We travelled out to the village in a pickup truck. Five of us sat in the front with the driver, there were about twenty people in the back and another twenty on the roof. The bags were tied to the side of the truck to make room for everyone sitting on the top. We crossed a the Mekong on a ferry and about six hours later, after driving down dirt tracks, through a wedding which took up the whole width of the road, and through a few fields, we eventually made it to the village.

All the relatives remembered us and we were made very welcome. Ali's dad, remembering I liked to smoke a bit of weed, presented me with a black bin liner full when I arrived. It wasn't long before the neighbors dragged us into their garden and began pouring rice spirit down my throat. The New Year party had started two days early. Someone told Ali's mother that we liked chips in the west, and that we ate potatoes like they ate rice. So that evening we were treated to a big bowl of chips, with aubergene curry.

We slept on the floor of Ali's parents house, along with about ten other people. The following morning, after ablutions in the jungle, we were treated to the most unusual breakfast I've ever eaten. First I was given a warm can of Japanese beer, then the left over chips from the night before were brought out, along with a plate of freshly cooked chips and a bowl of fried, crispy meat. I asked Dick what the meat was and he replied, "You don't want to know.". After a little prodding, he told us it was rat. It was very tasty. We were then taken on the back of one of the new motos, to visit Ali's brother, who fed us on beer, fish and shellfish from the river. We were also smeared with talcum powder, part of the New Year festivities.

That everning we had cold chips, vegetables and rice. The rice in the village is delicious. It's their staple food and they plant it, grow it, de-husk it and cook it in water from the river.

We soon got into a routine of lounging on a platform outside the hut, under the shade of a big mango tree. We entertained a constant stream of children and adults, surrounded by pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, water buffallo and drank jasmine tea all day. On the evening of the third day, new years day, there was a party on the other side of the river. We went over in a canoe and joined in the fun. A big sound system had been set up in what is their village square. There were small stalls selling food and drink. Several of them sold various types of home-brewed alcohol. These stall were manned by small groups of men who were completely drunk. I was constantly dragged over to sample their booze and it wasn't easy to escape. Lots of young boys went around throwing bangers, we continued to be smeared in talcum powder. Both villages were decked out in home made bunting. Small scraps of material had been carefully sown onto lengths of string.

The following morning we had cold chips and rat for breakfast, without the beer. After breakfast we decided to visit the village temple, or Wat. We walked along the river and came to two large huts, not much different from the hut we were staying in. The first had three statues of Buddha and little else inside. We were beckoned in and shown how to wash each Buddha in turn. We were then taken over to the second hut, which was a bit larger and still being built. It was empty inside, except for a fag smoking monk on a bed in the corner, and a couple of men mumbling into a microphone. The place was empty when we arrived, but everyone from the other hut had joined us. When the man on the microphone saw us all, he shrieked with surprise and changed gear, singing a song and starting another "Wash the Buddha", ceremony.  Behind the microphone was a small forest of "money trees". A small branch is stood in a bowl of unhusked rice and paper money is hung from the branches like fruit. Many of the families took a money tree to the Wat on Buddha washing day.

The evenings were spent dancing and drinking over the river. It's a real pleasure to dance the traditional dances, where everyone goes round in a circle, with a step that flows gently backwards and forwards.

In the day, Dot began to collect a group of girls around her, who enjoyed her art lessons, and began to fill her sketch book up with pictures of flowers and people. I noticed that the children played several games with flip flops (or "thongs" or "jangles"). One involved throwing a flip flop down the track, then throwing other sandals to see who could hit the first. Another involved drawing a small circle in the dust. Each player placed an elastic band in the circle, then took it in turns to kick their flip flop at the target. You kept all the bands that you knocked out of the circle.

The last time we were in Cambodia, I'd asked Ali if they ate dog, like they did in Vietnam. She'd interpreted the question as a sort of request and on our fourth morning in the village we were served a bowl of dog meat- mostly liver, with rice. The liver wasn't so great, but the meat was fine. I ate just enough to maintain my front of good manners. The days under the mango tree passed slowly. It was very hot, and we cooled ourselves off by swimming in the river. Finally, we piled back into the pickup truck and returned to Phnom Phen- and civilisation- chairs with backs, air conditioning, cold beer, cable tv, showers and all the other things that make civilisation preserving.

On our first full day back in town we met Lee, the tuc tuc driver's brother, Kong. Kong was the person who arranged and paid for Lee to stay in the mental hospital. He told us he'd been phoned recently and told Lee's fees had nearly run out. We arranged for him to take us out there again so we could pay his board for a couple more months. We took some fruit, rice and chicken and couple of cans of coke. It was sad. I couldn't honestly see how Lee was going to make it back to a "normal" life. He's not together mentally, and keeps drifting off, finding it difficult to concentrate. There is no such thing as "long term care" in Cambodia.

