The USA

The weather was warm, dry and sunny and despite my concerns about US customs I sailed through with no major problems.  Out on the street I was reminded very quickly that I was in Hollywood as I was stood next to Keiffer Sutherland waiting to cross the road. Then as I crossed the road Tricky, the singer/rapper from Bristol, crossed the road in front of me. Welcome to Hollywood!  My cousin had arranged a shuttle to their house in Westlake and the over-sizing began with the shuttle bus driver. He was pretty big. He also expected me to give him directions to where I was going. A bit strange considering I'm a Brit being picked up from an international airport. He complained about this as the journey went  and I was struck by his incredible laziness. I didn't know at the time but this was a representative introduction to West coast American service.

I had planned a short visit to the States catching up with friends and family rather than seeing the country. First stop was my cousin Iqbal and his family where I would base myself. I haven't been to America in 11 years and I have only been to LA but it really hasn't changed very much. It was nice to see Iqbal and the family again as I don't get to see them much. We had a couple of days together and then I hired a car and went to Glendale to meet an old Armenian friend of my fathers from Iran called Vartan. Glendale is a town east of LA which holds the largest Armenian community outside Armenia and Iran and is a little like being in Tehran with Persian and Armenian food everywhere and the same climate as Iran. In fact California is so close to Iran in terrain and weather it's small wonder that the largest Iranian community outside Iran is in California. On the way I dropped in on another Iranian friend called Parviz and his wife who run a dental practice on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. Last time I was in LA I stayed with them. They were very surprised to see me so we made arrangements to meet up later and I went on to see Vartan who used to ski with my dad in Iran. Last time I was in America we had a really good time and they are lovely people.

The driving in California is terrible. They drive in robotic trains as if they are driving in the only direction that exists and everyone must be going the same way. They don't signal, don't give way and can't seem to compute or react to anything out of their pre programmed journey. They don't know how to brake either. At 90MPH on the freeway they will stamp on the brake pedal for no apparent reason what so ever. The car is just an extension of the living room where people sit, eating and drinking whilst on the phone and oblivious to the world around them and this oblivious attitude became apparent throughout American life as the trip went on. That morning I had been contacted by my friend and colleague Adri, a photographer I work with in London. He was going to be in New Mexico the following week and invited me down to work with him so I set about making the arrangments. I stayed with Vartan for a couple of nights before he headed off to Armenia and then went back to Iqbal's via Santa Monica up Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. PCH is what you imagine California to look like. As you cruise up the coast surfers unload their boards from their cars in the sun and girls roller blade on the board walk. It's a great commute. Back at the house I spent a few days with the kids and Iqbal. We went to a birthday party at a bowling ally on the weekend which sounded like fun. I was introduced to the father of the boy whose birthday it was and he seemed very jolly and happy in his loud Hawaiian shirt and bermuda shorts having just parked his Hummer outside. 'So you've been around the world huh?! That's great, what was your favourite place?' ... 'Laos' ... 'Really what did you like so much?' ....'It was like stepping back 500 years. Their way of life is different and so amazing' I said. And I'd lost him. He seemed to just lose the ability to talk and looked at me like I was talking some strange foreign language. 'Great, great....Laos' he said and he just walked off! He briefly spoke to me again saying 'Laos huh....great, great' and walking off again. That obliviousness again. Californians seem to live in a bubble and the outside world is totally irrellavent to them.

