Travel Biography - Week 57.

General Overview of 1995 Journey across the States.

I was born and grew up at just the right time in human history. Indeed, I could have married during the early seventies when I entered my twenties. But having had a girlfriend around 1971-1972, and after I was dumped by her, it turned out that I was not yet mature enough to take on married responsibilities. Just as well as the old saying, Marry in haste, repent at leisure, would have applied, and I might have regretted it later in life.

On the opposite end of the timescale, I was already married and the father of our first daughter when on September 11th, 2001, a terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center forever changed the outlook on travel, especially long-haul.

Entry into the United States from the UK is a good example. For my first and second visits in the seventies, I had to apply for an entry visa at the US Embassy in London, a procedure which took quite a bit of effort to complete. Then in 1986, the Visa Waiver Scheme was introduced for all British and European tourists for visits not exceeding three months. However, as a consequence of 9/11, the US Government now require an ESTA, which the applicant would have to pay for. Therefore, I was able to take advantage of a fifteen-year window of opportunity, enabling me to enter the USA with nothing more than a valid passport with a stub of a green card stapled inside.

And so, there I was, leaning out of the window of a side-street hotel on the day of arrival from the UK, looking out into the night. However, I had one special target to aim for - to hike the Grand Canyon for the second time to bag some outstanding photos.

St Louis 1995. The Gateway Arch

The Journey Begins. Arrival at St Louis Missouri.

After spending much of the next day in Manhatten, I boarded the Greyhound Bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which I remember well from 1978. Although the bus was destined for Los Angeles, my first stop on the route would be St Louis in Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, with the west shore of the State of Illinois lining its east bank. 

The ride brought flashbacks from 1978 as the bus cruised through the Hudson Tunnel and opened out into New Jersey. This section of the whole trip was "fast" - that is, I didn't make any overnight or extended day stops between New York and St Louis, although there were a couple of cities where I had an hour's pause whilst the bus was given a service. At one point I was humming to myself Simon and Garfunkel's song America. Its lyrics were about a young couple on board a Greyhound Bus out looking for their destiny.

The fact that the distance from New York to St Louis is nearly as long as from London to Rome reveals the sheer size of the country. On the Americruiser, it took 21 hours to complete the journey, approximately a third of the way towards the Pacific Coast. 

After alighting at St Louis, I felt relieved to be walking on solid ground again. Looking for a hostel in St Louis wasn't easy, as I was about to find out here in America. North American HI-AYH-affiliated hostels tended to be privately-owned properties which were registered by the association rather than owned directly by the administrative body as were the YHA England &Wales properties. Thus, they tended to be located out of town for running cost reasons. One hostel that appeared on the guide I had on me was the Huckleberry Finn Hostel, an AYH-affiliated but private property some distance out of town. (This was 1995. The hostel has closed and gone out of existence long since then.)

Not knowing where to go, I asked a taxi driver to take me to the hostel. The driver pulled a face as if I was wasting his time. Then it became apparent. The distance was short, a five-minute drive to a residential estate south of the city centre. Right outside the hostel was a local bus stop for services into town. Hoping a bed was available this time, I entered the empty property. In searching around, I strayed into the owner's apartment, but the fellow wasn't rude or unkind. Instead, he reserved a bed for me and asked me whether I had a fear of mice. Reassured, he then told me to come back later, as the hostel was closed for the day.

After checking in that evening (having remembered the route from the City Centre, approx a twenty-minute walk) I claimed my bed. This was my very first hostelling experience across the Atlantic. Although I was already well experienced with British, European and Israeli hostels, this was to be a new and exciting experience I call The American Dream.

Nearby was a small superstore, and I found this to be convenient for stocking up. With other backpackers having arrived, I made my way to the kitchen and found the food storage pigeonholes near the cookers. I stooped to look inside. There were several dead cockroaches within the pigeonhole. Feeling disgusted at the sight and of the odour emanating from the tiny corpses, I decided to keep all my groceries in the rucksack next to my bed and only take out what I need for that evening.

 The courthouse from the crest of Gateway Arch. 1995.

While I was cooking dinner, I began chatting with another backpacker from Germany, who eventually began lightheartedly to refer to me as That crazy Englishman - although I had never considered myself English, but a full-blood Italian who happen to be British by law, and a holder of a British passport. Unfortunately, although he got to know my name, I never asked what his name was, so for the convenience of this biography, I'll refer to him as James.