On the way back to town, Lee's brother drove down some back streets, and through some gates onto a small piece of land where there was what looked like a warehouse. The warehouse was divided into alleys, about three metres wide. On each side of the alley were about eight metal compartments with big metal doors. A family lived inside each of these windowless metal boxes. Kong told us the rent was $35 a month. His family lived in one and he took us in to meet his children. Inside there was a tiled floor and small black and white tv, glowing in the dark. There was a baby asleep on the floor, two boys about 2 and 5, and a girl about 7, who was Tong's neice. His wife worked all day in a garnment factory. The neice's mother had died and lived with Tong and his family. It was her job to look after the other three children in the day, while Tong and his wife were at work. When we got there, the children were watching what looked like a Chinese soap opera on the TV. We stayed about fifteen minutes, drinking our small bottles of water, then Tong took us back to the Okay Guest house.

He didn't want to take any money for taking us to the mental hospital, but he said if we could help him with his fees for an English course, then he could earn more money and help his brother more. Kong was intelligent, and I realised he'd taken us to his home as a precursor to asking us for some money. The request was sincere and I couldn't blame him for taking advantage of the rich berangs who had tumbled into his lap.

We agreed to meet up again, and this morning we went to the language school with him. He enrolled and we paid his fee for the rest of the term- $46.

Hello all,Dot here.
We are now recovering from our visit to the village
which was fun, sad and mad all in one.
The new year celebrations lasted almost a week. There
was dancing most days and plenty of food and drink.
Although some of the food was a little hard to
swallow, but how can your refuse dishes delivered to
you with so much generosity even if it is rat, frog or
even dog!
I managed to get Anth into a temple, where we were
invited to wash the three statues of The Buddha. So
whether Anth likes it or not he's got a chance of
getting into heaven, even if it's in the Buddhist bit.
Phnom Penh is still as nutty as ever. People don't
walk if they can help it so drive their motos
everywhere. At crossroads they just weave in and out
of each others way. We have found the only way to
cross the road, is Ninja style, be there, but not
there at the same time!
Amidst all the celebrations their has been some
sobering moments. We tried to find our favourite
tuktuk driver, who last time asked us to be his mum
and dad. Sadly, we found him in a drug rehabilitation
community on the outskirts of town. Although well fed
and clothed with a roof over his head he didn't look
in great shape. We are helping out his brother who is
his only reliable family member who can support him.
Life is really tough here as there is no safety net of
state support and many people struggle to make a
living. The brother lives with his young family of
four children   one being his orphaned niece in what I
can only describe as a metal lock up garage with no
windows a few sticks of furniture. The older children
look after the baby while the mum and dad go to work
the eldest is eight!Still there are plenty of smiles
to be seen and the kids looked fed and well clothed.
We are left having a mess of feeling that take time to
settle.
Nevertheless we are both well and enjoying the
experience.
Love to all,
Dot     

When Dot and I got back to England after our big trip, we wanted to put our blog into a book. Dot had taken lots of photos and done a book full of sketches, which we wanted to include with the text. So, early this year I started putting the book together. With so many pictures and sketches, I didn’t realise what an ambitious task I’d started, and made several mistakes, as I relearned Quark Express and Photoshop. Steve helped me with the scanning and as I neared the end of the book, Tim came down to Cornwall and tidied up most of the mess I’d made.

We wanted to print the book privately and, as a way of saying "Thank You", give a copy to everyone we stayed with, or fed us, on our trip. I also wanted to send a copy to my Irish family, so they could see the photo’s of the flowers I’d put on Uncle Jimmy’s grave.

I took the book to a local printer and was stunned at the quotation he gave. The book is about 250 pages long, and every page is in colour. This means that it’s extremely expensive to print. I was deflated. We had the book, but couldn’t afford to get it printed. In desperation I contacted our friend Dick, in Phnom Phen, and asked him to get a quote from a local printer. He came back with a price that was low enough to make us think seriously about going back to Cambodia and getting the book done there. When he said Ali invited us to the Cambodian New Year party at her village in the jungle, we had two good reasons to go back. We bit the bullet and booked a couple of return tickets to Bankok.

We had a deadline and at the last minute I realise that the type started too near the binding, and the first word on every line, on the right hand page, would be illegible. I simply hoped we’d be able to get it sorted out when we arrived. The further down the line you get with anything like this, the more difficult it is t change it. So, armed with the book on a CD, and a few presents, we boarded an Etihad flight out of Heathrow and landed in Bankok next morning.

We returned to the same hotel we’d stayed in on our last trip, the Eriwan, near Kho San Rd, and spent three days wandering around and acclimatising by eating delicious Thai food. Then we flew down to Phnom Phen, where Dick met us at the airport. We went back to our favorite backpacker establishment- The OK Guest House, not far from the Mekong. The price of a double room, with cable TV, shower and air-conditioning, had gone up from $10 to $12 dollars a night. Inflation had been rampant here during the past 12 months, as in the rest of South East Asia. There’s a crisis with the spiraling price of rice, and two of three largest rice producers in the world, India and Vietnam, have banned exports.

