The Final Washup.........

This page is for anyone that may be interested in the facts and figures of this trip. In brief they are as outlined below, but I will probably come back and add to it over the next couple of weeks.

Total amount of days away................................107.

Kilometers travelled.
By air........40,747.
By road (driven)......13,679. Plus a couple of bus trips in Mexico that I have'nt included.

Rental vehicles.
In total.......9 (including 1 golf buggy on Isla Mujeres in Mexico)

Flights, (long and short haul).....17.

Accomodations.
Everything from tent, cheap hotels, wild west hotels, old friends houses, new friends houses that we met on the road, and beautiful cabanas where you stepped straight out onto a Caribbean beach..........45.
(some for 1 day, and some for a week or more)

Photos taken.
In total........18,325 (which equates to a total of 96 Gig on the hard drive)

One thing I want to say is that in hindsight after doing the miles and talking to people on the road, I am more than happy with the decision I made to go for the option of rental cars and whatever lodgings we could find on the way ( as opposed to a motor home / Winnebago setup).
Two main reasons for this are that the cost still came in well under what the motor home option was going to be by my calculations before we left, and the fact that with a car we were not restricted as to where we could go and where we could get a park. I'm guessing they are great if you are not interested in camping or dont want to take the chance of "winging it" with the motels etc,etc....... The amount of these things on the road in the states is bordering on unbelievable, and when they start bunching up on the road , passing them is pretty much the same way.We often ended up in places that I definitely would not (or could not) have gone had we been driving a motorhome (even the smallest one available for rent). All I'm saying here is that they are not for me, I would take the "family truckster" and camping / motel option anyday.

We were never caught out in a situation where we could'nt get a bed for the night within about 15 minutes of getting into a town .......most times the hotel/motel price would be exactly what I would have expected to pay or better (keep in mind we were travelling in low season for a lot of the trip though), a couple of times (maybe only two or three) it was a bit above that, but it all balanced out and the fuel/gas bill for the entire trip was more than pleasing.......I expected it to be more. The closest we got to not getting a bed for the night in a chosen spot was at Zion Canyon where we camped. About an hour after setting up camp I went back up to the front entrance and the "campground full" sign was up, I talked to the ranger, and he said that was normal for late afternoon out there, they pretty well fill up most days before dusk, but there was still a town with vacant motel rooms available about 20 minutes back down the road if we had got caught out.

All cars except for Mexico were auto transmission, easy driving and I enjoyed the variety from Chrysler Magnum, Subaru Forrester, and Jeep right through to a golf Buggy on Isla and even push bikes in Vancouver (which by the way, was not included in the rental vehicle tally above).

The maps above are highlighted with our routes for each country and state/province.
I dont have a map of Hawaii to post here yet but in short we completely drove around the big island (Hawaii) from where the lava cuts the road next to the ocean on the Hilo side of the island right around to the Kona side and then back to the other side of the lava flow near Hilo again. also going accross the centre of the island on one day to check it out.

Vancouver Island,British Columbia and Alberta are all pretty well self explanatory.

In Washington we went inland to Mt Ranier and then to Mt Saint Helens, and through Oregon we hugged the pacific coast highway just about all the way.

Once we hit San Francisco in California we hung a big left and headed east out to Nevada, Utah and Arizona via (NOT viva) Las Vegas. Then after we had spent time out there we turned around and did a VERY SOLID day's driving on the interstate 15 to get back to San Francisco, (as the "Dead Kennedy's" said in there song Viva Las Vegas "just a flat out burn through Baker, Barstow and (some other town which I cant recall the name of)"..................and this is where your all asking , why did they go all the way back up there instead of going straight across to LA which is a hell of a lot shorter. The reason is that I wanted to cover the entire west coast from Vancouver to San Diego including Big Sur and this is the way it was done. I probably would'nt do it again as it was such a monster day on the road and I had also previously seen that section of coastline, but the family had'nt, and I'm glad they now have.
If I did it again, I would choose more time in Utah/Arizona as opposed to the California coast as I know there is just so much to be seen in those places and we only saw a fraction of what is on offer out there. Those areas are stunning to say the least and I know now that I have to go back and have a lot better look around there some day.

