Lili Wilkinson

For long-haul flights

• Noise cancelling headphones. We bought these ones for about $70 online, and they are AMAZING. They use phase cancellation, which means they emit (very quiet) sound at exactly the same frequency as is going in – which basically cancels out the original sound. In short, they work with magic. Apparently low-frequency noises cause anxiety in humans (I guess instinct says LION! EARTHQUAKE! RUN!) and the loudness of planes causes extra fatigue – particularly as you have to turn up the sound on your little telly all the way (our headphones came with an airline adaptor!). These cut out most of the aircraft rumble, making the whole flight feel more serene.
• Change into trackies. Either as soon as you board, or just before. Trackies, a comfy top, and a comfy (or no) bra. This way you are comfortable for the flight, more likely to sleep, AND you’ll have almost-clean clothes to get into when you arrive at your destination.
• Drink as much water as possible.
• If you’re on an Asian airline, always choose the Asian meal.

For the US

• Get some Metamucil and multivitamins. In the big cities there is great food, but once you hit the middle, there is A LOT of fried, and not much green.
• Got an iPhone? Get an AT&T sim from eBay before you leave. Register it online with any US address (but don’t try and put credit on it). Call your service provider and ask them to unlock your phone. In the US, pop your new sim in, and find a wifi network. Go to unlockit.co.nz and follow the instructions there to change your APN. Then go to the AT&T website and put credit and data on your phone (where it wants you to pick a state for your credit card, there’s an option that says something like Outside US). Done!
• Priceline.com is an excellent way to book posh hotels on the cheap. Only once did we feel like we’d been given the “Priceline room”.
• Having said that, the posher the hotel, the pricier the wifi…
• …and the less stuff you get – no coffee-maker or kettle, no iron, no fridge – but you get all that in a cheap motel.
• But the posh hotels have very comfortable king-size beds, great pillows, and ace showers.
• The tipping system is ridiculously complicated. Get an app to help you out.
• Wholefoods is an organic supermarket with a wonderful salad bar. There’s one in most cities. You will need it in the middle.
• If you’re driving a lot, pop into a Best Buy and grab a GPS. Our car hire company wanted to charge us $10 a day to hire one (which would have ended up being $280), so we bought one for $105, which Best Buy replaced for free when I accidentally spilt Vitamin Water all over it, and now we are updating with Oz maps to use here.
• When they say Entree, they mean Main. And when they say Marinara Sauce, they mean Neapolitan sauce.
• Tripadvisor is the best way to find good food that you never would have found otherwise. The Lonely Planet’s food recommendations were sadly not as reliable.
• We also grabbed the Zagat app to help us find decent food, which was useful in the big cities.
• Avoid Dairy Queen – worst burger ever.
• When ordering a Navajo taco, and asked if you would like Large or Small – say Small.
• In fact, that’s a pretty good rule for all food-ordering. Get the Small.
• Root beer is just disgusting.

Our big trip ended with an astonishing lack of wifi. Highlights included:

Taking some high-speed photos at San Francisco’s Exploratorium

Putting our feet in the Pacific to prove we made it ALL THE WAY ACROSS

Getting water in my bra at Disneyland (do you like Mj’s Facing Certain Death With Grim Determination face?)

Staying at the Millennium Biltmore in LA, which you may remember from Ghostbusters, Pretty in Pink and One Million Other Films and TV shows.

Dropping off our hire car and celebrating our ability not to break it in ANY WAY despite our 10,000 km drive

Did you see that? 10,000 km! Without breaking the car OR getting shot!

Popping over to Tokyo for a few days. This was a slightly mixed experience. I love Tokyo – I lived there for six months when I was 21, and I love going back to visit, plus we got to meet up with our friend Warren who lives in Fukuoka. But I had the worst jet lag of my life this time. The first three nights I slept maybe 2-3 hours total, and the last night I didn’t sleep at all, and made myself sick with anxiety. That part sucked. But the rest of it was AWESOME. We…

Went to Akihabara Electric Town – a whole suburb of electronics stores (Mj liked this particularly).

