The Blog Awards

We're home again. Happily. We've reunited with family (see below) and started putting down roots (tentatively). Some pics of homecoming below, followed by The Blog Awards and some highlights.


Me with my mum, sister and her baby Abigail (7 months).

The Blog Awards (Thank you and Goodnight)

Most avid blog supporter: Jeff Brovet/ Delene Richards
Most avid blog commenter: Christine Terry
Most enthusiastic blog-writer-encourager: Nicci O'Keeffe
Most unexpected blog commenter: Duncan Smallbones/ Nickie Wallace
Most cheeky blog comments: Glen Tyler

Best meal: Salmon and moose in the Arctic (with Patrick and the Hickers)
Best view: North Slope, Alaskan Arctic (also Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica- 40 degrees 100% humidity and jungle to the horizon)
Most romantic place: Log cabin, Shenandoah (Virginia)
Scariest experience: Robyn- Bear Night, Arctic, Mark- Me, scared?
Most mileage travelled in one day: 800 miles
Worst experience: Hiking in dust storm, Grand Canyon (Robyn howling, Mark bewildered)
Best night out: New Orleans: Zydeco dancing and then dinner with Don and Jenny
Most fun experience: Riding tsunami from calving glacier in kayak on Prince William Sound, Alaska (again!)
Best musical moment: Preservation Hall, New Orleans (jazz maestros making music for your feet)
Worst campsite: Pecos, Texas (also Monument Valley and also......)
Best night's sleep: the next night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas
Worst injury: Robyn impaling herself on multiple tree spikes in bog in Costa Rica (followed by Mark chuckling while watching pulsation as spikes removed from artery)
Favourite supermarket: Trader Joe's ("I thought we were only going in for broccoli!")
Hottest night: La Leona, Corcovado National Park.
Coldest night: Robyn- Natchez Trace, Mississippi Mark- Me, cold?
Worst fight: New Jersey Turnpike (rush hour, Robyn driving, Mark thinking he should be driving)
Most confusing moment: Lost in New York City (part of above)
Friendliest stranger: Gene, Road Worker, Dalton Highway, Arctic
Most beautiful bird: Black throated trogon (also Scarlet Macaw and Long tailed Jaeger)

Stats
Distance covered: 24 000 km (15000 miles)
Budget daily: $70-80
Highest altitude: 12000 feet (Wheeler Peak walk, Taos, New Mexico)
Coldest temperature: -8 C, Vermont
Hottest temperature: Overcountable in Costa Rica

So, we're signing out. If you're interested in hearing about life in Cape Town, email us on: mark.richards111@gmail.com and robynltyler@gmail.com.

Byeeeeeee...

One last (icy) blast

It would be out of keeping with our record thus far to make a quiet exit from this road trip of a lifetime. Think selling our car 2 days before our departure, driving a car into a snowy ditch, twizzling gracefully across a frozen pond in Central Park and one last hell-bent careen down a ski slope.

Abandoning our lovemobile in Anneke and David's driveway, we hopped on the downtown train to the city on Thursday night. Courtesy of our fairygodmother and father in Seattle, we spent the night in an eclectic loft apartment BnB in lower Manhattan. Oh, the lights! The lights! The Rockefeller Christmas tree. The freezing wind funneling through the skyscrapers. Muffled up to our eyeballs we roamed the streets and sought refuge in the alluring shops and eateries around Union Square. A memorable meal was consumed at Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown before skeetering back to Pleasantville.

The Leffels had dangled a huge carrot of a chance to ski one last time with them at a resort in Vermont, but we had to sell our car. Phone calls flew back and forth and we were awoken on Saturday morning by a Nigerian paediatrician at the door. The deal was sealed then and there and before you could say 'off-piste', we were gunning it up the Taconic Parkway to join the Leffels for a morning of skiing on Sunday.

It was all going swimmingly until we lept into David's car to drive back to Pleasantville. The one piece of advice any experienced snow-and-ice driver tells you is: don't use the brakes. This works until you have to avoid an oncoming car in your lane. Mark cleverly chose the fluffiest snow drift to drive into, so no damage was done, but the wheels were firmly cemented into the ditch. A cold three hours passed before the last party was back on the road heading South in snow, sleet, rain and black ice to do our final pack and say goodbye to Uncle Sam.

We are currently in a jet-lagged fug, but happy to be with Nicci and Lyons to gird our loins for the final leg to Cape Town.