When we were last in Phnom Phen, we made friends with Lee, a tuc tuc driver who lived on the street. Lee took us to a party on the pavement, and was very friendly and kind. On our last morning in Phnom Phen, he’d driven us around and asked us, very seriously, if we’d adopt him. We took his request in the same serious spirit, and told him we couldn’t really accept the responsibility of having another son in a foreign country. But we did tell him we’d make him an honorary member of our family. Before we left England we bought him a few clothes. We were looking forward to seeing him again. He’d always parked his tuc tuc outside the OK guest house in the day, and he lived quite nearby on the pavement where his alcoholic father ran his tuc tuc repair business.

We had a good look around, but there was no sign of Lee. We went round to the street where he lived with his father and a few other homeless people. Nobody was there and his father’s repair stall was gone. We asked some of the other tuc tuc drivers if they knew where he was and began to piece together what had happened to him. One driver told us he’d gone crazy and was in prison. Another driver told us he’d gone crazy and was in a mental hospital. Then we heard his father had moved his repair shop down the street.

A driver called Sami went to find Lee’s father and find out exactly what had happened to him. He came back and said Lee had been arrested for fighting, he’d been in prison for about a week, and was then moved, with the help of his older brother, to a mental institution just outside the city. He offered to take us, and Lee’s father, if we wanted to visit. So we said, "Yes."

On our first morning in Phnom Phen,  Dick took us to the printer where they looked at the book on the CD, and gave us a new quote which was slightly more expensive than the quote we’d got from the local printer in Cornwall. I was quite depressed, and told them there was no way we could pay that price. They offered to come back with another quote for printing on a litho machine, rather than a colour laser printer.

After a trip across town on the back of Chumrun’s, (the computer operator at the printers) motorbike (Dot sat in the middle) we agreed a price for reformatting the book and printing a couple of hundred hardback copies. We went back this morning to see a sample copy and make sure everything is ok, but were told to come back this afternoon. The saga continues, but hopefully you’ll end up with a copy before too long.

Yesterday morning Sami, the tuc tuc driver, picked us up and took us round to Lee’s father, for the trip out to the mental hospital. Although it was only 10am, his dad was already so drunk he couldn’t walk straight. The hospital was past the airport, outside the city. Nobody was quite sure where it was. We were soon off the road, bouncing down miles of dirt track through an area that was supposed to be the site of a "new city", one of the government’s pet projects.

My instincts and common sense told me that this was a scam where the government forcibly bought up the land from the local subsistence farmers, then announced their plan for the new city, and sold the fields off as expensive plots to developers. Most of the plots had wall built around them, but nothing inside other that crops, cows or pigs. Eventually we found the mental hospital. It was in a large compound behind a big white wall with razor wire on the top. We arrived about half past twelve, but were told visiting time was at two o’clock,  so we found a hut with an ice box, drank water and played with the owners little girl, while Lee’s father slept in the back of the tuc tuc.

At two o’clock we returned and were let in. There were plenty of plots growing vegetables, and a few buildings. The guard at the gate filled out a form, which we took to an office, where it received a red stamp. We then gave that to one of the "guards" and were shown to the "visiting area". The visiting area was a concrete floor with a plastic mat, underneath a corrugated iron canopy. One of the assistants arrived with Lee.

He was pleased to see us and remembered us. He’d lost lots of weight but, according to the assistant, who knew him, he was making progress. His brother had arranged for him to be transferred from prison to the centre. Most of the patients had come from jail, with mental problems, fuelled by drug and alcohol addiction. Lee was in a delicate state, and along with the kilos, had lost most of his confidence. The assistant who was with him told us how the place worked- there were three doctors, five security guards, and several assistants who worked alongside the doctors, and  the administrators. The patients were assigned work in the garden, and attended various therapy sessions.

While we were talking to Lee, Sami talked to one of the doctors. Lee had been making steady progress since he arrived. He was no longer violent and seemed to be regaining his senses. He said he thought he might be ready to leave in two or three months time, but infortunately his brother had only paid enough for Lee to stay there for a couple more weeks. It costs $50 a month to fee and look after each patient. So think we’ll go back for another visit in a couple of weeks, and pay for two more months.

I was surprised by what the staff seemed to be achieving with very little resources. They had treatment programmes and therapy sessions which appeared to be positive. I’d been expecting a depressing atmosphere, where the patients were locked up without treatment. The staff were working positively wth the patients, and according to all reports, Lee was making progress. The assistant who was looking after Lee during our visit spoke good English, and told us he was a former patient himself, who had stayed on to work there himself.

We met Dick this morning who told us we leave for the village tomorrow. We’re not sure how long we’ll be there this time. I’ll report back to you when we get back to Phnom Phen.

It’s a real buzz to be back in Cambodia. I’d forgotten so much about the place. How crazy the traffic is. How crazy life is here. How friendly the people are. How lovely the frangipan   tree blossom smells. How bad the piles of rubbish smell. Last night we went to a German arts centre to see a film shot in Phnom Phen at the end of the Pol Pot’s reign of terror at the end of the 1970s.  The city was completely empty. The East German cameraman filmed street after street. The only living creatures he saw were two pigeons. Most people had been given about half an hour to pack and leave, when they were forced into the countryside. People who lived in the city were called "The New People", people from the countryside were "The Old People". The "New People" had to be killed or re-educated. If they showed any signs of intellectualism, such as wearing glasses, they and their families were executed.

