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'.



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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.