The weekend was soon over and it was time for me to go to New Mexico. I left at 5am on the Monday morning flying from Burbank this time which is a small, and that morning, a rather chaotic airport. My flight was from Burbank to Albuquerque, via Denver. The only other option was to fly via San Francisco which seemed ludicrous. The flight went well but as we landed in Denver I felt the plane was coming in to land but couldn't see any land or ski or horizon. We just never seemed to leave the cloud and this seemed very disconcerting until suddenly as we got close to the ground I realised I couldn't see it because it was white. Denver was covered in snow and a freak blizzard was raging! I only had a fleece and a couple of T-shirts. The temperature in LA had been 100 and Denver was 30 which made me worry a little about the temperature in New Mexico. I went into the terminal to wait for my next flight and found that all flights were delayed by at least 2 hours due to the freak snow storm and the queue for deicing. We were then all told to get on the plane and sat there for 5 hours! Yes 5 hours sat in a plane burning fuel. I was sat next to Navaho Indian from Arizona who was very sweet and funny. She was at a teaching conference with a group from her community and some of them had not been on a plane before. As we talked she told me that she has a niece who is a single mother and is in the army stationed in Germany. She was apparently due to be sent to Iraq which they were very fearful of. I couldn't believe that there was actually a chance that a single mother would be posted there and this reminded me that I was in a country that is at war.

Eventually I arrived in Albuquerque and met up with Adri. It was strange to see him after some 11 months but only because it was not very strange at all. It seemed like I'd only seen him yesterday and we went off to pick the car up. We decided to drive straight to Santa Fe a couple of hours north. Arriving in Santa Fe we booked into a motel and went to a diner. Santa Fe is a nice town with a very weekend away tourist feel and we had a look around before heading to Los Alamos where the first atomic bomb was developed. We went into the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos where the history of the bomb's development is on display which felt like a celebration of the bomb and somehow didn't feel right. Of course some Americans feel it was right to drop the bomb. We asked if we could take some pictures and one woman was very nice and helpful. Another woman who worked there came over and seemed to be an irritant to her. Her expression seemed to say 'Oh god she's going to speak'.  As we setup our gear the second woman came over and said 'Please could you keep me out of your pictures as I work with counter insurgency and I don't want to be identified'.  She stared strangely which was due to the amount of Collagen and botox she had pumped into her face and I suspected she had had a face lift too as her face seemed a little tightly stretched over her bulging eyes. Her nose had also been done. Looking at her in her brightly coloured clothes I realised that we had found the twilight zone. In fact I think we were at the centre. I got the feeling over the next few days that the 'Twilight Zone' had not been a sci-fi TV drama at all but more an early reality TV series based in a small American town. I had found it hard to keep a straight face talking to Mrs. X (we wouldn't want to reveal her identity now would we) as she slurred her words probably because of the prosak or valium. Adri had to remind me to remain composed. There were a few elderly visitors as we set the camera up and one man enquired what we were doing. We had a discussion with him about the bomb and combat and this led to the current combat in Iraq. His rational was astounding, 'we wouldn't have to be at war but the bad people have the oil' he said. If only he knew! I knew American thought like this but I was still taken a back to hear this as he was nice friendly and quite open man in his 80's who looked like he is probably a great granddad. People just think in the craziest way. The oil has been there for thousands of millions of years and the people have been there since the beginning of civilisation, but because Americans want to drive their Hummers we become the bad people because they don't like paying for their oil. It's incredible.

We stayed in Los Alamos that night after having to make do with some super market food which we ate in front of the telly as everything shuts so early out there. You can eat late as long as you're happy to eat junk. We hit the road for Taos next morning and also took in the Rio Grande again which we had seen from another point the night before. It was very beautiful and is like a mini Grand Canyon. We covered a lot of ground and at the end of the day headed back to Albuquerque stopping at Los Alamos again to try a Vietnamese place we had seen the night before. It was great and relieved the severe food boredom we were feeling. We stayed in an airport hotel and the next day were both flying out, me to LA and Adri to London. I flew via Denver again and this time my connection was over booked so they offered a free internal round trip flight to anyone who was willing to miss the flight and fly later that day. I jumped at the chance and went to get some Mexican food as you don't get fed on internal American flights, much to my annoyance. I also rerouted to LAX so arriving back in LA I went to pick up a car and headed back to Iqbal and Jamie's house and to another weekend with the family. The weather again was fabulous and over the weekend we went for Persian food, hung out in the jackouzi and I went to Yoga class with Jamie which was pretty cool. Then it was off to Malibu for an evening with Parvis and family at their house on top of the seafront by Pepperdine University campus on PCH. It's an amzing house overlooking the sea and sunset. More Persian food and I set off down PCH to Orange County to visit my cousin Kian whom I had seen in Bangkok when I stayed with his father Kew.  I arrived late and met his mum briefly before we headed off to his place. We only had 2 days but I got an idea of Orange County at least.

