And no, Paul didn't make his flight.

Back to Auckland

I may have been a bit harsh on Auckland last time - admittedly the public transport is still non-existent and it is a bit of a sprawl - but we have grown to like it. It's amazing what a difference sunny weather makes to the appeal of a city!
We met up with our friend Scott and he took us to Mount Rangitoto, a volcanic island 30 mins boat ride from the city. We hiked up to the summit of this mountain on a glorious day, before visiting some caves made out of the dried lava. The island is thought to be be extinct, as it haven't done anything since it suddenly popped up out of the ocean 600 years ago. The views of Auckland from the top were stunning, as were the Lava Caves. Scott then took us on a driving tour of the suburbs of the city, so we can now see how it all fits together, and where all the rich people of Auckland live - there appear to be quite a few judging by the expensive mansions he drove us past.

During our time in New Zealand, we haven't been eating out in the evening at many interesting places - mainly pubs. So it was a relief on our final night in the country to get the best meal - at a Belgian Bar, of course. I had the mussels, Pie had the metre-long sausage, and Paul had the mixed platter. All washed down with good quality Belgian Beer.

Buoyed by our successful meal, we went back to celebrate our final night in the country by... doing a jigsaw. Which we didn't have time to finish. What crazy people we are.

Mount Egmont

On our super-quick sightseeing tour of New Zealand, we had to rush from Wellington to Auckland in just over one day. It's not that far, so we managed to squeeze in a huge detour via the Mount Egmont National Park. It was well worth it - the National Park contains one mountain, Mount Egmont (also known as Mount Taranaki). It is a bizarre sight to have one mountain on its own, miles away from any other, sitting there with its top shrouded in cloud and covered in snow. Mount Fuji in Japan was mentioned as another example of a lone mountain. When we come back here, we'll go hiking on the mountain. But for now, we had to be content with looking at it!