Tar Pits, a Sign and a Beach or Two

I had a pretty good sleep in the van. I hope Kylie and Blair did too and I didn't snore horrendously or something. I guess the main problem with the van is that in the morning you don't have a bathroom or anything so the first thing on the list was food and bathroom. We decided a filthy Wendys was as good as we needed and ate nutritious burgers for breakfast. I was a little bit hungover as well which certainly wasn't helping anyone.

The second on the agenda was the La Brae Tar pits and the George C. Page Museum. It was pretty cool. Holy shit they have found a lot of fossils in the tar pits, 750'000 or something! The museum had a lot of them including this mammoth:

It was pretty dated but still one of the better museums I have been to. We could also go and look at "Pit 91" which has had ongoing excavation since 1969. We then decided to go for a cruise up the hill behind the city. It was a cracker day but quite hazy so couldn't see out over the city too far. Did get this shot of Blair and Kylies sweet ride with the Hollywood sign in the background though:

In the afternoon we went to Venice beach to have a wander around. Holy crap there was a million interesting characters there. Lots of dudes trying to sell us CD's as well. Poor Blair is pretty rubbish at saying no and ended up yarning with a couple of them for ages. Heaps of shops selling the same shit too, dunno how they all stay open. Just before we left I took this:

We still needed to kill some more time before Stephanie got back from her trip so we went for a walk down Santa Monica Pier. There is a cool big ferris wheel on it that has changing lights on it that occasionally morphed into a scary face. Terrifying.

For dinner we went to buy ingredients for sandwiches. We decided we had eaten enough crap recently that we could justify sandwiches for dinner. We also bought some more tasty beer to drink while we were eating out healthy sandwiches.

Blair and Kylie are in LA too!

After a brief few facebook messages I had vaguely arranged to meet Blair and Kylie today at 2pm. Stephanie had to go on a camp thing for work at 5am and I couldn't really leave the flat because I didn't have any keys to get back in so I killed time by sleeping. Unfortunately Stephanie's flatmate came back early (she wasn't expected until 7pm or so) and was greeted by a very groggy sleepy kiwi on her couch. A bit embarrassing but she was pretty good about it. I got up and went to the supermarket (called "Vons" what kind of a name for a supermarket is that?) to get some supplies before getting back to the apartment to wait to be picked up at 2pm. Seeing Blair and Kylie pull up in their sweet ride was pretty crazy shit. Didn't expect to see them overseas! As Stephanie was away for the night they offered me a spot in their van for the night. It was pretty tight so lucky we know each other pretty well and they are such good people!

We then went in search of tasty beverages. The first place supposedly called "The Gentlemens and Scholars Club" unfortunately didn't exist any more. We failed on the second place too as it was opening at 5pm, another 1.5 hours away. By this time we were pretty bloody thirsty so we wandered down the road (Hollywood Boulevard as it happens) and found an Irish pub to whet our whistles. At 5pm we went back to the craft brew place and tasted some fantastic beers. It was a true craft pub with info up on the walls about the different types of beer and the menu was a projector screen (so that it could be changed easily). They had about 20 different beers on offer. Lots of great hoppy stuff and some nice spiced pumpkin ale too. After a few drinks we decided we needed to move the van to a permanent sleeping position. Luckily there was a parking warden in the pub that directed us to some free parking nearby. After we moved the van we went back to the Irish pub. At some stage someone had the terrible idea to do Jager bombs, it was a good night with many a great yarn had:

At about 1am we went back to the van for a cheeky rum before hitting the hay.

Santa Monica

Today I went for a walk around Santa Monica. I walked down the 3rd street promenade and ate a burrito for lunch. The promenade was kinda cool with some decent street performers (and a bunch of shit ones too). After eating a big ole burrito  for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to go for a bit of a run down the beach. It was quite surprising how big the sand area at the beach is.

 It was a really nice warm day so I a pretty lazy run. I was also trying to kill time until sunset so that I could take photos of the sunset:

The moonrise was pretty sweet too:

After Stephanie got home from work we went for a cruise around Hollywood to see the walk of fame and the place with the hand prints and stuff. For dinner we ate hotdogs and fries with bacon and ranch dressing all over them from a place called Pinks.

Goodbye Miami, Hello LA

Today we got up and went for a drive around Miami. We went and wandered down South Beach where all the people that want to be seen at the Beach go. There was lots of surfers out too because the sea was quite high from the storm that had just gone through. We had a pretty tasty lunch that was at a place Blaine knew was not $40 USD per main meal. After lunch we drove past the places that cost $40 per main. It was pretty obvious from all the Ferrari's and Lamborghini's parked out the front.

