We're Running out of Road...

Today was a wee bit ridiculous.

On the one hand, the list of animals one can find on the street is ever expanding. Add chickens, horses, ponies, camels in either couples or herds, never any other combination. Also pigs and goats, who wear coats. Dr. Seuss would have a field day.

We've also taken the public restroom revelation to a whole new level, let's just say it's not a story for polite company.

Also I talked about the ridiculous cacophony of car horns that is constantly blasting in the background. This was not correct. I'm convinced that each vehicle has a tiny little trumpet player tied to their grill blasting away till Miles comes home. The bigger your auto the more skilled your musician, motorcycles and rickshaws get your traditional squeal but the buses get little melodies and the trucks blast out arpeggios.

Horns are for everything. If you're passing someone honk your horn. If you're turning honk your horn. If you're approaching a group of school children doing cartwheels on the freeway, honk your horn. If driving on the wrong side of the road, honk your horn. If you're eating a banana, don't honk your horn that will just confuse people.

Most of the temples have marble floors. They're VERY slippery.

I am now in deep in the heart of the Madhubani region, after another solid 10 hours of bus time, which is now officially the biggest shenanigan I have ever experienced in a bus. Besides the breakneck speeds and weaving through opposing traffic, every turn we make leads to a smaller road. Eventually the bus is wider than the entire strip of pavement. That's when they start stopping to ask for directions.

There's a whole team of drivers on our bus, and they have a very nicely furnished cockpit at the front of our bus with a bed and an extra chair and a shrine.

On the way we wandered through a couple mud sculpture workshops, two excavations of sacred Buddhist sites as well as a Sri Lankan guest house for pilgrims (not the thanksgiving kind) for a rest stop and bathroom break. Think hole in the ground.

Don't take pictures of people with guns.

In the cities, we were generally ignored by everyone either because of our language or our skin or our ridiculously tacky fashion sense. Not so out here in the country. This is as close to being a celebrity as I will get. Every time we stop we immediately collect a tail of anywhere from 4-30 people following us and staring at us.

Probably wondering why we would try and squeeze a bus through a herd of camels.

Well the life of a celebrity is exhausting so until next time!

Cheers,
The Wayward Hoover

What's that smell?

Why it smells like India! and Naan.

It took about 31 hours to get here (a new personal record) and I'm exhausted so I'll just start rambling now.

So. I don't have Malaria. Yet. I'm workin' on it.

There are dogs everywhere on the streets. Also Cows. Also Monkeys. Also Snakes. I charmed one.

First stop was New Delhi, which is also old Delhi... I don't quite understand either.

The term "public restroom" has a whole new meaning for me. Think a wall with a drain.

The soundtrack of life in India is car horns, constantly blasting in the background of everything.

Schoolchildren love to be in your photos. All of them. I feel like I need a spray for the kids instead of the mosquitoes.

I got to wear a snake. Two snakes actually. The first was your garden variety "give this to a tourist" kind of snake, which I would like to think I handled quite well while it explored my arm. The second one was the kind of snakes they make movies about and staffs for disney villains. It lunged at me. I jumped. Snake #1 was not a fan of the jumping. It was a vicious circle to say the least.

They're not police cars here, they're "Mobile Police Posts" and they have curtains in the windows.

I definitely did NOT oversleep this morning almost getting left behind.

I'm going to fall asleep on my keyboard now so I will talk to you all soon, hopefully with select arts-y photographs.

Cheers,
The Wayward Hoover

Nah We Got Plenty of Time...

So. Funny story.

A good friend of mine and fellow traveler was flown home from Malta recently by good old Tulare County to testify against the guys who kidnapped her and stole her car last December. But that's another story.

The point is the county offered to pay for my gas if I'd pick her up from SFO, and seeing how I love San Francisco I told them "Well I guess I could..."

So I left Fresno last Friday with one of her best friends to pick her up from the airport at 8.

