One Last Fitting

Spending a year and a half in hotel rooms means you start to find the little details fascinating (I did anyway). Here's the last hotel room shot from the trip, our framed air-conditioner controller in Bali.

For more photos of interesting/depressing/weird room fittings, see here, here, here, here and here.

Around Agra

Food map

One of the most spectacular architectural wonders of the world is surrounded by some of the most spectacular architectural failures. I'm talking about the hotels that have windowless walls, or teensy windows, facing the main attraction. View form our room (thorough cement grate).

The Taj and surrounds

Rooftop breakfast - Muesli, curd, milk tea and the Taj

Agra street

Behind the Taj is a river, and from there you can see the Taj for free (it costs over $20 to enter the grounds).

Offerings revealed by the low water level

McLeod Ganj - A Piece of Tibet

The main street and the gompa (temple)

Ever since he fled Tibet back 1959, the Dalai Lama has called McLeod Ganj his place of residence (it is never referred to as his ‘home’). From here the government in exile campaigns for true autonomy – a struggle that seems to be increasingly and tragically futile. Although there is support coming from various world powers, the stubbornness and greed shown by the Chinese government prevents any fair resolution from being reached.

McLeod Ganj

Along with the tragic history of Tibet, the Tibet Museum has some amazing photos of the Dalai Lama riding a donkey through the Himalayas on his way to India; eventually a quarter of a million Tibetans would make a similar journey to escape persecution in their own country. It is a highly risky journey – twenty-two days of hiking over the highest mountain passes in the world, suffering frostbite (most of the refugees do), and reaching India or Nepal does not guarantee that they wont be sent back to Lhasa and severe, inhuman punishment.

Typical weather in McLeod Ganj

Rain became a big part of our lives in McLeod Ganj

Many of them came to McLeod Ganj, and there is a strong Tibetan culture here. Every shop and hotel display ‘Free Tibet’ posters and Tibetan flags (which the Chinese government has banned in ‘Tibet China’, as they call it officially. They have also ‘banned’ the Dalai Lama from being reincarnated in Tibet). There are Buddhist prayer flags flying from most of the buildings and Tibetan stallholders selling jewellery and Tibetan food.

Tibetan flag and prayer flags

Badminton time

The Tibetan refugees seem to be doing well here, but it is sad to think that they’d probably rather be at home in a free Tibet, without fear of persecution.

Prayer wheels in the Gompa

Monks protest for a free Tibet. If they did this in Tibet, they'd be in prison for years.

We Arrive in India

Our hotel was hiding in there somewhere

Utterly exhausted, we arrived in Delhi; my bodyclock was telling me it now 3am and demanded I lie down and have a long, deep sleep. All my faculties were concentrated on the singular goal of spotting my name on a board held by the smiling, pre-arranged driver from the hotel, then of course motoring off to our pre-booked bed.

Of course, there was no sign to be seen, and no sign of our driver.

We now faced the vile prospect of catching a taxi from the airport to Central Delhi. Generally, taxi drivers are bastards, and the ones who hang around airports and bus stations are utter bastards. The drivers of Delhi have a reputation for being a particularly devious and untrustworthy breed; never taking you where you ask, dropping you off in the middle of nowhere, overcharging and generally enjoying making your life hell.

With this in mind we peered outside to a screaming throng of touts, drivers and all the kinds of characters you don’t want to deal with in the fragile state brought on by a sleepless international flight.

We stepped outside the terminal to whoops of greedy glee as taxi touts spotted us - another delirious and naïve white couple, the exact kind that can usually be parted from large wads of their cash without too much trouble.

The slight concession of a pre-paid system of taxis exists at the airport, where you buy a slip that tells the driver where you want to go and give them that slip as payment when you’re there. After going through an attempted scam by the clerk (which brought the total number of attempts on our cash to three for the day already; one short changing by a phone attendant and another involving miscellaneous and unspecified ‘other taxes’ at the currency exchange), we were handed our precious, precious slip.


So of course, this slip was now the key to all our happiness. I left Angie in charge of it. The driver needed to have the slip signed by a guard before we could leave the airport, and a small battle ensued inside our cantankerous Morris Minor when the driver asked for her to hand it over. With steel in her eyes she passed it forward, it never left her sight until it was handed back to her. Pure mother bear instinct.

We left the airport and headed out underneath a low slung haze, thinking only of bed. After all the usual near-misses and close-calls that arise when an entire population of drivers regard lane markings and traffic lights mere suggestions, we arrived in the vicinity of our hotel. Exactly where our hotel was no-one was sure, and we spent a good deal of time bouncing down alleys that didn’t exist on my map, or any other map, probably.

Eventually we found it: a collection of wood-walled, dusty rooms with cardboard thin mattresses. Mattresses! I was ecstatic at the thought that I might very soon be stretching out on a horizontal plane. However, Angie was sure there were better accommodations to be found and went off in search of them. Meanwhile, my head pitched and yawed atop my slumped body in what you might call a lobby.

She soon returned with the happy news that a room had been found and I would presently be free to lapse into blissful unconsciousness. We got to the room, and I have never been happier to find myself in front of a circular bed seven feet in diameter, though at that point, I would have been delighted by a reasonably thick pile of hay.

Every time we entered or exited the room, we did battle with this, the World's most complicated light switch

Adios Latin America!

A statistic: After fourteen and a half months, we left Latin America and entered El Paso, Texas. In the 444 nights since we landed in Santiago, Chile, we stayed in 148 different hotels and hostels. Some of those hotels we stayed in more than once, and we also spent 20 nights sleeping on buses. Add up other random nights on boats and camping and we come to a total of 211 different sleeping places. So, on average, we moved to a new bed every 2.1 nights.