Went to Nippori Fabric Town – a whole suburb of fabric shops (where I died and went to fabric heaven).

Went to Tokyu Hands – my favourite shop in the world.

Visited some shrines.

Did some excellent people-watching.

Ate gyoza, onigiri, teppenyaki, yakitori, chashu ramen, kaiten-zushi and ONE MILLION OTHER DELICIOUS THINGS. This was particularly exciting after the blandness of a lot of US food.

Explored the teensy cramped bars (no bigger than my laundry at home) of Piss Alley (Shomen Yokocho) in Shinjuku. Most could only fit the three of us and maybe two other people. It used to be a seedy area full of gambling dens and prostitutes, but now it’s awesome little quirky bars and great food on sticks.

And now we’re home. It’s absolutely lovely to be home, and I’m very excited about the two books I’m writing at the moment (the PhD one and Another One).

Holiday deemed a giant success!

Death Valley is the lowest point in the US, 282 feet below sea level. It’s hot, dry, and empty.

It’s also the location of my favorite Christmas ever. I was 17, had just finished year 12, and was traveling around the West Coast with my parents. We were on our way to the Grand Canyon and realized too late that it was Christmas Eve and we weren’t going to get out of Death Valley in time for Christmas Day. We stopped for the night at some tiny, rustic cabins in a place called Panamint Springs. The only food we had was a tin of beans. Those who have ever met me will know that I like Christmas. A lot. A dingy cabin in the desert with a tin of beans was not my idea of a good Christmas.

Luckily there was a little bar that made us some burgers, and even poured me an underage Christmas Eve Baileys. We chatted to a pair of teachers from North Carolina, who asked is if we were staying for Christmas lunch tomorrow. “Um,” we said. “Hell, no.” But then the barman joined in, telling us we must stay. So we did. We went for a hike the next morning, and when we arrived back, the tiny bar was transformed. Nearly a hundred people had come from all over the world for this free, traditional Christmas Dinner. We ate next to a Japanese fighter pilot and someone from Mum’s hometown in Derby. It was wonderful.

We didn’t stay in Death Valley this time, just stopped to look at the sand dunes and the salt flats and remark about how damn hot it was (about 38 degrees, relatively cool for DV).

We drove out of the Valley and stopped in Bishop for the night. The plan was to drive through Yosemite the next day and end up in San Francisco, a 5-6 hour drive. The plan was not to be. A crazy storm system from the North dumped a pile of snow on the mountains, and all the roads to San Francisco were closed. ALL OF THEM. We ended up driving up to Reno, a four hour detour. It was a long day, with much snow. Snow. One day after 38 degree desert. California, you are peculiar.

Everyone says you should be careful of scams when in Vegas. So when a guy came up to us as we were checking in and asked if we’d like free tickets to a show and $150 of gambling credit in exchange for attending a presentation about a timeshare, we said… Sure, why not?

The presentation was actually pretty convincing, delivered by an awesome Jewish/Italian lady with a thick Brooklyn accent. If you were the kind of person who travelled a lot, and always wanted to stay in resorts, then it’s a pretty good deal. But needless to say, we decided not to sink $15k into a Vegas timeshare.

This is Mj being happy that we didn’t buy it.

That’s our room at the Luxor, by the way, which is a casino inside a giant black pyramid. Our room had a spa in the corner where the wall slopes (cause it’s a pyramid), which was very awesome. Also all the elevators in the Luxor travel diagonally, which is a very strange feeling.

(I should add, that if you’re planning to visit Vegas and want a fancy spa room for a very small amount of money, check out smartervegas.com, which lists all the deals. Vegas can be VERY cheap if you’re not the gambling type)

So we left the boys in the hotel room watching TV, and set out to see the sights of the tackiest, most ridiculous city in the US.

