UTAH, ARIZONA & NEVADA BLOG (written 12/6/19)

The Wild West. Epic scenery. Pioneers. Route 66. Red Indians. Ghost towns. Two-mile-long trains.

With so many themes, is it hard to know where to begin a blog about the USA's South-West?
How about this?
The very first person I met on our trip was friends with the sister of Butch Cassidy, the Wild West's most successful outlaw.

WESTERN MAGIC
I've loved Westerns since I was a kid. Thanks, Dad.
I've loved history – particularly exploration of new lands – since a round-the-world trip 15 years ago, at age 27.
So I was cooing with delight when sitting in a rocking chair in the actual cabin of the sheriff who rescued Mormon pioneers stuck in snow in 1856.
And when my son Leo, 3, and I climbed onto a real hooped canvas wagon in a restored 1880 village, all my dreams had come true.

Within five minutes of arriving for my first taste of the Wild West at Salt Late City's Mormon Pioneer Museum, I was rubbing my jetlagged eyes with disbelief when, while leafing through a Butch Cassidy book, the elderly librarian told me she was a family friend. (and Cassidy's sister gave her a wedding present).

Constance Hutchison, the librarian, insists Cassidy was not killed in Bolivia – as shown in Paul Newman & Robert Redford's movie – but escaped and returned to Utah, died in 1937 and is buried within a day's ride of his hometown Circleville.
Constance's surprises just kept coming. She's also a direct descendant of the 1620 Mayflower's crewman John Alden.


NOW SIT DOWN, IT'S ALL MADE UP
Now make sure you're sitting down, Western fans.

The Wild West as you know it is a complete fabrication. Hollywood movie directors made the whole thing up.

Only a handful of face-to-face gunfights ever happened (eg OK Corral), and none at high noon.
Gunmen, who didn't wear cowboy hats and didn't wear holsters but kept a gun in their pocket, did not wait for an opponent to draw first, did not shoot from the hip without aiming, did not shoot accurately, and did not shoot from distance but close-up.
The fabrication about gunfights comes from sensational novels written after an 1867 newspaper article about a rare real gunfight involving Wild Bill Hickock. These novels were the inspiration for Hollywood westerns.
There were plenty of murders though, and gunmen were happy to shoot someone in the back, as Jesse James' cousin did to him to claim reward money.

And Native Americans were not the bad guys. They helped pioneers (who were stealing their land) navigate and plant crops, and traded with them.
Pioneers didn't circle their wagons to protect against Indians, but to prevent their cattle wandering off.


TUMBLEWEED & GOLD
But a two-foot wide ball of tumbleweed really did blow into our car one day.
The wind really does make a swish sound as it blows through scattered trees.
And the sheriff still posts $1,000 reward notices in saloon windows for a burglar.

Inside that saloon – the old stagecoach stables in Chloride, Arizona, population 420 now but 5,000 in the 1870s gold and silver strikes – a cowboy sung and danced to Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.
We walked with only moonlight and a creaking hotel sign to guide us between restored wooden buildings in Oatman, population 70 but boasting 13 hotels and a suburb of tent brothels when $1 billion of gold was mined in the 1910s.
The next day, as a rattlesnake chattered, I found miners' century-old tins of oysters in gullies and peered between 20metre-high collapsed wooden mineheads down shafts, some 400m deep.


PIONEER SPIRIT
The California Gold Rush of 1849 had fanned the rush west.

The astonishing fact is that 500,000 pioneers made the five-month journey of up to 2,000 miles from the Mississippi over the Rockies for a new life in the West between 1830 and 1870 – and all those over age five walked. The whole way. Barefoot (Most were too poor to afford shoes).

Wagons were full with 1,200kg of dried food and equipment. Extra weight would slow the mule/ox, and the path was too narrow for wagons behind to overtake.
One in 10 pioneers died on the way, mainly due to disease, often cholera from polluted water, sometimes rivers accidentally polluted upstream by other pioneers.

Incredibly, 6,000 Mormons didn't even use wagons. The man of the family simply pulled a mini-wagon 'handcart.'
To understand why they did it, you need to understand how appalling conditions were in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution had turned cities into slums.
Poor factory workers met Mormon preachers and swopped 16 hours a day in a factory for a new life in the USA's West.

So when the pioneers finally made it to the West, what awaited them?
Racing to build a log cabin before they froze to death in winter.