We did some more tiki-touring before Blaine dropped me at the airport. A huge thank you to my host for such a relaxing time in Miami. I didn't really get out and see much but I was very happy to be just chilling out at her house. I will definitely try to be back at some stage to do a bit more exploring. Possibly in her plane, possibly in a yacht. Blaine and I on South Beach:

I am writing this while sitting on the plane to LA. Unfortunately I have been on the plane for an hour and we are still on the Tarmac. We just got a call through the intercom from the captain saying "We are sorry but the ground crew have had some trouble with the weight balance of the plane. This has meant that we have been sitting on the tarmac too long and burnt too much fuel so now we need to go back to the terminal to fill up again." How stupid is that? How complicated is it to balance a plane? Is this the first time they have done it? How come they didn't balance the plane before taxiing out to the runway? So many questions, so many retarded airline staff. My last flight with American Airlines was delayed an hour because an overhead locker wouldn't close. I have flown a shitload in the last couple of months and never had any problems, now AA has 0 from 2. Man I hope they don't loose my bag as I don't think I am dressed appropriately for the LA weather.

Half way through this epic flight now and I just realised that this is the last flight of my epic journey. To stem the ridiculous flow of money for travel I am gonna try and bus/train up the west coast to Vancouver. So this is definitely the travel part of my trip drawing to a close. I am definitely ready for work but getting a bit stressed about having to find a job. It worries me that I couldn't find a job I liked in Christchurch so what made me think I would find one I liked in Canada? I guess when it was so far away I didn't have to think about it but now that it is right around the corner I am trying to think about how much I might have to compromise what I want just so that I can find something. Oh well, guess we'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

When I got to LAX I txt Stephanie to say I had landed. Unfortunately I got a message back from her saying "this message cannot be displayed". Thanks phone, what you are telling me is "Stephanie sent you a message but I'm not going to show it to you", brilliant. I found some free wifi and suggested she emailed me which worked a charm, technology! She picked me up from the airport and we went straight to a Halloween party. I put my All Blacks jersey on but felt decided under dressed. There were all sorts of cool costumes. After the party we went to Dennys! hah hah, Dennys at 4am, this brings back memories! Got to bed around 5am, this is gonna be a busy week!

Miami More

So I am gonna combine a couple of days into one post cos I was extremely lazy.

Thursday:

We got up early to drive Ben to Fort Lauderdale airport. But that didn't really extend the day at all because when Blaine and I got back we went back to bed, it was 7am when we got back though. It was awful weather and the makings of a hurricane so was really windy and rainy. I used this as an excuse to sit around the house and chill out with Bear. We did go for a run though and when I was halfway through the run it pissed down. Serious rain. I didn't mind but Bear seemed a bit put out by it. I don't think she like the pace of her "walk" either. I think she might be more used to strolling. We did race the last 150m of the run though and I think if I didn't have a rope attached to her neck she might have beaten me.

After Blaine finished work we went for a cruise around town. It was crazy windy and there were a couple of trees on the highway. On the way home we picked up a massive tasty pizza (from an unlikely looking place, I think it was a gas station) and sat down for a beer and a movie. We watched a movie called "Captain Ron" which I can imagine is a bit of a cult classic in the States. It stars Kurt Russel as a bumbling captain of a shitty yacht and I don't know how he did another movie with the stigma of "Captain Ron" on him.

On Friday I was equally as lazy. It was still pretty crappy weather so I used that as an excuse to watch a couple of episodes of the Walking Dead. I also did a bit of research as to what I was going to do in LA. Didn't help though, still not sure.

In the afternoon we drove out to Blaines parents farm. It was fish feeding time and they have some karpy type fish. This would normally be pretty uneventful but there was lots and they were big/wacky looking and you could pat them. A bit weird. Their place is on a very nice section of land out of the city a bit and features really nice plants and manmade rivers, pools and waterfalls. After the fish were full we went to the Everglades to go gator hunting. Apparently the place is normally overrun with them but I was beginning to think that the Miami Alligators were about as common as snakes in Australia. Some story about a high water table meaning they were out further in the everglades where we couldn't walk. We wandered around for about an hour and everyone except me was pretty surprised we didn't see any wildlife. Then when we were just about back at the car we found this guy:

He was about 2m long and sitting in a side creek that ran under a wee bridge we were walking over. It was pretty dark by now so when Bob and I found him we got a bit of a fright because he was lying about 2 feet (when in Rome) under out feet. We also found this wee guy:

Who is an "Everglades Toad" top man. For dinner we went to a mexican place. The food was really great and I ate way to much. Possibly because I finished up everyone elses plates.