It’s good to see the city slowly recovering. The streets and houses are full again. It’s struggle, but things are slowly getting better.

 Hi Dot here,

Just a little note from me. All is well in Cambodia.
It’s hot,hot,hot. The people are still as lovely and
as wacky as ever.
This is the only place I know where you can smell the
beautiful Frangipani blossom on the trees while
standing in a pile of rubbish!
We are now getting ready to go to the village for Kmer
New Year. Golly gosh!
Love Dot.

We've finally returned to our little, overcrowded, island of barbarians. We are sleeping in our own bed and devouring the contents of our own fridge. We gaze, confused, out to sea every day.

We landed in London and spent the weekend with Mike and Charlotte, the last place we stayed before leaving England. We met up with Tim again, who came over with Mike's birthday present. the bottle of LaoLao, only five months late.

After emptying the bottlewith  Mike and Andy, and old friend over from New York, Dot and I went to Padington and took the train down to Cornwall.

The chalet had been taken over by spiders. Dot went to put the kettle on and was caught in a web by the sink.I rescued her with a garden fork and clothes line. It took us a while to adapt to being home. I kept waking up wondering whose house we were in.

Eventually we adopted the "hedgehog" approach. We ate all the spiders, curled up and went to sleep for two weeks. When we woke up we realised we should make some contact with the rest of humanity. This took two weeks of excrutiating phone calls to BT.

 I must have spent about 40 hours on hold, and getting transferred from department to department, my tale of woe growing by the day. Nobody was able to tell me why the phone wasn't working. Eventually Dot suggested plugging the phone plug into the socket on the wall. I'm embarrassed to say it worked, so I stopped my daily ritual of haranguing poor innocent BT workers.

The big story in England has been the suggestion by an American (where else?) who interviewed the Queen, that maybe she could remove her crown for one of the pictures. The program makers dared to suggest that Her Majesty marched off in a huff. Careers are being smashed daily at the BBC. The scandal has been running for about two weeks.

The other, minor story, is that half of Britain is under water and it's been raining for the past three months. It's a wet summer this year in England, but after months in the blazing sun, it's good to feel the cool rain again, and sleep in a mosquito free bedroom. I can't really get any of our experiences of the last year in perspective, and often feel like the chalet is just another temporary stop, which I suppose it is in a philosophical sort of way.

Since we've been home people have asked us what we learned in the past year, where we liked best, worst, where we'd like to live and so on. What did I learn?

The big, reassuring lesson for me was that people are the same all round the world. They are mainly decent, mainly kind and hospitable, mainly helpful and mainly have a sense of humour and like a laugh. This was true from Berlin the Bejing, and from Cambodia to Canada. It was a relief to find it was true for lots of the Americans we met, as they've been getting bad press for the last few years.

I learned that everywhere, the beer tastes good and the weed is strong.

I learned you can get good food everywhere except Russia.

I learned that tourism has become a massive global industry, and wherever you get off a bus or train, they're waiting for you with hotels, pizza restaurants, cable tv, internet cafes, and organised tours to the local tourist attractions.

The highlight of our trip was the three days we spent in the village in the jungle, in Cambodia at Dick and Ali's wedding.

The lowlight was the Chinese tour guide, on the train from Bejing to Guilin, standing in his underwear at one oclock in the afternoon, shouting at us in Chinese. And we've more than been paid back in laughs since the outburst of Mini-mao.

It was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

It was great to see how the world was doing.

I really enjoyed doing the blog, and that was because I knew friends were reading it, so if anything interesting happens on the cliffs this summer, I'll do a blog and let you know.

Dot did lots of sketches, and took lots of photos when we were travelling, and we hope to put them in a book, along with the blog. I'll let you know what happens so check here in a few weeks.

On Friday we left San Francisco, and the warm hospitality of Marianne and Raphael, for Vancover, and the warm hospitality of Jim and Laurie, our last stop on the way home. At the airport, we were subjected to the now familiar, "secondary search". We have been "secondary searched", every time we've boarded an aeroplane in America, including each of the three internal Hawaiian flights. San Francisco's secondary search was the most thorough yet.

When our boarding passes are issued at the airline ticket desk, they contain the label, "SSSS",  As soon as the security guards see the SSSS, they tell us we'll be taken aside for a secondary search. They supervise us while we put our bags through the X-ray machine, walk through the metal detector, then take us aside, usually into a small cordoned off line, In San Francisco, our hand luggage was subjected to a second X-ray machine, one of the gurards than swabbed the inside of my pockets on my denim jacket, and the inside of my shoes. The swabs were then inserted into a machine and analysed. We were then told to enter a cubicle and place our feet on the white silhouettes on the floor. A blast of air shot through the cubicle, ruffling hair and clothes. Presumably this was analysed for suspect molecules. Eventually we were given back our clothes and told we could go.

Vancover, like San Francisco and Auckland, is a beautiful city, set on water. You can see snow capped mountains on the horizon, it's warm and sunny and full of fresh air. We spent our first night in Canada staying in the house of a film producer friend of Jim and Laurie. He was away pitching a script in Hollywood, so I got to pillage his fridge unopposed. I hope he sold his script.