TINGLES FOR ROCKS
I'd always loved Australia's scenery the most. But sorry, Bruce and Sheila, the US is now in first place.
It's just so big and expansive. Salt Lake City's valley is a whopping 18 miles wide, boasting epic Utah skies and wispy clouds kicked up by the Rockies.
But to bust some more misconceptions; Arizona and around is not desert.
Parts have green bushes, parts have cattle ranches and even crops, and the Grand Canyon is rimmed by a beautiful gnarly pine forest with red soil, 8ft elk (we almost hit one), and tarantulas (actually harmless).
Most remarkably, snow-capped mountains are visible in June – even from Death Valley.

Feeling like a pinprick is easy at the mile-deep, nine mile-wide Grand Canyon, looking down at rocks almost two billion years old - half the age of Earth - then gazing up at the sparkling Milky Way, shooting stars and satellites.
The power of nature is everywhere, especially when you realise the Canyon was created in just six million years, a blink of an eye in geological terms.
Note the Grand Canyon National Park is actually more of a valley, as it is not sheer-walled. Other parts of the Colorado River do have vertical cliffs, such as the Grand Canyon image you probably have in your head right now (thanks to google photo results), 400m-high Horseshoe Bend, 100 miles away; and the 300m-high spot where Leo and I swam in water surprisingly tepid given it was snowmelt.
That was at adventure sports and RV ('recreational vehicle,' think caravan the size of a house) capital Moab, boasting rock arches, some of the world's top dinosaur sites, and a Wrangler-sponsored rodeo with all the locals brilliantly in jeans, Stetsons and check shirts.

But for me the scenery was all about Monument Valley, arguably the world's most iconic natural wonder thanks to John Wayne westerns starring the 400m-high rock stacks made of compressed sand dunes beside an ancient sea which split the USA 270 million years ago.

My tingling anticipation sensation in the days before visiting was comparable only to the days before seeing Machu Picchu and the Northern Lights.
And the immensity of USA vistas was summed up by the view made famous in Forrest Gump: a dead straight road to an horizon with silhouettes of Monument Valley.
13 Navajo families live in the valley itself.


NO “HOW,” NO TEEPEES
Now to quash some Indian myths.
They don't raise their hand and say “How.”
They don't live in tepees.
And a wigwam is not a teepee.

Only the Sioux said “Howgh,” and didn't raise their hand.
Only the Plains natives lived in tepees (up to 6m high, with nine poles representing the nine months of pregnancy, covered by 15 buffalo hides).
A wigwam is an igloo-like dome of skins over thin sticks.
Natives in the South-West lived in – and some still live in, such as the grandparents of several Navajo people I met – a hogan, a thick timbered dome caked in adobe earth on walls and roof.
Some lived in stone houses hid by cliffs.

Hundreds of tribes lived in America before Europeans arrived in 1607.
They hunted and gathered, and traded and fought with their neighbours, scalping them, gruesomely especially prising the scalps of women and children (Demonstrating they had entered the heart of their rivals' camps).

Their culture's transformation by the horse is viewed as arguably the biggest transformation to occur in any culture.
It was obtained from Spanish Mexico in the 1600s. Previously, to catch buffalo – their main food – they had to drive herds off a cliff or don a wolf hide and creep close enough to spear them.

But the USA's greed for gold and land (eg increasing the size of the country by 50 per cent after deliberately provoking war with newly-independent Mexico in 1848) meant the native population plummeted from between two and 15 million to 250,000 by 1890.
European diseases were the main cause. Indian Wars saw General Custer appallingly boast of easy victories after murdering women and children. Forced marches to detainment camps killed thousands.
No wonder the Hualapi people we met have brochures and posters calling their treatment genocide and terrorism.

Living standards today on reservations (semi-autonomous Indian land) are far lower than the general population.
60,000 of the 180,000 Navajo on their reservation have no mains electricity or water.
More than half of all deaths on the Hualapai reservation are alcohol-related.

But traditions remain.
All main life ceremonies are still held in hogans, including healing ceremonies as medicine men drizzle coloured sand on the floor to create stylized art symbols, wiped away before sunset to represent healing.
The biggest celebration in woman's life is for her first period, when 200 extended family members demolish a 5ft-wide cake. There's no typo.
Weddings – not allowed to someone within one of the foour clans each person has, and disproved of to a white person – attract 500 guests. All male guests must arrive by horse. Really.
Many Navajo speak their language as their first language. (and taught me, eg yaaheth = hello, dejunier = beautiful)
Most live in modern homes, but we saw elderly folk in a town dressed in stunning red and blue traditional clothes, even for a trip to the local supermarket.
And young adults share traditional beliefs – such as that rare tornadoes this year were punishment for the Navajo's current generation losing their culture.