Failed Barnacle

There is an old homestead thing up the road from where Blaine lives called "The Barnacle". It is an old historic building (I think the last surviving original building in Coconut Grove) and there are  guided tours around the property with lots of info  about the area, both current and historic. It sounded interesting and cheap so yesterday on my run I went past to check out the opening times. I saw that it was closed Tuesdays and most public holidays and tours are every 1.5 hours from 10am. Unfortunately today when I walked along there at 11:30am I realised that I had failed to read the bit that said "group tours only: wednesday, thursday". So that was the failed Barnacle.

Since it was another nice day I went down to the marina again with the vague mission of getting some cash out. Down by the water I took a couple of arthouse pics:

Its like... Life.

I spent the afternoon being as lazy as possible. At one stage we left I managed to hunt down another hopped up beer by dogfish head called "90 minute hopped" which was pretty good. In the evening we went to the yacht club for dinner and I ate a very tasty Mahi (fish) open sandwich. Delicious.

Belated Northern Lights

So an English guy named Alexi took a whole heap of photos today so I thought I would post a couple. It was pretty incredible:

Running and Eating

So today I reverted to what I always do when I have no idea what I'm gonna do: go for a run. I set off about midday which was awesome/stupid as it was about 28C! I like running in the heat though and it was OK as long as I was on the move. As soon as I stopped I kinda overheated and drowned in my own sweat. At the end of Blaines street I took this of Palmetto Ave:

Apparently she is only about 15min from the center of Miami so it is pretty cool to be living in such a lush forested area. Even the main road that is close to her has awesome big trees that arch across the road. I noticed as well (of course I did) that the powerlines are all overhead but are heavily insulated, most of the trees have vines growing up them and many of the vines have started growing along the powerlines as well. That's one way to camouflage them!

The run was pretty good, I went down beside the marina and explored a few little side streets. There are heaps of wee lizards here and I got a pretty good shot of one little guy:

On the way home I got a little lost and apparently ended up in the ghetto. I didn't really fear for my life though but it did look a luttle but rough. I was running as well and I doubt anyone would wanna chase me in the heat anyway.

In the evening Blaine and Ben had some friends over for a BBQ. I had bought some super-hopped craft beer to drink called Ruination IPA (from "Stone"), and I was not disappointed. The fantastic hosts grilled some chicken, sausages and Blaine made some unnecessarily tasty baked bean dish thing. I know I am biased towards baked beans so these were amazing, I think they had some limes added or something and bacon on top. Blaine also made a key-lime pie for dessert. How good? (too good).

Monday

Nothing much happened today. I just waited around until I had to leave for my flight. Unfortunately the computer that EZ was building doesn't work.

So that is it for NYC. It was pretty cool. Saw a couple of shows. Ate some food. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice everyone was. Special thanks to my excellent hosts: Andrew, Trish, EZ and Mo (EZ's flatmate). I think I would like to go back to New York some time which I can't say about all of the places I have visited.

On to Miami, after some communication issues I finally got in touch with Blaine and I am stoked to be going to visit her. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do there though, I might just relax and go for lots of runs like Porto. We will see. Apparently it is 30 deg C there now and it is 8:30pm so I at least know its gonna be hot!

Landed in Miami and caught a taxi to Blaines house. When I got there she fed me amazing corned beef with cabbage and potatoes. Very very nice to have some real food for a change. I think I have been eating too much fast food, but its so much cheaper than normal food!

Then Blaine, Ben (her BF) and I spent a while drinking and talking shit until very late. I am super stoked to be in Miami visiting her already. I even had a glass of red wine and didn't hate it. This could be the beginning of me being able to drink wine, we will see. It was even a Marlborough Oyster Bay wine! Or maybe its just the warm weather going to my head...

Killing time and a show

I left the house today at about 11am to get to the book of mormon lottery for the 2pm matinee. Unfortunately I missed out again and I decided that $155 was too much to pay in the cancellation line and I might not even get the chance to buy one either. There was a standing line but I think they only let around 25 people stand and they were lining up at 12pm. I figured I would probably get another chance to see it. Instead I went and booked a ticket to Avenue Q.

Then I had about 7 hours to kill before the show. I ate a burger, I went to the rockerfeller center, I went to Grand Central Station, I sat in Central park for a while. I took this picture of St Patricks Cathedral to add to my scaffolding collection:

It was quite a long afternoon but it wasn't too bad. There are always wacky looking people to see and different streets to wander down. I am getting really good at this being alone thing I think. I still think that being with people is about a billion times better but I am now pretty comfortable hanging out by myself. Gross.