We are considering setting up a support group for our readers after our next and final blog. Some of you might be wondering: what will we do while sipping our morning coffee? how will we fulfil our need for escapism now? how will we get that psychological boost we're used to from comparing our settled, safe lives with the madness and risk of robynandmarksroadtrip? While of course others will be thinking...uh, where did you guys go again? No travel souvenirs for you lot. In any event, in our last blog, we'll be giving back to you loyal readers. Expect: The Blog Awards.

R

Cape Cod

Leaving Narnia we nudged our ever loyal Veedub towards the coast to see how the Pilgrim Fathers took to their new land. A sort of ending of the north-easternmost leg of our journey. This time, having had our vows put to the test on the New Jersey Turnpike, we were armed with that miracle of marital bliss- a satellite navigator run by the inimitable Carla, she of silky smooth voice with ne'er a flicker of emotional perturbation at a wanton right turn instead of straight (she only gets mildly excited when you arrive at your destination).

Through Boston and down into the Cape we ran, savouring these hours of freedom and our own company after the days of merry thronging with friends and family that have marked our last few weeks. We had hoped to camp somewhere, but it appears that not all of America shares our passion for stars and frozen noses. Thus it was that we wended our way to the Provincetown Inn, an old establishment, empty passages still echoing summer gaiety.

It was here in Provincetown that the first Pilgrims first made landfall opting to carry on sailing to Plymouth. The beaches are wind swept and wide. Eider ducks bob in the water and only the most solitary of walkers passes by. It was good to wander along the miles of seashore together, a happy mix of silence and easy conversation- remembering, looking ahead, dreaming.

It is altogether a piece of America that lives for summer's throng- children in the sand, men in boats and picnic baskets. Now it is cold with a watery sun and we tilted our way to New York, the beginning of the end.

Snow and sleigh bells

Being in New England at this time of year feels a little like Narnia. For us, in our memories, it will always be winter, but never Christmas. Everything is moving inexorably towards December 25th with mistletoe, tinsel and even snow in tow. But alas, we'll be missing the main event.

We've beaten a hasty path North from Raleigh via Virginia (a romantic stop in a woodsy cabin with a jacuzzi bath in the bedroom - Mark's birthday treat) to New Hampshire where we're visiting our friend John Cristando at Dartmouth College. A learning environment second to none with - my favourite - a glittering Christmas tree in the middle of the Green. We've rubbed shoulders with bright, handsome MBA students in John's class and gawked at the fluffy white stuff like we haven't since seeing it adorn the slopes of Meribel, France, in January.


It is chilly, though, and our chances of one more night camping on the coast are looking slim. Unless we want to risk having a sheriff shining his flashlight into our van window in the dead of night on the side of a highway. All shall be revealed in a few days. After Cape Cod, we'll be heading back to Pleasantville, New York until we fly to London on the 15th, with a short excursion into The City on the 10th.

We have our seatbelts securely fastened for the transition to South Africa. Hopefully the turbulence will be light. Come on Lovemobile, you can do it! (Or rather, come on Craigslist, work your magic!)

R

DC dreaming

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” American Constitution

Lovemobile in general anaesthesia, warm home with the Brovets in Raleigh, Robyn and I headed up to Washington DC in a normal automobile. Landing deep in the travail of Thanksgiving highway gridlock we got to the Mall late in the afternoon as dusk on a wintry day fell. Our walking route took in the milestones of this great human experiment that is the USA. Washington, Jefferson, FDR and Lincoln, silent in their stone memorials. Men who saw clearly and with tenacity and the power of the word, written and spoken, laid down some of the yardposts of this thing we call democracy. As Jeff Brovet noted after we recounted our afternoon on the Mall, “It makes you want to go off and start your own country”.

Next to the memorials of these figures, stand those more solemn and disquieting. Vietnam, Korea, World War II. Less easy to place amid the triumphs earlier in our perambulation. A reminder of the discord between gilded words and human proclivity. But perhaps also a call to return again and again to the task of nation building.

A new day and to the other end of the Mall to realise the childhood dream of visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Apollo, Voyager, Hubble, Saturn V, Orville and Wilbur, Lindbergh, Yeager, X-15 among the pantheon. And even deeper into the psyche of closet petrol-head, boy-racer, eternal kid- an IMAX of an F-15 jet pilot zooming around with his buddies over Nevada. Brilliant. Left alone by my spouse, I became even more primal, finding my way to the Geology section of the Natural History Museum where for a happy two hours I crept amidst the prizes of asteroids, mantle and tectonic.