James wasn't alone but had a companion with him. As we cooked, we chatted, and it was then I realised that I had forgotten to bring the Greyhound route map of the USA with me before taking off. It was still resting on the dining room table in my apartment. James took out his copy of the map and gave it to me, and he said that I could keep it. This, with my anticipation to hike the Grand Canyon, might have earned me the title of crazy Englishman.

I was talking with James when, all of a sudden, a grey mouse sprang out of a mousehole in the kitchen, then hesitated as it paused to look up at us, then sprang across the floor to a hidden corner. I wasn't startled, as I was already aware of its presence, having been warned of it when I turned up earlier that afternoon. But I have wondered how many females in the past, and even some males, had let out a whoop at its sudden appearance? And I also began to wonder how the AYH accepted the owner's application for registration after what was meant to have been a vigorous inspection.

It was during the following morning that what I saw and experienced made me decide that the Huckleberry Finn Hostel was the worst hostel I ever stayed in, and no other establishment anywhere around the world had ever eclipsed it. And that was the row of toilet cubicles. For me who had a pressing urge, the Western saloon bar type of swing doors was an awful embarrassment! Any individual passing by can turn and look straight in. But like any living organism, nature's call had to be answered. But fortunately, hardly anyone passed by on that occasion and nobody looked in. 

Toilets with doors like this!

A little later that morning, I stood with three other backpackers at the bus stop. Presently, a saloon car driven by a middle-aged gentleman stopped at the bus stop and explained that his wife ran a grocery shop downtown and needed helpers for the day, whom she was willing to pay. All three of us climbed into the car after waiting a good while for a (non-existent) bus to turn up at the stop. Once in town, the car paused not at the shop but in a parking bay. The driver told us all to sit and wait while he got out of the car and slammed the door shut, leaving us four alone.

That's when I said,

Listen, all of you. What we're doing is illegal. If caught by the authorities, it could mean a jail term or thrown out of the country.

Immediately, the guy on my right flung open the rear door, and so did the fellow on my left, and both of them climbed out, with me following the chap on my right. However, the backpacker who sat in the front passenger seat remained in the car to await the driver. Probably the prospect of some extra cash in his pocket cancelled out any fears or apprehensions of tampering with the law, thus willing enough to take the risk.

I made my way to the 192-metre-high St Louis Gateway Arch, and I remembered it as it was in 1978. Nothing had changed, except that this time, I was swimming in deep curiosity about the reaction of the car driver when he sees that three of the four passengers legged at the first opportunity. Indeed, I would have loved to have seen his face!

Like I did fifteen years earlier, I boarded one of the eight cylindrical pods that make up the tram operating in one of the arch's curved legs There is a tram on each of the legs, making a total of 16 pods, thus a total capacity of 80 people are carried at any one time, five people in each pod. However, during my 1995 visit, the tram in the south leg was out of action, thus only the north leg gave access to the curved viewing platform at the crest. I also spent some time in the underground museum, learning why the arch was there in the first place and the trail that would lead from it westward, towards the Pacific coast in the Oregon area.

There were sofas here and there in the museum, and one, in particular, faced the entrance. Some people entered and they were messing about. Then they saw me looking up at them and they suddenly started to behave. They thought I was a staff member and carried authority. I watched as they made their way to the tram doors.

I also paid a visit to the famous St Louis Law Court, I visit I didn't make in 1978. This was the place where a slave named Dered Scott sued for his freedom in 1846, and won the case. I managed to see the interior.

Interior of the St Louis Law Court, 1995.

Later that evening, I made dinner and began to wind down. James and his mate had already moved on. The next day, I would vacate my bed and make my way to the Greyhound Bus terminal to continue the journey west. The journey, which includes sections of Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, would, from Missouri, cross into the State of Oklahoma, where the bus has a service stop at Tulsa, a town whose name was made famous by the late Gene Pitney's 1963 chart-topping song, 24 Hours from Tulsa. 

The bus then would journey on and cross the border from Oklahoma into the northern square of Texas, where a stop would be made at Amarillo. After leaving the town whose name was also made famous in the pop song world by Tony Christie's 1971 hit, Is This the Way to Amarillo, the bus would eventually cross from Texas into New Mexico, where I made a day stop at Albuquerque. From New Mexico, I travel on to reach Flagstaff in Arizona, the start of the branch journey to the Grand Canyon.

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Next Week: More details on the St Louis to Grand Canyon Greyhound Bus travel.

What an Insult!