I knew we were in for an adventure when I inadvertently took the wrong freeway west across the valley. I'm not sure who decided to randomly include a freeway exit in the left lane but obviously I was not consulted.

Lucky for my passenger and I everything eventually meets up with the I-5 here in California, and I do mean everything, so all was not lost.

Just north of the junction with the 5 there is a massive facility of some kind surrounded by gigantic, 25-30 ft fence.... except for the north side of the complex.

I'm just as curious as you are.

Pushing onwards me and my compatriot got to SF without much further incident, if you don't count the ridiculous construction before the San Mateo bridge that is. Concrete barriers on each side of the lane and a 25 mph corkscrew of an on-ramp.

I felt like a hotwheels car.

In fact, as we got to the SFO exit on the 101 I noticed the clock on my dashboard reported we had made killer time, hour and a half to spare killer time.

With all that time on our hand we did what anyone would do, we hit the city.

Of course, we weren't entirely sure what we wanted to see, and we also seemed to be using Jack Sparrow's compass. If I was sure something was to our left then she was just as sure it was in the dead opposite direction.

So we wandered around the city like that until our bladders got the best of us and we parked near a Burger King to take care of business.

The Burger King on Market street has a bathroom guard. He's little and angry and holds the keys to relief. Not a good combination. Not a good combination at all.

Even after proving that we were indeed paying customers and had permission to use the restroom he had to be talked into it, and if you got that far he would still grumble about how much he hates letting people use it.

After solving all of the bathroom troll's riddles we returned to the car where I realized I had missed a phone call from south SF sometime during our wanderings.

Things I forgot to do:

1. Adjust my dashboard clock for daylight savings time.

Yup.

People whose flight got in early:

1. My friend.

Yup.

All told she waited about an hour in the airport while her deadbeat friends escaped from the city as fast as they could. Naturally we decided not to tell her why we had been late.

Naturally I was sold out as soon as we got to the curb.

The drive home was less eventful, we paid a visit to Donut Nation in Los Banos where the king requires a $5 minimum purchase if you wanna use a card and to Robertito's where they teach you how to fish your food out of a pool of delicious grease.

Finally rolled back home around 2 in AM and nobody even got kidnapped, so I deem the trip a success.

Cheers till next time,

The Wayward Hoover

VROOM!

Well it looks like being a travel intern isn't such a pipe dream after all, so I've decided to dust off the old blog-o-rooni here and fire her up for new visitors and new adventures!!

To start things off I think I'll talk about my latest adventure, which actually turns out to be applying for the STA World Traveler Internship (that's a lot to type so from now on it's just going to be STA. Or intern. Or whatever I feel like calling it at the time)! I'm going to take you back.... baaack.... to a time loooooong agooooooo.... like last Tuesday.

Specifically, the Tuesday 3 days before the STA submission deadline.

I was deeply engrossed in my studies (read: goofing off on the internet) when my sister sent me a link to the STA intern homepage and informed me that if I didn't apply she would hate me.

Now me and dear ol' sis have had our differences ever since the Great Noogie Incident of '92 but I'm not down for hate, so I hit the link and was immediately hooked.

What followed was a marathon even in video production. I spent the rest of the day brainstorming ideas, studying the competition and writing. by 10 in the PM I had a working script and was scrambling to find a femme fatale for my opening sequence.

After a delightfully hilarious/awkward conversation I had an actress and a location and started filming 11 PM. 4 hours of giggling and hip wiggling later I had my footage and started the editing.

Editing (in all of its riveting detail) went on from 3am until 9pm with a short break to go to work at the trusty library (also riveting). and by 10 Wednesday night I had a video and an application up and ready to be voted on.

Ah voting. It took me all of 20 minutes to get banned from Facebook Chat for spamming my friends.

I think that deserves an award.