We already had tickets to see Beatles Love, which was utterly amazing. So we decided that we should go to the other end of the scale, and see Tournament of Kings, where you watch jousting and eat a chicken with your hands. It was about as craptastic as you might imagine. Lots of “huzzah!”ing and raising of tankards.

I hoped the boys were getting along.

Then came our $150 of gambling credits. We were both a bit scared. The only gambling I’ve ever done before is betting on horses at the Melbourne Cup, and I’ve always been anti-gambling. Seems like an easy way to lose money to me. But we had free credit, so we had a go at the Ghostbusters slot machine (surprisingly fun) and played a few rounds of blackjack, which wasn’t so scary once you got the hang of it. When we’d used up all our credit, we had $120 of real chips that we’d won, which would have been a loss if it hadn’t been free to start with.

So here are my thoughts about gambling: it’s quite fun when you’re not using your own money. But after an hour and a half, I was quite ready to cash out, take our free $120 back to our room and have a glass of wine in the spa.

I can see how Vegas might make you go weird though. You have to walk through a casino to get anywhere, and they keep the lights dark all day so it always feels like drinking and gambling time. And there’s sex and nightclubs and strip poker around every corner, as well as sexy pirates and real lions in the middle of a casino and in one night you can visit Egypt and Paris and China and Venice and New York.

It’s not my kind of place, but it’s no wonder that it makes people do… strange things.

It isn’t possible to capture the Grand Canyon in a photo. It’s so big, so deep, so overwhelming. It’s quite frightening, really.

Have I mentioned that I have a fear of edges? Not really heights, but edges. Nothing is more terrifying to me than walking along a jetty without a handrail. The Grand Canyon is one big edge.

It covers a million acres of land. It’s billions of years old, carved by water and wind. There’s nothing else like it.

And I confronted my fear. It didn’t make it go away, but I felt a little stronger.

Imagine Mars. Plus water.

That’s basically Lake Powell. In the 50s, the Colorado River was dammed here, in the middle of the desert, to create a water reservoir and a power station. The lake has 1000 miles of ‘coast’, and is around 300 feet deep.

We went on a boat tour through this stunning landscape, although to be honest I wish we’d had a few extra days and had hired a houseboat, and just drifted through the canyons.

(the white line is the Bath Ring, the point where the lake was at it’s highest, in the 80s)

The boat took us to Rainbow Bridge, an amazing natural bridge formed by air and water, that is a sacred place for the Navajo people. It’s a massive arch that a photo doesn’t really capture – but the Statue of Liberty could fit underneath it.

If you ever visit Lake Powell and want a good dinner that isn’t fried, go to Blue Buddha. We’d already had an AMAZING meal at Green Goddess in New Orleans, so the Coloured Deity restaurant seemed like a good bet, despite the fact that it’s a sushi bar that is more than 500 miles from the ocean. But it was truly excellent, with an almost Melbourne standard of laid back funkiness.

I’m a bit behind, due to the massive lack of phone reception/wifi in the middle part of the US.

Firstly, a few people have asked me the following questions:

Did you hear about all those people in New Mexico who died from eating cantaloupe?
Did you eat any cantaloupe in New Mexico?
Are you okay?

The answer to all these questions is: yes.

Monument Valley is part of the Navajo Nation, which is the largest semi-autonomous Native American reservation in the US. It’s stunning.

The other people booked for our tour didn’t show, so we got a private tour with our local Navajo guide, Larry. He told us all about the Navajo people (actually, Navajo is a Spanish mistranslation of Diné, which means “we, the People”), and many stories about the Valley. We went on the backroads that the big tours don’t access, on vinyl seats bolted to the back of Larry’s pickup, with the wind in our hair. He sang us traditional songs in a stunning natural amphitheater. It was one of the highlights of our trip.

The Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo is pretty famous. There’s even a Simpson’s article about it. So even though the food reviews were so-so, we went along. It’s an awesome place, busting at the seams with weird taxidermy and Ye Olde Western kitsch.

