xini blog

Everyone has pre-conceived ideas about Miami. Palm lined avenues, cops in Ferraris, babes in bikinis, white jackets with the arms pushed up. Yeah, okay, all I knew about Miami came from Miami Vice. The flip side to this glamour is the drug trade, violence and general seediness. Fortunately this is a somewhat exaggerated view of the city, at least in our experience. We arrived at the airport mid-morning, our flight from Montreal having left at 5am. We got a taxi into town along quiet avenues, the sun glinting off the large glass and white-painted hotels and giving the water a lovely deep blue colour. The roads crossed bridges over harbours dotted with gleaming yachts, and there was none of the grotty neighbourhoods you might expect to pass on a drive from an airport into a major city. The taxi pulled up outside our hotel, and we were greeted by a smiling guy in white trousers and a casual patel coloured shirt who welcomed us to the hotel. Actually he welcomed us to The Hotel , as that w...

As you may well have noticed, we haven't updated this blog in quite some time. It's not that we've got bogged down in Suriname bureaucracy, or lost in the Amazon jungle. But over the last few years, all the internet cafés have slowly disappeared and been replaced with wireless hotspots. Great, technology is moving forward - as long as you have a laptop. Anyway, we're now in Miami for a few days before heading into South America for a couple of months. So whilst relaxing by the pool and beach, we'll try and get this blog up to date as much as we can to give you something to read. The dates we'll be putting on the entries reflect the day we were there, not the day of the posting. So do look back over old entries and see if something new turns up. Now, where's that mojito....

So we were back on the long straight roads that the French Canadians seem to love so much. We were heading to an area called Laurentides, recommended by the guide books, which was pretty much following the tourist trail but it seemed like a good route. We arrived at the town of Magog earlier than we expected. It's quite a small town, but with a nice lake (with the great name of Lac Memphrémagog) and a railway (I think they considered this a tourist attraction). But before we could savour these delights, we needed to find a room. Again this proved harder than we thought it would. We'd made a shortlist of the places in the guides and drove slowly around town trying to find them. It's probably good no police were tailing us, as I'm sure the slow multiple drive-bys looked dodgy, but they paid off. On the third passing (we weren't lost, exactly) of one places we had our eyes on, the notice had dropped the "no" from their "no vacancy" sign. It turned o...

We headed out of Québec in a southerly direction, heading back towards the border with the US, and Vermont in particular. Near the border was the park of Mont Mégantic, which according to our guidebook, held plenty of opportunity for hiking. With our Peruvian Inca trek getting closer by the day, it was time to leave this city-touring behind, and get back to a bit of hill climbing. The countryside got less flat and more interesting as we headed south, but the roads were mind-numbingly straight. At one point you could see for miles into the distance, and obviously something had thwarted the road-planners desire for linearity. There was a small semi-circular loop of road around some obstruction, maybe a sacred site or a particularly stubborn land-owner, but once circumnavigated, the road resumed the course it had been on and that it would follow for many more miles. After a while, something in the scenery began to provide some distraction. We began to notice very triangular hills, initial...

Our original plan was to book a car, and drive through scenic countryside to Quebec City. However the Gay Games had put a strain on the rental car market, as well as the hotels and we had to settle for a train journey instead. The station felt far more like an airport than a railway terminal, all very organized and we checked in our luggage hoping it would come to Quebec too. The train was quite a sleek modern affair, and the geek in me was pleased to see the train had wireless Internet access. In the States, we'd had difficulty finding ordinary Internet cafes, just wireless hotspots so I'd purchased a Palm handheld computer with built in wireless networking. Consequently, I'd become somewhat obsessive about checking email whenever the chance arose. And this time I even had a real excuse... finding accommodation in Quebec. So leaving Esther to her book, I set to my task. After about 20 minutes, I began to get a bit worried. Most websites I was using either didn't work p...

It's only an hour's flight from Boston to Montréal, but it feels like you have gone much further when you emerge in the Canadian province of Québec. We're in France really - lots of cheese, onion soup, gallic shrugs and pouts, as well as an emphasis on culture (films, books, traditions) - but with a North American twist: the roads and buildings look American, fast food chains abound (although not as much as in the US: we have not seen a Dunkin' Donuts for days), and there is a wonderful mish-mash of language. Although everyone's first choice language, especially outside of Montréal, is most certainly French, bits of English are are slipping through the net, leading to wonderful combinations such as 'Bon Cop, Bad Cop' (the title of a newly released movie that was being advertised everywhere). As for the language, it's definitely French, and it's called Québecois French, not Canadian French (I made that 'mistake' only once), but the pronunciati...

Today was a travelling day. We travelled to the station, travelled to the airport, flew to New York, then flew on to Montreal. To get out of Boston, we had to brave "the T" again, Boston's bonkers transport system. Having already been baffled by a system that is free in one direction, and expensive in the other, has the ticket prices on the platform *after* the barrier, makes you pay in cash to the driver in loose change (and six dollars is a lot of loose change) we thought we'd understood it and it'd all be normal from now on. Well, the silver line is quite different to the red and green lines. It looks normal enough going through the station, but as you approach the platform you notice the trains don't look quite right. It's because they're buses. They still run through tunnels, still stop at stations but there's no tracks and a driver with a steering wheel. Very odd. As we came out of the tunnel into the sunshine, the driver stopped the bus, got...

We looked around Marblehead early on Sunday morning whilst most people were in bed or at church. Marblehead was founded by fishermen from Devon and Cornwall, and the place bore more than a passing resemblance to Topsham near Exeter but felt considerably more wealthy. The roads were small and windy, the houses and gardens immaculate; more English than American (but hey, we were in New England after all) and pleasant to wander around. The view from the old fort was a beautiful 270 degree vista overlooking the harbour. Marblehead was the birthplace of the US navy and is still a major sailing location. It's a shame we did not have longer in the town but we had lots of things to do. So we went to the airport to change our tickets (we decided to fly from Boston to Montreal and have an extra day in Quebec rather than Miami). Our view of American Airlines didn't improve much as we spent a fair part of the morning at Boston airport queuing while a single overworked woman dealt with al...