By the numbers I directly contacted over 600 friends, over 2,500 guests of the "Help Andrew Hoover" event, over 6,700 fans of a recently cancelled radio show and unknown thousands of hapless MCJ students via the campus listserve (thank you prof. Hayes!). After about 24 hours I had broken into the top 50 with a meager 2400 votes.

Then I did a stupid thing.

I went and told all of those people that if I could break 15,000 votes by the submission deadline, I would shave my head.

I picked 15,000 because it was obviously unattainable.

I am a fool.

Over the course of 9 hours, my vote count skyrocketed to hit over 18,000 votes before finally slowing down, by midnight I was squarely in the 20,000s. So fast that it prompted some to even to pose as STA administration and accuse me of cheating.

Which was hurtful.

But no matter.

I made it to the top 50! Which is awesome in at least 7 different ways.

and on that happy note I'm off to check out the Fresno Rogue Festival

In the mean time, go vote for me on my intern page!!

http://worldtravelerinternship.com/member/andrew-hoover/

Cheers,

The Wayward Hoover

Kangaroos Are Dirty, also last international post.....for now

Greetings from Melbourne!! Since I left you last I have visited Flinn's Reef, Milnn Reef, Sydney, Tourqay, Geelong, Lorne, Port Fairy, The 12 Apostles, Tommy's Lookout, Hall's Gap, Rose's Gap, the Grampians National Park, and Loch Ard Gorge. Not to mention about half of the nooks and crannies spread thickly across Melbourne city center

*Inhales*

It's been a busy to say the least.


I really have no idea where I should start and which stories are worth including so I'll just start with the diving. Hard to go wrong with a wonder of the world right?

In Cairns there are three types of buildings; empty ones, restaurants and dive shops.

My kind of town.

After repacking my stuff in the dark into a bag for home and a bag for travel, a van stole me away from my hostel and shuttled me to the docks where I was given milk and a slice of cake and told to wait while they took all of my stuff and put it in my cabin and fluffed my pillow for me

The cake was delicious.

Much to my delight the cake was a constant fixture in life on the dive boat, our schedule started at 6 in the am and went something like this:

Dive cake dive breakfast dive cake dive cake and lunch dive cake dive dinner and cake dive dive

...cake.

It was wonderful.

For all you fish freaks out there I saw so many fish I couldn't even begin to try and list them all here......what's that?? You want me to try anyways?? Well if you insist.

I saw Anemone Fish, Maorie Wrasse*, Bumphead Parrot fish*, Parrot Fish, Butterflyfish, Butterfly Fish (there's a difference), Angel Fish, Black spotted puffer, Yellow Spotted Puffer, Orange and Black Puffer, Brown Puffer, Grey Pipefish*, Yellow Pipefish*, Lionfish, Grey Reef Shark*, White Tip Reef Shark*, Black Reef Shark*, Mako Shark*, Common Hermit Crab, Silver Fish, Common Coral Trout, Black Banded Triple Fin*, Common Reef Lobster, Red Sea Bass, Round Ray, Shovel Nose Guitar Fish, Greenback Turtle, Various Trigger Fish, Surgeon Fish, Forcep Fish, Reef Eel, Cardinal Fish, Little Blue Annoying Fish, Big Blue Annoying Fish, Spiny Sea Cucumber*, Hairy Sea Cucumber, Totally Gross Sea Cucumber, Giant Clams*, Less Than Giant Clams, Panicked New SCUBA Diver, and of course the Goofy American Fish.

* = something that was bigger and/or longer than me

That is maybe a quarter of what I saw, but it's all I can remember.

For those of you playing the home game and who are slightly less interested in the specific names of all the fish, I saw the entire cast of Finding Nemo.

Got there autographs.

Went out to lunch and pitched ideas for their next movie and how I will direct it.

(Minus Bruce)

If we weren't underwater than we were on the top deck eating cake or dancing or running face-first off the edge and falling to the water 25 feet below us.

I saw a crocodile. It was a baby, but it coulda ate my toes.