And then to the holy of holies. As icy winds whipped across the Capitol, we came as disciples from across the globe to that most sacrosanct. For we waited our cold two hours to enter into the chamber of the US Supreme Court. Negotiating our way through body searches and metal detectors we came to look through the heavy red curtains into the room where two people argued their cases before the nine assembled judges of the Court. It is here that all of us came to see the daily reminder of the task never finished, yet so eagerly embarked upon by Messrs Jefferson et al. No great potentate. Only men and women arguing the cases for freedom and obligation.


Outside, the wind was still icy, but we made our return to Raleigh inspired by this wonderful, perplexing country. Awaiting us, birthday tuna and a happy two year old.

M

A Turkey Tale

The warmth of the hearth, grandma's pie and an overwhelmingly large stuffed bird in the oven - no, we haven't time-warped 5 weeks ahead to Christmas, it's Thanksgiving: that most American of holidays.

We are hunkering down at our friends the Brovets in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our happily extended stay with them is due to the Lovemobile demanding some love (I mean, honestly!) in the form of a new cleavis. I know that sounds like a growth you might expect to find in a nasty place, but it's actually a part of a transmission. So we'll make a foray to DC to get our fix of Smithsonianism and then come back to Raleigh for a last soiree with the Brovets and pick up our spanking new cleavis and attendant Lovemobile.

Mark has refound his love of the kitchen and has baked scones and rusks and tonight is cooking the quail he shot in Beaufort. Yes, we entered the life of the landed gentry for a day. I even had a go at sporting clay shooting. I managed to hit a few flying clay frisbees, which was a miracle seeing as my eyes were closed for many shots as I was recovering from the kick of the shotgun.

Erin, Jeff, Bongi and Ava have been facilitating our relaxation and recuperation of body and mind (this is becoming a theme on the East Coast) in the form of lots of good eating and drinking, a brand new uber guest bed and daily walks around the neighbourhood or local Shelly Lake. We have loved sharing family and extended-family time with the Brovets. Today Erin treated me to a true shopping spree to make sure I'm ready to hit 5th Avenue and the Kings Road in an upcoming episode of 'The Road Trip goes Upscale'.



R

Y'all come back now!

'I am following the river, down the highway to the cradle of the Civil War' (Paul Simon)







































We're hunting down the elusive SOUTH. Everybody tells you, 'over in Alabama/South Carolina/Georgia - that's the real South. Now, you're not gonna taste grits like you'll have them in North Carolina/Mississippi.' Every town seems to have some claim to a conclusive battle in the Civil War. Certainly every state has a few claims on literary or musical greats. So we're still hunting.

Admittedly, our main concern these days is mileage and hence we've sacrificed dalliances into history. From New Orleans we raced up the Natchez Trace parkway through Mississippi and Alabama to Tennessee and now we've wound our way through Georgia to Beaufort, South Carolina. A key feature of our roadtrip at the moment is catching up with old friends. In Sewanee, Tennessee, we stayed the night with my friend Cari who was a camp counsellor with me when I was 18. In Beaufort we are hosted by the Burtons. Paul and Mark grew up barefoot and carefree in Ladysmith together in the '70s.

This part of the world is dead beautiful. It is the opening shots of 'Prince of Tides' - indeed Pat Conroy is a veritable neighbour of the Burtons. The abundant water teems with scaly, shelly, befeelered things, which are all good eatin' - all excepting the 'gators which stop you being lulled into a false sense of paradise.

Winter is extending its tentacles, even in the balmy South, and we feel like we've turned towards home. And what a good feeling that is, despite the delights that still await us.

R

Music is the language of us all (Cat Empire)

Emerging from the bayous of southern Louisiana a gearbox fixed with a spitball and something from the garbage, we were back on the road to our rendezvous with our friends Don and Jenny Broyles. They had once again arranged to lavish kindness on us with a stay with them in a grand old New Orleans hotel, replete with rooftop pool and PB&J sandwiches and milk at 10pm every night in the lobby.

New Orleans is like no other city we have experienced in the US. Bawdy, brazen and boozy. Dark alleys and Katrina's shadow only a part of a much longer shadow of travail. But somehow through these dark mills has sprung the defiant note of trumpet, trombone and ivory'd key. We have been privy to the clarion call of New Orleans' silky wee hours magic, sitting next to foot tappers from across the globe, revelling in husky crooners and the charms of ancient men behind drums, keys and reed. It is common knowledge here that one day ole Mistah St. Peter will revise his instrument of choice and welcome the glad throng of happy Saints marching in.