..

On Saturday we took the ferry over to VancoverIsland. It's a couple of hours ride to the island, which is about 300 miles long. It's a lovely relatively unspoiled part of the world, with loads of islands, bays, evergreen forests, and wooden houses. The capital is Victoria, where we're staying in a detached wooden house, "old" by Canadian standards- (built in the 1980s). Saturday night there was a barbeque here and we met lots of friendly, interesting, people, drank lots of beer etc. I did my best to display the best of Britishness, got drunk, started a fight, shouted a lot, broke a couple of things and ended up being thrown out. Fortunately, when I woke up I couldn't remember any of it.

Sunday we took a trip into the wilderness, and had a meal at the house of Marcus and his friends and family, in a lovely house overlooking a valley. We at fresh wild salmon, played music, drank beer, relaxed and enjoyed the view.

Canada is different from the US. Like Australia and New Zealand, they still have the English queen on their money, and the traces of the old colonial power still linger here and there. People are friendly and slightly more laid back then their southern cousins. I suspect this may be because the Canadians don't go round shooting each other like the Americans do, although apparently the odd American sneaks over the border and commits a murder now and then.

..

Tomorrow we fly down to LA, change planes, then fly home to England. I'm looking forward to getting back to our own bed and stocking our own fridge. So this is probably the last blog I'm going to write while we're still traveling, although I'll do one when we get home again. I've learned lots of things since we set out last September, but one lesson stands high above all others.

People are good, warm, friendly creatures from Berlin to Bankok. Everywhere we've been the people have been wonderful. Of course there have been one or two exceptions, there's always the odd asshole lurking somewhere, but overall folk have been wonderful. Nowhere has this been more obvious than when we've been staying with friends, Andy in Berlin, Eva in Poland, Dick and Ali in Phnom Phen, Abi, Chris, Carla, John, Jill, Dave, Barbara in Australia, Sally, Ricki, Mary, Monique and Monique in New Zealand, Anthony, Margaret and Ken in Hawaii, Raphael and Marianne in San Francisco, Jim and Laurie in Vancover.

Friends are beyond price, and make the world a better place.

Another thing I've noticed is, all over the world, people from different races and cultures, are falling in love, getting married and having children. Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Vancover, are all cultural melting pots. And we'll be flying home to another great cauldron of humanity, London. When our species first appeared, up to a couple of hundred thousand years ago, we were a single race and culture. It looks like we're heading back that way again.

Oh yes, Laurie told me I'd got the date wrong on their house, and it was built in 1908, not 1980, but what's a decimal place betwee friends?

In the few days we've been in San Francisco, Dot and I have enjoyed walking up and down 24^th St, between Marianne and Raphael's house and the BART (Metro) station. We've eaten in very good, very cheap Mexican restaurants on the street, and walked around taking photographs of the exquisite murals that decorate the area. Most of the conversations you overhear in the area are in Spanish and everyone seems to get along fine.

Last Saturday while we were meeting up with some old friends in a South Indian restaurant in the area, just around the corner, a fifteen year old boy was shot dead near a butchers shop on the corner of 24^th St and Harrison. Dot had taken a photo there earlier that day, of the shop next to the Harrison street sign, to show her brother in law, whose name is Harrison and who used to be a butcher. Nobody really knows why the boy was killed, but apparently it was connected to trouble between gangs. On Monday, when we walked down 24^th again, a shrine had appeared where the boy was shot. A semi-circle of burning candles had appeared on the pavement, around a lamppost that contained messages of condolence, flowers, ribbons and pictures. It was very sad.

San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district- the area around a crossroads between two streets called Haight and Ashbury, is credited with being the birthplace of the Hippie movement of the 1960s. Yesterday, Neil, Marianne's older brother, took us on his personal tour of the city, which included a visit to Haight Ashbury. Our visit to Haight started in the amazing Ameoba record shop at the end of Haight St, where we gazed with nostalgia at the psychedelic posters covering the wall, and rummaged through the tens of thousands of albums and CDs, vowing to return with hundreds of dollars to spend on rare recordings. We managed to escape after only spending a dollar on an old LP of the Mills Brothers, a present for Dot's dad.

Haight St has become a row of brightly decorated shops selling hippy paraphanelia, joke items, old posters and post cards, interspersed with cafe's, The area still attracts young, homeless people, who are probably attracted to the area by its lingering reputation. Apparently things went downhill in Haight Ashbury after the 60s, when heroin and speed took a hold in the area and it became seedier and unpleasant. But these days it's going through something of a renaissance as a hippy emporium.

We wandered through a small park, called Panhandle Park, in the area and came across a couple of artists building a magnificent recycled stage, from car bonnets ("hoods" in American). The stage is the shape of a quarter of an eggshell (work it out on paper), and decorate with borders of printed circuit boards. It was built in modules in a warehouse by a group of a dozen artists, and was being assembled in the park. We talked to the two guys for a while. They were part of an organisation called the Blackrock Foundation, who organise an annual festival in the Nevada desert, called Burning Man. They only had permission to put the stage in the park until September, and were hoping to erect it on a barge in San Francisco Bay after that. There's a concert to inaugurate the stage on Saturday, but it looks like we'll miss that, along with the lesbian motorcycle gang, as we should be on Vancover Island by then.