The show was pretty cool. It was very good value at $55. Some bits didn't make sense but on whole it was pretty well done.

I then ate a flithy hot-dog for dinner before heading home.

Lazy Day

20/10/12

EZ felt a bit crook today so we took it fairly easy (get it?). He also had to wait for a fan to turn up for his computer he was building. I gave him a bit of a hand with it as well.

Later on we managed to get out of the house and wandered down to the river where I got this shot of the Manhattan skyline:

Nothing else of any not happened really. I took a photo of a black squirrel but I won't post it here as I feel that 2 pictures of squirrels in my blog is already enough.

In the evening we went to a beer garden. It was a pretty nice place and I could imagine it being pretty busy in summer.

Natural History Museum

19/10/12

This morning it was kinda rainy and shit so I went to the Natural History Museum. When I got there the place was packed with other tourists thinking the same thing. I was also stunned at the $19 USD "suggested" price. Holy crap that is expensive for a museum. I will see what the other cities are like that I am going to but NY is definitely killing my bank account. I only gave them 5 bucks cos I am a poor backpacker. I was hoping that I had recovered from all of the museums but unfortunately I was wrong. There was a lot of cool stuff in there and the place was huge but I just didn't care to much. There was a cool planetarium thing that had a timeline that you walk down to retrace the big bang process. The only photo I took today is below and I think Hayden will be the only one that gets it:

After the museum I moved house to go and see EZ in Queens. We talked shit for a while before heading into town for one of his friends birthdays. Pretty good night because I got some tasty carrot cake. The music was either club music or Salsa music so it wasn't really my scene but I had a bit of a yarn to a few people.

I had my first experience in a NY taxi on the way home and it was just the same as any other taxi ride.

9/11 Memorial and a Show

This morning everyone in the house had a pretty late start. Trish and Andrew didn't leave the house until 10am! I thought NY was all go-go-go but I like these flexible hours. I jacked up a lunch with the guy I am going to stay with for 3 nights from tomorrow but I wanted to go to the 9/11 memorial first. Andrew was very kind and said I could use his computer and printer to get a ticket and print it. It all sounded very easy so they left for work. I booked the ticket and went to print it but unfortunately the page was mostly blank. I tried again and still no luck. I want to blame the Andrews apple computer but I guess it is more likely it was out of blue ink. Nothing is ever easy is it. Instead I had to book another ticket (lucky they were free) and choose to pick it up (discouraged apparently). That was OK but I wasn't counting on making a stop on the way so now I was pretty pushed for time. Luckily I didn't have to be there dead on when I had booked the ticket for so that was good. It was very good that I decided to book online and pick the ticket up too as there was a massive line for getting tickets at the door.

The memorial itself was pretty cool. Very simple which I thought was a bit out of character for the US. It must have been a nightmare to try and think of something to embody such a tragic event but I think they pulled it off. While I was there I tried to compare it in my head to Dachau and Terezin but kinda failed. I know it wasn't nearly as bad but I think the main reason I couldn't draw any comparisons was because it is just so damn unbelievable that it happened at all. Which doesn't mean that Hitler murdering all the Jews is any more believable. I feel I am digging myself a hole here...

Pictures, The North tower pool:

A new tower that is under construction:

Survivor tree:

After the memorial I high-tailed it to Union Square to meet EZ. When had lunch and he showed me some of the stuff he was working on. He works for a web development company and the office was exactly like I would imagine a relatively new web development company to be. Free coffee, people in T shirts and jeans, USB foam missile launchers, big room with bean bags and soft chairs in it. It was a very cool space and I couldn't help but think that MLL lives in the dark ages of office environments.

I then went to have another go at the Book of Mormon lottery. I didn't win this time either. On the way home I stopped in at a discount Broadway ticket office to see what they had on. I decided to buy a ticket to Fuerza Bruter ($55USD). I biked home, which reminds me: I have been borrowing Andrews bike a bit and biking around New York is awesome. I imagine it is much the same as biking around any big city but I have never really done it before (hell I used to be scared of biking around the bottom of the hill between the bottom of the downhill tracks on the port hills and bowanvale ave!) but it is so much fun. I am not sure what is more dangerous: Biking down the flying Nun or biking down Broadway avenue, both have about the same adrenaline rush! I dropped the bike off and walked to the show.

