A Wild Life

Made it to the Gold Coast. Long, long day-- one of the German girls who gave me a ride was bitten by a spider just as we were preparing to leave. All you hear when you come to Australia is how the top 20 most venomous creatures in the world live here, so she was understandably terrified even though our host, Chris, insisted it was just a black ant bite. It was, but she went to the emergency room anyway to get it checked out. I walked down to the (gorgeous, incredible) beach via a beautiful cliff walk while I waited for the girls to return from the hospital. We got underway several hours late and I had to get my host for tonight to give me a ride from Byron Bay, which he luckily was willing to do. (I am his first surfer and he is cutely eager to do right by me.) Anyway, the point of this post is to tell you how awesome today was, despite the dely, because I saw the following Iconic Australian Animals:

Koala in the wild: Check
Koala up close in a hospital: Check
Kookaburra: Check
Wild kangaroo: Check check (yes!)

For the record, I also saw:
Wild parrot
Wild turkey
Gecko

Still waiting on the platypus and dingo, but you can't have everything. Especially not within a 24 hour period.

More morsels

I'm so sorry to keep doing this, leading you on with tiny little clues and tastes. Unfortunately that's what I've had time for. I keep hoping the next place I go will have better access.

Anyway, I am in Port Macquarie at the moment. Took the train up here (about 6 hours) yesterday through endless farmland. Last night I surfed at the house of a Brit expat hippie. There were five other girls with me, from Germany and the UK, and we all drank wine and made amazing Malaysian stir fry, then drove out to the headland nearby, where there is a lighthouse, to watch the moon rise over the ocean and drink champagne. I know, I can't believe it either.

This morning we woke up early to listen to the birds at sunrise. I actually was woken earlier by kookaburras. I thought I had heard a kookaburra (which is a humongous bird related to the kingfisher) before, but I was wrong. The buggers sound deranged, like the Joker with a beak, and they are very, very loud. The other bird calls were beautiful, though.

In a few minutes I am leaving to visit a koala hospital (!!) and then catch a ride up the coast with two of the German girls to Byron Bay, which is close-ish to Brisbane. Hopefully there will be better internet where I stay tonight (if all works out, in the Gold Coast. If not, in a camper van, which will make the prospect for quality internet slightly less solid.) For now: an incredibly blue sky, a gorgeous coastline, and 6 hours to take it all in.

Southern Crossing: Charleston-Raleigh/Durham-Home

Although we technically had a few more days to go, Charleston was the last real stop of our Southern Crossing road trip. We pushed hard to make it in one day from Charleston to Raleigh/Durham, where Emma had a college friend. Durham was a mildly interesting place-- we drove past the Duke campus, explored the restaurant options, and settled on an authentic-feeling Middle Eastern restaurant with delicious apple tea. The little downtown area also provided an hour's worth of enjoyable window shopping, but that night we had to content ourselves with coffee at Starbuck's with Emma's friend and her back-roads-Tennessee boyfriend.

The drive from Raleigh/Durham to Philadelphia was equally taxing, but at least we had a few treats along the way. Near the Virginia border we finally stopped at a Waffle House (we had been counting them for fun--Waffle Houses are everywhere in the south!-- but hadn't gone in one as of yet.) I found it to be surprisingly personable and the food to be quite edible. Like an IHOP but with way more character and personality, almost bordering on a diner feel.

We also had a chance to visit the legendary, legendarily racist South of the Border, a Mexican-centric theme park just "south of the" North Carolina border. To be honest, the best part of the park was the signs, which started about 100 miles away, advertising it. They presented a series of stupid puns and silly cartoons on billboards up and down the Carolina coast. I am nothing if not a sucker for an ad campaign involving stupid puns and silly cartoons.

Our visit to South of the Border didn't last long; we found it too depressing. We looked in a few souvenir shops, buying some lovely, schlocky things and trying on a million varieties of goofy hat at a store specifically for, well... goofy hats. We thought about exploring the midway, but at this point our thoughts were already ahead of us in Philadelphia.