The city of Melbourne was built to order just for me, I am convinced of it. The layout was originally designed with wide streets for moving large carts of goods, which the citizens promptly ignored and created their own intricate system of alleyways and tunnels to get around the town.

This city is alive, and when you cut it bleeds adventure.

I have been here for about a week and a half and have been exploring from sunrise to sunrise and have maybe worked my way over half of this city.

Maybe.

Big Maybe.

There are two sets of doors here, the ones that are open during the day, and the ones that are open at night... With that in mind let's say I've only seen a quarter of the city.

Most stores don't have signs, the good ones are only accessible through the back of another store and the best ones are in the back, around a corner and down a flight of stairs. And you have to knock.

I pet (petted?) a Kangaroo. It was dirty.

There is a massive open air market here that sells all sorts of discount wares and fresh foods and fried foods and fried discount wares.....and a homeless man having a butterfly painted on his face.

I get on an airplane for the states tomorrow and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The Melbourne International Jazz Festival runs from April 26th to May 2nd.

Excuse me while I wipe the drool from my face

*wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipe*

The festival and its events however were hidden from view, to the uninitiated you would never know that jazz talent and appreciators from all over the world were converging on the city to share and experience alike the new flavors and old recipes being traded in back alleys and on performance hall stages.

Walk down any given empty alley and knock on the right door, it would be opened to reveal a packed house, stretching to point an ear towards the corner stage where the likes of Jim Black, Charlie Haden, Marc Hannaford, Katie Noonan and countless others were letting the music do the talking for them.

It was unreal. If the city bleeds adventure then it certainly Screams, swoons and cries jazz

Now there is a certain matter which is most unfortunate but we all must address together.

My trip is ending, and soon (Tomorrow Soon). However my adventures will not be ending, if I have anything to do about it. I will be rumbling around the central valley for about a month before heading off again to work as Ranger Director on Catalina island, and then after that, who knows??

I should mention that I lived in a van for a week in the Grampians National Park. Also google the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, they were awesome.

The question is, should I keep tip-tapping at my keyboard to share my experiences, accidents, ravings and discoveries? Or should I leave it as a tribute to the epic journey that these last 4 or 5 months have been?

I will definitely return to at least share some pictures that I feel represent the various highlights of the trip, as I know you are all just tripping over yourselves to see exactly what I have been rambling about.

But before that, I have one more night to try and trick this City into showing me what she's hiding, so until then

Cheers,
The Wayward Hoover

Neener-Neener!!

Hello faithful readers, friends, family, random visitor from India that I keep getting.

I am currently traveling in Australia, and have nowhere near enough time to write a full post right now as I am waiting on a van to pick me up and take me to a very large boat, on which I will be living for the next 3 days and from which I will be jumping as often as possible into the Pacific decked out in SCUBA gear.

For the win.

I Definitely only told you so that you could be jealous (neener-neener!)

Also this marks the end of my semester!!

No more tests, homework, random geology side trips, lectures in beautiful places, rests in less than beautiful places. From here on out its just me and my wandering compass needle until May, which is when I will be returning to the beloved U. S. of A.

Allegedly.

Who knows? I might miss my flight.

Needless to say this will lead to an epic increase in tomfoolery, mischief and your all around good fun shenanigans.

Only about half of which I can tell you about.

Because my mother reads this blog that's why.

Well, my van is here, so until next time...

Oh ya, I'm in Cairns for all you Google Earth fans. Since Queenstown I have also been to Dunedin and then back to Christchurch before flying north to Cairns.

Cheers,
The Wayward Hoover

"Who wants to be run over by the Zorb?"

What a silly question. Of course I want to be run over by a Zorb. Who wouldn't?

That's right dear readers I'm back after an extended stay in a magical land where you have to pay for internet.

Places I have been since my last post for you google earth geeks: Picton, Kaikoura, Christchurch, Cass Field Station, Westport, Greymouth, Hokitiki and am currently staying in a field station in Harihari *Gasp*.