SACRED TARMAC, TITANIC TRAINS
We followed the road of dreams down Route 66.
Tens of thousands of families in Model T Fords emigrated to California down the now-sacred Tarmac after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and 1930s Dust Bowl Great Plains drought.
Coming-of-age, Chicago-to-LA, 2,000-mile road trips followed in the 50s and 60s – and then the towns died overnight in 1984 when bypassed by new highways.
Now, Route 66 nostalgia is rescuing the towns with a tourism boom, especially in Seligman, Arizona, time-warped in the 1950s with neon signs and the famous Snowcap ice diner with old pick-up trucks parked in the garden with painted-on eyes on the windscreen – a significant inspiration for animated movie Cars.
The problem with a diner from 1953 is you have a 1953 menu.
We muddled our way through the menu, which included milkshake (a meal in itself), malt (1950s milkshake loaded with malt barley), float (ice cream in fizzy drink), root beer (fizzy sugarcane) and sundae (milkshake with ice cream).

The big attraction on Route 66 for Leo was not the road, not the milkshakes, and not the motels (hot tubs, ice machines and king-size beds blitzed preconceptions of low standards).
It was the freight train line, running alongside the road for...100 miles.
Leo's favourite activity on our trip was giving train drivers and lorry drivers the horn gesture (fist above head, pull arm down to shoulder level, shout 'naaah naaah,' leap with delight when driver lets blast).
First we counted a train with 109 wagons. We thought that was a big one. Then we got 128. Surely we couldn't beat that.
Then, one epic day, Leo and I leapt from our car at a level crossing as a train passed at 40mph. Over three minutes later - I know, I videoed it - a 272-wagon monster had passed.

Each wagon held a shipping container. They are 12m long. Plus coupling makes 15m per wagon x 272 wagons = 4km-long train.
Oh, and every wagon was stacked with two shipping containers. That's 530 shipping containers on one train. 40,000 tonnes. Half a cruise ship.
So that's why the train had nine engines.
And guess what? It overtook our car at 60mph later in the day.

Who goes to a place with such colossal sizes of road and rail?
People making colossal journeys of their own, of course.
An elderly couple in a glimmering red 1938 Buick with an immaculate dashboard pulled up next to us at a garage. They were doing a 2,500 mile return trip in three days each way.
Rock band AC/DC's Austrian bouncer gave Nati a spin on his Harley Davidson. He was doing 7,000 miles in three weeks.
But a guy I saw walking into a supermarket in a yellow shirt stole the show. Robert Cleave is 16 months into an 18,000-mile, 18-month round-the-world cycle. So how old is the fit fellow? 64 – he's just retired.


YES WE WENT TO VEGAS, NEW PERSPECTIVE
Our meagre 1,200 miles was accompanied by my exploding Spotify account's playlists of road trip rock, 50s and 60s, country, western movie themes, Aaron Copland's hoof-racing Hoedown (imagine the Oklahoma land rush as a five-minute classical epic), Native American flute – and house music classics such as Utah Saints, The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, and Power of American Natives.

There's a tiny time window to visit the USA's South West if you don't want to be frazzled or frozen.
Route 66 had snow two weeks before our 30C visit in early June.
Vegas, which has 4C spring nights, leapt in nine days from 22C to 38C - and is staying that hot every day the three months.
It's down to the 1,000-2,000 metre Colorado Plateau's altitude, and the desert.

Vegas, virtually single-handedly popularised by mobster-friendly Frank Sinatra by the way, is not a Dubai-esque futuristic metropolis in the desert. Two blocks off the main drag could be any other city (My attempt at performing the Levi's advert in a launderette was cut short by Nati).
But it's exciting to see the famous hotels (some with 16,000 beds; that's four cruise ships), Bellagio's fountains really are beautiful, 1950s Fremont Street's four-block long video ceiling is mesmerising, and the 1950s neon signs scrapyard is fun.

Salt Lake City is Vegas' antithesis. The near-sober, immaculate, blue-skied home of the Mormon church, is bursting with green grass and super-sized houses below the snow-capped edge of the Rocky Mountains.
It's super friendly, five-kid families are standard, and, walking down the street at sunset on Memorial Day, I was invited to a neighbours veranda barbecue and plied with hotdogs and amazing toasted marshmallow-and-cracker sandwiches.
They are great people, so they're not Trump supporters, of course. Wrong. They're all massive Trump fans.
The USA's South-West is not the land of fake news however, it's the land of no news. It was impossible to buy a newspaper. They're just not sold in shops any more.

As I was flying from Europe to the west of the USA for the first time, I expected we'd fly west from London, right?
So I was increasingly staggered to pass my home town of Lincoln, due north of London; then Edinburgh; Greenland's ice and fjords, and; Canadian Hudson Bay's five-mile wide icebergs drifting down the North West Passage.
The reason is the world's countries are not as we see them on the standard Mercator Projection world map, but actually, as the Peters Projection shows, droopy like wet washing on a line, so arcing north is shorter than flying west in the straight line you would expect on the Mercator Projection.