The blatant racism (ick) and awesome roadside schlock (yay) of South of the Border


Awesome. (Sorry for posting this on the internet, Emma...)

We pushed on. For lunch, we stopped to see an old friend of mine, Andy, in Washington DC; he was hosting a brunch and it was lovely to see him and his new life. And by late that night we were back in Philadelphia.

We had survived two thousand miles with minimal wear and tear and a lot of good stories. The car was dirtier and our wallets were thinner, but my camera card was packed with pictures and my suitcase featured a collection of little souvenirs, postcards, and brochures. It had been a lovely, sometimes crazy ride (literally) through a country I hadn't known much about, really. We'd traversed several mountain ranges, traveled 14 states, seen a lot of great road side attractions, eaten lots of BBQ, and learned a lot about the country we call home. A wholly successful trip, and proof that you don't have to travel around the world to experience new things and have your perspective changed for the better.

Although, as it turned out, the traveling around the world would happen, anyway, not long afterward...

Southern Crossing: Nashville-Birmingham-Atlanta

Another leg, another early morning. Emma, John, and I got up at dawn for an epic day: south from Nashville to Birmingham, then across Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia. Our dance card was quite full, as well, as we were planning to stop at a roadside archeology museum in rural Tennessee and to spend several hours in Birmingham.

John slept in the back as we sped down the highway toward Cornersville, TN. The idea to visit the Wyatt Archaeological Museum came from the same road-side attraction website that had been the source of our trips so far, and, as usual, we were not disappointed. Cornersville was a quiet town of rolling, green hills sheltering a patchwork of small farms, the kind with wagon wheels resting against the shed and a smattering of cows in the paddock.

A few wrong turns finally brought us to the museum, which focuses on the life and work of an archaeologist who spent his life trying to scientifically prove biblical events. The museum was shuttered, and we were concerned that it had closed until we heard a door slam in the trailer parked next door. A tall, bearded man strode across the gravel driveway, unlocking the tiny two-room building just for us.

He introduced himself as Wyatt's protege and successor, pointing out a few highlights as we made our way to a drafty cinder block room at the back of the building. The room, which was covered in posters and a large mural depicting Noah's ark, was bare except for a big screen TV on an AV cart, the sort your teacher would wheel in to the classroom to show you NOVA in middle school. He pressed play and left the room

What followed was a homemade documentary about Wyatt's work. According to the video, the man's calling began in Turkey when he became convinced he had found the remains of Noah's Ark near Mt. Ararat. He went on to claim he had found the ruins of Sodom and Gommorrah in southern Israel, the point of Exodus out of Egypt on the Gulf of Aqaba, and the tomb where the Ark of the Covenant was buried. The video, edited sloppily, followed his rise to semi-fame with a mixture of awe and adoration. Emma's head was on my shoulder, as we were both tired from the early start, but neither of us could take our eyes away from the screen.

Some of the displays at the museum at the Wyatt Archaeological Museum

The caption says "Crystalline Capsules around the Sulfur Balls-- From Gommorrah"

As it turned out, the video was actually most of the museum. Once we were finished, there was only another small room to look at. We walked around looking at a model of how the pyramids were made, trying not to mutter the snide comments we were dying to make too loudly (scholars have been theorizing for hundreds of years, but this guy just so happened to get it right)

How the pyramids were built

There were several other objects presented as evidence-- a cast of a chariot wheel from the bottom of the Gulf of Aqaba, a piece of petrified wood said to be from Noah's Ark, crystallized sulfur from the fiery rain God brought upon Gomorrah. I found it all very silly. Let me clarify, although my religious beliefs are generally pretty secular it wasn't the Christian undertones that the Wyatt Institute was built upon that bothered me. It was really the enormous leaps of logic that got my goat. As Emma and I discussed after we returned to the car, finding a chariot wheel in the ocean in a place where chariots were very common for a long time does not an Exodus make. Neither do some rock formations in the Negev desert automatically scream "mythic center of sin and hedonism." I appreciate that Wyatt and his followers found some pretty interesting artifacts, as just-plain-artifacts go. But as for applying those artifacts to bolster a history based on religious events, well, I wasn't buying it quite yet. Doesn't make the museum any less fascinating, though! In fact, that anthropologist in me finds it all the more intriguing.

