Claire was ESLEWHERE for a while and now she's moved to VOX - catch new adventures there at Goin' Country... 
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Atlanta, Georgia seems like a handsome city, lots of trees and parks, some nice buildings - and a great art museum.
 and it's showing its spring colours
I went to the High Museum of Art and found a painting by one of my art heroes! Yay! The first time I've seen a painting by Chuck Close.
 
up close the brushwork was much looser than I'd anticipated and the image doesn't gel quite as easily in the flesh as it does in a photo - you need to be able to see them from a long long way back and it wasn't hung in a spot where you could go quite far enough. This one gave a real sense that it was painted from one of his recent daguerreotypes because of the extreme blurring at the edges.
Which reminds me that in several museums I've seen old 19th century daguerreotypes and they're very interesting. Much more metallic than I'd realised, almost holographic and incredibly sharp and detailed.
 
Also interesting to see was this sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein which does exactly the same trick as NZ sculptor Neil Dawson's work Echo at the Christchurch Arts Centre. But I think Echo is more interesting and it messes with your mind and eyes more effectively.
 
These two works are by Gerhardt Richter. They are stacks of plain glass that reflect the room and the viewer in a blurry way. For years Richter has been painting blurry images and these works kind of make you and the whole room into a Richter painting. They were pretty cool. There were a bunch of his grey paintings there too but I didn't like 'em much.
 more art I didn't like - continuing Claire's super-sophisticated critique of famous modernists and whether she likes em or not after finally seeing the real thing: Donald Judd rated 'Meh'. I've seen several works in several museums and they all did nothing for me
But Robert Louis stained paintings are very nice to look at - again there are quite a few around and they've all been interesting, though not earth shattering.
 
There was also a collection of totally over the top English porcelain which would have had Marie transfixed - I put these photos in specially for you Marie! I know you'll be on TradeMe now trying to get a nibbles stand like that one.
There was a pretty cool work by Tony Cragg whose work I studied quite a bit in 2nd yr at art school. (It's made of old bits of coloured plastic junk, he did quite a bit of that)
also a bunch of interesting design objects - this is an office by Frank LLoyd Wright.
And a lot of folk art including this one Elvis at 3 was a angel to me by Reverend Howard Finster, who's a pretty interesting guy.
More interesting religious art - unusual anatomy and unusual saints - in the bottom left is Saint Verdiana and her pet snakes - they don't look it but apparently they were "miraculously tamed"
 this was very old, 1400 something, there's always plenty like this in the museums, this one just caught my eye.
Then my first home cooked meal in months! So yummy. I was lucky to catch up with an old varsity chum John Stroud who now lives here in Atlanta with his wife and daughter doing big things in the corporate world. It was a delicious meal, great to catch up and a really comfy bed for the night too - thanks guys!
And that may be all I see of Atlanta because today since I got to the library it started pouring down rain and we're expecting thunderstorms so I think I'll just relax and read a book back at the hostel. At least its better that the tornadoes they had last week - glad I missed that.
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Ah sunny Florida. I can see why people come here to escape winter. Miami has a tropical climate - I saw mangoes ripening on a tree in someones back yard.
I didn't stay long in Miami because spring break meant the place was jammed with college students partying up and beds were scarce.
The hostel (on Miami beach) was fine, a bit noisy but what do you expect.
 security was tight.
The beach was nearby and I did have a lovely swim as the sun went down, the water was warmer than most beaches in NZ and clear.
While I was there I visited the booming new arts district in Wynwood which was really interesting. A mix of shoe factories and warehouses which were all different lolly colours:
And a bunch of them had been converted into galleries, mostly dealers plus also a MOCA satellite which had a show that was an interesting mix of print/paint. Saw some interesting stuff in the dealer galleries too. And even on the streets:
 a mural
Other interesting features of downtown Miami included a large flock of vultures circling and camping on top of the courthouse:
 you can't see it in this shot but there was a ziggurat shped roof that had vultures sunning themselves on every step. There must have been 50-100 of them there.
There was also a free little rail trolley thing, the 'metromover' three storeys up twisting through downtown like a sort of commuter amusement ride.
Then it was time to go get down with the gators....so I took the bus to the Everglades. You can actually get nearly there by public transport - miles and miles for a buck fifty, very good value.
And I can add another hostel to the highly recommended list -
 the 'garden lounge'
 a friendly resident on the outdoor chess board. All the pieces were tea-light lanterns.
it was tropical, laid back, friendly and clean and full of interesting folk. A big garden, free pancakes and fruit and they put on tours of the swamps....
So I decided to splash out and take a day tour of the Everglades National Park and I'm so glad I did, it was great.
There was all kinds of animools and birds.......
 there were loads and loads of gators. All sizes upto 10 or 11 feet long.
 a great blue heron
 little blue heron. There were also green herons which were pretty but I didn't get a good shot. Other ones that got away - wood stork, tri-coloured heron, ibis, spoonbill and egrets, the place was fair jumping with critters especially birds, its a twitcher's paradise.
 a cormorant with our guide Jeremy. I was really glad I went on the all day guided tour because this guy not only knew a whole lot about the 'glades, he knew exactly where to find all the birds and animals .
 an anhinga on his nest. bromeliads all around him and all around everywhere. several types of them grew on anything that didn't move all over the park.
 an anhinga sunning himself. they are diving birds and have to dry out after a dive so they can fly better.
 a soft shell turtle. There were also another kind of turtle but i didn't get a good photo of those. this kind spits water at things.
 a black vulture and a 'gator. the black vultures follow the turkey vultures around because the turkey vultures have a sense of smell and the black ones don't. the gators were still too dozy to chase the birds. by late afternoon they might.
 a lot of the 'glades looks like this. This was the driest time of year (late winter/early spring) and some areas had dry cracked mud. In summer there's be a foot or more of water everywhere. The little bunch of trees is called a cypress hammock. the trees in the middle grow taller because the densest amount of dropped needles is in the middle (they are deciduous) and the needles acid breaks down the limestone underneath and lets them get more nutrient. The whole place has a limestone base and very little soil. Many ponds are the result of old limestone quarrying and are now full of birds and animals.