An appropriate start to a trip which also corrected my perspective on the magnificent Wild West.

GRAN CANARIA BLOG: 30/4/19 (mostly written 8/1/19)

 GRAN CANARIA BLOG: 30/4/19 (mostly written 8/1/19)

Drunk Brits. No culture. Crap food.
Welcome to Gran Canaria...right?
I was far more excited our trip meant Leo would have visited all six continents bar Antarctica by age 3yrs 4mths (it took me to 27; didn't even fly until 21).

CULTURE...BERBERS, STONE AGE, OBLITERATION
The Canary Islands, part of continental Africa, 70miles off the coast of Western Sahara (Morocco's disputed Berlin Wall-style enclosed territory), were created just like Hawaii: Earth's plates drift over a bubbling volcanic hot spot.
Berber Africans, from mountains in Algeria and Morocco, arrived around 1,000BC. They lost the ability to navigate by sea, and - incredibly - on some islands, even to swim; strongly suggesting they migrated to flee persecution, so had no need to sail as they no wish to return from their safe haven.
They lived as a Stone Age people - 500 miles from Europe - until just 600 years ago. (This is remarkable, but I remember on Easter Island being staggered it was Stone Age until 150 years ago).
Spain then did to the Canary Islands what it would do to Mexico's Aztecs and Peru's Incas: Obliteration.
Today, it feels nothing like Africa, and more like Latin America than Spain.

FOOD...WILD PICNICS, MARMITE
We picked wild figs, almonds and cactus fruit. We picnicked on local oranges, avocados, tomatoes, cheese, ham and 'morcilla dulce' sweet sausage (blackberry truffle meets black pudding. I loved it, Nati hated it and Leo was scared of it when I chased him round the room waving it).
We - OK, I - even tried gofio (the Canaries' Marmite; fine wheat/corn/fern root flour), great served like mashed potato in fish soup, but truly vomit-worthy when toasted mixed with milk as cereal.

RAVINES, FAKE BEACHES, SPRING BEFORE XMAS
The interior, laced with spectacular 1,000-metre high ravines studded with bright green scrub, looks quite like Peru's Sacred Valley to Machu Picchu.
And it boasts magical stargazing.
The coast poses the 'fake beach' question. On an island of grey beaches, by far the best are the two with imported sand (from the Sahara and Caribbean, which probably explains why one is yellow and one orange; unfortunately they look out of place as adjacent to one another).
So they're not real beaches, they're artifical, so don't feel as satisfying. But every park could equally be called a 'fake field,' and no-one moans about a park's authenticity.
Stacked high with cliff-hugging resorts, south coast authorities seem to have disposed of the town planning manual when approving developments.
Sahara-esque dunes made Playa del Ingles bearable for a night if we ignored swarms of old German tourists sitting by the cafes facing a car park and not the beach lined with more windbreaks than a bad day at Scarborough (it faces the cold prevailing wind).
Las Palmas, the capital, once sacked by Francis Drake (hero/pirate depending on if you're English or Spanish), has a magical small old town and sweeping beach.
Spring starts so early that almond trees were in blossom before Christmas.
The cold Canaries current meant the sea was cold but swimmable in January – and keeps summer temperatures 10C more bearable than nearby Morocco

MASH-UP MAGIC, THREE KINGS CHAOS
We'd arrived at lunchtime on New Year's Eve and were dancing within minutes as a brilliant local mash-up band segued through some of my favourite songs ever – AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long, U2's Where The Streets Have No Name and...Corona's Rhythm Of The Night.
Leo was asleep before midnight – helped by that time being the start of the party, not the end, as it would be in the UK.
But Leo got a second Christmas as Spanish kids receive their presents from the three wise men, not Father Christmas, on Epiphany, January 6.
Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar (in case you didn't remember) were magnificent, caked in make-up with beautiful hair and beards, riding camels and throwing thousands of boiled sweets to spark a joyous frenzy during a parade with 200 Roman musicians through the mountainside old town of Aguimes.
It was a great party.
And at last I got to see a drunk Brit. I looked in the mirror.

LOS ANGELES BLOG: 26/3/18

The house we stayed in looked like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air house.
We saw where Michael Jackson died.
Leo had an urgent bathroom moment outside Gucci in Beverly Hills.