Mexico............same applies for down here too. There was'nt much that I did'nt enjoy through all of Mexico, and I think Wendy feels the same way....(Samara maybe not so much), too hot and maybe a bit too "cultural" (her words) for her.
Well I tell a bit of a lie there, there was one thing that I was not all that impressed with, and that was, (going down like a sack of spud's for about three days with a nasty little virus , which I did'nt go to the doctors for, but opted to hit it with some broad spectrum antibiotics on the third day that we had brought with us from Australia for this very reason, (thanks for the advice Luke) I would have been struggling to make it to a doctors even if I had known where one was on the second and third day of being hit with this thing, and to top it off we did'nt have a car and then there was the language barrier also . Anyway, the antibiotics worked and on the fourth day I was back up and moving again).


There are a lot more places in Mexico that given the time we would have loved to have seen. We only had two rental cars in Mexico, one being the golf buggy in Isla Mujeres and the other being the little beast in Puerto Escondido to get down to Barra ............and "daytime only driving" was the order of the day down there due to unknown security risks at night and the animals, washout's and other obstacles on or in the road.....oh, did I mention the "TOPES", I swear if you hit one of those things at any sort of speed you would be sitting in the body of the rental car about a hundred meters up the road from the tope where the chassis of the car would still be.......some of them are truly savage and a lot of the time they are that poorly marked or just plain unmarked that you would be on them before you realized and by then it's too late to avoid hitting them.
The military road blocks were'nt an issue at all for us, we passed straight through them with a polite "Buenos dias".... no hassles at all (four in one day), but the guys (three surfers from So Cal) that we were hooking up with this particular day south of Puerto Escondido were checked out fairly well and asked fairly "standard"questions, ...................what are you doing here ? .......where are you going ?....... and where are your family ? Their car and I think their surfboards also got a bit of a "once over" as well.
Easy going guys with big smiles on their faces, on holidays and all loaded up with surfboards with no women in the car....... I suppose they looked the part for a bit of a chat. We all had a bit of a laugh about it back in Puerto that evening !
Getting questioned by half a dozen or so federalis with those big M16's hanging across their shoulders would have to be a bit nerve wracking for anyone though, even if you know you are perfectly above board and all "legit".

All in all though, we found Mexico very welcoming and friendly in general, and from my personal point of view with common sense firmly in place I would say also a very safe place, that is obviously with not having done any night driving while down there. (Please note that I am not speaking for everyone here when I call it "safe" it is my personal opinion based on the experiences that I had while down there, this was my second time and both have been "freakout free" (we also walked home from dinner via the beach one night which is not advised by most travel sites, and still felt no threat) ........apparently knife point robberies have occured on beaches at night, but as I said before, common sense and "gut instinct" go a long way when travelling.
All the places we chose to stay at were coastal towns if that counts for anything, and quite often we would be wandering the streets at night but still mostly in public areas on the way back from dinner or something where there were people around. I never once felt threatened or uneasy in the time we were there ( except maybe one morning when I was down at Zicatela beach for three hours shooting and the street dog with no top lip started smiling at me in his own peculiar way), naaa, just kidding, even he was friendly, albeit a bit mangy looking . He got the message loud and clear after I stepped back from the camera to talk to someone and he had decided to sit right behind my feet and I proceeded to step right on top of him......there was an almighty yelp, the camera, tripod and myself all nearly went down in the sand and the lipless smile got even bigger as he took off, but by that time I think it may not have been a smile.
Anyway, I love the place, and thats that!

Hopefully I will come back to this page over the next couple of weeks and add more to it as things get sorted out and we settle back into life in a house and not a tent / hotel.

Adios amigos.

I'm back...............Ho, ho, ho and all that bollocks. It's a couple of days before christmas '07 and I thought I had better do one last little bit of blogging for the working year.

