Weblog » 2005 » May

I am writing this post from my computer at home in Douglassville, PA USA. It is currently 78 days since I started this trip, and as of this moment, I am finished.

The PA DMV apologized for not being more helpful, and offered to fax me a copy of my driving record if I needed it. I told them to mail it to my house where I plan to add it to my scrapbook of other papers from the trip.

I could not justify waiting so long to start the trip across country, and so I boarded a flight to Philadelphia and, for the last time, put on my backpack and set out.

Amtrak was an option early on, but unfortunately my finances are not what they were when I started the trip; only for an outrageous price with several connections and only coach seating for days would I have been able to get an Amtrak ticket.

Leaving Tuesday from San Francisco with my driveaway car would have been possible but would have cost more than the plane ticket and extended my trip far past the 80 day mark, leaving me unprepared for my move to Poughkeepsie.

Besides, I missed my MINI.

It’s been a great trip. I will tell you all about it as I add my pictures (full size versions up now, edited versions soon) and finish my travelogue. I’ve come to realize (while trying to write it on my laptop during the journey) that it is far too much information to stick onto a few pages. Compressing it down just makes it sound like a boring journal without any of the delightful “mikeyoung-isms” you all know and love. So, expect to see that whole section expanded and filled… especially with witty photo capitions.

For now, give me a shout/comment telling me that you’re still alive. Let me know where you are living now (for those of you who have moved) and what you are up to. I’m going to try to catch up with the world I’ve missed over the next few weeks and your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Yesterday, I hit snag #1 on my trip around the world. It took until I was almost finished with the trip to encounter a serious problem, and of course that serious problem had to occur in America — not Russia or Morocco, or even Venezuela with its mudslides.

It looks like the drive across the country will not be happening, and we can all thank the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles for throwing up roadblocks.

In Russia, plenty of paperwork was filled out, stamped, and filed; in America, no one seems to know how to fill out the paperwork required — and when they do, they decide that it will take 2 weeks to do it.

I tried to get my Drive-Away car the other day. The idea behind this system is that people who move across the country don’t want to drive their cars; so, they pay a company to find a driver to do it for them. Its a great idea, and allows many foreign visitors to see America very cheaply, as they get a car essentially for free as long as they get it from point A to point B.

I informed the drive-away company of my desire to drive across the country, and everything looked perfect: There was a car going from San Francisco to Windsor, CT; it was a small car and would be cheap in terms of gas; I had given them my information and was set to pick up my car on Friday afternoon.

Then, the hassles started.

If I had been a foreign visitor with an international driver’s license, everything would have gone smoothly. Unfortunately, I was a Pennsylvania resident and Pennsylvania is one of 3 states which require up to 2 weeks to perform a simple driver’s background check. The guys at the drive-away company hadn’t realized this when they told me to head up to San Francisco, and when I arrived it was a disaster.

Without a driver history, the drive-away company can’t insure me, and I can’t drive across the country. There is no way I can wait 2 weeks to get my history, and so it looks like my trip will end here.

I tried to go online to see if I could expidite the process, and PA does offer an online driver history system. Delightfully, after paying $5 to get it, the PA system failed to work — instead giving me a blank page with a big “Log Out” button.

In Russia, state-sponsored atheism had one benefit: people worked on Sundays. Here in America, no one does, and so I am stuck. I can either wait till monday morning and call the PA DMV and hope to be able to work things out, or I can say, “screw it all” and board a $250 plane back home. I need to buy the ticket with at least one day’s notice to get the cheapest fare, so that’s another difficulty.

It’s a sad state of affairs… I knew this part of the trip would be the trickiest to organize, but to come so close just to have it all dashed is still upsetting. Part of me wants to wait and see if I can get it sorted out; the other part says, “you’ve lost 15 pounds in Siberia; you’ve sailed across the Mediterranean; you’ve stayed in both a 5-star hotel and a sleazy guesthouse in Hong Kong. It’s time to go home.”

If you have an opinion, voice it now.

I’m home.

Well, at least in terms of my home country. I left Fiji 3 hours from now, and travelled back in time to Los Angeles.

I’m staying the night in a hostel here with a bunch of other people from Fiji, and then tomorrow I’m taking the train (and bus it seems) to San Francisco to pick up a car fromt he Auto Driveaway people. Then I’m planning on meeting Dave Maino from PSU who is doing an internship there.

After that, it’s off across the country on a random, unplanned trek across the country.

I’m not yet sure what I should make an effort to see, so if anyone has any suggestions, give me a list! Bear in mind, however, that I have no money and am running down the reserves on the way back home.

So, Fiji is going well. I’ve just gotten back from the Robinson Crusoe island and a few days of relaxing on the beach and some fun partying with all the other backpackers at night (til the power goes out at midnight)

I’m off now to another island with some snorkeling and peaceful white sand beaches to lay out and relax before I fly back home.