And that is the Californian experience, a bubble where the rest of the world doesn't really exist or if it does it is in some kind of parallel universe. Anyway after the brief visit it was time for me to catch my plane and fly to NYC from LAX. I thought I had a direct flight but I was flying via Chicago on the red eye. Chicago was a surprise from the sky. It has massive residential suburbs but the high rise city area on the coast is tiny. But that was all I saw. Then back on the same plane to LaGuardia airport in New York and after some haggling and aggravation over my ski bag, I got a shuttle to Greenwich Village where my cousin Babak lives. On the drive over New York was another surprise and looks really quaint and pretty in an unkempt kind of way a bit like London. I was very surprised how much like London it is in fact.

I haven't seen Babak for many years and he's changed quite a lot. We went off into town for a look around heading straight for Ground Zero which is surprising again in that it's such a small area and some very old buildings close to the twin towers were unaffected. They literally came straight down. One building very close is warped from the heat. It's a huge building and claims that it is warped and dangerous have been denied. I spent a few days seeing the town including the Empire state where the queue was massive but the view was excellent. The Empire state itself was pretty under whelming as a building and the tourist circus they have setup inside is ridiculous. The Chrysler building is stunning however. After the Empire state I went to MOMA, The Museum of Modern Art, which was great.  It's not the Tate Modern but great. The metro is good but like all big cities it has a system that takes a while to understand. Best of all though the food improved at last. There is plenty of good, cheap food in New York and no strip malls.

For the weekend I went to Phillidelphea to visit Tom and Amanda who I met in Queenstown in New Zealand. They were good fun and invited me over to spend an evening in Pennsilvania and Philli. I got the New Jersey link train from Penn Station and they picked me up. Tom and Amanda took me for Cheese stake, pizza and cheesy chips.  Not healthy but good. and that evening I went out with Tom and the boys to a local bar where we had a fair few beers after which we did burn outs all the way home in the V8 pickup truck while they whooped out of the window! Can't get more American than that, although the truck was Japanese. In the morning we got up and all went for breakfast at a diner followed by a lovely Italian lunch back at the house and then I was on the move again back to New York where I was straight out to dinner with Babak and some friends in 'The Village'. And that was it all of a sudden. The next morning I was getting ready to leave. Babak was flying to Paris and so we took a car to the airport that evening and checking in I was all of a sudden on my way home spending the last night of my trip on a 747 over the Atlantic. America was such a blur I didn't really think about getting home. After 11 months and 2 weeks I arrived in London to warm weather in November where my parents met me at the Airport.

I've been back about 3 weeks and I'm working already mostly on freelance web design and in the studio a little where I got to look at my film from the trip for the first time. It's been a bit strange to be home but not in the ways I had expected. I've been super busy which is why I haven't written for a while and I guess I'll have to write a mail about home. Anyway I'm home now for those who didn't know so say Hi. Somehow I'm not sure I'll be around that long ;o)

Ciao,

Kaveh.

Leaving New Zealand

Hello, it's been a while so I'll have to split this email into 2. I thought my emails would be more frequent once I began to move again but I have had little time to sit down and write.