And then the food- gumbo, jambalaya, green tomatoes, shrimp, crawdad, crab and catfish po'boy fighting for the attention of my coronaries. Mere flailing on the hotel's treadmill in the gym upstairs to fight off slavery's most subtle revenge. Our trip also included a visit to a Creole sugar cane plantation, which not free from the 3 AM ring of the slave bell, was refreshingly different to the grand visions of the white columned facade of the English American plantation homes. Bright colours and a dark matriarch yelling at the Union battleship that cruised up the Mississippi lobbing shells at all the riverside mansions, "We fought with you against the English!". And a swamp cruise with a skipper who called gators out of the ooze like his children. And an evening of Zydeco dancing, merry men drawing us into the throng of Arcadian ritual and fun.


We eked out our last hours at the Preservation Hall, a humble room of only a few benches and standing room with walls carrying the rubbings of countless pilgrims to this shrine of syncopation and souls that soar.

Bayous, belles and biscuits

Writing this post from our hotel room in Le Pavillon on Poydras Street in New Orleans, it seems unbelievable that the world of Acadia (that's the Cajun world) is just a swamp or two away. We wound our way east from Houston through Southwest Louisiana to get to the Big Easy and passed through at least three different cultural enclaves along the way.

Louisiana has the headiest mix of cultural influences I've come across in any state so far. Africans from Senegal, French-Canadian refugees, Spanish, Native American (by name only, it's hard to feel the presence of the indigenous people here) and a myriad others have sparked each other off to fuel greater and more wild culinary and musical fires than could be expected in such a saturated place.

On Wednesday we ate corn dogs, fried chicken and fried catfish. We listened to Cajun music in a restaurant and camped in a state park between a levee and a swamp. For our next blog, we may have to provide a glossary of terms. I'm struggling with the lingo almost as much as I struggled to decipher Costa Rican Spanish.

We had a first minor calamity with our beloved lovemobile which was quickly remedied by some excellent mechanics at 'Cajun Transmissions'. We lost a vital piece of rubber from our transmission on a dirt road and cruised around in 3rd and 4th for a good few miles before it got replaced. But we're back in the saddle again and hoping for a trouble-free passage to the Big Apple.

We're lapping up everything New Orleansian and thoroughly enjoying the company of Don and Jenny.

R

Bumpy Rides

We’ve stowed our lovemobile and thrown ourselves upon the vagaries of public and self-powered transport while in Costa Rica. It has been an interesting change.

Our long distance bus rides from San Jose to Corcovado and back again and down to the Southern Caribbean coast have been painfully slow, but not bland. Indeed, food appears whenever the hunger pangs start to bite: on the bus in the form of oily pieces of dough handed out by migrant vendors or at wayside cafeterias set up for the purpose, serving chicken and rice – none of your Big Macs and Coke. On one trip we were entertained by a band of boy and girl scouts headed to a jamboree, toting flags and singing the Spanish equivalent of ‘Bobbejaan klim die berg, so hastig en so lastig…’

When things get really jungly, roads get really bad. To get into Corcovado National Park we jumped on a 4WD ‘collectivo’ and bounced around like so many sheep on their way to market. The road is 40km long, the trip takes 2 ½ hours.

Here in Manzanillo on the Caribbean coast we have had the pleasure of two-wheeled transport. Although ‘pleasure’ may be overstating it, as deciding whether to try to dodge potholes in the pitch dark or just go hell-for-leather and hope to skim over the top of them can be trying. But making the trip by full moon to eat at a bamboo-roofed Argentinian restaurant with four romantic tables open to the jungle was definitely worth it.

On Saturday we head north up to Volcan Arenal to, hopefully, catch a glimpse of some real, live lava. That's if we don't get carried away by one or other stinging, biting thing before then...

R

Living is a Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver can write a person’s socks off. Perhaps a case of judging a book by its cover but one of her books, a collection of essays, has for its cover a pair of scarlet macaws flying across rainforest in Costa Rica. The text and the cover thus burned themselves into my hippocampus, biding time till present fruition.