So the show: Holy mother of god it was crazy shit. If there is a chance you will ever go to it don't read on cos it would be amazing if you had no idea what was going happen. It was just the most mental show I have ever seen, including the Blue Man Group. It started out with a guy running on a treadmill with walls coming at him and then he got shot. Then he got up and they sent tables and chairs at him and then some people. Then there was some aerial dancers running around above our heads. Then there was a small room of dancers, the dancers then destroyed the walls and ceiling and they went mental. Then there was the suspended clear water bath thing with people in it doing all sorts of crazy shit. Then there was more dancing, there was a hose pointed at the audience at one point. All this with a DJ making pumping music the whole time. Bloody epic and an amazing experience.

In the evening I went to a cool we club in the basement of a building (mole people) for one of Andrews friends, Michael, who is leaving to live in Berlin. I bought 2 drinks of Crown Royal and dry ginger ale which cost me $12USD each plus tip. It tasted pretty good but not like gold.

Central Park and stuff

This morning I got up and did some faffing and organising stuff. I was pretty hell bent on a run for some reason so I borrowed Andrews bike to ride to Central Park, gotta do the cliche stuff eh?

Riding a bike in NY was pretty exciting. I actually ended up walking my bike a hell of a lot of the time for fear of losing my life to a car door, or a taxi, or a taxi car door. It wasn't too bad though as I was mostly in bike lanes (I went to the Hudson waterfront) where I could huss along and the only things to crash into were people and they mostly just bounced off anyway.

When I got to the park I didn't really know where to run so I just decided to run around the whole thing. I didn't really know how long it was gonna take but I had a bit of water and a muesli bar which is approximately a bit of water and a muesli bar more than I normally take running. I took this photo looking out over the reservoir:

The whole thing took me about an hour and a half but that was with a significant amount of faffing around looking for photos and exploring. The park was pretty damn cool. Such an amazing and large place to be in the middle of Manhatten! I managed to find my bike again and went back home down the east side of the island. On the way home I got my highly reccomended (by multiple separate people in Iceland and in NY) Pastrami sandwich from this diner:

I went home and had a shower before setting out for a walk to the Book of Mormon theatre. It was about 40 min to walk there. For each performance they hold a lottery 2 hours before the show for highly discounted tickets so I was pretty keen to give it a whirl. It is so much more expensive than the west end! Book of Mormon tickets start at $155USD! Ridiculous, but they are pretty much sold out until 2013 so I guess whatever people are willing to pay. The lottery tickets are only $32 but unfortunately I missed out. I think I had about a 5% chance of getting one.

Fortunately I found this sign:

Which made everything better. Instead of the show I met up with one of Carlas friends that is living in NY and we had a couple of drinks and a yarn. Cheers John!

On the way home I ate a Big Mac.

New York Brooklyn Bridge Wander

This morning I started to have a bit of a look at what I was gonna do and sent some emails and stuff. I found out there was a visitor information center fairly close so I thought I would go there and find out some info on walking tours. Unfortunately when I got there it was closed for winter. Instead I decided to try out a self-guided guided tour of Brooklyn Bridge. On the way I was surprised to find so many shops selling restaurant equipment. I have never seen a shop like them before and there were heaps on the same street. They were selling stuff like commercial BBQs, commercial fridges, meat cutting machines and even pots and pans and stuff. Weird. I wonder where people buy that kinda stuff in NZ, probably just one warehouse somewhere or something I guess.

I got to the bridge and took this half way across, I found her!

There was some information about how the bridge was built and a bit of a story about the project managers: A German guy designed the bridge and fell ill after construction had started, he enlisted his son to take over the project but his son got the bends pretty bad when he was working on one of the underwater pillars and was kinda bed-ridden for the rest of his life. His wife took over and managed the project to the end. She apparently did a fantastic job despite not having a background in engineering.

I got some pretty sweet views from the bridge but nothing amazing because of temporary fencing and anti-suicide fences.

On the other side the tour led me down a couple of nice little residential streets (the property values must have been ridiculous) and a wee park where I found this guy:

Why does everywhere get squirrels but NZ? The tour then led me down to DUMBO which stands for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass" to the waterfront where it recommended the "Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory":

I got a chocolate and chocolate chip ice cream (luckily it was a beautiful warm day!) and it was fantastic. I wandered around the waterfront and got this shot of the Brooklyn Bridge:

I decided to go back across the Manhattan bridge but it was all metal and shit and no where near as cool as the Brooklyn Bridge.

I then decided to go on a mission to get a power adaptor so I could charge stuff. Andrew had recommended a "best buy" which was pretty close to their place so I went there. Apparently they always sell out of anything-to-north-american adaptors pretty quick so there wasn't one there but they said that I could 14 blocks up Broadway to another best buy which had 8 of them in stock. So I walked 14 blocks up to the other Best buy only to find out they didn't have any either. I queried the guy to make sure they didn't have any in another part of the store or out the back and he said definitely not. When I went downstairs to leave I saw some other similar adaptors sitting on a shelf but not the one I wanted, but that kinda blew his theory that they were no where else out of the water. So kinda wasted about 45min walking up and back for nothing. I went to another store and they only had universal (large) expensive adaptors, then I finally found a place to sell just a anything in - North America out adaptor for twice as much as Best Buy were selling them but at least now I can charge my stuff.