 Poisonwood - you can get a nasty rash just by touching it.
 inside the hammock, showing the water line - we only got our feet slightly wet but a few weeks ago it was still mid-calf.
 growing on the trees there were orchids
 and bromiliads - this is a tiny one.
 we walked around all inside the cypress hammock till we found this guy - a water mocassin. he's venomous but was pretty laid back (long lenses are great aren't they?)
 also in there was this red shouldered hawk and a mama 'gator with her babies (didn't get any good shots of them. baby gators look just like grownup ones only smaller)
 then we went to a different place and saw a crocodile. They have narrower jaws than gators and can tolerate more salty water.
 then we went canoeing through the mangroves.....
 with the gators! we got quite close to a big croc too.
 there were lots of kinds of fish - this is a gar.
and when we got back to the van there was a welcoming committee......
then it was back to the hostel for a beer or two after a long hot day.
And next day I was lucky enough to get a ride all the way to Atlanta Georgia with a couple of girls from the hostel which was a long way but much faster and more comfy than the old greyhound bus. So not a very long stay in Florida but a fun one.
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One of the nicest hostels I've seen so far - The Blue Moon in Lafayette - shame I could only stay there one night. They have a band playing on the back porch every night Wednsday-Sunday and the band playing the day after I got there was so popular with folk from miles around that it was booked out.
So I stayed one night and enjoyed this band...
Name of Backbone Stew, chatted to some nice fellow hostellers, had a drink ot two, slept in the next day and then dragged my pack back down to the Greyhound station.
Travelling by Greyhound has been interesting, everyone told me that's how the poor and dispossesed travel and its true. Luckily most (but not all) bathe regularly and don't talk to themselves overmuch. The buses are rarely new or overly clean, often late, and you can't reserve a seat which means you have to turn up an hour before it leaves and queue to make sure you get a seat. Luckily I always have and only one bus has ever been full.
Unfortunately for y'all it was this bus to New Orleans so I didn't get to take any photos of the swamps or big rivers or Lake Pontchartrain that we drove by because I didn't get a window seat (and the windows were dirty anyway). But it was more interesting viewing than driving across Texas I can tell you.
The driver repeated his spiel a couple of times when a bunch of new passengers got on:
"Welcome to Greyhound. This is a non smoking bus. You may not smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes, marijuana or crack and that includes the bathroom. If you're listening to music turn it down so it doesn't disturb your neighbor. Gum chewers: you kin chew it but you cain't pop it. Also there is no whistling on this bus."
So we were all careful not to pop our gum or smoke our crack and eventually we got to New Orleans. A long wait then a short ride on the streetcar (some nice pics of New Orleans on this site) I got to the scummiest hostel I have yet stayed in.
 the hostel is on the left. So unappealing my camera veered off and mainly put the neighbor's house in the picture...
 a few sad mardi gras beads in the back yard - trees festooned with beads can be seen all over town, some of them groaning under the weight. I guess you gotta do something with all the beads that get hurled around at the parades. It seems to have caught on at skifields too - you'll see trees near liftlines with beads (and sometimes underwear) draped in them all over the country
The less said the better really, its quiet at least and safe so I'll just stay here for now. I found a cheap plane ticket to Miami and booked it, or I'd probably have chosen to stay less time here. But I'll get time to have a bit of a look round.
The first day I was here I went to the art gallery of course, and one of the things I saw was huge photographs by Robert Polidori from his book After the Flood (hurricane Katrina, August 28 2005). They were very good photos and very sad. In the book, which I saw too, he said he'd intended to document the whole cycle of recovery as the homes were restored, but in the 18 months of the project very little resoration was done and so the book is mostly photos of homes after the floodwater receded, not many of resoration. I wondered how much had changed another year down the line so I went for a long walk. I didn't venture too far into some of the neighborhoods but really you don't need to. Once away from the tourist area its fairly clear that the posh parts of town are all fixed up, the medium areas are fixing up, and the poorer areas are going very slowly indeed. 
Lots of houses still bear the X graffiti from when the emergency services went round and checked for survivors (and the dead). Lots are still boarded up, many are obviously lived in but not entirely fixed. Some people are still living in FEMA trailers, though I believe these are going to be taken away because they are themselves a health hazard. There is a huge homeless camp under a major underpass that the Canal St streetcar goes right past which the city is trying to close - but of course there's nowhere for these people, some of whom do have jobs, to go to.
This Louisiana Weekly article was interesting reading on the recovery and how the make-up of New Orleans has changed since Katrina. In another part of the paper was a report that said a United Nations committee on racism had given the USA a poor report card especially in relation to Katrina recovery. I'm having trouble finding a good link to this - the CBS link to that particular story has been removed but I found this one for those interested in reading more. It seems the UN does these report cards for all countries that are signatories to a convention on eliminating racial discrimination - I assume NZ is one, I wonder what our report card looks like?
So that's all been very interesting if not particularly cheering.
There was a Katrina related show at the contemporary art space too - 14 invited artists were brought to New Orleans with no art making gear at all and asked to make Something From Nothing. Some of the work was interesting, some of it was twaddle. Ellen Harvey's work was my favorite. She asked people to end her a photo or description of something they'd lost in the disaster and she'd make a painting of it and give it to them after the show. Quite a lot of the paintings were gone already. The people's letters were posted there too and they were actually the interesting part really. And again, sad.
But you know it is still a beautiful town. An amazing number of old buildings. The French Quarter of course, the whole of which is a national monument, while seething with tourists and all the tackyness that their presence brings is still rpretty cool. But other neighborhoods in my opinion, are even nicer. Lakewood,
 
which did get flooded, is real nice and of course the Garden District is full of massive mansions. And a couple of very pretty Universities, Loyola;
and Tulane;
whose generous free internet access in the library I am shamelessly hogging for ages to bring you this blog. The photos will have to wait though, I can't upload those here. (update: photos brought to you by even more generous Georgia Tech, Atlanta)
So speaking of tourist tat of course I did visit the quarter and wandered around taking photos by day:
 
this was a museum - an original house that hadn't been changed, it was interesting but a bit weird in that it was totally empty so you could look at the building but there was little context from 'stuff' except a few explanation boards giving its history.
and by night - the St Joseph's Day parade (Italian community) was on Saturday.
 
And of course its spring break so the place is full of college kids drinking and carrying on as they do. It's fun at the time (when you're a college kid) and I'm sure we were all as inane and dumbass as these kids - but we didn't think so at the time.
I also visited the botanic gardens, where they had a nice jazz concert going on, and a couple of cool displays.One was a fernhouse themed 'living fossils' where they had lots of ferns, cycads and horsetails along with fossilized versions of the same plants.
Another was a good cactus house, and there was also a rather wacky miniature railway with funny looking models ofNew Orleans landmark houses.
