Mumbled Words and Ridiculous Faces: pollution, canyons and smut.

San Diego greets us in the early hours of the morning and fuck, is it hot. We were staying with Alec in the diverse North Park area of San Diego, which is just west of downtown and where lots of the University of California students live. Patrick had met Alec 3 years prior on a drunken night in Mexico City and sent him a message on the off chance that he may be able to put us up. Lo and behold, he did and what a humble person he was; very easy to talk to and a lot of fun to hang out with. He was incredibly eloquent and in our myriad discussions on various political or social matters he would put his point across accurately and effortlessly, making him such an enjoyable person to converse with. Not to mention his championing of country music that, at first, was questionable but after subjecting us to various car journeys with a country radio station blaring out we were soon relishing every opportunity to get back in the car. I was sold on country music in about half a day and it is its sheer idiocy coupled with its reluctance to be concerned with any complexities in life really brightens the day. In the same way that a cat chasing its own tail illuminates a day. God, beer and women is all these rural folk know and it’s all they need. The chorus of Billy Currington’s ‘People are Crazy’ sums the genre up rather nicely with the line ‘God is great, beer is good, but people are crazy’.

San Diego was a pretty chilled out time. Again, we saw nothing of the downtown area as we heard, on good word, that it was not worth it. Instead, we spent a lot of our time taking it slow, sitting in the sun, chewing the fat, drinking beers and playing old N64 games. We did get to try our hands at ‘frolfing’ which, for the less jargon-inclined, is the sport of Frisbee golf. Which takes the walking and accurate movement of inanimate objects of golf with the beer drinking and Frisbee throwing enjoyed at the beach. It is damn good fun, particularly when the sun has got his hat on. Obviously, we were all pretty terrible at it and it wasn’t long before the discs were going astray and eventually wedged high up a big tree. Turns out the key is not power, but technique. Who’d have thought?

One of my favourite moments of the whole trip did come in San Diego when we decided to make an impromptu trip to La Jolla at 10 in the evening to have a swim in the Pacific Ocean. Alec’s flatmate had teased of a time before that he went night swimming in the Pacific during the early summer months when the water was filled with bioluminescent algae that glowed when touched or moved vigorously. We couldn’t believe it that after telling us we then got to see this phenomenon first hand. What it translates to is crashing and rolling waves that glowed bright under the soft southern Californian stars. It was truly beautiful and like nothing I’ve ever witnessed before. When walking through the water your body glows as it comes into contact with all the algae, it is a curious sight to be able to see your limbs in the black of the ocean. You could even kick forward shuriken-esque balls of glowing algae with your feet. Even just being in the Pacific under the night sky with not another soul in ear or eye shot was an experience in itself. It was truly something.

I hate LA. Like, really hate LA. I’d heard all about it being this huge area, a collection of suburbs that somehow make up the city. A bowl of pollution that only exacerbates its own problems by making the ownership of a car being an absolute necessity to traverse the city, since the oil companies bought out the railways in twenties and tactically demolished them. My expectations were low, but with low expectations you anticipate then be succeeded by a pleasant surprise. This was not the case with the City of Angels. It is huge. Places like New York City are pretty damn big, but at least NYC is actually filled with things, filled with life and people. So much of LA is just empty and desolate. There are few pedestrians and much of it is just endless cookie-cutter housing and ugly warehouse-style buildings. Hollywood was criminally underwhelming, it just doesn’t feel special at all. It is just a couple of streets filled with tat-specialised shops, people trying to get you to go on tours to look at famous peoples’ houses and then a theatre that has a pretty big reputation in the film industry. Yet, that theatre is so unassuming that we walked past it without spotting it. Venice Beach is quite cool, I guess. But it is mostly just a glorified Camden market where the canal is replaced by the Pacific Ocean. The innumerable shops that sell t-shirts adorned with such classic lines as “I love sushi” alongside an image of stickman going down on a stickwoman. There is a pleasant atmosphere of weird and wonderful people among the throngs along Venice Beach and it is a beautiful beach. Yet the water is so clearly polluted that I feel that I would get gastroenteritis just gazing at it. Furthermore, if you walk literally one block in from Venice Beach you are in a dreary suburb devoid of any life. This makes LA seem so diluted.

I will freely admit that it would be possible to have a good time in LA. I mean, if we had a car we’d have got around a lot quicker and had seen a lot more of the city. If we had not been staying in Koreatown and instead in a hipper neighbourhood then I’m sure we’d have found cool bars to drink in and met interesting people. Even if we had planned a little more what to do we may have had a better time. The fact of the matter is, we couldn’t afford to rent a car, or stay somewhere cooler and by that admission LA is not a place for someone on a budget. It would have been ideal to have got a Couchsurf in LA, as we were like lost souls, meandering around, not really knowing where the hell we were going. Some sound advice would not have gone amiss.