For dinner we went to a pizza place and I met a couple of Andrews mates. Also had a Pilsner beer that was quite nice hoppy. Pizza was damn good but I'm not sure if it was as good as the place I went to in London with Gaz and co.

New York New York

So the plane trip was uneventful apart from watching Prometheus (on a telle, not a screen) which was bloody awful. On the flight I became somewhat apprehensive about the states because I realised I didn't know anyone there as well as I knew a lot of the people in Europe. I also felt a bit intimidated by the States for some reason with all of the Customs shenanigans. Man it would have been ridiculous if I had to fill out a form online for all of the European countries I went to, which is exactly what I had to do to visit the states. I also got a bit worried about how tired of travelling I will be when I get to Canada and even then I still have a long way to getting myself sorted and settling in. I landed, collected my bags and caught the Subway to where Andrew and Trish live and when I exited the station I was instantly super stoked to be in the U.S.A let alone New York. First impressions were very good.

I went up to Trish and Andrews place and had a big yarn to them before hitting the hay pretty hard after a long day of sitting in Hot pools and travelling... 1st world problems...

Blue Lagoon

Today I had a relatively lazy start to the day and got up at 9am. At 10am I was picked up and dropped off at the blue lagoon for a few hours before they picked me up again to go to the airport. The blue lagoon was pretty cool but somehow seemed pretty similar to Hanmer. It was different water, the layout was different, there was silca stuff you could put on your face, it was in a cool place, the water was different (it was an opaque blue colour and was 33% salt water), it was pretty flash (It came as part of my package but normally costs 8000 ISK) but at the end of the day it was just another big communal bath. It didn't have little hot pools like hanmer either, just one big pool that was different temperatures depending on how close to the inflow you were. Pics here:

The whole thing is actually just a by product of the excess heat generated by the geo-thermal power station which you can see in the background of this photo:

I'm now typing this sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to JFK in New York. Oh and now might be a really good time to thank Mummy again for the beanie, it was invaluable! Goodbye Iceland. Despite sucking a massive chunk of money out of my wallet (I think I probably spent about 1500NZD here!) you are a really cool place and it would be awesome to come back in the middle of winter sometime for some sweet four wheel driving missions but I don't know if I will ever see you again. Special thanks to my travel agent, Sofi, for finding the stop-over though.

Golden Circle with Snow Mobiles

So Golden circle tour take 2. I was not disappointed by the truck that picked me up:

So that was a good start. We headed off and I spent a long time trying to come to terms with amount of money I had spent on a tour I had largely done yesterday. One encouraging thing was that it was a cracker day and yesterday it was rainy and crap. When we got to the place where the North American tectonic plate meets the European plate I was OK with doing the tour again. See cool picture here:

I now see why Simon wanted to come here! Iceland is the only place in the world where you can see the plates doing their thing so obviously, most of the time it is all underwater. It was a pretty cool place to walk through. Also at the site is Law Rock where Iceland used to have its outdoor Parliament sessions. They also have big celebrations there occasionally. Then it was on to Gulfoss waterfall again. See sweet picture showing how amazing the day was:

The waterfall is really cool and was apparently rated in the top 10 European waterfalls to check out. It is broken into 3 tiers which were created by liquid hot magma (you better have just said that with Dr Evils voice in your head). It is pretty powerful in terms of cumecs of water and was very close to being lost at on stage to a company that wanted to build a hydro station at the site. Some Icelandic person campaigned pretty hard against it and has been unofficially named Icelands first environmentalist. Onwards we went to Geysir again and I got another cool series of shots which I won't bore you with. We had lunch at a cafe and I had "traditional" lamb soup. Back in the day it was a poor mans food but this was pretty expensive at 1600 ISK. Luckily I discovered that you got free bread and a free refill so I got those which maybe made it a luttle but more reasonable. It was damn good anyway.