And now folks a recommendation: if you're in New Orleans eat at the Camelia Grill.
It's good cheap food and a great place to see truly masterful short order chefs and waiters at work. Its constantly full as far as I can tell - one advantage to traveling alone is that a seat for one is usually possible without waiting.  
Beautiful Audubon Park had a lot of egrets nesting in it. While I was scrambling around at the pond edge lining up this duck photo there was a faint hiss behind me...snakes alive! I jumped up....but it was just a mallard hen saying 'get away from my nest you'
My last day in New Orleans was exciting because I had a job interview by phone with University of Western Carolina and then I went to the zoo. The interview was more exciting really but the zoo had some cool creatures including ugly toads and a white alligator  
The day after that I hopped on a cheap flight to Miami Florida.....
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But I forgot!!
I visited San Antonio - home of the Alamo - before Houston, but momentarily muddled my Texas towns so the blog is out of sequence now...no matter, I'm sure you'll forgive me.
I went to San Antonio mostly because travel distances between hostels made it a good stop. But its quite a cool town for a couple of days.
The main attraction is The Alamo, the mission/fort where the earliest Texans fought against the Mexicans and overwhelming odds for 12 days before being overrun. So it's kinda the birthplace of Texas. Very touristy, but actually quite attractive looking and fairly interesting. The guides and most of the visitors took the whole deal very seriously and quite reverentially.
It was also home to this little guy. Squirrels are everywhere here and I'd been trying to get a good pic of one for a few days. They're a funny mix of cheeky and shy and very fast moving when they run away. This one was clearly on the cheeky end of the spectrum. I was only about 4 feet away when I took this.
The other tourist attraction is the Riverwalk, which is a nice way to walk through town, cool and pretty. Mostly lined with overpriced bars and restaurants though.
I stayed at Bullis House, which is the hostel there. My room you can't see in this picture but it was in the attic (at last - I get to be an artist in a garret!) The bathroom was a flight of stairs and a few twists and turns away, the kitchen was in another building altogether, no laundry, no internet and the most expensive yet. But it was interesting anyway, and quiet and I got my garret to myself. It was right on the edge of Fort Sam Houston which looks real historic but is still a working army base.
Also public transport in that area was kinda sketchy:
 Just kidding. This was in the back yard.
I tried to walk through the base to the Botanical Garden (on my map it looked like a normal road) but the guard at the gate turned me away - he said it was because the gate at the botanical gardens end was closed due to roadworks. So I walked the long way round and checked out the gardens. They were ok, not the best time of year I guess. They had a Texas native plants area which was interesting, featuring different types of Texas ecologies:
South Texas
Very dry, basically things that will grow in desert or almost desert.
East Texas Pineywoods
The nicest I thought, also I guess the area with the most water
And hill country, which didn't look so different to desert to me, and which I can't seem to find a photo of.
Each area also had a little reconstructed settler homestead which were all a bit different from each other.
Some of the local's own gardens were pretty interesting too:
And absolutely everywhere was this funny stuff in the trees:
It's 'ball moss' (Tillandsia recurvata) a relative of 'spanish moss' (Tillandsia usneoides), neither of which are mosses at all but bromeliads - they are air plants and just perch in trees and anything else they can hang onto. All the water and everything they need they get from the air.
I also went to a big nearby park, which I've now forgotten the name of, but it had this wacky 'japanese tea garden' in what had once been a quarry
And that's about all I did in San Antonio. Back on the road again......
Oh - I did go to a gallery of course but it wasn't all that inspiring, and a particular painting I'd read they had in their collection wasn't on display and I could get access to it :(
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Well, no we don't have a problem, I just couldn't think of a better heading...
The hostel in Houston was a funny place.
 
A shabby old house in the museum district, only a few blocks away from some of the poshest places in town. The guests were a mix of backpackers, older guys living a cheap and mobile lifestyle and locals who were "between apartments", and a few other stories of varying complexity. Then a bunch of college kids with a very heavy dose of Jesus came along. They were nice kids, there were 5 of them sleeping in my dorm and at 5am every morning they'd get up (trying to be quiet, bless them) and go off to serve breakfast at a homeless shelter. This was partly a spring break holiday for them and partly their community service thing they were doing. I tried to maintain my humanity and not snarl at the wee dears every time 5am rolled around...and I am proud to say I succeeded.
Nearby were a couple of very good art museums (is anyone noticing a trend in this blog yet?...just skip this bit if you're sick of art...later on there's PIG RACING!)
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston was having its monthly free of charge day which was great, and I saw a great show by Miwa Yanagi. I'd seen some of her work before at the Sydney Biennale and really liked it. This show was great too. Very very big composite photos very cleverly done. My Grandmothers was my favourite series - I've linked to it here.
Also on was a big bunch of work by Nan Golding which was very good too. Part of it was a slide show with music which I enjoyed because some of it was Nick Cave, who you don't hear a whole helluva lot of in Texas.
And downstairs was a cool permanent installation by Bill Turrell - the Turrell Tunnel, which lined two buildings
The Menil Collection was another really good one, and it was free too - it's always free which I think is really cool.
Heavy on the surrealists, who I don't like much, it also had a great drawing show on.
Associated with it were some other places; the Rothko Chapel, The Byzantine Chapel and an installation by Dan Flavin, which I visited in that order....
Looking for a place to have a spiritual crisis? Look no further! Head straight for the Rothko Chapel and confront the most boring 'religious art' to be found. Dang that place was dull. An octagonal concrete bunker with 14 very very dark purple or back paintings hung around the walls. A bunch of people were in there, whispering extremely quietly, or just staring, or maybe meditating on the void, the meaning of life...or maybe wondering if it was all a gyp. What's a gyp? Religion or high modernist art? Take your pick, in that place it could have been either or both.
There was a guy there checking a sound system - he said he was getting it ready for a wedding later in the day - criminy!! What a way to begin married life, in the Temple of Gloom...sheesh
Anyway the next place was better - the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum which had quite a cool atmosphere. But I think the coolness of the chapel shape thing was really undermined by the space that housed it. It would have been really good outside, but of course no good for the frescoes, or maybe in a larger surrounding space thing. Again the mixture of art gallery/religious space didn't really come off.
The Dan Flavin work was a little underwhelming at first but then it grew on me.
A really interesting aspect of visiting all these museums for me has been seeing a things in the flesh that I've only seen in print before - often they don't measure up to expectations, sometimes they do and sometimes they exceed them.