ICONS
Los Angeles is iconic - thanks to movies, music, TV and a big sign.
It should have been New Jerseyland. The US’ fledgling film industry quit the east coast in 1910 due to licensing fees and awful weather ruining primitive moving image cameras.
A director tried filming in a village near sun-baked oil town LA and told his industry pals. The village had almost been called ‘Hauling Wood’ - but its founder edited its name to Hollywood.
By 1915, US movies made Brit Charlie Chaplin the most famous and well-paid person in the world.
The Beach Boys further popularised LA and California in the 1960s.
Baywatch – the most-watched US TV export – appealed to a new generation in the 1990s.
And the big sign helps. HOLLYWOODLAND's 40ft high letters were erected in 1923 to advertise as housing development. The last four letters were later scrapped.

LA IS COLD. REALLY.
But it's time to bust some LA myths.
The sea is cold. It's only bearable without a wetsuit in summer.
Most beaches have no surfers.
It’s not hot most of the year. Average maximum summer temperature as LA's main beach Santa Monica? 21C. London’s average is 22C. But LA does gets hotter inland, the area which also has mild 19C winters.
The traffic is not that bad. 10-lane freeways running right through the city (unlike London) mean driving is much faster than underground trains (unlike London).
Hollywood Boulevard is only four blocks of neon; the Oscars theatre is buried inside a shopping mall; and the only star we saw there was a meaty striped raccoon bigger than a fat cat.
Disneyland is five times smaller than Paris’ Disneyworld.

FRESH PRINCE & BAYWATCH
Some LA stereotypes are true.
It's massive. 20 San Franciscos would fit into LA’s 50×20 mile sprawl.
Hazy beach sunsets over lifeguard huts look like the Baywatch credits (minus Hoff/Pamela slow-mos).
Some houses really do look like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air set. I was waiting for Carlton and Big Phil to come down the sweeping staircase.
Some roads have 16 lanes.

They love sport. I counted 64 beach volleyball courts on just two beaches.
We skated the San Diego beach prom (Leo joined us in his pushchair); I played volleyball with spring break uni kids and basketball with Mexicanos; and we met one of the world’s top 20 ice hockey high school players training on the skate hockey pitch at our local park.

We hired a compact car but were given the smallest available – a $30,000 three-month old Chrysler 300 super-saloon so fat it was a struggle to squeeze into parking spaces.

In palm tree-lined Beverly Hills and the twisting Hollywood Hills, we see Jacko's house, where Britney Spears shaved her head, Tom Cruise’s old pad, David Beckham's mansion… and where the guy from Colombo lived.

Even the normal news is interesting. One day's LA Times newspaper business section alone contained: Facebook sold data to get Trump elected; US accesses travellers’ phone data via airport security scans; robot-driven car kills pedestrian; MGM chief executive quits.

And I almost spat out my sensational kettle popcorn when two 10ft dolphins leapt fully above breaking waves.

WE GOT OUR KICKS TO FINISH
On the last night of our three months in the USA, at Leo's insistence, we battled the cold to eat ice cream (Leo: “Ice, ice, I-C-E!”) on Santa Monica pier.
At my insistence, we danced to an electro-violin pop music busker.
At Nati’s insistence, we battled the gale to walk to the right to the end of the pier.
I'm glad we did.
It turns out the end of the pier is also one end of the legendary Route 66.
It neatly summed up LA: It all starts here.

SAN FRANCISCO BLOG: 18/3/18

San Francisco = new ideas.
From the Gold Rush to 1960s music, drugs, free speech and gay rights, to Silicon Valley's Google, Apple and Twitter generation, it happens here.

BEAUTY AND THE BAY
It's a beautiful city.
The Golden Gate Bridge frames skyscrapers next to cliffs, beaches and pin-prick kitesurfers – it’s up there with the world’s epic harbour views. New York, Sydney, Rio.
Perspective stuns as straight streets roll down hills almost to the horizon, flanked by immaculate wood-clad three-storey bay-window mansions.
100 sea lions bark beside a pier restaurant serving awesome clam chowder soup inside a bowl made of bread.
1,000-year-old giant redwood trees tower over lush gorges just north of town.
Little-known quadruple-span Bay Bridge’s night-time twinkles rival the Golden Gate vista.
And the world's biggest city park even has a herd of buffalo.

GOLD FEVER
I stand on the spot the Gold Rush began in 1848, as nuggets from the nearby Sierra Nevada were shown to a crowd.
I read the handwritten diary of the sawmill worker first to find gold: “Boys, I believe I may have found a gold mine.”
Possibly the biggest blunder in newspaper history followed. The editor visited the find location, didn’t pan water correctly and reported there was no gold.
£10billion-worth in today’s money was found in seven years.