Neil also took us through the gay district, around Castro St, which is festooned with rainbow flags, and well endowed with bars and cafes with names like "Moby Dick" and "Piledriver"- my mind boggles.

Neil then took us over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. We visited the eccentric floating house community in Sausolito, and then up to Point Bonita, with its stunning views over the Pacific Ocean. The whole area contains military installations, dating back to the middle of the 19^th Century, spanning WWI and WWII, and on into the cold war. There are concrete forts, gun emplacements, barracks and missile silos, all over the place, facing West across the Pacific. I imagine they were built initially to counter any threat from an invasion from the Hawaiians in their war canoes, who, after paddling three thousand miles, would have been in a position to conquer the continent.

We ended a wonderful day back in the Mission district, with a Mexican meal in Chavez restaurant. Walking home down 24^th St we saw that the candles around the shrine to the murdered boy now stretched across half the pavement. That evening, Raphael, a public defender, told us he thought he'd be defending the kid who did the shooting.

Hi,this is Dot.
Just in case you got the impression that Castro was
all Piledrivers and Moby Dicks! I did sight a few more
homely shops for for the more domesticate gay- Bean
There Brewed That, coffee house and Imagiknit creative
knitting for the stay at home gay!

Big, big thank you to Neil for a great tour of San
Francisco yesterday!

We arrived in San Francisco Tuesday evening and were met by our old friend Marianne, who's a lawyer who mainly defends people who are sentenced to death. She's got an amazing model, in her office, of a death row cell, made by one of her clients. It's a scale model, made from cardboard, soap and bits of everyday items. It even contains a model of the guy in his bed.

Marianne lives with her partner Raphael, who is also a lawyer. He's a public defender and works for City Hall. He's Mexican, and a lovely, warm, larger than life character with a great sense of humour and a laugh that tickles your spine. They both live in Burnal Heights, which is on the edge of the Mission District. The Mission area is inhabited by lots of Latin American folk, from Mexico and South America. It's lively and decorated with loads of lovely murals.

On Wednesday Raphael invited me to a baseball game, to see the San Francisco Giants play the Toronto Blue Jays. Knowing nothing at all about baseball, I was keen to go and see my first game. But first we had to go to court. Raphael had to be there for the sentencing of one of his clients, who'd stabbed somebody. The court was a small room, much less formal than a British court. The defendant was marched in, wearing an orange Guantamo outfit. I didn't understand the conversation regarding his sentence- he'd pleaded guilty. The judge asked if this was his "first strike". It was. He had two more to go. I wasn't sure if this meant the first time he'd struck someone with a weapon, in which case he'd be allowed two more stabbings before going to jail. It all seemed very confusing.

Soon we were at the game. The Giants stadium is next to the Bay, and at every game, a posse of canoeists circle like sharks next to the stadium, waiting for someone to knock the ball into the water. In baseball, when the ball is hit into the crowd, whoever ends up with it gets to keep it, and a ball knocked out of the stadium has extra value. Particularly if it's knocked out by a famous player.

Baseball is like the British game of rounders with a few minor differences. The bat and the ball are bigger. The posts have been replaced by white squares on the ground and people wear funny hats and weird gloves on one hand. Each team takes it in turn to bat. If you miss the ball, it's called a strike. Raphael, over hotdogs and beer, explained that if you miss the ball three time, ie three strikes, you're out.

Suddenly what happened in court became clearer. English law is based on Roman law, but in California the legal system is based on the rules of the game of baseball. I think the old rules were too difficult to understand, so they replaced them with rules everyone was familiar with. This seems to be  a sensible approach and I think we could learn something from it, and maybe simplify our legal system by basing it on the rules of cricket, or maybe football. At least we'd all know what was happening. I really enjoyed the game, the beer and the hotdog, even though the Blue Jays beat the Giants.

The next day another old friend, Roger showed up. I spent a bit of time with him last time I was in California when he took me on a tour of the seedier side of San Francisco. This time he'd arranged to take Dot and I to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is an island in San Francisco Bay with an old prison on it. The prison was closed in the 1960s, and it's now a tourist attraction. We watched a short movie about the history of the island, then went on a tour of the cell block, with headphones telling you where to go, and what happened there.

It was informative and entertaining, and we even saw the cell with the hole Clint Eastwood made using a teaspoon, when he escaped. We also saw the cell where Burt Lancaster looked after his pet birds. The cells were tiny. Just enough room for a bed, a toilet next to the pillow, tiny "table", shelf, copy of the prison rules, and open bars at one end. I think they were designed to give everyone psychological problems before they left. Judging by the cardboard model Marianne's client gave her, nothing has changed in fifty years. People are still caged like battery hens. I guess that's the consequences of the rules of baseball.