I did, however, like the Santa Barbara area of LA, it seemed a little more pleasant than other areas of LA. Only we did not stay there long as we had a long walk ahead of us to Venice Beach. And despite the location of our hotel, it had buckets of character. The hotel clearly used to be a very high-end hotel decades ago, got abandoned, fell into a state of disrepair, got bought, got done up to a passable standard and then re-opened as a budget hotel. The lobby was of epic proportions, a huge, high ceiling, an old drained fountain, large staircases and large double doors. The walls were adorned with oriental artwork to cement its place in Koreatown. The kitchen that those staying in the hotel use is the old restaurant kitchen, and we ended up cooking small pasta meals in vat-like pans, whilst water leaked on our heads from above. This place just brought a smile to my face. There was none of the fear associated with our hotel in Frisco, instead replaced with quirks that made it unique. The smoking area of the hotel was the roof, accompanied by deck chairs. In any hotel conscious of health and safety there would be a locked and twice bolted door at the peak of the hotel’s staircase. Not a door wedged wide open. This reluctance to abide any of that bullshit was a, literal, breath of fresh (polluted) air. Some of my favourite times in LA were sitting up on that roof, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes and talking to the early hours with the glowing lights of the city illuminating our peripherals.

Las Vegas would be the last place we all remained together as a four; the ramblin’ boys of pleasure. The sin city seemed like a good a place as any for a swan song. After our stint in Vegas, Patrick would head to Baltimore, Rich back to blighty and Rob and I to Philadelphia. Vegas was another city that I had little expectation for. My penchant for the vices in life tends to stop at alcohol (ending right before gambling and prostitution). So whilst the fact that it was legal to drink in the streets in the city (illegal everywhere else in the States), this was one of the few details that grabbed my attention. What I was expecting was a crass city, full of crass people. And these expectations were met, the unexpected factor was that I loved it. Vegas is like nowhere else, the city does not stop. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week the slots in the casinos are whirring, the drinks are flowing and the lights are flashing. It is such a ridiculous place that you have to just take a step back and admire it; a city in the absolute middle of nowhere, surrounded by fucking desert, that is completely unsustainable yet money courses through the blood in its veins, people flock there by the million every year and new, bigger and better casinos and hotels spring up like clockwork year in year out. There is nothing else to it.

There is enough entertainment in Vegas to just wander around all day without spending a buck. The myriad free shows such as the famous Bellagio water fountains and the smut-ridden Treasure Island battle between two ships. The former is simply a very impressive display of water fountains being used to match up to music. Whereas the latter is a selection of “enhanced” women dancing around to shit music to a backdrop of balls of fire and explosions. There is some vague narrative that provides some justification to the antics, but that’s mostly just an elaborate equivalent of a plumber coming round to fix the sink. It’s all very laughable, yet entertaining. The hotels themselves are worth visiting to admire their audacious design, from the hollow pyramid of the Luxor to the sheer towering stature of the Stratosphere to the roller coaster that writhes in and around New York, New York. You get the impression that one-upmanship is the name of the game in Vegas.

One particular treat of Las Vegas is the “whilst you gamble you drink for nothing” rule. It’s like having a waiter at a free bar, allowed me to indulge in white Russians every day. Gambling very, very slowly is one way of going about milking this rule of Vegas. The other way is to take $20, head to the bar, put said dollars into the bar-top gambling machine, flick about on the menu between various games and help menus until the barkeep brings you your free drink, cash out with the $20 and leave with a smug smile of victory on your face.

One of our greatest and most productive days of the whole trip fell during our time in Vegas. We hired a Dodge Charger and Rich alone drove for 12 hours, covering around 600 miles and crossing into four different states. On this route we fired a selection of firearms with porn stars for company, admired man’s domination of nature at the Hoover Dam and then witnessed nature’s comeback by indicating man’s insignificance as we were but a speck of dust gaping into the mystifying Grand Canyon. It was quite the day. We decided to go to the North Rim of the Canyon, rather than the tourist-infested South Rim that has over 5 million visitors every year. What we didn’t quite expect was how much further the North Rim would be. It’s at a much higher altitude that meant that the temperatures were quite cool, despite being in the desert, and we witnessed a ferocious rain storm, which was not what we expected. The extra few miles were, without a doubt, worth it. The location we got to was empty, not another soul around, so we had a much more natural encounter with the Grand Canyon, without the need for any huge, steel construction jutting into the canyon like an unsightly nail to enhance our experience. It was truly breathtaking. I’ve never seen something so endlessly vast in my life.