So far Rothko and Barnett Newman have failed to impress, while Motherwell, Kline, Cy Twombly and some Helen Frankenthaler works have been really great to see for real and powerful works
 Kline  Motherwell (detail of one of his Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings)
There was a building as part of the Menil that only had Cy Twombly's works in it. I particularly liked the HUGE Say goodbye Catullus to the shores of Asia Minor (I stole this photo from someone else's website, the guy in the pic is the artist himself). The whole gallery is full of his scribbly work and he's obviously very good because nearly all the time he manages to pull off making scribbles look very clever and interesting. Mostly they're not as colorful as this and not quite as big.  Well that was a big big day of art - 7hrs - i went back to the hostel and had a big sleep.... Next day I thought - enough high culture, lest see the real Texas - off to the rodeo! I was lucky to hit town right at the start of the 2 week long Houston Rodeo and Livestock Show - lets see how they do A&P shows here.... Well they do em indoors for a start. The whole livestock show was inside a big giant stadium. The day I was there in the main arena was the weigh ins for cattle that were going to be judged...the brahmans were very impressive and not a type of cattle I'd seen before. they also have a different Moo to other cattle! There were plenty of other cattle there and they were getting the very best of grooming - shampoo and blow dry, trimmed up with clippers. they were all looking perfect and very fluffy. They also had very BIG BUTTS.  much fatter I thought than cattle I'd see in NZ shows. There was a lot of educational stuff for kids down one end including the birthing centre where sheep cows horses and pigs that were due to give birth were held and videos of the process were shown and when they were born they stayed there too. I didn't see any being born but there were some very cute little piglets. The education part ran through the whole process of farming US style, which is much more intensive that ours as you know with feedlots, factory farming etc. The displays made no bones about this, its obviously completely accepted that this is how you farm and when the steers arrive at the feedlot of course you give them a "growth promoter" (estrogen) . I think I may go organic when i get settled and get regular access to decent groceries (supermarkets are mostly only easily accessible by car, often I have to make do with convenience stores) Here's the display on chicken farming:  And clearly the kids were benefiting:  Then I went to the horse arena where they were doing cutting horse contests which were pretty impressive - the horses were like eye-dogs, they stared the calves down and dodged side to side anticipating the calf's every move. The object of the game is to separate one calf from the mob then doge about in front of it keeping it separate for a while, then you let it go back and cut another one out. You have to do this 3 times in about 2 mins.  After that I wandered off to the big giant funfair and found the PIG RACING...I know you've all been waiting for it....  It was kinda cute, the last race was Vietnamese potbellies and those little guys weren't hurrying for anyone, they ambled to the finish (they were racing to be the first to get to an oreo cookie, then they all raced straight back into their trailer where they live, and are no doubt fed again) Also there was Mutton Bustin' - which it little kids trying to cling to the back of very big sheep. They did pretty well, some pretty spunky 6 yr olds out there.  But that's not all the rodeo action there was folks...the real rodeo started at 6.30pm and it was real slick. It stared off with this girl riding around the darkened arena with a huge flag while fireworks (rockets) went off. I was very impressed by that horse, he didn't bat an eyelid.  Competing in the rodeo were the top 50 people in the world in each discipline (mostly American but also some Canadians, South Americans and an Australian) 10 per night were competing in each round. I saw round 2. There was: Various kinds of calf roping - this was lassoing  this one involves leaping on a galloping calf from off your galloping horse and tying his legs up  Bareback bronc riding  Saddle bronc  Barrel racing  Bull riding   a funny thing where college kids tried to catch and keep a calf (not so easy in a big arena).  chuck wagon racing Then there was a rock concert.  The night I was there it was Faith Hill. I listened for a few numbers but she really wasn't my style. Most of the rest of the big crowd seemed to like it though. And that was Houston folks.....and time to leave Texas and head for the bayou...
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The reason for going to Dallas was to attend the College Art Association Annual conference and job fair. I'd joined the CAA back in NZ to let me use their big job database to find a teaching job in an art school over here. And the conference is apparently where many of the interviews for the jobs that are advertised take place. I'd applied for about 25 jobs by the time we left NZ in January. By the time the conference rolled around it was pretty obvious I wasn't going to be run off my feet doing interviews since none of the places I'd applied to had got in touch with me :( But there were workshops about getting a job, mentor sessions and interesting conference presentations. All in all it was a busy 4 days, and I got quite a bit out of it...just not a job. It was a good way though to get a bit of a feel for the system here, which is quite different from back home. When I first arrived in Dallas I went to a hostel, but the place was really a bit of a dump and also on a very slow and infrequent rail connection to downtown where I needed to go each day. So I shifted to a motel on the other side of town. This wasn't close to downtown at all but both the motel and the conference centre were close to a more efficient light rail line so it worked out pretty well. I spent a day in the mall getting a haircut and trolling through the department store sales for a cheap, smart outfit including a pair of shoes that of course seemed comfortable in the shop and then chewed up my feet for the next 4 days.
Dallas seemed to be a city of either freeway/corporate wastelands (big glass buildings and empty streets where it took me 2 days to find a coffee shop because they're all hidden inside big hotel concourses) or freeway/suburban wastelands where a lot of trash collects. Not very gorgeous.
 downtown
 between the train station and my motel - the sign of my motel is at far right.
but there are some interesting old meets new areas downtown like Deep Ellum, which are funky and interesting.
An interesting thing that happened every evening near my motel is that thousands of birds would turn up and roost in certain spots on trees and power poles. they could be quite dizzying flying overhead, and they made a lot of noise, including a noise that sounded like raindrops hitting the ground around you....but it wasn't rain....
 
I'm not sure what kind of birds they were, they may have been mockingbirds. It was cheaper to pay for a week at the motel that for 4 days so after the conference I had a few days to look around and go to....you guessed it, art galleries. I went to the Nasher Sculpture Centre which had a nice modernist garden with sculptures in it including a Richard Serra which was a little disappointing. I'd been looking forward to getting up close to one ever since we drove out to Kaukapakapa (yes, that's Aotearoa not Texas) to see the big Serra there that belongs to Alan Gibbs. Mr Gibbs doesn't let the hoi polloi wander all over his farm where the huge steel sculpture is installed but we'd been told you could get a good view of it from a road nearby. So we drove around where we'd been told but couldn't see anything. We stopped and asked a local where the sculpture was, but they just looked blank, so I explained that it was a like a long steel wall..”OH...that. It's a sculpture is it? We wondered about it because it looked like a useless fence – the cows just walk around the end”. They showed us where we could see it from and we duly admired it. But you have to get up close to these sculptures to really 'get' them. They all weigh many tons and are usually on a lean so there's supposed to be a massive sense of weight and some sense of threat too. I didn't get that feeling much from My curves are not mad at the Nasher, but later I saw Vortex at the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth and it was great. The best thing about it actually is the sound, its a really great amplifier of every little sound you make in it and an echo chamber too. 