Yesterday Dot and I took a walk down 24^th St, which runs through the heart of the latino quarter. She was delighted to find gigantic stores full of towels with the Virgin Mary on, and T-shirts ;with Jesus ripping his heart out. Dot went into a weird shop selling crucifixes, statues of saints, herbs, incense and divine toiletries. She bought a bottle of spiritual floor cleaner. The instructions say that the liquid will remove any evil that's knocking around on your kitchen floor. "Pour half a bottle into a bucket of water while reciting the 23^rd psalm,"- I jest not.

San Francisco is a great city. It's also a gay city. Sadly we won't be here next Saturday for the Gay Parade, which is going to be led by the infamous Lesbian Bikers. Apparently the parade also attracts lots of fundamentalist Christians, who take loads of photos as evidence that Satan is alive and well in San Francisco. What a shame we'll be in Vancouver instead.

Hi Dot here. We are now enjoying the delights of San
Fransisco.
Marianne and Rafael are making us so welcome! I can't
believe how kind everyone has been.People are good ,
very very good! Shame about the few bad apples, Eh?
You know the ones who enter politics and start
throwing their weight around!
Anyway,what have we done? Well we went to Alcatraz,and
before you ask, no, I couldn't persuade them to keep
Anth on the island. I tried, honestly I did !
Yesterday, we went to The Mission, an area of town
where mainly Latin people live.I had a great time
taking photos of spectacular murals painted on the
side of schools, shops and people's homes. So vibrant
and colourful.
I discovered some wonderful shops, one of which sold
religious paraphernalia, where you could buy healing
herbs, statues,tracts and what looked like spells to
attract or repel lovers, bring luck or cast away evil!
For those of you who live in London, The Mission area
is a bit like a Latin Brixton, lively colourful and
diverse and full of energy.
Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here! See you
soon.       

Our time on Hawaii has gone too fast. It doesn't seem five minutes since we arrived, had our fingerprints and photos taken, were body searched, had our shoes tested for explosives, and were welcomed to America. We ;leave for the mainland tomorrow. Alas, Graham Nash never made it to the gig on Saturday, but the band were great anyway. The evening was held in a very posh hotel and was in aid of an organization called Save Our Seas.

We're staying with Ken, in a lovely little cabin by a small, freshwater stream, about five minutes walk from the beach. Ken has made a couple of dams, and is rearing a flock of fresh water prawns. We were planning on eating most of them tonight, before we leave in the morning, but last night, while we were out at another gig, they all escaped from their traps, so unless we can get them back in, it looks like we'll be having beans on toast tonight.

On Friday Ken took us up to Todd and Michelle Rungren's new house for a barbeque. The house is still being built and they were celebrating the successful laying of a new floor. It's made from deep blue resin, which has been mixed with bits of silver glitter. I think the floor alone cost about two million dollars. The house has to be seen to be believed. It reminds me of a Southeast Asian Buddhist temple, overlooking a beautiful valley with the sea glinting in the distance. The centre of the house is a massive archway, about as big as St Pancras Station in London. When it's finished there will be a stream running through it. The place is a building site at the moment, but already looks quite spectacular.

There were 20 or 30 people at the barbeque, and our hosts looked after us really well. The food was great, a big salmon, beef, vegetables, salad, and delicious deserts. There was plenty to drink and smoke and the guests, and hosts, were really nice people. Although Todd and Michelle are obviously loaded, they were completely unpretentious, great hosts, friendly generous and good company.

We've been to the beach every day. Yesterday Ken hired a surfboard, and he and another mate of his, a lawyer called Bob Polli with a pony tail down to his waist and Tahitian tattoos everywhere, gave me a surfing lesson in between beers. Bob said I was the first person he'd seen fall off in front of the board. Nevertheless, I managed to stand up for about two seconds, and was most proud.

We've visited lots of lovely folk, Mike and Charlene, Sandy and Al. They've all made us most welcome and reminded me that there's lots of lovely people in America, despite their atrocious government.

Evenings have been spent drinking beer, smoking, and drinking Kava. Kave is a powdered root from Fiji, which you mix with water, or juice and drink. It goes well alongside other intoxicants. It's difficult to describe the effects, but it sort of makes your chin a bit numb and fills you with a feeling of well being. It's quite legal, so I'm bringing about ten kilos back in my rucksack.

We've had a fantastic time here. Anthony and Margaret looked after us really well on the Big Island, and Ken has done the same here. Everywhere we've been the people have made us welcome.

Hawaii has its problems. There are lots of homeless people living on Oahu- the island where Honolulu is. The traffic is increasing all the time. Noisy night frogs and mongoose are invading from the big island. The mongooses were introduced to take care of the rats, but, as in so many of these cases it didn't work. The mongooses are awake in the day, the rats are nocturnal. They pass each other on the way to and from work.  But in spite of this, the people who live here seem laid back, and very happy to be on a little island in the middle of the Pacific ocean- as we are.

But tomorrow we leave for the mainland to disrupt Raphael and Marianne's peace for a couple of weeks, then north to Vancover to empty Jim and Laurie's fridge, then home.