Browsing the Daily Mail online is something I find so relaxing after a day's work window cleaning. So it was the case when I looked through the Travel section that one article caught my attention. Under the heading: Stress and cheap travel deals are main reasons why Brits are going on more holidays...the article went on to announce that 40% of British people fly out every six months. Whew! Sometimes it's great when you work for a generous company allowing you so much paid holiday time in the year, as well as earning an income which meets those needs, on top of all the mundane day-to-day living expenses, such as groceries, fuel bills, mortgage or rental, and household utilities, not to mention both local and national income taxes. Yet these lucky 40% are a world away from one of the poverty heap who has to make a somewhat embarrassing visit to a Food Bank just to sustain himself and his family.

With the class divide so firmly entrenched in Britain, I was taken back by this comment written by a female living in Leamington Spa, which read, word for word:
I'm not a snob, but I wish the working class would holiday in Blackpool or Littlehampton where they belong and let us middle class enjoy our holidays without having to see, hear and smell the working class.

At first I thought such a comment would arouse fury, but instead I just marvelled, perhaps even feeling somewhat amused. As it stands at the moment of this typing, this comment had received 29 red arrows of disapproval, and 16 green arrows of agreement. This woman knew nothing of the meaning of Travel. But just to remind those not living in the UK, and as such, may not be so familiar with British geography, Blackpool is a brash seaside resort on the Lancastrian coast of the Irish Sea, made famous for its Autumn illuminations, while Littlehampton, far from being brash, is a quiet and sedate resort on the Sussex coast which has a very middle class feel to the town. By using these two contrasting resorts as a haunt for the crowds of loud mouthing, smelly yobs parading drunk along the promenade betrays her ignorance, not only of Travel in itself, but also of English geography.

It was obvious to her that foreign travel should be reserved for the better off, you know the sort - the man wearing a suit and tie in the office, along with the equally educated female graduate, not at all unlike those who compete in Alan Sugar's or Donald Trump's The Apprentice. Fiercely ambitious, yet remaining stoic, with an iron-like stiff upper lip, and a vast education to match, these men and women with their British Bulldog reserve are a world away from the crowd of British students in Thailand, on a gap-year, getting utterly sloshed on cheap booze and drugs while frolicking on the beach, with sex thrown in. Somehow I find it difficult to believe that the fun-addicted student staying at a backpacker's hostel in the far East, stoned out of his wits on alcohol and cocaine as he attempts to seduce a young woman - will be the same serious businessman walking along Waterloo Bridge spanning across the River Thames in London, while dressed immaculately in a suit, kept dry from the drizzle by the umbrella held aloft. As he enters through the doors of the shimmering glass office block, it will never enter his mind that the very office building he is so proud to earn his keep was constructed by the "smelly working class."

The Gherkin is one of many office buildings in London.

Yes, the same "smelly working classes" not only built the shimmering office block, but had also constructed the roads and walkways leading up to it, along with the rail tracks on which his train ran, maintained and kept in order by these same "base" men. If at home, the water mains happen to burst in the freezing Winter, he is not going to call a fellow office colleague, but a plumber dressed in a greasy boiler suit. As he looks around, everything he sees, which has made his day to day living so much more convenient, were built or laid down by the "smelly working classes" who would not want to be seen sunbathing next to him under the warm sun at a beach on the Greek island of Rhodes or Crete, or for that matter, at the Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles.

I, for one, am not ashamed to call myself a window cleaner, and as working class as I can get. When I first began cleaning windows in 1980, I asked my father whether I was a businessman, as back then,  as now, have always been self employed. His reply, quite correctly, was that I could not be classed as a businessman, as such a profession fulfilled a very different role to what I was doing. In other words, I was not in the same category as a bloke in a suit sitting at a desk. However, there was nothing in my line of work to be ashamed about. Rather, into the 1990s, I began to work extra harder, saved up harder, and started long-haul travel for myself, beginning with Israel in 1993.

Far from drunken frolicking on the beach, rather I was soaking in the ancient history and modern Jerusalem alike, checking out all the archaeology, as well as admiring the Medieval architecture of churches, and walking through the narrow, roofed souq with the pungent fragrances of spices and mint. Even the tiny backpacker's hostel I stayed in had a Medieval domed ceiling, and it was located at the heart of the Old City. To the east, the Mount of Olives overlooks the whole urban area, and I felt such a privilege to witness the very site where  the resurrected Jesus was lifted to Heaven and, sometime in the future, will return to that very spot, rather dramatically, as his arrival will cause the mount to split into two, according to Zechariah 14:3-5.