But what I went there to see was inside and it was great - a big sculpture show by Martin Puryear - I wasn't allowed to take photos except of this one which is in their permanent collection 
They also had a great collection, highlights of which for me were some big modernist paintings by Motherwell and Kline, some good Warholls and paintings by Vija Celmins and Gerhard Richter which I didn't find so amazing but were very interesting to see 'live'.
Then I went across the road to the Kimbell Art Museum where I was super delighted to see a painting by on of my heroes George Stubbs - and I was even allowed to photograph it! 
I spent ages looking at that one. Also there was a Boucher, which seem to pop up all over the place here.  detail of cherubs After that I wandered back to the train station. Fort Worth seemed like a much more appealing city than Dallas (they are kinda Siamese twins). As I walked back, inspired by the Puryear show I was seeing sculpture everywhere.....  Title: 100 slides downhill (after Richard Long) Artist: Unknown, thought to be a youngster.
 Title: Posthole diggings. Artist: Unknown, undoubtedly Hispanic
 Title: Untitled (green blobs) Artist: Unknown, greenfingered.
On my last day in Dallas I decided to have a walk in Whiterock Lake Park - a big park around a lake just one rail stop away from where I was staying. It was a nice walk, lots of people out enjoying the park, lots of bikers and people fishing in the murky looking water. They all said the fish were fine to eat but none of 'em actually ate them, they all said they put them back.
One thing I noticed there and all over Dallas except the CBD was the litter. There's really a LOT of it there, much more than I've noticed in other places. Its a shame, it sure makes places look ugly, but if you just point your camera a little higher, you can pretend like its not there at all in the photos....
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this is my wee bed at the santa fe hostel (bottom left) bit of a banana bed but not too bad. only one roomie and she's pretty civilised.
the hostel is a sort of hippy relic, there's free food they scavenge from bakeries etc at the end of the day, internet is cheap (so i did the time-consuming photos first) and you have to do a chore in the morning, which is a first, not too onerous tho. and very cheap.
this is the yard at the hostel
Santa Fe is all adobe buildings, even supermarkets and mcdonalds etc. big ones and little ones, all boxy shapes and dull warm brown color. probably much prettier in summer when the trees, which there are a lot of, would be green. but now in winter its a very very brown place. which is nicer than grey.
these are some folks houses
indian traders selling stuff to toursts
similar stuff in a tourst shop. there's oodles and oodles of this stuff. also lots of fashion that frankly made my eyes bleed.
i did like these cowboy boots though. these are just a few from a shop that sold nothing but
a lot of the art made my eyes bleed too
an especially awful sculpture
Santa Fe is not like California - there are all sorts of dogs.
and a lot of bronze sculpture both public (like this one, life size) and for sale, most of it either realist animals/people or super kitch stuff, especially featuring eagles and indian braves
however before i give the impression that its all bad art i should say that there just SO MUCH art that some of it is bound to be bad. and the good stuff you're generally not allowed to take phtotos of.
good stuff i did see:
the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. nice to see some of her work in the flesh, tho there wern't any of the big abstractions.
at SITE there was a retrosprective of a local video artist Steina. some of the works were very cool, some were very dated or i guess just not to my taste. I liked The West, Mynd, Tokyo Four. each work was a room sized installation often featuring 4 or more simultaneous video projections. The SITE building is huge and the Steina show was the only thing in it.
Near there were contemporary delaer galleries but it was sunday and they were closed, so the part of the Santa Fe art scene i got to see was Canyon Road. That's gotta be the most galleries (over 90, on one street) i've seen in one place. Some of the stuff was interesting, some awful. a great variety really. The barman at a restaurant that evening told me its not uncommon for the gallery to keep 60% of the price - 60%!!! . crikey.He said his sister was an artist but also worked in the bar, not surprising - with that much competition and that kind of commission it'd be even harder than usual to make a living as an artist.
At the Georgia O'Keefe museum there were lost of her paintings of brightly colored hills and a quote from her saying opposite her house was a blue hill and I though "oh, she's exaggerating" but when i walked up museum hill the views were all of bright blue hills. This photo isn't a very good illustration of my point but you can take my word for it ;). This yellow dried up flower stuff was everywhere. It was lovely sunny weather but cool - in the shade all over town there were patches of perma-snow. Santa Fe is quite high (about 7,000 feet) People kept asking if I was feeling the altitude but i didn't. Altitude is funny that way, sometimes you feel it, sometimes you don't.
this is a big hotel
church at night.
The Museum of International Folk Art was pretty interesting. The website totally doesn't give you a feel of what its like. there's a huge collection of all sorts of stuff collected by one guy and all displayed in these big themed diorama things, so all sorts of mexican dolls of all sizes will be staged in a funeral scene, or Polish tin foil nativity castles and dolls will make a big scene. There's tons of it.
And quite a lot of creepy Spanish Catholic retablos . I've been seeing a lot of Spanish colonial and Mexican religious art and there's a heavy focus on the blood and the martyrdoms (both of Christ and the saints), plus they are often painted kinda ugly... personally I find it a little disturbing.
Some of the church altars are covered in similar stuff.
And speaking of which, it was Sunday so of course I went to church like a good girl (ok, so i just went to gawp and the art and stuff and not actually to a service or anything...) actually I went to a coupla churches - the Loreto Chapel, which was TACKY and the mission church of San Miguel, which is the oldest church in the US and was pretty cool (and said to be hauted, but don't worry, there's a sign in the church saying "Do not fear, the spirits are friendly") The Loreto Chapel is not a church anymore, the nuns who owned it flogged it off some years ago and now its just a tourist attraction, mostly because of its staircase but also i guess on account of it being gothic style which is pretty unusual around there. The best thing about it is its story and a staircase – the church was built with no way to get up to the mezzanine choir space, and a normal staircase would take up too much room. So the nuns prayed of course for an answer to the problem; “On the ninth and final day of prayer, a man appeared at the Chapel with a donkey and a toolbox looking for work. Months later the elegant circular staircase was completed, and the carpenter disappeared without pay or thanks. After searching for the man (an ad even ran in the local newspaper) and finding no trace of him, some concluded that he was St. Joseph himself, who came in answer to the sisters' prayers.”