With no law, San Francisco became the wildest of boomtowns.
California’s non-Indian population, 500 in 1848, rose to 300,000, via the overland route west, and by boat across disease-ridden Panama or round Cape Horn.
San Fran had hundreds of brothels. Ethanol and food colouring served up as wine. Murders every night. Runaway Australian convicts pillaging the city. Possees raised for vigilante justice.
Even women drugging men’s whisky with opium and selling them unconscious as sailors (victims woke up on boats bound for Asia). Not dissimilar to British Royal Navy's outrageous press gang recruiting tactics.

ALCATRAZ
On Alcatraz, we meet an ex-guard who worked with Frank Morris, played by Clint Eastwood in Escape From Alcatraz (three prisoners spend year using spoons to scrape concrete from air vents, leave paper mache heads in beds, climb from ventilation shaft, never seen again).
The guard’s verdict on the escapees? Drowned.
My verdict on visiting Alcatraz? Gripping.

CHOO CHOOS AND DING DINGS
No, not a shoe designer section (sorry, Nati).
San Francisco has every form of public transport imaginable. ‘Cable cars’ are old uphill trams. ‘Street cars’ are old flat trams. Muni is a new tram. So basically everything is a tram. Apart from Bart. That's a train.
Now you know why Leo has spent a week shouting ‘choo choo’ and ‘ding ding.’

THE CALIFORNIA WAY
Car accelerators and brakes must wear out fast here. In a grid-layout city, traffic lights or compulsory stops at every junction seem bonkers. Journey times would surely would be halved if one road had priority.

It sometimes rains every 10min. But it’s sometimes sunny enough for an end-of-winter Golden Gate vista picnic.

No wonder Yanks think the Brits are tight. 15-20% tips are standard, even from takeaway sandwich shops.

But we're learning the American way and the lingo.
“You're all set” = “Here’s your receipt.”
“In the back” = “Over there.”

And the popular “Right!” = “Yes!”
Probably what James Marshall exclaimed when he saw something glinting in the river on January 24, 1848, starting San Fran’s transformation from Mexican village to one of the world's great cities.

HAWAII BLOG: 11/3/18

Hijacking our 07-08 travel blog again to share this

HAWAII BLOG: 11/3/18

LIFE IN HAWAII

So far in 2018, we’ve survived a ballistic missile alert and being locked inside a volcano.

Welcome to life in Hawaii.

Living in Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, is a tourist fantasyland: Hundreds of gas flames shoot from head-high metal tubes on pavements (Tribute to beach fires lit by ancient Hawaiians to guide canoes); malls consist of New York designer stores plus giant trees; surf lessons cost $120.

But we're living like locals. We bought Hawaiians’ must-have accessory - a hammock. Nati made flower necklaces. I learnt to surf. Leo is learning the Shaka sign.

We’ve learnt life-work balance is in the right order here: Evening means 3pm onwards and it really is quite normal to play beach volleyball for three full days per week.

I do have a temporary office in our apartment. But it consists of an ironing board & stacked empty boxes of nappies, beer and cornflakes.

Priorities are different here. On New Year's Eve, Hawaii's main paper buried news 6000 homes will flood when sea levels rise, preferring a front page splash on tuna fish being cheap. (Raw tuna is the – surprisingly delicious - New Year meal here).

POLYNESIA & SUNSHINE

I love remote places. Hawaii is three-quarters of the way from Peru to New Zealand, and so far west that islands south of here are on the other side of the International Date Line.

Just when I was feeling chuffed to have visited the Polynesian Triangle’s three extremes (New Zealand, Easter Island, Hawaii), I found out Hawaii is actually in Oceania. Yes, the same continent as Australia. Then I was really pumped.

It’s year-round summer here.

But every Hawaiian island has the same extreme microclimate: West side dry (dusty river gorges), east side dripping wet (world’s wettest place is in Hawaii).

Rainfall is incredibly localised. The valley three miles from us is 10 times wetter than England. But it hardly ever rains in Waikiki.

And there’s snow right now on Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island. And don’t tell Edmund Hillary but it’s the tallest mountain in the world, measured from the seafloor.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Hawaii might be nervous about North Korea, but the islands will be destroyed by the ocean – eroded away, with nothing left above sea level in a few million years. It’s already happened to the other 200 volcanic islands in the chain which stretches to Alaska.

Unless a 500-metre high tsunami hits first.

There's no typo in that sentence. Underwater volcano collapses trigger mega-tsunamis. A 500-metre high one obliterated Hawaii's main island millions of years ago.

Hawaii’s islands - like most of Polynesia’s islands – were created by the Pacific Place plate moving north-west at 10cm a year, passing over a stationary hotspot in the earth's mantle, which bulged upwards to create 200 volcanic islands.