Despite some late snow I didn't ski again in New Zealand. There were many injuries in the last week so it was a good idea. Instead I spent my last weeks in Wanaka swimming in the local pool and getting things in place to move on. The car was up for sale and I was very low on money so I did agonies a little about what to do next.  I was finding it difficult to leave Wanaka and every time I decided to leave I found a reason to stay so I forced the issue by giving my land lady notice thinking when my notice was up it was time to leave. Of course friends offered me a place to sleep for free so I was tempted to stay another weekend but the night before my rent was up I went round town saying goodbye to friends. The car was getting little genuine interest but as I prepared to start the 5 hour drive to Christchurch someone rang about the car and came to have a look. He seemed interested and I gave him till lunchtime to decide but he never got back to me. It was a shame as that would have made life very easy.  So, I packed the car, went into town for one last pie from the 'Dough Bin' and set off towards Christchurch.  My money had run out and the trip north would be pricey if I had to go all the way to Auckland but I had heard that the market for cars was far better.

Over the previous fortnight people had been slowly leaving town.  One friend called Pascal had decided to cycle to Bay of Islands north of Auckland. His van had packed up while in Wanaka and when he found no economical way to fix it he had to give the van away and decided to make the trip on his girlfriends push bike which was too small, with an improvised tent and a didgeridoo made from a piece of plastic plumbing tube. It's a very long trip but the weather had been fine with spring having been virtually bypassed for full summer. As soon as he left town though, a cold front hit the south island and he had 3 days of snow as he made his way past mount cook. As I left town he contacted me randomly to tell me where he was and knowing I would be passing I arranged to meet him in Geraldine where he was staying in his home made tent!

So I began my journey and before long the scenery began to change very dramatically.  Having become used to the valley settings of Wanaka and Queenstown where you are over shadowed by the mountains all day I was surprised by the more open and dramatic scenery I experienced as I left that area behind and headed towards mount cook. Up here the mountains become bigger but the valleys under them are more open.  There was a lot of colour and the road twisted and turned gently which made for a nice drive. The car was going well.  I had a small leak which dripped onto the wiper switch when it rained and switched the wipers on permanently and of course it began to raintermittentlyitantly so I didn't really need them on. The only way round was to pull the switch out and sit it to dry on the heater. I still loved my amusing car though and the idea of parting with her made me sad as we had become companions on these long trips. On the way we passed some funny little towns that had a very small town feel to the point of being a little odd sometimes. The weather was fabulous and constantly changing like proper New Zealand weather does. I passed Lake Tekapo and then Mount Cook and although the peak was shrouded in cloud it was still very beautiful. The crazy bright pastel blue rivers which ran from the mountain glaciers looked amazing in the sun which broke through big dark clouds that moved rapidly overhead.

Eventually I arrived in Geraldine. It's a funny little town in the middle of nowhere and after some searching using Pascal's very Italian directions I found him in a camp site on the outskirts of the town. The centre of the campsite was an old wooden church which was now being used as hostel like accommodation with a big wood burner and small wood paneled rooms. Pascal had set his tent, fabricated from various tent pieces and tar poulen under a tree and had been there a day already. It was nice to see him as I had felt quite lonely being on the road on my own again and not knowing anyone at my final destination. It had been a very strange feeling as my departure from Wanaka had been very non eventful and quick. We had a long chat and made a very nice meal of steak, onions, potatoes and couscous with bean salad. It was delicious and massive. Pascal had had quite an adventure since leaving Wanaka and seemed very enthused by the experience. It seemed to be a lot of fun and he had the time and space to loose himself in his journey. It got late and I didn't really fancy continuing with the drive to Christchurch in the rain and dark so I took a bed in the old church. I was the only person sleeping in there and Pascal assured me that there must be a lot of ghosts as it was a church. Thanks man! It was a spookyspookey with the fire banging and cracking through the night and the funny little windows. I had a very sound and warm sleep though considering how cold it was. Next morning we had an early breakfast and I saw Pascal off before heading off myself to Christchurch. The drive changed again and was flat and straight on the straightest road in New Zealand. It was nice to just relax and drive in a straight line for a change and it was a relief to the fuel bill also. Arriving in Christchurch was strange. I had becomcountrifiedtryfied in Wanaka and the sprawling suburbs and industrial look of the city didn't sit well with me. I felt very out of sorts with no view of the lake and mountain and a more scruffy urban environment surrounding me. After looking around at a couple of hostels I decided on Foley Towers which was setup and is still owned by the founder of BBH which is the best and most popular hostel organisation in New Zealand. It seemed a little quirky at first but soon became like a home and is a fantastic hostel. By the end of the first evening I was making plenty of friends. I had noticed that one girl was a north Londoner and I was pretty sure she was Greek so she was probably from Southgate or Palmers Green. When we spoke she was from Grange Park, where I live in London, and once she told me which road I knew who she must be. I said is your name Constantinou and she nearly fell off her chair. She turned out to be the sister of a guy I went to school with who's mum went to school with my mum. I'd say 'small world' but I can't stand that saying. The world is massive. These things just happen. We had a lot of laughs over the next few days.