 Old Joe did good - it's a pretty good staircase – a spiral with no central pole or visible means of support.
But as for the rest of the experience, which was accompanied the whole time by a narrative explanation of the chapel, the sister's teaching mission, the special staircase ect in the most saccharine tones – well I think this photo from the gift shoppe (as big as the church itself but MUCH tackier) sums it up.
 not sure if you can see but its a tea urn full of holy water and you can buy little bottles But I liked the mission church better, much nicer atmosphere, and its still a real church, though the gift shop is still pretty spectacular in terms of bad taste.
 
and next to the oldest church was the oldest house in the USA which dates from 1610 I think:
 After a few days in Santa Fe it was time to head to Dallas for the conference, so my way of a night in Albuquerque (I can't tell you a thing about it except the bus station is art deco and actually good looking, which is a miracle, and the motel was fine and the flight out was fine) I flew to Dallas....
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Just before dawn the next day the Chief pulled into Flagstaff, Arizona, and I hopped blearily off. I had crossed a time zone so even though it was 6am local (mountain time) time it was 5am to me, becuase after a month in California I was on western time.
Flagstaff is a pretty cool looking town in a slightly scruffy way. Route 66 goes right through it.
It's a mix of western looking railway town will cool old un-retouched buildings and other areas that are your standard American ribbon of crappy looking fast food, motel and petrol outlets - or as Bill Bryson put it, "endless rows of Kwik-Kraps and Jiffy-Shits". But near the railway line its older motels and stuff and they haven't been touched much since the 50's or whenever they were built. I don't know if this is a deliberate aesthetic choice - maybe sometimes but mostly not I suspect.
About every half hour or so a train rolls through, mostly big freight trains and BOY do they like to toot their horns. At night too, though for a miracle I didn't hear them last night and slept like a baby.
Anyway my hostel is in one of those old motels, which has been converted into a combination of apartments and a hostel. It has this awesome sign:
and is a good hostel.
I had a day of doing chores - laundry, trading in 3 books at the second hand book store for another one (a bad deal, but at least my pack will be 2 books lighter), updating this blog, which takes quite a while, then a great night's sleep.
And I woke up this morning to snow, which pretties up the town a bit because yesterday it was all piles of old, dirty snow.
Here's the hostel's back yard:
and some more flagstaff pics:
I'd been hoping to get to some of the closer sights, like the native cliff dwellings and such, but the bus system here is really not good at all. If you wanna get your kicks on Route 66 you better have a car.
There are daytrips from the hostel to the spectacular attractions "nearby" like the Grand Canyon and Sedona but they're pretty dear and I think I'll save them for another time. And its still snowing. Apparently there's a closer by old pueblo you can walk to from the mall, where the bus does go(it goes to the mall I mean, not the pueblo) so maybe i'll check it out later - but first it's time for lunch....later dudes.
  
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The train trip to Los Angeles along the coast was pretty scenic, it started early in the morning and went along some pretty nice coast:
Lots of surfers in lots of places, and people camping on the side of the road in their RVs.
Also went past some missile launch pads. Much less appealing.
Got to LA and caught a long bus ride to my hostel, dumped my gear and went out to explore. In the area I was staying there were some cool things - the Farmers Market is like a cross between a Singaporean food market and a European grocery type market, the permanent stalls type that's open every day but still an outdoor warren of stalls. Right by that was The Grove which is really just a mall I guess but outdoor too and really nicely set up. I've never been able to imagine saying "I'll meet you at the mall" before but this was actually a nice place.
Then just another block down (further than it sounds - a block in LA is the distance between 2 major street like Melrose and Santa Monica - but in between them are about 8 smaller streets.) on Wilshire is LACMA which is a pretty awesome gallery. Actually it was becoming even better that evening with a grand opening of a new wing, all the beautiful people and big patrones were strolling up for champers. Too bad my designer threads were in the laundry...
General public won't get to see it for a couple more weeks, first its invite only stuff and member time-slot views. Can't imagine the crush when it does open.
Anyway I saw the older bits which were free after 5pm, so i hung around a bit looking at the La Brea Tar Pits (stinky holes in the ground out of which they've dug a lot of ice ace fossils) and went in with all the other cheapskates who turned up at 5. Saw some paintings by Boucher who was one of the artists I used for backgrounds for the pony paintings last year. That was really cool, to see those things for real that I'd squinted at so hard as reproduction of a reproduction of a....
Some other real cool stuff there like a Bridget Riley...AND
Eventually I left there, went and got some chilli at the Farmers Market and walked back to my hostel on sore feet.
 It was a pretty ok place but a young crowd who came home at all hours of the night, and it was real hard to sleep.
Next day I got up and decided it was time for a day with no museum fees and little more low-brow entertainment. So I headed out to Venice Beach, where every LA cliche comes true:
 skaters
 'healers'
 hippies
 psychics (this guy is having his tarot done)
 homeless crazies
Also a good place to illustrate my california dog theory:
 type a) macho dog
 type b)small and silly
 combo 1)- one of each
 an attempt at combo 2) - pintsize macho
And here's why they call it Venice Beach - it has canals!
AND then i saw an actual famous person and they were filming him and it was actual acting and filming going on right there in front of me - the real hollywood experience.
It was Dennis Hopper and they were filming the intro for the Free Spirit Awards or some such thing (indie awards to co-incide with oscars I think)
 
That day brought home just how big the city is. It was a 2 bus ride to get there and took an hour getting out and an hour and a half getting back. Both because its a long way and because there's so much traffic.
Still I didn't learn and next day headed out on a 3 bus trip to Beverly Hills to see the Getty Centre. Also a long way but BOY was it worth it. That place is magnificent. And from there LA even looks pretty gorgeous.
Highlights were again seeing a painter I used last year - Fragonard - whose paintings were just lovely to see for real, and a photography show by Graciela Iturbide
and a very cool video by Bill Viola which managed to make video feel like painting.
I couldn't stay a long as I wanted because it was time to check out of the hostel and lug my enormous backpack on a bus crammed with schoolkids to Union Station.
Hostel photo of the day - rent notice because i was late checking out:
LA was largely about buses for me, which really makes you notice its vast sprawl and bad traffic. Still I thought it was a pretty cool place - though did I mention it was HOT? 30 degrees c both those days. In winter.