Puppies, Filth and Murder: Ah, Chihuahua!

In the hotels of Chihuahua, this is the most popular wall decoration

‘Ah, Chihuahua’ is the infectious phrase conjured up by the state’s/city’s tourism board. It’s fun to say, and it kind of rhymes, and it actually quite catchy. Whenever I saw something of note in the city, I would hold Angie’s hand and say ‘Ah, Chihuahua!’

In the main square, we found these two small chihuahuas along with a small Chihuahuan.

Ah, Chihuahua!

A clean bathroom is a hygienic bathroom

Accommodation in Chihuahua was depressingly polarized. When forced to choose between a hundred-dollar-a-night chain hotel or a fourteen-dollar-a-night safety hazard, economics forces us into the latter. This was the kind of room we had largely managed to avoid on the trip. It came with a menagerie of insect life: bees in the bathroom, mosquitos, two kinds of cockroaches and even fleas in the blankets. Every time I brushed against something in the room, say the bedhead or the floor, I came away with a big dirty mark where I had made contact. I slept on my back so that I couldn’t smell the pillow, and crawled underneath the sheets with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t see the stained, probably unwashed, sheets. And this was the best of the seven or so rooms we looked at.

Ah, Chihuahua!


We were walking through the city centre when we heard a quick series of loud bangs from the other side of the square. They sounded like gunshots (but what series of loud bangs doesn’t?), and people started streaming over to the location of the sounds. In these situations at home, people walk with a kind of quick, disinterested swagger that gets them there fast on the off-chance something morbidly interesting has happened, but they don’t look like they’re rushing, which would make them look silly when they round the corner to find a dog with a broken balloon in it’s mouth and a startled look on it’s face.

There was none of that here in Chihuahua, though. Grown men loped unashamedly across the square, shoving the slower women out of the way and knocking over bins in order to see what was going on. They had a unsettling, morbid kind of joy in their eyes. I swaggered quickly and disinterestedly around the corner and found people crowded around a ute pointing mobile phones at the cabin.

Angie got her camera out (of course I’d left mine in the hotel room) and started snapping pictures, as was the local custom.

Seven shells

The police showed up and cordoned off the area, breaking up the mosh pit. People didn’t really take the yellow tape seriously though, and the bicycle cops had a hard time keeping the crowd away.

The press showed up shortly after the first police, and used the police trucks to get a better angle on the action.

The next day, we bought a paper (one illustrated far more graphically than this post) and found out that the victim was an ex-police officer who died on his way to hospital. His girlfriend was uninjured and the shooters escaped on motorcycles.

Ah, Chihuahua!!!

The Missing Hotel Room of Chihuahua

Missing Mirror

Missing Powerpoint

Missing Toilet Seat

Missing Light Bulb

Walls in Creel

Charming Puerto Vallarta

Angie, self-portrait with 2-for-1 margarita

Enormous, waddlesome tourists clutching ice creams and fistfuls of pesos guffaw along the spotless waterfront. Tour agency spruikers attempt frantically to strike up conversation in the hope of a commission. ‘Hey, are you guys from Minneapolis?’ they ask us too brightly, their distended eyes betraying their desperation as we keep moving, heads down. We hear their anguished calls from afar: ‘Do you want to go to Yelapa??’


Restaurant spruikers block the pavement and manhandle pedestrians into their establishments. The touchy-feely one dressed in a gorilla suit seems especially popular. Taxi drivers cluster on the dark corners and offer drugs, massages or taxi rides (in that order). Plump North American students in seas of gelatinous sequins joggle in the windows of loud, flashing clubs like satiric Amsterdam window displays. They wear balloon sculptures on their heads and chug 2-for-1 margaritas. Their liquored, glossy lips mime along to the music: ‘Man, I feel like a woman’.


A block away, in the brimming tourist market, untold oceans of lurid fecal matter (or souvenirs) are on display. Listless t-shirts hang like carcases in the suffocating, breezeless air while small fans struggle valiantly to circulate the wretched atmosphere of an marketplace both figuratively and literally overcrowded. ‘I’m shy, BUT I’VE GOT A BIG DICK!!! Puerto Vallarta’ the shirts proclaim. ‘F.B.I.- Federal Breast Inspector. Puerto Vallarta’ sings another. Below the shirts are shelves filled with souvenirs- pieces of crap that have been superglued to other pieces of crap. The resulting amalgamations have then had ‘Pto. Vallarta’ scribbled on them with felt-tip marker and been thrust optimistically into the world.

In contrast to the tack of the waterfront, the people at the hotel were lovely, and even had Escher in to do the staircases

That this exists is novel and amusing at first, but it soon becomes scary and intensely depressing. All this stuff is here because that’s how people want it. They buy the shirts and guzzle the weak drinks and get groped by gorillas and look positively enthralled and come back for more next holidays. It’s everything the Gold Coast wishes it could be, and once the novelty of the spectacle had dissipated, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Trippinvignettes - Number 2

In which ‘Protein Man’ relates to us some of his finer points.

‘I’m probably the strongest man in Buenos Aires. No wait, I AM the strongest man in Buenos Aires’.

Hotel La Casona, Cartageña, Colombia.


Runners up from the same night:

‘I drive fast and furious’

‘I drive better drunk than most Canadians do sober’ (This was his explanation as to why he should be allowed to drink-drive)

Zihuatenago

The Zihuatenago 'ruins', an abandoned and crumbling beachfront hotel

Yet another sleepy little beach town...

Fishermen

La Ticla

Beachfront cacti

Another inspiring room, this time made completely out of concrete (even the bedheads)

Highway 200, the coast road