That’s why all Pacific Island chains run North-West to South-East. Cool hey?

CANOES & NATIVES

Asians paddled and later sailed canoes to settle Polynesia, arriving in Hawaii in two waves around 500 and 1000.

Captain Cook was the first European here, before being knifed in the back while kidnapping the island chief.

Apocalyptically, Hawaii’s native population - a million strong when Cook arrived – was reduced to 44,000 by European diseases in 100 years. 

The USA illegally grabbed Hawaii in 1898, about the same time it did similar to Cuba and Panama.

We went to Hawaii’s uplifting protest march on the 125th anniversary of the US takeover.

Hawaii has a 10% native population. They're in a better position than Aboriginals. They strive for the Maoris’ status in society.

FLOWERS & SHAKAS

This is a Hawaii blog so I’ve got to mention loud shirts, Mai Tai cocktails, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (singer with the most stunning voice who died from obesity), and Shaka gestures (a man lost his three middle fingers in sugar mill accident in 1960. When he waved, an iconic symbol was born).

Oh, and I forgot the stars. Hawaii’s amazing stars. The same stars that humans used to navigate to these beautiful islands in the first place.

PS The missile alert was a false alarm. And the guy from the volcano crater cafe unlocked the gates.

Playa Rincon, Dominican Republic

Caribbean tourism...but not as you know it

Hijacking our 07-08 travel blog to share this article I really enjoyed writing. It wasn't ever published (I was paid tho) - feedback, good or bad, is welcome.

