Apologies, more Santa Fe, Austin and Greyhound Buses
First of all apologies for not writing in a while. The last couple of hostels I’ve stayed in have had really poor internet facilities.
I ended up not going to San Antonio and just staying in Santa Fe for a couple of days extra. It was a good choice. Bruce took Sophie, a girl we met at the hostel, and I to Taos Indian reserve which was fine and we then went to the Rio Grande gorge and took photo’s from the bridge. As I’m not too keen on heights I didn’t stay on the bridge for too long. When we drove back the three of us went for a dip in the Rio Grande and it was amazing. It was early evening, the sun was setting, the scenery was astouonding and the company was good. It really was one of my favourite times on the trip thus far.
After leaving Santa Fe I had a mammoth greyhound bus journey to Austin, it was meant to take about 15 hours but it took about 22 hours in the end. I arrived on Saturday 3rd August. Despite being knackered a few others from the Hostel, including Sophie who it turned out also visited Austin and New Orleans, went to check out some music on 6th street in town. Austin is a big music town so we did the same again the following night and saw a couple of really good bands.
On the Sunday I got invited to go tubing on the river just south of Austin in a wee place called San Marcos. Tubing is basically sitting in a rubber ring and floating on down the river for a couple of hours. It was fun but one of the guys who drove us down was really quite aggressive and his behaviour quickly became irritating. I just bit my tongue and tried to enjoy the sunshine.
On the Monday Sophie and I went to check out the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum. We were both leaving that night and we didn’t really set aside enough time to do it properly. It did include an imax cinema show Called the Lone Star of Destiny which was pretty much a propagated movie centered around the famous ‘texas spirit’. It was entertaining nonetheless.
As a bit of a footnote I’ll write a spot about Greyhound. A huge part of my trip thus far has centred around the Greyhound buses, it has been an intriguing experience. They are extraordinarily disorganised. None of the stations I’ve been in have a departure board which means that when you are getting a connection you have to queue to ask when and where it will be leaving from. Of course everyone else with the same connection queues to get the same answer.
There is a great deal of visible poverty on the buses and surrounding most of the stations. There are lots of poor and homeless people begging, or panhandling as it is called here. Greyhound is like the default travel system for those who cannot afford to fly or get the train.
The worst part though is the, ‘restroom onboard for your convenience’, as the bus drivers say. It is basically just a big ol’ tank at the back of the bus with a toilet seat on top and a hand sanitizer. I managed to avoid using it entirely until my Santa Fe-Austin experience. Let’s just say it was not fun and that I’m glad I can stand up and use the loo.
I can think of two positives about Greyhound off the top of my head. The first is that I’m nearing the East Coast and the cities I’m planning on visiting are much closer together. The second is that watching the landscape has been incredible. The difference between the brown hills of California, the barren Nevada desert, the red mountains of New Mexico, the flat plains of Texas and the wetlands of the Louisiana delta is quite extraordinary. I can look at a map of the U.S. and think that it’s kinda cool that so many thousands of miles have passed under my seat on a Greyhound bus. I just checked the distance online and I’m at about the 4000 mile mark.
Still got a couple of thousand more to go.
Just found out via wikipedia that Greyhound was bought in September 07 by Aberdeen’s very own First Group. Who’d have thunkit.