For the past week or so we've been bouncing around mountain field research stations where there is no internet *tear* and even when we're in town you have to pay for it, which I'm not going to do.

I finally went Zorbing, which was awesome. They filled it with water and its the closest thing I think I can get to riding in a washing machine.

During a free day in Christchurch me and a friend decided to take advantage of a nearby gondola and take some bikes back down it. After being reminded exactly how long it has been since I rode a bike on the first hill it was down hill the rest of the way. I should also mention the massive wind gusts that had me riding at a 45 degree angle (Karma for Wellington?). It was so windy that flies congregated on the side of our legs and bikes to get out of the wind.

I was chased through Cathedral Square by marching bagpipes, into a wall of more bagpipers(??) Apparently I wandered into some sort of Bagpiping competition while I was looking at a man in a top-hat.

The most interesting pizza I have ever eaten was on a whole wheat crust with onions, spinach leaf, fresh hen, ham and hare with mozzarela cheese and bleu cheese chunks. The sauce was plum sauce.

While we were in New Plymouth we were actually staying outside of town. The Profs dropped us off in town and gave us directions (kind of) to wander back into the holiday park (a motel/rv/campsite/whatever the heck else you want it to be). On our way back (well after sunset) it occured to us that we had no idea where we were going, so we stopped some poor random kiwi on the path to point us in the right direction. She proceeded to invite us to her house (think beach-front villa with windows for walls) offer us dinner, ice cream, introduce us to her dog and sons (interchangeable apparently) and then give us a ride home, leaving us with an invitation to wander back for another meal and to meet her daughters who were visiting from America of all places. She was nice.

There are at least 23 different ways to prepare black-eyed peas, I know because that's what I've had for dinner every night since Christchurch.

It more or less never stops raining here, the current storm has been going for almost a week.

There is a cave near Greymouth that I am going to get married in, and then go rafting through.

Bookstores here are only for the adventure spirited, sure there are the ones like Borders but most of them are pretty well hidden. My favorite so far was a store hidden in the back of an antique shop. I wandered upstairs where there was a clothing store and in the back of the store there was a little nook with a giant bookcase in it, when I got closer there was a door to another room crammed with bookshelves and a little cash register in the corner. Books three deep on the shelves it was smaller then my room at home with honestly thousands of books lying around.

When leaving Kaikoura our train was cancelled and we were left scrambling to find a bus to get to Christchurch.

I swam with dolphins. I hit one (on accident) in the face.

I found a blues bar in Christchurch called The Southern Blues Bar (kiwis aren't known for their creativity). It was pretty good and they let me go up and jam with the house band which was pretty sweet.

Everyone comments on my accent. I think they're nuts.

I saw watchmen on March 4th. With the dateline that's 2 days before you. And I was the only one in the theater.


I found a "Mexican" food place in Auckland that tasted like Thai food. I want a quesadilla more than life itself at this point.

Tomato sauce (ketchup) is still really weird here.

You know that crusty old bum/troubadour that you always see in movies? I found him. He lives at the Strawberry Tree in Kaikoura and he is hilarious. I think his name is Steve. He was playing with this band (by band I mean two guitar players, one from Brazil and the other from Czech Republic and by playing with I mean wandering between the two while they played their set.)

American pool is impossible to find here. Every table has billiards a little bigger than golf balls and side pockets with rounded rails, it's ridiculous. All I want is a free pool table with real billiards.

I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's at the Botanic Garden in Christchurch, and I watched the rain scene, while it was raining.

That's right, be jealous.


There is a man in Cathedral Square in Christchurch who looks just like Doc from Back to the Future. They call him Wizard. He has been screaming at passer-by for over ten years they say. He has a milk crate that he hides his water bottle under, no one knows why.

Ok.

This is all I can remember for now, I may or may not have knocked my head on the roof of a cave (repeatedly).

Cheers,
The Wayward Hoover