It was my turn to drive through Tennessee to Birmingham, Alabama. It was early afternoon and both of my compatriots were asleep. This was perhaps my favorite part of the whole trip, drivingwise. The afternoon sun slanted on the highway, and I twiddled the radio to find something to listen to. What I found was some sort of rural radio Craigslist. People were calling in saying things like "I have four chickens to sell, and I'd like to buy a sack of grain." The announcer would give a number for interested parties to call, and sometimes a few minutes later would say that the lot had been sold. While I was listening to this program, I suddenly realized we were driving over a vast swamp, the kind I've never seen before, miles of water thick with weeds and mangroves, the way I imagine a bayou looks. There was something divine about driving on this vast bridge over a swamp in Alabama, listening to the farmers drawl about their chickens and corn in the slanting light. A perfect moment.

We arrived in Birmingham shortly afterward. Emma had spent a little time there after Hurricane Katrina, doing clean up, and she had such positive impressions that she pushed hard for us to go back. Specifically, we came to see the Civil Rights Institute, which was highly recommended, and to explore the Birmingham Museum of Art.

As we disembarked from our car, we were greeted by a tall, gangly black man in over-alls, who introduced himself to us as "Bond, James Bond." After this quirky greeting we were a little wary of him, but his brand of crazy seemed to be fairly benign. He correctly deduced that we were tourists (the Massachusetts license plate might have given us away) and started giving us a brief history of civil rights in Alabama, pointing to the memorial park across the street -- which we would visit later -- and speaking in a fairly poignant way about how the city has progressed in his time living there.

We spent almost two and a half hours exploring the Institute, which is one of the best museums I've ever visited. The exhibits were thorough and informative, but they also retained interesting interactive elements including life-size models, video, and fine art, and they never let you forget the intense humanity behind all of the words. I was alternately moved, saddened, and infuriated--all emotions I would hope to feel when learning about civil rights history.

One of the most interesting parts of the Institute visit for me was the opportunity to see, for the first time in my life, black people teaching other black people about their history. As a white upper-middle class suburban kid, that was just not part of my experience growing up. But we were at the Institute in the middle of the week, and the only other visitors were local kids on field trips. Their teacher guided them kindly from exhibit to exhibit and I tried not to be too obtrusive as I traveled through the museum, looking with them, and to some extent at them. Their eyes were as round as they took it all in, and I heard one little boy ask his teacher, "Does that mean that my dad and uncle were a part of this? Does that mean they were treated this way?" His voice wavered. It was a powerful, deeply sad moment.

The Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham

We spent more time than expected at the Institute, but had time to briefly explore the Museum of Art before it closed. I opted to wander the museum's lovely Asian collection (mostly ancient Thai and Japanese; no photography allowed) before dropping in on a rotating modern art exhibit on the first floor. There, I found myself entranced and disturbed by a video piece depicting the artist and her partner immersing themselves in water repeatedly, the bubbles and ripples playing endlessly over their faces, shot from below the surface. As the video progressed, the images blurred gradually, almost unnoticeably, until a gray mass not recognizable as a face and the buzz of white noise filled the screen. I was joined by a man about my age as I watched. He introduced himself as a student at a local community college, and we watched the video together in silence.