Its been great to not have to worry about things and just take a “real” vacation finally. I’m looking forward to coming home, but I’m also glad that the trip isn’t quite over and I’ve still got all of the US to drive through.

Ok, so for the record, I am now in Fiji.

I am terribly behind on my weblog. I’ve missed writing about leaving Hong Kong and New Zealand. I will try to rectify that now.

After my dad left Hong Kong, I stayed one night in a delightfully tiny cupboard. The room had a bed which literally occupied 90% of the space. It was wall, bed, wall in one direction and wall, bed, 2 foot space, door in the other. It cost 200 Hong Kong Dollars and was the cheapest in the area.

I then left for a 10 hour flight to New Zealand. It was uneventful, and would have been much better had I been able to sleep. SInce I couldn’t, I slept most of the next day in Auckland, New Zealand.

New Zealand is a very beautiful place, and although it is crawling with backpackers it wasn’t quite like Barcelona. Barcelona was full of kids with lots of money and not so much time; they partied hard. New Zealand is full of kids with lots of time and little money; they partied hard — economically.

I jumped off a building in Auckland. Everyone else was doing it…

It was a “fall-by-wire” jump where they allow you to free-fall and then slow you down just before you go splat. It was something like 500 feet, from the tallest building in the southern Hemisphere (they say). I survived and got a certificate.

While I was falling from the sky, Clark from PSU called me. I obviously didn’t answer during the decent, and I didn’t notice the ring so it wasn’t distracting from the ground flying up to meet me. When I called back, I realized that no one knew where I was… so I went online first thing in Fiji.

So far, Fiji is great. It is definitely a tourist place, but you can tell that there are certain “segregated” areas for real tourists and us backpackers. The backpacker side is much more real and seems more enjoyable.
The guy staying in my room just arrived as well, and he is on the same flight as me back to the USA. We are both winding up round-the-world trips and jsut want to lay out on the beach, so it looks like we’ll be hitching around together to visit the different beaches and outlying islands.

I’ve only been here a few hours, but I can already tell its going to be nice and relaxing… as long as I can get insect repellant.

I’ll try to write again, but it might be tough as the islands we are planning on going to don’t even have electricity, much less internet access. If worse comes to worse, you’ll hear from me again once I arrive in Los Angeles on the 12th.

So after I arrived in my luxourious hotel room and had a good sleep, I ventured out into Hong Kong to make good use of the three days I had before my dad arrived in China.

I did indeed take the funicular railway up to the “Peak” which, I might add, wasn’t really the peak at all. Then I climbed the actual peak via the trails until I reached the radio towers.

I also rode the Hong Kong trams around the town just for the sake of doing it. These trams run along what used to be the coastline of the island. Due to reclamation, the lines are now a few blocks back but still feature the thin double-decker trams of death that have been around for quite a while.

I also took the ferry between Kowloon (the peninsula) and Central (the island) and visited some of the parks.

The people of Hong Kong have some quirky things in their city, and I love them all.
The first was a foot massage path that had a bunch of little stones designed to poke into your feet as you walked over it. The path was excrutiatingly painful, which did make your feet feel much better afterwards (if only because they were numb from the assault).
The second was a pedestrian escalator. Yes, I am serious. The people of the city had to travel to work at the bottom of the mountain, and return home at the side of the mountain every day. So, to ease their labors, they built an escalator right up the side of the mountain. It is preposterous. Its actually a series of quite a few escalators and you can get off at every block, but I still rode it from start to finish just because it was there.

When my dad finally arrived, I took the subway and train over to the border and to his hotel in Shenzhen. From that point, we spent a few days visiting Shenzhen and then Guangzhou (Canton) and then made our way back to Hong Kong.

Shenzhen has this amazing little theme park called “Window of the World” which consists of every major landmark — miniturized. There were the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, The Statue of Liberty, the Hermatige, Mount Rushmore, and even Venezuelan mudslides. It was just so delightfully tacky that I had to go and take pictures. Most of the minitures were quite well done, and now I feel like I made it to all of those places that I never got a chance to travel to… albeit as a giant.

Also, since I had internet access in my dad’s hotels, I was able to put up my photos. I haven’t organized them other than putting them in categories as to where they were from, and I haven’t manipulated them other than making them small enough to upload. (They currently fill up several GB on my computer) But for all of you who have been complaining, they are there now.

As my brother tells me, I haven’t taken any pictures of myself or other people. This is true. You should remember that I am travelling alone, and can’t exactly take many pictures of myself standing next to things. Similarly, in many of the places I have been, if you hand someone your camera, they will either steal it or ask for money to take the picture. So, what you see is what I saw…

Here’s the link, and it will also be accessible in the links list to the right. It looks as if I will only be able to finish my travelogue and completely organize my photos after I finish the trip, but I will try to get as much stuff up for people to see.

http://www.elyoung.com/resources/images/trip/raw/