The purpose of going to Christchurch had been to find to a better market to sell my car but after checking things out the rumors proved to be empty and the mass of people now arriving for the summer season were in fact to be found in Auckland where cars were selling in large numbers and quickly. I was disappointed and the thought of driving that distance and staying in Auckland just to sell the car didn't fill me with joy. There had been a few people looking for cars at the hostel but no-one wanted to spend as much as I was asking. One chap in particular wanted a jeep to carry his hang glider.  He could give me $1500 which is what I had paid for it and I was very tempted.  I had also been thinking about what I really wanted to do next and deep down I had no interest in going to Fiji, Cook Island or Tahiti. They are all just too touristy and my budget would not allow for a decent diving trip.  A quick visit to Air New Zealand made my mind up. My flight went from Christchurch to Auckland, Fiji, Cook Island, Tahiti and then LA.  For a mere $100 (£40) I could fly to LA direct from Christchurch that weekend on a half empty plane!  And so I went to the hostel, told Matt he could have the car for that price and the following day we did the deal and my flight was booked. It was such a relief and it gave me a few days to enjoy Christchurch which had grown on me a lot having made many friends in the hostel. Over the next few days there was much drinking and late nights in the hostel living room playing 'shit head' and 'Jenga'. I ate out a lot and spent a fair bit of cash on some music as New Zealand music is very good but hard to get hold of outside the country. There is a lot of reggae and folk music which is excellent. I also bought a merino wool jumper as I had gotten into the habit of wearing New Zealand wool clothing I had bought for a few dollars in a recycle centre. It's fantastic stuff in the cold. Some of the snow boarders from the Rookie course in Wanaka also came up to Christchurch for the weekend and we all had a night out on the town before going our separate ways.

So it was time to leave and on Sunday 2nd October I got packed and my friend Leonardo kindly drove me to the airport. I was a little concerned that David another Italian friend was kindly smoking a joint over my luggage in the back of the car and filling the car with smoke. Turning up at LAX airport with luggage stinking of weed could be interesting. I already have a passport which says born in Tehran and more trouble in the airport was not really what I needed. Then once Leonardo left the airport I realised I had left my rather expensive MP3 player which is also my back up drive for photos on the book shelf in the living room of the hostel. The 1st time I had forgotten things on this trip. He kindly brought it to the airport for me though and I checked in. I felt very strange about leaving New Zealand which had literally become home. I have family in the States and my trip there was more to see people than the place but I didn't relish the idea of going there and in my mind my trip was already over. New Zealand had been wonderful with it's clean air, smoke free bars and the simple outdoors lifestyle had made me very healthy, relaxed and happy. It's a place I could live very happily and life has a good balance. You sometimes do miss the culture and hustle bustle of Europe but it is a wonderful place. I had made so many friends and the summer was bringing a very different feel to traveling there which I would have loved to stay and enjoy but I knew it was time to go home for various reasons most importantly, money. So I left with very mixed feelings.

Next..... America! Oh my goodness!