I went downtown to Union Station, checked in my backpack and then had a little while to wander around before the train left. I went looking for MOCA (yes, another art museum) but it was closed. I did find the cathedral - and truly LA is a city where they worship their cars:
nah just kidding. this was just the cathedrals parking garage - it really loked like this
impressive building, but lacked aura for me. I preferred Grace Cathedral in San Francisco which had an interesting combo of old and new, including an altarpiece by Keith Haring and replicas of Ghiberti's doors from the Duomo in Florence, and a very nice atmosphere,
Then a quiet beer at the rather nice deco station
And then onto the train, dinner and bed - I'd booked myself a "roomette" on the Southwest Chief which rolls through the night from LA to Flagstaff (and then on and on, eventually to Chicago) thus killing 3 of every traveller's birds with one stone - how to get there, where to eat and where to sleep. No snoring roomies!!
took this snap with the good old self-timer
goodnight!!
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Getting a bit behind with the blog here, but on we go...to SLO
San Luis Obispo is a nice little town halfway down California near the coast.. I went there by greyhound, which was an all day ride from San Francisco down highway 101, which is more interesting that taking freeways (bigger than highways) but also slower. stopped at a lot of towns.
I chose to go there because from there I could take the coastal train to LA, which seemed like a nicer way to travel and a chance to see the coast. But first a few days break from the hustle and bustle in a nice quiet Amercian town (not too sleepy though, it does have a college which always peps a town up somewhat.)
I arrived on a Thursday evening which was a stroke of luck because they have a weekly farmers market Thursday evening where thy close off the main street for many blacks and have vege stalls and bands and lots of fantastic smelling woodfired barbeque stalls. I wandered around, bought some organic veg and dried fruit snacks and smelled all the good smells. Then to my new hostel which, like the town, was real cute.
Next day I decided to go check out the beach and the hibernating place of monarch butterflies. The butterfly grove was quite neat, though I think quite a few of them had already woken up and started fluttering back up north. I nearly put my neck out getting you guys this photo so I hopeyou appreciate it ;) getting butterflies to pose is tough work.
Pismo beach itself was a tacky place, for ChCh folk - think New Brighton at its least appealing but bigger.
Plus lots of trailer park homes and also lots of RVs (recreational vehicles, giant giant campervans, very popular here.)
Riding the local buses is quite funny. There are several networks - town, regional and a diferent regional one (one of which goes by the acronym SCAT, though SLO would be more apropriate). so when you get on a bus the very friendly driver says 'where are you going?" and then he'll radio the next bus you need to catch if its a 2 bus ride and tell them to be sure to wait fort he transfer. so the buses are co-ordingated to meet up and let passengers transfer, but because they're often waiting a few minutes the schedule gets a bit out of whack. very friendly though.
Later I went for a walk up a hill to get a look at the place and saw this hummingbird in a patch of burnt scrub:
More bus fun the next day. I got up and got to the bus stop to go to Hearst Castle. When the bus showed up the driver was throwing a conniption fit at his supervisor because he'd drawn the pintsize yellow bus for the day instead of a real bus. And there was no place for people to put their fares (other buses there had a special container) so he had us all put the money in the bus trash can. Then off we rattled with the driver some time of raving about his supervisor etc and talking to other passengers about his daughter, their work & family etc. The usual motley crew on the bus, working folk, the lone tourist (me) and a few derelicts, who the driver all seemed to know by name so i take it they rode the bus quite a lot. The trip was not direct. we had to go to all the small settlements on the way which varied from depressed Los Osos where mostly hispanic working folk lived, who work in SLO, to the chintzy beach homes and knick knack shoppes of Cambria. Eventally we got to the cstle.
I'd beeen expecting something rather tacky and a bit Disney but the reality in a way was weirder than that. You have to go on a tour which starts at the base of the hill and buses you up a few miles to the castle.
 This is outside one of the 3 "small" guesthouses, not the main house.
The building is kinda spanish style on the outside with lots of marble statues and flashy outdoor pools, mostly reproductions or made new for the place but did include a 3000 year old egyptian statue (granite, not marble). But iside it was like a house/museum mixture. Quite sombre with lots of entire woodent carved ceilings shipped from Italy and Spain - one of which dated from before Columbus reached America. huge rooms panlled in choir stalls from similarly aged churches.
Painting, statuary, furniture, tapestries. And the man called this his little ranch house (he had lots more houses). It was interesting and strange.
Strange to see so much really old stuff, from a variety of places, in a place that had been a family home as well as a 'bach' where he entertained a lot.
The indoor pool had tiny tiles which were Murano glass. The gold ones were actual gold sandwiched between glass.
And of course he had a private movie theatre, with OTT decoration
Then I went down to the beach to relax a bit and to see if any elephant seals had shown up from the main colony 5 miles north, which is also a local attraction, but not accessible by bus.
sure enough not long after I arrived a huge blubbery form wobbled his way onto the beach.
He was quite surprisingly fast, and the park rangers headed dwon to tell people to back off and give him more room because you don't want to be within range of a pissed off pile 'o' blubber that big. I wandered round the beach a bit and there were 4 of them there in total. They may have been 'losers' in the mating fights at the main colony and had come away from there fo a rest. quite impressive beasts. And a nice beach.
 A dramatic moment - a small foolish fluffy dog decided to give a sea elephant a piece of its mind, its owner rushed up and snatched it from the totally unimpressed and unflustered jaws of death.
Also i saw some sea otters but they were too far away to get a photo of. Or even much of a look.
Then it was time to get back on the bus and head back to town. big bus this time and a much less entertaining , but quicker, trip.
Hostel photo for the day:
The owner's dog, who is unusual in California becuase nearly all the dogs i've seen are either a)pit bulls or something similarly macho or b)things that are actually dusters, or fluffy slippers, or rats with thyroid problems on a leash. The other end of the leash has a human who's convinced their pet is a dog.
This dog by contrast was your average totally insane toy-obsessed collie, it would harass each guest in turn to throw the toy. Some guests were dumb enough to play along. They're probably still there, enslaved to the dogs' never ending 'game'.
So the next day I was booked on the Pacific Surfliner train to LA which left at 6.45am. As always when you need to get up early I didn't get a very good nights sleep owing to the fact that one of the sea elephants had followed me to the hostel and was in the bunk opposite me snoring its goddamn fat head off all night... So at sparrow fart off i stumble, unrefreshed, to head for the big smoke once more...look out Hollywood, here I come.