Aloha,Dot here.I am completely relaxed after a
wonderful stay on the sumptuous Hawaiian islands of
Hawaii and Kaua'i.
Hawaii(the big island)has all the volcanic activity so
it feels strong and new,with huge swathes of land
covered with cooled lava flows and great cinder
boulders.
Kaua'i is older,the volcanic activity has finished and
there is a gentler, softer,greener terrain with flat
fields of  green taro growing in the valleys and
spectacular beaches.
We've had a wonderful time swimming in the clear blue
sea and wallowing in pools, heated by the thermal
springs,checked out the hippy strong hold of Pahoa and
the wandered around dreamy Hanelei.All the time being
serenaded by gentle Hawaiian music, Aaaaaahhhhh!!!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you,to Hawk and Margaret
for a great stay in your cabin hidden in the tropical
forest.What a wonderful place,so lush and green. A
special place indeed.
Thank you, thank you,thank you, Ken for taking such
good care of us and showing us the delights of Kaua'i.
The beautiful sandy beaches,the turquoise ocean, the
fantastic sunsets, the glorious mountains and above
all for making it possible for me to tell everyone,' I
married a surf dude!'
I really hope I can make it back to paradise some day!

In 1967. my friend John and I spent the summer on the French Riviera, sleeping on the beach in Nice, "avec les beatnicks" One of the friends I made amongst the bohemian community was a young American guy called Anthony. He told me his father was a successful artist who advertised on the back of Superman comics. We had a memorable drunk night together once, where we both ended up swimming in the sea fully clothed. Next morning my passport fell to pieces. We  lost touch, and years later, when our boys were young, I picked up a Superman comic in their bedroom and notices Anthony's ather's ad on the back. I decided to try and get back in touch with my old mate from Lido Plage. I wrote him a letter, care of his father, and was pleased to receive a reply. Anthony was an artist and living in Hawaii. We exchanged correspondence at least once a year after that, and being as we were passing over the Pacific on our trip, I thought it would be great to look him up again. It had been forty years and we had a lot to catch up on. We also knew a brilliant Hawaiian guitar player who also lived on one of the Hawaiian islands and thought it would be good to look him up two.

We left New Zealand on Saturday, and arrived in Hawaii on Friday, which was quite confusing. Anthony and his partner Margaret were expecting us on Sunday, but they made it out to the airport and picked us up. They took us to their home, which Anthony built himself, in the Hawaiian jungle, on the north tip of the Big Island. The place is incredible. It's built out of reclaimed Hawaiian woods. There are several buildings. The main house is a bedroom, large living room, and a corridor/library that leads to a large studio, where Anthony and Margaret both paint. The kitchen, shower, and toilet are all free standing buildings amongst the trees, as was the cabin where Dot and I spent six days.

The property sits on six acres, and is in the shade of the islands most active volcano, which is constantly pouring lava down into the sea. In the late 1950s, the lava erupted and flowed over a large area, finishing only a few hundred metres from where the house is now. The jungle suddenly stops and there are miles of lava fields, black crunchy stuff. Trees are only just beginning to grow there again. A few miles up the coast is a hot pool, where you can bathe next to the sea, in hot water. On the other side of the rocks you can see giant turtles cavorting in the waves. The place is amazing. There are volcanoes all over the place, sometimes erupting with ash, sometimes with lava.

Although Anthony was only 16, and I was 17, when we last met, our lives have taken very similar routes- neither of them conventional. Both him and Margaret are living alternate lifestyles, and they've remained quite true to the old spirit of the 1960s. It was a real pleasure to meet Americans with an educated, well informed view of the world. I'd forgotten what lovely people lots of them are. Their government does terrible publicity for the country, but many of the people are only too aware of this.

We spent hours, catching up on our travels, friends and journies since 1967. Anthony left the USA the day after he received his call-up papers for Vietnam and spent a long time traveling the world, rather than go to a foreign country and shoot people he had no beef with.

The six days in the jungle passed very quickly, and yesterday it was time to fly to the northernmost island of the chain, to Kauai. Ken met us at the airport and drove us to his place, a small wooden house, also in the jungle, next to a stream where he's breeding giant prawns, five minutes from a beautiful bay.

Ken is a brilliant guitar player, who's recently won two Emmies for his Hawaiian guitar playing. It's a real treat to sit in his cabin and listen to him play the guitar, and sometimes, if I'm lucky, get to play harmonica along with him. ;Ken, like Anthony and Margaret, is spoiling us to death, taking us around, feeding us and looking after us according to the guidelines in the "Perfect Host" manual.

This morning Ken took us out to one of the beaches in front of the mountains, where the sea is pleasantly warm, the sand golden and the view takes your breath away. It's been a great relief to feel my anti-American prejudices drop away instantly. I'd forgotten that there were still some really wonderful yanks in the world. They don't all support the adventures of George Bush and his war-mongering mates.

So, we've just stopped off at an internet café, on the way back from a morning on the beach and in the sea. Ken is taking us to a barbeque this evening, round at one of his musician friends' house- Todd Rungren. . And tomorrow  he's taking us to a fundraising concert for a group who are working to protect the ocean and its inhabitants, where he'll be playing with a couple of guys, one of whom is Graham Nash, from Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Hollies fame.

We are not worthy.