It’s famed for its 72 oz (2kg) steak challenge, where if you can eat a full steak dinner – meat, fat, gristle and two sides – in under an hour, then it’s free. If you take on the challenge, you have to sit up at a special table with timers and sick buckets. Luckily no one took the challenge while we were there. Apparently the fastest human ever to do it was in about 8 minutes (ugh), and the fastest ever was a Siberian Tiger who did it in 90 seconds.

Just outside of Amarillo is Cadillac Ranch, which is reasonable self-explanatory.

As we drove into New Mexico, the landscape started to change from dryish fields to something hot, barren and deserty. Which meant the last thing we were expecting to see was… Scuba divers?

This is Blue Hole, an 80 ft deep sinkhole in the middle of the desert. It’s about the size of our living room, but I guess if you’re a scuba enthusiast in New Mexico, you can’t be too fussy.

We spent the night at the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup. The hotel was built in the 30s by DW Griffiths’s brother, to house filmstars shooting Westerns in the desert. The hotel has seen better days, but was also full of kitschy taxidermy, a self-playing old pianola and about a zillion framed photos of the stars who stayed there.

As we turned off the interstate and headed North, everything became suddenly more dramatic, with giant red cliffs stretching along the horizon. This is the Intercontinental Divide, the point that separates the water that runs off east to the Atlantic, from the water that runs west, to the Pacific. We were getting pretty tired, so we let the muppets drive for a bit. This, it turns out, was a mistake.

My phone died in New Orleans, but resurrected itself three days later in Texas. So I don’t have many photos of the Big Easy. But basically, it was a weird, steamy combination of beautiful and quaint, and loud and raucous. We ate amazing food, and someone tossed me a string of beads from a balcony even though I didn’t flash at them.

After New Orleans, we headed over to Breaux Bridge where we took a tour around Lake Martin Swamp on a teeny flat bottomed boat. We saw many frogs and turtles and lizards and alligators and a prehistoric bird that has solid bones and can kill a 3 ft alligator by spearing it through the head with its beak.

(note alligator in the bottom right hand corner)

We stayed in a cute little cabin that backed out onto the bayou, and sampled some homemade boudin sausage (nom), pork crackling (meh) and root beer (gahhh vile vile vile). Then we ate a “swamp platter” at a Cajun restaurant that was mostly crab and crawfish, but there was one deep fried frog leg, that tasted exactly as you would expect. Slimy. I’m sorry, Kermit.

We saw a touring production of Hair in Dallas, which was fun (but not as good as the Melbourne production I saw many times as a kid). I particularly liked the way the Very Serious Dallas Performing Arts Centre was transformed to look a little hippyish.

Today’s drive saw the landscape get drier and redder, until we could have been in Australia. Now we’re in Amarillo. Some big driving days ahead!

We…

Went to Elvis’s house, where I didn’t particularly gain an appreciation for the King, but gained an insight into the American psyche. And swam in our motel’s guitar-shaped pool.

Went to a scary dilapidated strip mall in Memphis that housed the dodgy-looking Uncle Lou’s Southern Kitchen with its amazing fried chicken in Sweet and Spicy Hot Love Sauce.

Cruised down the Blues Highway, listening to Keith Richards’ autobiography (read by Johnny Depp), pausing at Morgan Freeman’s bar (Ground Zero) and the Blues museum in Clarksdale.

Visited Jim Henson’s home town and shed a small tear in the little museum. Then Mj played Rainbow Connection on his ukulele by the creek which was the Best Ever.

Ate awesome hot tamales from a roadside stall in Greenville.

Drove through fields of burning cotton.

Drove off the beaten track so we could put our feet in the Mississippi.

Ate po’boys and crawfish étouffée in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Rode a steamboat down the Mississippi and pretended Mark Twain was writing it.

Listened to blues in an awesome little bar called the Three Muses.

Another two days in the South, then we start north again into Texas!