I just loaded my emails a couple of minutes ago and recieved one from my good mate Doug in Canada. Seems like I'm not the only one that would pack up and move to Mexico without too much encouragement, he's saying the same thing so there must be something going for the place.

While I am here I also have to say a bit about the Arizona / Utah area.
The places we visited were pretty spectacular. I was blown away by Zion National Park and also the slot canyons , they were something else .
The hike up the "narrows" was a day that is etched into my mind forever...........hiking constantly for 6 or 7 hours in water that was from six inches deep and up to chest deep in one or two places (and reasonably fast flowing in some areas) with a couple of professional cameras, tripod and and all the other gear a photographer carries around makes for a memorable day out. I stopped at the point where I came across a couple of pretty "hard core" hiker's standing chest deep in fairly fast running water about to try and climb up a big flat faced rock that was well over their head height and which that fast running water was flowing over. I watched with envy as they helped each other get up and continue on the adventure whilst getting soaking wet.......there was no way known I could have gone beyond that point on my own with all my gear and to this day I am wondering what I missed out on up there .
The people on the hike had thinned out considerably by this point, so if you were hiking on your own, that's it....you may not have been lucky enough to have someone around at a time when you may have needed help, and god forbid getting injured up there and spending the night stuck out there on you own would definitely not be a positive scenario.

It brought back memories of my little escapade up on the Emmons Glacier at Mt. Ranier in Washington state when I left Wendy and Samara at the Glacier Basin base camp after a three hour hike up to there and headed up the glacier on my own. I got that far up the thing that by the time I got back down off the ice to the "Basin Camp" and back down the original 3 hour hike to our campsite at White River I only had less than one hour of daylight left, and one hour of daylight when you are stuck half way up a mountain injured or for whatever other reason on your own with no one coming down behind you is not a place you want to be..........the addrennalin pumping through my veins that day was unbelievable, I remember running through the last bit of forest and out into to the campground thinking how happy I was to see civilisation again, and when I saw Wendy at our campsite looking up towards the track wondering when I was going to appear, (they had been back at camp for a couple of hours already) I jumped about three feet in the air and just punched the air with excitement knowing I had come back from a situation that at a couple of times on the way down that mountain I had started thinking that if I screwed up and injured myself or took a wrong turn I could be in a lot of trouble. In saying all this though, for me this was one of those times in life when I truly felt alive, ( and I mean like goosebumps and pins n needles sort of alive).

That brings me to more icy thoughts...........Canada.

Dont think for one minute here that I was'nt impressed with Canada. It's just that I could write for another day about it without even trying, so again, it is something that I will come back too soon.

Hawaii....Are we there yet ........?

In Hawaii and well and truly on the way home...............this picture says a lot to me. I reckon we pretty well look like we have been on the road for a while, tired from having way too much fun, plenty of contented smiles and a bit of colour, but also I think that there is that little nervous twitch in there somewhere about going back to the real world and dealing with all the crap associated with it.

Samara is taking the pic at an arms length, Wendy is close to cracking up laughing and I'm just kickin' back relaxing (and thinking that maybe I'm missing Mexico just a little bit too much).
I remember Samara taking this shot, but don't remember exactly where that was.....but anyway, It's a cool family shot.....and after all this time (24 x 7) in each other's face, the knive's are'nt out and we are all still smiling, that's gotta say something...!

We are very close to the end of this trip's blog, but I will be back over the next week or two with a couple of final entries and a few interesting facts and figures hopefully if I can retrive them from all the data that has filled my head over the course of this journey. It has been nothing short of stunning, life changing, and totally unforgettable , seeing old friends and meeting new ones that will hopefully last as long as the old ones we have just revisited after 25 years.
I have seen and experienced things over here that I could'nt have even dreamed about, and I think I can speak for the girls also when I say that.
Now it is heads down and start working on the next adventure, and I'm pretty sure that Mexico will be part of it again.

Hawaii, North Shore.