By Alistair Grant
AFTER a slack-jawed stare at the deserted white sand, azure sea and towering coconut trees, there seems only one thing to do.
Gathering driftwood, fallen tree palms and creepers, I piece together my first raft, trying desperately to remember those reef knots and clove hitches I once knew.
An hour later, with the help of a young Dominican boy, I launch into buoyant waves.
Admittedly, the raft wouldn’t have made the prop list for Castaway - it is borderline seaworthy.
Nevertheless, ignoring the ’Wilson’ jokes/taunts of my girlfriend Nati on the Playa Rincon shoreline, I make steady if unspectacular progress with my bark oars, fulfilling a boyish fantasy a million miles away from most travellers‘ experience of this country.
The Dominican Republic is an all-inclusive hotels goliath; attracting half-a-million Brits annually as well as an endless stream of American college students.
The done thing is to spend a week or two in a resort strip: generally Playa Dorada, Punta Cana or Playa Dominicus.
Customary practice is for guests to eat and drink as much as possible, taking occasional overpriced trips beyond the gate guarding the buffet restaurants and manicured lawns.
Our trip is not the done thing, and there is no customary practice.
There is no hotel wristbands-only buffet spread out on Playa Rincon, because this stunning place has no hotels.
We are on the north coast of this nation about twice the size of Wales, the safer neighbour of strife-hit Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. Our beach is accessible only by motorboat or hour-long bumpy jeep ride.
Instead of a buffet, a lady operating a food shack for the dribble of visitors throws some firewood onto her rough brick stove, somehow producing marvellous grilled red snapper with fried bananas.
Tired from the raft building and paddling, we sit on powdery white sand beneath a palm tree and wash the meal down with a tall Presidente beer.
Refreshed, it is time to find desert: coconuts.
Lacking the agility to copy the Dominicans’ harvesting tactics - monkey-like scrambles up near-vertical trunks - we use the English approach.
Hurling logs skyward, I make a mental note to tell my mother. Those skills honed in childhood autumns throwing sticks at chestnut trees have finally come in use.
This time, the targets are bigger and a lot tastier than conkers.
One miss, two misses….12 misses and a couple of hits later, we are chopping open two giant coconuts with a machete.
Behind us, a 750m forest-clad ridge forms the backbone of the Peninsula de Samana, sheltering the DR’s biggest claim to fame.
A boat ride and hour’s zig-zagging minibus ride later, we arrive at deepwater Bahia de Samana, once the haunt of pirates attacking Spanish galleons, and now only inhabited by several thousand humpback whales.
North Atlantic humpbacks breed here between January and March every year after migrating up to 7,000km.
As Nati suggested, they must be desperate.
Equally so are the gaggle of American tourists, who rock our charter boat racing from port to starboard the moment a spout of water - a whale’s giveaway locator - shoots into the air.
Only the size of our hull must have prevented a capsize.
We follow a graceful mother and two-month old calf dipping in and out of the waves, and find two ‘fellas’ (as our English-speaking guide calls them) trying to impress the girls.
The pair show off a few tricks for their observers, although on this occasion don’t produce the spectacular leaps which make the humpbacks and this place famous.
Still, what we see is beautiful and natural, unlike one of the DR’s most infamous attractions; dolphins trapped in sea cages moored off the shore of the Bavaro hotel strip, near Punta Cana.
Charging tourists US$85 for a swim, the horrendously mis-named ’Dolphin Island’ has long been a target for criticism of the negative effect of the country‘s tourism empire.
We avoid that visitor trap and spend a couple of hours in a gua-gua. It is a form of minibus transport which, strangely, we find to be half the attraction of travelling in this country.
These are not minibuses by British standards, oh no.
Let’s call them Dominibuses - clapped-out vans usually with no doors but including any combination of the following: a buttock-clenching five passengers per bench seat; blaring merengue music, and; standard luggage plus live chickens and sacks of fruit and vegetables.
Despite requiring flexibility worthy of a contortionist and the patience of a saint, we realise we enjoy this peculiar mode of transport, offering unusual views of brightly-coloured wooden houses, beaches and forests at the roadside.
Unfolding ourselves after a serious squeeze, we arrive in the town of La Vega unprepared for a physical test of a different kind.
Today is a Sunday in February, and that means Carnival.
La Vega, we had heard, held the wildest celebration in the country.
And, true enough, what we are about to experience makes Notting Hill seem like a vicarage tea party.
Hundreds of men dressed in giant devil outfits race through the streets, swinging whips tipped with a thick rubber ball against unfortunate bystanders’ backsides.
And boy, do these diablos love a white ass to smack.
Feeling a little, ahem, raw, we choose a safer vantage point at the Carnival season’s climax in Santo Domingo, the DR’s historic capital.
Bottoms safely pressed against a fence, we admire the best troupes from towns across the country, able to make poor attempts at merengue and batacha steps without the threat of an imminent thwack and yelp of pain.
Next morning, free of fiestas and not worried about whips, we explore this city which doubles as a world heritage site.
Christopher Columbus landed on the north coast of Hispaniola in 1492, making the first significant landfall of his world-altering expedition.
After two attempts at settlement in the north had failed (due largely to fighting with the indigenous Taino population, soon to be wiped out by the colonists), Columbus’ brother Bartholomew moved the capital to its current location on the south coast.
Because of its key role in European settlement of the Americas, Santo Domingo boasts more firsts than Michael Schumacher.
It was the first city in the New World and had the first fortress, first university, first paved road and, arguably, the first cathedral - which is where we are now.
Pausing to brush up on our history, we discover Sir Francis Drake was once resident for a month in the building in which we stand.
It was 1586 and the famous English privateer (or pirate, if you are Spanish and hold the alternative view) had invaded and was looting the city for ransom.
Having seen where the Spaniards’ bad guy lived, we thought it only right to see where the good guy was.
Columbus’ tomb, the Faro a Colon, is a mammoth cross-shaped monument on a hillside.
Impressive, it certainly is.
There’s only one problem; no-one’s sure if he’s buried inside the casket here or in Seville.
Anyway, enough of the history lesson - we came here to see beaches and that’s where we’re going.
Next stop Playa Limon in the east, near Samana, via a four-hour gua-gua chug sharing a seat with school kids, oversize women and a sack of bananas.
The final 4km of this amusing journey, down a rutted dirt track, are on the back of a youth’s motoconcho (moped). A little precarious while juggling a 70-litre rucksack.
Our guest house, the most expensive of our trip, costs US$25 for an ensuite double and rents horses for a bargain US$10 an afternoon.
We pay up and procure the equine equivalent of the hare and the tortoise.
Nati’s horse, Ricardo, trots sensibly as we cross a slightly wild deserted beach and approach the breaking waves.
My mount, Pedro, suddenly acts as if he has had stimulants rather than straw in his nose-bag.
Our guides are disinterested so I opt to go for it, resisting the urge to yank the reins. We hit canter, then gallop and then whatever is faster than gallop.
My knees aching, the sand, surf and coconut trees flash past as the sea water flicks up from Pedro’s hooves. A truly exhilarating feeling.
As sunset nears, we pause for more conker-style stick throwing at coconuts, eventually hitting the target and gulping juice before scraping out crunchy white chunks.
We return to our accommodation, via a similarly hair-rising ride: why is it that horses don’t consider the height of their riders when charging past low-hanging trees?
As we arrive, Dominican workmen in trucks pull up and begin taking measurements in the forest.
Incredibly, they tell us developers have ordered a feasibility study for a possible resort.
Gobsmacked, we look through the coconut forest to the deep golden sand and aquamarine sea, listening to the thump of big, breaking waves.
We feel instantly fortunate; lucky that we were able to experience Playa Limon - and this remarkable country - like this.