Hosteling can be a fantastic experience without the need of hedonism or excess alcohol. While staying at the hostel in Jerusalem, another backpacker from South Africa and I started talking, and eventually asked me why I was in Israel. I explained to him how close to Jesus I felt as I walked the same streets he walked, see the same sites as narrated in the Bible, and to pray over the city from the Mount of Olives. I then explained the Gospel to him, and he asked me questions. Although this grew into a discussion meant to be between my new friend and myself, when I looked up, there were three or four other faces looking straight at me and apparently listened into our conversation. Then at another time, still at the same venue, there was this Irish builder who had just completed a year's contract in Israel, and was spending a few days bumming around before flying back home. The friendly banter over breakfast between myself and the builder must have lasted a better part of an hour, but there again, I was in no hurry to leave, neither was he.

Then not to mention other places visited, such as Singapore, and particularly Sentosa Island, with its superb sandy beach, lined with palm trees which marked the edge of beautiful tropical gardens. These in themselves were a joy to wander through, without losing sight of the giant Merlion which dominated the whole island. Sentosa Island also boasted a superb outdoor water theme park with slides and other fun features, such as the Lazy River, where the provision of an inflated ring for reclining makes superb scenic relaxation as it drifted slowly, winding through lush tropical vegetation flourishing on both sides of the river. Who says we as believers in Christ cannot have some fun?

Then Australia, with the Great Barrier Reef! Did I spend my time there getting sloshed with alcohol? Rather, exploring the Great Barrier Reef using snorkel gear was an eye-opener. Imagine my fascination and joy as I stood on a small beach of coarse sand and broken seashells which surrounded Green Island coral cay, and then the even lusher Low Island coral cay with its rich reef surrounding the tiny speck of land in the ocean, with beautifully coloured Surgeon Fish and the striped Zebra Fish swimming peacefully near us, totally unperturbed by our presence. Then the Sydney Opera House, in which I bought a ticket to watch and listen to a classical piece - the skill needed for composition of the music earned a standing ovation even from myself, a smelly working class window cleaner, seen inside an opera house rather than at a nightclub or bar slowly becoming fizzled with alcohol.

Then I must mention the United States. Backpacking there was also great, if the humdrum of modern city after modern city can be absorbed without the tediousness of it all. Downtown New York City provided free education at a museum close to the New York Stock Exchange. In here I learnt of how New York was the original capital city of the USA before being transferred to Philadelphia, then to Washington D.C. as it stands today. Then not to mention the 630 foot high steel arch which dominates St. Louis in Missouri. This monument marks the Gateway to the West, commemorating the western expansion of the United States from the Mississippi River, which in a geographical sense, splits the whole nation into two distinct halves. Then how can I not travel across America without visiting - and hiking - the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River? This two-day trek along the Bright Angel Trail allowed me to take a closer look at the different coloured layers of sedimentary rock which erosion over time formed the pinnacles of Buddha, Zoroaster and Isis Buttes, along with Pharaoh's Pyramid, and the spectacular view of Battleship Rock set almost right above the trail. I then spent the night at a spot close to where the Bright Angel Creek joins the main Colorado River, under a dome of brilliant stars filling the sky to a level I have never observed over the UK.

The Gateway Arch, St.Luis, Missouri

Such was the experience of an unmarried working class window cleaner out on a long-haul backpacking trip. If I had an odour, then nobody told me about it, to make me aware of the smell, particularly on any of the overnight rides on the Greyhound Bus, where the passenger sitting right next to me would have suffered most. After marriage, I took my wife to Kos, Rhodes, Israel, Sicily, Malta and Lanzarote. Not so much as independent backpacking as package holidays designed for families, but as a couple we did backpack Israel in the year 2000.

So what does all this mean? The comment written by this female was published on the Internet worldwide which gives a bad impression of the working class as only flying to the sunshine abroad for a grand booze up. Okay, much of that is true. Ibiza in the Mediterranean is a hotspot for both working and middle class revellers, their social distinctions becoming blurred with the alcohol. But let us not generalise all working class holidaymakers as boozers and beach revellers while the middle class are all on educational tours. All that is pure tosh! If anything, the drunken revellers and beach frolickers on the shores of Thailand are more than likely to be university students out on a gap year, a bit of relief after remaining closeted in educational institutes for much of their lives. But to believe that foreign travel should be reserves for the middle classes only, would put the culture of Britain back by at least fifty years.