The first photo here is taken from the steps of the house again and looking just up towards Pipeline which is pretty well right in front of the end of the lagoon you can see here. That lagoon is made from when the bigger sets of waves come in and come right up the beach and over into this low spot.....on big swells and the right tides this happens that regularly that the water does'nt get time to soak away before the next wave dumps another load into it, so it just keeps getting deeper and deeper, when this shot was taken it was just below waist deep.

The second shot is actually my last shot from this day, and shows how this day ended up. It got as black as hell........lightning strikes were going directly into the ocean and the lagoon at this stage was well over waist deep and taking up a good sized area of the beach. The couple of white spots you can see on the photo is from rain drops on my lens picking up light from my flash which went off automatically as it had got so dark. There were still a couple of guys out in the water, but I had been at the beach for over 10 hours by this stage and it was time to go back to the house and start downloading 4 CF cards full of images and see what little nuggets I had managed to capture through this day of magic surf. This day alone made it well worth the effort to get back to the North Shore on our way home to Oz......when this place is going off, it really is something to witness........the next day it had dropped right off, and the day after that it was basically flat again. All this group of surf photos in the next few posts of this blog were taken on the one day...it went from perfect waves in beautiful sunshine to wild waves and a full on storm black sky.........I got sunburnt in the morning and saturated in the afternoon, and loved every minute of it.

Hawaii, North Shore.

The first photo here is a wide angle shot looking straight out to "Off The Wall" surf break and up past the trampoline towards Log Cabins break, taken from the steps of the house I stayed in nearly two years ago.
It is my favourite place to shoot OTW from as it is elevated and right in front of the break. My big lens is still mounted on the tripod in the foreground but I have taken the camera off and mounted it on the wide angle for this photo...note the sky in the background starting to darken up.

The second shot is another photographer down on the beach just to my left who was shooting OTW and also Log Cabins........note how a wave has just come right up the beach and under his feet leaving a foam ring where it stopped and the plastic bag over his lens, and also how dark the sky is by now....it had started raining by this time and the ocean was getting progressively wilder.

In the first shot here, this guy is looking up and back at the wave he just caught, pointing at it and seemingly having a few words to it, but in the second shot which was taken a couple of minutes later he is standing on the beach looking out into the break and waiting for the front half of his board to appear after copping the same wave on the head after his little conversation with it........these waves were breaking very close to shore in shallow water for the end of the ride.

Hawaii, North Shore...... Backdoor and Off The Wall.

Another couple of shots from the same day as the previous photos....one of them a big hack and the next just a nice barrell, but by this time it had started raining and I was shooting from under a $2 plastic raincoat.

John John Florence at Off The Wall.....Hawaii

What a difference a day makes again........LAX to this in a day.......well nearly.

We flew out to Hawaii as planned on 2nd Nov and arrived in Honolulu at about 9.30am, went and picked up the rental car and booked into our hotel in Waikiki.
I left the girls there to go and cruise the shops and whatever while I hit the H1 freeway in the rental, as all I was interested in was getting up to the North Shore to see what was going on in the way of waves, and also to try and find our accomodation for the next 5 days. One hour later I was up there looking at a dead flat blue ocean and not holding a lot of hope of any sort of real wave action. BUT, this is Hawaii we are talking about here. I did what I had to do up there and headed back to Waikiki to hook up with the girls again and head out to dinner at DUKE'S on the beach ........(Thanks Chris, it was 100% beautiful and appreciated like you would'nt believe).

The next day we were back on the H1 first thing and heading across the island. About half way up to Haleiwa I hear this odd noise coming from the car and then feel a bit of a sway up happening......flat right rear tyre, (after about 13,000 kilometers on this trip, we get the first car drama in our last 300 K's of driving) and I just happen to be on the far inside lane of a freeway, so somehow I navigate my way through 3 lanes of traffic and pull over on the side of the road without loosing the car and start unloading all the luggage out of the back so I can get to the spare. I am just about to put the jack under the car whilst laying on the road, and Wendy says something which I can not quite hear, anyway I stick my head out from under the car, and there is a tow truck just reversing up to the front of the car.