Inside (and outside) the Birmingham Museum of Art

By late afternoon we made our way to the memorial park across from the Civil Rights Institute. This park was set up in memory of four little girls who were killed in a famous bombing of a church across the street during the Civil Rights era. It is part sculpture garden, part memorial and is very affecting, featuring images of violence and wrongdoing from throughout the struggle. In one corner, a metal cast of the high-powered hoses used on marchers confronts the viewer. In another, the visitor walks a claustrophobic, frightening path through a sculpture out of whose walls slavering dogs jump. It is a very visceral memorial, balanced out by four pool/waterfalls in the middle of the park, representing the four little girls at peace. There, a sculpture of Martin Luther King rises over a plaque reading "place of revolution and reconciliation." After experiencing the symbolic pain of the civil rights era, the park reminds visitors of its ultimate goal.

Images from the memorial park

Replicas of the high-power hoses
The inscription reads, "I ain't afraid to go to jail"

Before we left Birmingham, there was one more stop to make: Mrs. B's Kitchen, a legendary soul food restaurant. For not very much money at all, we were each able to buy a multi-course soul food feast of ribs, spaghetti and meatballs, black-eyed peas, candied yams, and the best banana pudding I have ever had (and I don't even really like banana pudding.) All of us ate like it was our last meal, left the restaurant hearing our seams creaking, and it was totally worth it.

It was my turn to drive as we headed east from Birmingham to Atlanta. We passed the to-scale model of the Statue of Liberty, and as we got on the highway, "Sweet Home Alabama" by Thin Lizzy came on the radio. We got really excited, turned the radio way up, and then shortly after were ashamed of ourselves for singing along loudly and turned it back down. It was a silly moment.

Around twilight we drove through Anniston, Alabama, home of the world's largest office chair as of 1983.) We managed to find it after a few false starts.

Sadly unfocused pictures of the world's largest office chair, as of 1983, in Anniston, Alabama

From Anniston it was a straight shot through the evening to Atlanta, where we stayed with John's parents. It was very late when we arrived, so John introduced us to the dual delights of Steak & Shake (which is a late-night joint serving its name) and Korean karaoke-- a great way to end a long, lovely day.

Southern Crossing Part 1: Charlottesville-Asheville

So, I've made a decision. I've been attached for a long time to the idea of this blog having a strict chronology. That means that nothing gets posted out of order, and two trips aren't recounted at the same time in alternate posts. I suppose I wasn't even that strict about chronology in the past (there are some interesting loops that happened when I commented about my current adventures in China, discussed things that had happened weeks or months earlier, and then didn't get back to those current adventures until several weeks or months after that.)

I've been putting off blogging about the road trip I took in March through the American southeast, and because of that I haven't written at all about my preparations for the Around-the-World trip on which I will embark in January. So I'm making an executive decision (that's easy to do, since I am the one and only contributor to this blog.) I will intersperse discussion of the road trip with preparations and hopefully my readers will be smart enough to follow along.

Which brings me to: the road trip. March 2008, spring of my senior year of college. I was in the throes of writing my senior thesis (using research completed during the time I spent in China, see February-July 2007 in this blog.) It hadn't yet started to soak up all of my free time like some deranged academic sponge, but I certainly needed a break. I enlisted a close friend, Emma, to go on a trip. Any trip, an adventure.

For months we had planning phone calls which got us nowhere. There were so many options for adventure. Where could we go? Germany? Costa Rica? Hungary? The limiting factors were time and physicality. I had a whopping 21 days off for spring break but needed to use the first 10 for thesis work. Emma had taken the year off from college and was working--planning ahead allowed her to get all 11 days of our trip off. However, I had fallen and severely injured my ankle in December, and although the fracture was healed the multiple sprains were still a big problem and I generally walked using a big black boot reminiscent of Darth Vader's foot. We reluctantly axed Europe, where I would be unable to walk the 7-8 hours necessary to truly explore a city. When we thought about it, neither of us had spent much time (for me, not counting Florida, none) south of the Mason-Dixon line. Additionally, I had friends in Tennessee and Georgia and Emma had them in Virginia and North Carolina. After much discussion we traced a challenging but doable route that would take us south from Philadelphia through Virginia, western North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and eastern North Carolina.