I am sitting on our viewing deck, a warm rain dripping through the canopy high above me. Around our cottage are numerous hibisci and other flowering bushes, each it seems with its own resident hummingbird. I have seen four different species here. They are constantly engaged in high speed aerial combat fending off interlopers bent and on nectar and wife thievery. Then it is to their own tended flowers that they return, wings a blur with beak gently probing the flowers, David Attenborough all the while lending commentary. Out of sight amongst the tree tops, howler monkeys are are calling across the forest. The noise can be arresting, sounding more like a tyrannosaurus than a primate.

Nights are warm and buggy. Days mostly cloudy with long rainy hours in the evening. The daily cycle of returning water to a sodden earth. The sun when it appears is bright and very hot. The ocean clear and hilariously warm. The undergrowth, rank and ever decaying, as though life and return are in some great struggle. Nature’s red tooth and claw are evident to match each wild iridescence.

This is a generative world though, and as I sit up here it is as good as walking on water.

Costa Rica con pictures!

Hot chick (literally - see that 'glow' on my arms) in the jungle (Corcovado).

Beach on the Pacific (West) coast.

Bolita hostel, border of Corcovado National Park, Osa Peninsula.

Costa Rica sans pictures

I can see our popularity ratings are going to take a plunge since we left our camera cable in our Eurovan in Houston. You'll just have to believe without seeing for now.

We are bringing our body temperatures down in the air-conditioned internet cafe in Puerto Jiminez after three nights in the jungle. This particular jungle ("the most biologically diverse place on earth" - National Geographic) resides on the Osa Peninsula in the south-western corner of Costa Rica. It teems with wildlife. I mean, it feels like you're wandering around in zoo; they're that easy to spot. Only they're all real, wild, free-range beasts of the forest.

We faced a set-back on arriving in Puerto Jiminez - the departure point for Corcovado National Park. The main station in the park is closed for October. And on a two-week schedule, we didn't have time to hang around. So we had to put our plans to trek across the park on ice and make others. We camped for two nights on the park's boundary hiked a day hike into the park. We saw toucans, scarlet macaws, black birds with red heads that even Mark didn't know the names of. We saw raccoon-like cuartis, spider monkeys and an anteater. Our eyes were on stalks. We returned to our camp with serious dehydration headaches, even though we drank water all day. You just pour sweat in the jungle. Well, Mark pours sweat, I pour 'glow', of course.

Last night we spent a deux in a remote 'hostel' (sleeping platform) in the jungle. I woke Mark up to check he wasn't being eaten by a fer de lance - one of the world's deadliest snakes - but other than that it was a beautifully peaceful night. We were woken up by howler monkeys this morning and ate papaya and bananas for breakfast.

Gotta go as we're due for dinner with two Dutch travellers we've met. Off to the Caribbean tomorrow.

R

Texas and spare thoughts

Of all the state caricatures that filled my mind,
perhaps the best defined was that of Texas.
Wide, brash, big hair, chiselled cowboy under a stetson, oil. Also that big belt buckle. So with some eager anticipation we floated down from our happy farm in New Mexico into west Texas, replete with cacti and prongorn antelope plodding along in a far away haze. Evening caught us in the fading light of Pecos where home was the wasteland on an RV park next to a big interstate. No matter as we travelled into our 16 wheeler dreams with plates of wonderful Mexican food in our bellies.




The following day's travels took us through a vast plane populated with oil pump jacks and tired old towns worthy of many a photographic anthology. Sky everwhere with a mere bump of hill many wagon days trail away. Those were my thoughts as I imagined myself on my steed wondering what I would have been thinking of were I that chiselled cowboy with my red bandana. I would certainly have noticed the road runner that scuttled across our car's path.






Then as though slipping through a door we emerged into the green and sea gifted breezes of Austin. And to see the shiny face of one Don Broyles who like a Scarlet Pimpernel dropped out of the sky to spend a wonderful 24 hours with us. Austin is an enticing city- lithe river runners, Dell, a university, green, vast clouds of bats, music and good food. But perhaps just the happy cloud of seeing Don again....drinking a beer and listening to great live music.

Onto Houston where we met the city on steroids (via 2 south africans and one bemused american eating a McDonalds (block your ears Tylers) meal on the lawn outside of said emporium). Vast with now what feels like terrifyingly highway driving. But from the hospitality of Don we drifted into the happy home of Cyndy and Howard (parents of an Alaskan friend) for more Mexican, great ice cream and a late night of packing before the adventure of Costa Rica.

-M