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Well the start of hostelling seemed like the end of the cushy life - San Francisco downtown HI was frankly unsalubrious. They were renovating and had no lounge and no laundry, so there was your room - shared by 4 people, or the kitchen - flouro lit, buzzing with the hum of many big fridges and decorated with loads of notices saying 'have you done your dishes' 'don't do this, don't do that' etc. Cozy.
Breakfast on the first day I was earbashed by a woman who claimed the government were holding her passport and refusing to let her go home to Brussels where she was an important medical researcher (she was American). She said it was because 'they' wanted to control all the medical research etc. I started to realise she may be living in an alternate reality to my own...
Many other people in the streets around the hostel also live in alternate realities, mostly ones created by drugs, alcohol or mental illness. Downtown SF around Union Square is a curious side by side mix of rich and poor with the Hilton and other posh hotels one block away from the area called the Tenderloin which is very poor indeed. It makes for interesting walks around the block. There are a LOT of homeless in SF, but according to our freind Andrew, who's local, not because there are no welfare support agencies. Apparently there's a lot of welfare in California. Still a lot of beggars and folks in sleeping bags on the corner though.
Anyway I decided I'd take a photo a day of whatever hostel I was in to try to capture something of its character.
1. 
this was a radiator right next to my bed. it got pretty hot and every now and then a steam valve would hiss loudly.
2. This was the view from the computer room where I spent nearly all of day 2 of my stay there doing job applications on a computer that you had to feed dollar notes into to stay logged on. It had a little dollar-eating box attached to it (actually lots of things do here, including buses, you get on the bus and feed a note into a machine).
on day 3 i got out to do interesting stuff.  (This is the outside of the hostel.)
I went to the San Francisco art institute to see a Diego Rivera mural. It was at one end of a small gallery on the campus and there was master's student's work in the rest of the room - so on one end wall Rivera:
and on the other end wall:
i'll let you all make up your own art-critical opinions.
then i caught the ferry to oakland
where i went to the Oakland Art Museum, which was partially closed but it was cool to see some paintings by artists I knew, particularly some photorealists.
Then I got on the train to Berkeley college campus, which is like a small town in itself, where thay have a really cool art gallery - great building - (which they don't feature much on the site). That was a long day on my feet...
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Welcome to California, where it snows all night and it snows all day. In 2 weeks of skiing we didn't have one day where we were forced to ski on "used snow", Fresh to you each day, white 'n' fluffy. Actually by the end of it we were kinda "enough already, my legs ache from all this powder and where's the sun gone?"
But enough whining - we had a blast. We skied Mammoth, Heavenly, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Kirkwood, Squaw Valley and Northstar. Some of these fields are huge. Heavenly lies across the border of California and Nevada, so you ski two states in the same day, Squaw has 22 lifts and, they claim, 4,000 acres, and Northstar kept us busy all day on just the 'backside' section, never mind the main area and the other 2 bits.
Some days, like the day we had at Squaw there was just so much snow we really struggled - in some places there was 3 ft of new snow. Many parts of Squaw weren't very steep, which makes deep snow more difficult. And it wasn't exactly champagne fluff that day either. Actually one of the highlights of that day for me was spotting two porcupines up a tree. We weren't sure what they were and we didn't know that porcupines climbed trees so we had to describe them to at least 8 people before someone said, yes they climb trees and yes, that'll be what we saw. A guy on the lift behind us saw them too and said they were badgers. Pfffftt. Now I do know that badgers don't climb trees...well I'm pretty sure they don't.
Overall I think Northstar was my favorite field, we did heaps of fantastic tree skiing there and even though the day worked itself up into (another) snowy gale we had a ball.
Tree skiing was very much the order of the day pretty much every day. It tends to be more sheltered in the trees and the snow can also settle more lightly, making it easier to get through deep stuff (not so heavy). Also you can find untracked snow for longer in the trees as some folks don't go in there. Looking for untracked snow isn't just a vanity thing - "look at my lovely ski turns" - it's actually much easier to ski in snow that hasn't been all chopped up by other people first.
Unfortunatley skiing is one of those things that's rather hard to photograph - especially when your camera keeps saying "change the batteries" which is camera speak for "I refuse to work in these freezing conditions, put me back in your pocket immediately". And when you do get it to work it inevitably captures you looking awkward or merely looking like a tiny black speck on a white square. so here are our best efforts - note all the good ones are taken from off a lift.
 Mark peeks out of the car - we were SO glad we upgraded to a 4WD. The travel agent had booked us a mustang. I'm really not sure what that man was thinking or if he's even ever been over here skiing.
Eventually we had to leave Tahoe and make our way back to the coast. Even though the weather was still pretty horrible we had a nice day/night in Marin county, staying near Point Reyes which was very lovely and a birdwatchers paradise. Though some of the birds are watching you back - when we woke up there were 8 of these turkey vultures circling the back yard of the B&B we stayed at:
After breakfast we drove towards San Francisco via the coast and Muir Woods, where there are giant redwoods. Very cool. It rained on and off all day but between showers the sun kindly came out so that I could take some pics:
We didn't see any wildlife in the woods - but we saw these 2 little guys in someone's front yard - I took this photo standing on the driveway:
Then sadly it was time to take Mark to the airport and say goodbye. No more holidays with hubby and Jeep and nice B&B's, now it's budget travel and job seeking....but that's a story for another day
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Hi all, Having invited youse all to a Barbie (Sunday January 13, 12pm onwards, don’t forget) we thought we’d better make sure we had something to feed you with…so we headed off down to the West Coast a’huntin’. (and for a lovely Christmas with family in Greymouth) We consulted knowledgeable local sources…..
 local mystic, near Kumara.  some sort of pixie, Hunt’s Creek and armed with what they told us set off to hunt down a beast
 the great short white hunter, Taipo River And we were successful!!! (though not at any of the locations pictured. We forgot our camera on the sucessful hunt trip and were also forced to abandon our leaking tent in favour of a farm shed used, by the smell of it, mostly at crutching time. It was a somewhat excessively aromatic but at least dry place to sleep and also provided some empty fertilizer sacks for a mattress since we’d also forgotten one sleeping mat) we DID manage to remember to haul the deer we shot out of the bush and we’ll serve it up to you along with a few snarlers and bevies.  welcome to camp slaughter So hope to see you soon and hope you all had as fun and relaxing (though for your sakes, less pungent) Christmas break as we did. Cheers, Claire & Mark
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