Then it was on to the real part of the tour. The snow mobiles were stationed on Langokull which is the second largest glacier in Iceland/Europe (the biggest being in Iceland as well). Half way up was base camp where we suited up with helmets and warm overalls. Then we did some four wheel driving to get up to where the snow mobiles live. We had a quick briefing on how they operate and then we headed off. They were pretty simple to drive and of course we had to travel in single file at a pretty tame speed but it was still a cool experience being out on the glacier. half way through we stopped and took some photos:

On the way back some people were driving pretty retardedly and cutting the corners but this gave me some opportunities to follow the original line and go faster. The fastest I got up to was 65km/h and it was pretty awesome. I think it was probably a good thing that we had to keep in a line most of the time as if I was left to my own devices I would have probably killed myself.

On the way home we stopped at the crater site again but it wasn't more exciting the second time. We got back in about 6pm.

I relaxed a bit and wrote my blog for the day before (hence the confusing opening paragraph). I had a few beers that I still needed to drink so had a few of those but decided I wasn't gonna get through them all so I gave the remainder to the receptionist guy (who I had a bit of a yarn to the night before because he is studying Jazz/Classical guitar at university). For dinner I bit the bullet again and decided to go and eat by myself at a restaurant called "Tapas Barinn" that had been recommended to me. I got there and ordered the "Gourmet Icelandic Feast" and after getting the first dish of tasty Salmon a girl walked in and was seated in the booth behind me. I asked if she was by herself and she said she was grumpy with her drunken friends so had gone out alone and was happy to join me for dinner. We were both pretty damn stoked that we didn't have to eat dinner by ourselves. We had a massive yarn, she worked for the Denver airport in Colorado. The food was also extremely good. It started with a shot of Brennivin and for dinner I ate salmon, smoked puffin, lamb,  minke whale (which was very similar to steak!), lobster, monkfish and for dessert I at a white chocolate "skyr"moose. It was all very good but it should have been for 6000 ISK! I decided that I would buy it with the Prezzy card that Mum and Dad sent me so thanks Mum and Dad for the delicious Icelandic meal, bet you never knew you were ever gonna give me that gift! I also realised that if you averaged my dinner costs over the 4 nights I was here it wouldn't be too much as I just ate two $3NZD hotdogs for the first 3 nights!

After dinner I went back to the guesthouse to pack up my stuff and had one more beer before going to bed.

Iceland Golden Circle Tour

OK, so this is gonna be slightly confusing but here we go. I am writing this post the day after I did all this stuff and the day after I did all this stuff I did most of this stuff again for reasons that will be explained at the end of this post. So I am gonna brush over most of the stuff in this post so that I can talk about it tomorrow (which is actually today) when I got better photos but I am gonna write it as though I wrote it yesterday. I have no doubt that that made absolutely no sense. I also apologise for any mistakes as I can't be bothered proofing and I want to go eat some dinner tonight (which is actually tomorrow night).

So I was picked up at 8:30am and we headed out to Thingvellir (actually spelt with a crazy letter that looks like a P but the round part of the P is in the middle of the line, look it up) National park where there is heaps of shit going on. First stop was where the North American Tectonic Plate meets the European plate.

In the place was the drowning pool which, exactly as it sounds, was used to drown people. Woman to be precise. The men just had their heads chopped off:

On we went to Gullfoss falls which means "Golden Falls".

Further into the park we went to check out Geysir and the surrounding thermal area. Smells just like Rotorua:

There was a massive Geyser at the site called Geysir which is apparently one of the only words we use in English that was derived from an Icelandic word. The language is actually kinda crazy (but we already knew that). It is actually an ancient Norsk language that was spoken in Scandinavia but their language changed due to external influences but because Iceland was such a small community and so isolated they have retained more of the old language. It is also really similar to Ye Olde English as well, our guide said it is actually pretty easy to read stuff in Olde English. Languages are wacky.

There is still an active geyser at the site though as it was "cleaned" (I'm not positive what that means but it seems man has been meddling). It fires water up to 40m into the air. I learnt how to use my rapid fire mode on my camera to capture the following couple of photos, one at the start of the eruption and one towards the end:

On the way home we stopped at a pretty cool wee church. I have seen a lot and from the outside this didn't look too different but inside I really liked the mosaic Jesus instead of the normal old statue or whatever. It was quite a new church and is about the 10th or so that has been built on the site. All of the old ones only lasted a few years and then blew away or burned down.

Behind the church was this building that is a replica of the churches they used to have in iceland. Sweet cladding!

On the way home we stopped at an old crater site that was pretty sweet:

When I got home I made the (difficult) decision to go on a superjeep / snowmobile trip the next day. Reasoning was as follows, Pros: I am sick of museums so I think it would be better to get out and about in the Iceland country side instead of wandering around Reykjavik (inevitably ending up at a museum), I really want to have a ride in a super jeep, snow mobile sounds mint, I don't know if I am ever gonna be back to Iceland so I might as well go the whole hog. Cons: The trip costs 40900 ISK, half of it is exactly the same as the tour I did today but in a super jeep instead of a van.