So: after 10 grueling days of thesis work, I took a train south from Hartford to Philadelphia, where Emma met me with her trusty Honda Accord. It was a beautiful early spring day, and we were both excited to get to even warmer weather as we headed south. That day was comprised mostly of driving, and driving, and then driving some more (That day, including the train ride from Connecticut I spent time in 7 states.) We stopped briefly in Frederick, Maryland, whose bricked streets were reminiscent of Philadelphia, for lunch at a cute cafe. We traversed countless pastures, acres of cropland, skirted the outside of industrial cities, before finally arriving in Charlottesville, VA. We had a bit of trouble locating our hostel, which was described on the traveling website HostelWorld as "a yellow clapboard house." We unnecessary trespassed in the yards of several wrong yellow houses before finally realizing our mistake: in Virginia, there can be two or more roads with the same name but with a different suffix-- Brick Lane, Brick Road, Brick Avenue, etc. We found this to be extremely confusing.

Although we initially had ambitions to go out to a bar or restaurant, we ultimately opted to stay in and conserve energy for the long day the next day. And long it was, but equally wonderful. After a snack at an adorable old-fashioned donut shop, we spent the morning exploring Charlottesville, which is a college town that hugs UVA tightly. A free shuttle bus loops around the downtown, and we took advantage of it in order to explore an adorable (if scarily gentrified) line of cafes, bookstores, toy stores, and boutiques, followed by the UVA campus and its surroundings.

Classic Southern architecture at University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville


The free shuttle

The restaurants and stores around UVA were brashly pro-University life but had their own charm. Emma bought a "UVA Cheerleading" shirt for fun and I tried hot fried apples, which were buttery and strange but delicious. We bought sandwiches to each outside in the sunshine outside of this coffeeshop, with an amusing sign:

(If you can't read, it says "Is Caffeine a Nootropic drug? You tell me. While you're at it, please tell me what a nootropic drug is.")

We left Charlottesville to drive part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which wends its way across the top of the Appalachian mountains from Charlottesville to Asheville, North Carolina (our next stop.) Emma didn't want to drive the whole way on the Parkway, as the speed limit was low and the road were winding. But we did spend a good chunk of time on the Parkway, stopping regularly to admire the beautiful views.

Wouldn't you stop, too?



About halfway down the Shenandoah Valley, we got hungry. It was raining lightly as we drove down the switchbacks that led us into Vesuvius, Virginia, a tiny town with all the ramshackle, half-broke-down Appalachian charm I (the elite northeastern girl) was expecting. We ate at Gertie's General Store, which had basic essentials (flour, bread, extra ammo, cigarettes) on one side and also sold fantastic pulled pork. Really. I made an effort to eat barbecue in each state we visited, and this was some of the best. The walls were signed with the names of people from all the world who came through the town while walking the Appalachian Trail.

Signs at Gertie's. I guess we're really in the south now.

About 3/4 of the way down the Parkway, we exited to visit one of the most exalted places in all of Roadside America: Foamhenge. This ten-ish year old roadside attraction was developed by an artist and left to slowly degrade, which it has-- much like the real Stonehenge! Foamhenge is in a tiny town called Natural Bridge, Virginia, which supposedly also houses a rock formation to rival the Grand Canyon, although we couldn't find it. Instead, we walked up the hill in light rain to Foamhenge, which was utterly empty, the red clay soil sticking in amazing amounts to our shoes.

Foamhenge, in all its glory


Just outside of Foamhenge, FoaMerlin casts a spell. There was quite a bit of FoaMerlin silliness to be had.

On the way back to the highway, we also found our way to this roadside attraction, a house shaped like a coffee pot. Complete with a handle and everything! I had seen it on a website which lists roadside attractions by state and had compiled a list, which we attempted to complete as we drove from state to state.


After driving briefly through Tennessee, we reached Asheville, which sits in far west North Carolina, very late at night. We settled into our hostel Bon Paul and Sharkey's (as quirky as its name) and got ready for a great couple of days in North Carolina.