About four minutes later the job is done and he is gone.........all he said was "your a traveller are'nt you" I answer him with yes, and he says "no worries, let me fix this for you" and gets his trolley jack and "rattle gun" from the back of the truck and next thing I know he was gone. Pacific Towing I think was the name on his truck....very much appreciated I will say.

Anyway, we were all back up on the North Shore by mid morning, checked into our place at Sharks Cove, and snorkelling in that flat blue ocean I was talking about before by lunch time..........still no waves !!!

The next morning I woke up at a sparrow's fart and headed straight down to Pipeline to see if anything has changed........grabbed my camera on the way out just in case and BINGO....this was what I'm greeted with. The first two shots are of John John Florence hanging onto the wall at "Off The Wall" and then pulling out before the axe comes down on him, the third shot is taken looking up towards Waimea at a break called Log Cabins, and the fourth is some lucky barrell hound getting shacked at OTW again. The North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii is legendary for going from dead flat to huge within hours, and that's basically what happened on this occasion, it's certainly not as big as it can get, but it was still a good size and pretty clean,( and thankfully so) as thats the main reason for coming here on the way home.........to get the waves when they are on.
I think the young John John in these pics is totally on fire with his surfing and will be a force to be reckoned with in the not too distant future....(Kelly Slater has said that he will know these waves better than anyone ever has) as he has been surfing them since he was about 8 years old, he is just so good at such a young age and is totally relaxed in pretty heavy conditions.
I also got some really good shots of him last time I was over here, he does'nt miss out on too many sessions as he lives here.........look for that name coming up through the ranks real soon.

LAX....1st Nov 07.

It's me again (Mal).

Oh my goodness............what a difference a day makes.
The beautiful surrounds of Mexico and the Caribbean one day and Los Angeles international airport the next.

Big thanks go out to Terri and Larry for their synchronisation and effort in getting us and our gear all up here today (our bags seem to have expanded since Mexico).......... we would be lost without you guys.

Tonight, this is the view from a decidedly crappy hotel room right on top of LAX for a quick and hopefully easy exit to Hawaii early tomorrow morning....(one thing we have learnt on this trip, is that there is generally no such thing as a quick and easy exit from LAX). This is our third passage through this airport in the last three months, and not one of them has been remotely pleasant....it's always stressfull and full on, but at the other end Hawaii is'nt, so it's all good.

As I type this the girls are in bed and there is a constant flow of jets landing and taking off to both the north and south of this motel which makes for a stereophonic sonic sleep tonight I think, but wait, there's more............................the main highway south to San Diego is at the front door, so we are surrounded by sound, and it is not quite the 'Bumberfest" type sound that I would prefer, but it is the sound that we have become quite used to over the course of this journey, "on the road type sounds". It is all part of the travelling experience though and "ya gotta love it for what it is", and thats why we are travelling is'nt it.......the joy of new experiences, new friends, and learning in life, and believe me.....this trip has delivered on all of the above for all of us.

As we drove through Poway, Pendleton and other bits of southern California today on the way to the airport, the extent of the bushfires that went through here last week while we were in Mexico became fully apparent .....something like 1,400 homes completely lost or damaged (and there are still minor fires burning around here as I write this) , it just seemed surreal that our friends here were going through this ordeal while we were down in Mexico oblivious to the fact that it was even happening, these fires came so close to where we stayed with Terri and Brent before and after Mexico while in this area.

Anyway, tomorrow I am hoping to land in Hawaii to be greeted with some sizeable "Pipeline" magic over the next 5 days or so, and we have another early start in the morning to make it all happen, (but not as early as our 3am start yesterday in Cancun to get to Dallas Texas so we could connect to San Diego and be there for all the hoohaa of halloween which the grommet absolutely had a ball in joining in with all the local kids and trick or treating) so I will sign out of here for now and get back and do some more in the next day or two.

See ya.!!!