I have always figured that you often inclined regret the things you don't do and very seldom regret the things you do do. So I hope in 30 years time when I read this I am not thinking "God damn that $400 would be handy right now!". So I went about booking the tour. It got a bit tricky as the company I had been recommended to go on was not running the tour on Sunday so I did some more research and found a company that I could go with. So that was sorted.

Then I got a call to my room to see if I wanted to go on a Northern Lights tour. Apparently the lights were pegged to be pretty sweet with very strong electro magnetic activity and skies supposed to be clearing. We went and stood in the dark and the cold (I think it probably dropped below 0 while we were there) for about 3 hours and it was totally worth it. There was a couple of really good shows during the time (they come and go a lot) where we saw all sorts of dancing colours in the sky including green, red and orange. The whole sky was aglow at one stage, it was incredible and extremely hard to describe. I think I was extremely lucking as you don't often get colours other than green in the lights. We had "arches" (3 at one stage), "spikes" and all sort of other crazy shit. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever seen and if I didn't know that there was some solid science behind it I might start believing that UFO's were behind it or, heaven forbid, god! Abso-bloody-lutely Amazing. I will hopefully get some pics off a guy that had an SLR with a tripod. Damn not having a tripod!

Also: Had an epic small world moment. I was standing in the dark in the middle of nowhere waiting for the Northern Lights with about 200 other people scattered around. Then this kiwi guy asks me where I'm from and this is roughly how the conversation went down:

"where you from?"
"Blenheim, you?"
"Christchurch"
"Oh yeah, I went to uni in Christchurch"
"What did you do?"
"Electrical Engineering"
"What year?, my brother did that"
"Finished in 2007, what was his name?"
"Adrian Gin"

Wacky shit.

I crawled into bed at about 2am and knew that when I woke up in the morning the lights would be one of those experiences that you are not really sure happened or not.

Iceland Southern Shore Adventure

So this was the first of 2 day trips I had booked for Iceland. I was picked up at about 9am and we headed off down to the south coast. The first stop we made was at the Skogarfoss waterfall. The tour guide remembered that they were making a film there but it was no problem as they weren't shooting when we were there. They had pretty cool trucks though:

I had a bit of a yarn to a couple of guys and they said they were filming shots of the waterfall for Thor 2. Apparently they were going to make it 10 times wider and 10 times higher in the movie. So keep an eye out for something that looks kinda like this:

But probably without all of the tourists taking pictures in front of it. Then we drove to the Glacier that was feeding the waterfall and we could walk right up to it:

All of the black stuff is ash left over from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano that errupted in 2010 and had all the planes grounded. The eruption made quite a bit of a mess of the countryside and there was a pretty big clean up job to fix it. Another picture I took at the glacial "snout":

There are lots of sweet stories about trolls in Norse folklaw and the story goes that they have all been turned to stone now. Apparently in the photo below the islands on the left are a troll that was turned to stone while dragging a boat ashore. You gotta use your imagination a luttle but.

We stopped in at Vik for lunch where I had a really good burger. I think they used Big Mac sauce in it! Then we headed further around the coast to a little church that sits out close to the sea on a cliff, I think this was the southern most point in Iceland. The sky was doing random shit so I took this photo:

And this:

I took this at the edge of the cliff beside the church:

Quite recently a guy flew a plane through the hole. Our guide was a bit confused as to how they did it as the cliff is so close to the hole. Would have been quite impressive I would imagine.

I took another couple of photos for good measure:

Then we went to the Skogarfoss waterfall. It was really cool as where it falls is down an old sea cliff and the cliff had eroded quite a bit so now you can walk behind the waterfall. I searched and searched for the secret stuff that is always stored behind waterfalls but I couldn't find any of it. Probably already got picked up by another tourist, but I'm surprised it hadn't re-spawned yet. Anyways, here is a photo of it:

And one from behind the water fall:

In the evening I worked on my inner introvert and had some drinks by myself in my room before going in search of some live music. It was bloody cold outside (about 4 degrees I think) but there was quite a few people around. I found a pretty heavy band playing and listened to the for a bit. There were lots of locals around and it turns out all males here look like Thor. Hilarious. I had a couple of drinks (500 Icelandic Kronar for a pint, 1NZD is about 100 ISK) which were not as expensive as I thought they would be. The band was nothing amazing but they were extremely loud, I might try to remember to wear my earplugs tomorrow night but I hope I don't get beaten up for it. On the way home I had dinner from the hot dog stand again. The hot-dogs really are that good!