Send in Your Thoughts and Ideas!

Here is a new idea I came up with.

If you have anything you want me to investigate or a question you want me to answer or are just curious about anything or how things work in India or what something might look like over here send me a quick little email at FloridaSzy@gmail.com or post a comment on my blog and I will try to answer it with a video or through a new post. Send in some stuff!

A Visit to Elephanta Island!

Here is another video hosted at YouTube. Click the image below to go to the video. Please allow some time for the video to load up if you are using a slow connection.

(Click Image above for Video)

Originally this island had a different name, but the Portuguese renamed it because at that time there was a large stone elephant sculpture which has since deteriorated and been moved and reassembled at a Mumbai museum. This was a very nice place and I should be travelling to some other Buddhist carved caves in the next few days. I believe that there are thousands of caves like these around the country, but many archaeologists consider the above carvings to be among the most beautiful in the country.

Small, but cheap!

Check out my TINY hotel room. Its kinda comical how small this place is! I am sure there are smaller places out there, but this is the smallest place I have ever stayed in.

Hope you enjoyed the video! Ever stay in anything smaller?

One week later...

Hello... I have been in India for a little over a week now. All in all things are good. Check the video below for a quick update.

Also, last night I went to the Hard Rock Cafe of Mumbai. This was the most American-like place I have been so far in India. I looked on the menu and they did have a 100% Beef cheeseburger and hot wings too! I still wouldn't really care to eat them though after seeing the meat markets. I mean, just because this place is swanky doesn't mean that they are getting their meat from anywhere more special than the rest of the city! The main reason I went was because I heard that there was an Indian rock band playing that night. They were ok, but nothing special, kind of run of the mill pop-rock stuff; the guy sung with a strong British accent and their amps kept cutting out during the show. But now I am looking for even more Indian rock and roll venues or shows. I would love to catch some more music while I am here in India's most cosmopolitan city. Once I leave here I doubt there will be much of a modern, western music scene. Ohhhh... and one thing that was TERRIBLE about the hard rock... right before the band went on the all male wait staff of about 12 jumped up on a small wall and did a rather flamboyant dancing bit to the Village People's YMCA. It was so bad only a French person could love it!

First Video Post from India

Click the Picture below to view the Video at YouTube. Again, the video was to large to post on the blog so it is at Youtube... allow some time for it to load up if you are on a slow connection.

(Click Pic Above to Watch Video)

Mumbai is a massive city and the shear amount of humanity here is overwhelming. People are literally everywhere. As I wasn't sleeping so well just yet I got up at about 5:30 AM and walked around the city. At this time you can see the huge number of people living in the streets of Mumbai or sleeping in cars and trucks.

I used a guide named Terance who appears in some of the video to show me around the city. We went to many destinations, some straight out of the travel book and some off the beaten path. At one point we walked for nearly an hour through Mumbai's largest slum settlement housing millions of residents. It was quite a sight to see... an assault on the senses of sight, smell, and sound. It was supposedly the neighborhood in which some of Slumdog Millionare was filmed. I was very impressed by the amount of activity in the slum- people were making things happen, not idly sitting around. You can get just about anything you want in the slum too... they had an arcade full of old skool video games, barber shops, meat markets, schools, temples, plumbers, auto-mechanics, psychics, everything but BEEF! The tour of the city was quite enjoyable, but fast paced and hot. I feel like I saw just about every tourist attraction the city has to offer within a 8 hour day.

All in all things are good... the worst thing about the city is how dangerous the traffic is. The cars, trucks, taxis, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, bullock carts, buses, and pedestrians all participate in a noisy, maddening dance, defying all laws of traffic, in an collective effort to speed down the road in the most dangerous way possible. No hard and fast laws or rules exist and crossing traffic at some of the largest intersections is very nerve racking. Its a mad dash... kinda like the video game Frogger where you guide the frog back and forth avoiding oncoming cars until you cross the road to safety. I'm getting accustomed to it now, but it is still crazy! More video to come soon!

Oh and I apologize for the poor shooting and editing quality of this video. Some of the shots are kinda crappy and I crop out my own head several times! Gotta get better.

New Experiences...

I did happen to see some holy cows today... and a few street goats too. The most off the wall thing to happen to me yet in India occurred earlier today on the street near a large monument called the Gateway to India. This structure near the Taj Mahal Hotel is dedicated to the first English King who visited India ceremoniously at this point... Think Paris' Arch de Triumph. It is a rather touristy area and so there are a large number of Indians trying to separate Westerners from their money. One man, a "doctor" stopped me and said I had soap in my ear. When I stopped he handed me a card and stuck what appeared to be dental tools into my ear and proceeded to relieve me of ear wax. It was a bizarre experience but well worth the $3. He originally wanted approx $20. No way! I am still experiencing some trouble getting a cell phone in India due to some bureaucratic reasons... hopefully tomorrow I will be able to finally circumnavigate the problems.

Incredible India...

Whew... after a pretty brutal 16 hour plane ride (during which I watched Star Trek, The Great Buck Howard, Valkyre and 3/4 of Bolt) I safely arrived with all my luggage at the Mumbai International Airport. Customs was a breeze and I was able to get money (which goes a hell of a long way around here) out of the ATM. I grabbed a baby taxi (3-wheels open air- just like the movies) and was able to make it to the Hotel. However, at the hotel they were having electrical issues and transferred me over to another hotel that they also own or manage. The room is nice and the AC works great. It has a western style toilet and shower and even has a flat screen TV with 72 channels. So this place isn't exactly a primitive world. Last night a ton of stray dogs were barking all hours of the night and so I didn't exactly sleep well, but I am adjusting to the time change very rapidly. The area around my hotel is really slummy and I will be moving to a better location near the Taj Mahal Hotel of Mumbai tomorrow afternoon. This area of town has more tourist activities and is all around nicer and more modern. I am having some trouble getting the internet connected to my laptop at the hotel so I am writing this from a dingy little internet cafe. Tomorrow I should be able to get a cell phone set up and will post that number here for people who want to call. I shopped around for a cell phone today and found out what documents are required to activate the phone. Also, I registered with the US Embassy, should any problems arise and I visited the Indian National Tourism Office. They gave me some decent information.. some stuff I am going to look over tonite. All in all things are good and I am not worried and I don't feel unsafe. I won't be going out on foot tonite in the neighborhood around my current hotel though. Tomorrow night is Saturday and it is the start of a big annual 10 day long celebration in Mumbai. Tomorrow night I will hit the beach avenues to do some people watching or cultural immersion. Tonite I am just gonna kick back and watch some good old Hindi music videos on the TV and get some sleep. Take care and I will be posting again soon.

Roll Out...

Today is the day. In just about ten minutes I will be leaving my home in Milton, FL and I will be headed to the Pensacola Airport. It seems that we should have fairly smooth weather and when I land in India in about 2o hours I will be entering a hot humid world climatically similar to FL, just stinkier and full of millions upon millions of people. I will be in touch so don't worry... one of my first goals will be to get a cell phone. And I am addicted to the Internet so I will certainly be making updates to the blog and sending emails. Hit me up... let me know how you are doing and just send me a quick shout out... I know I am gonna be homesick, so all the emails from home will be much appreciated. Take care!

Flying to Mumbai on Wednesday...

Hello All!
It's almost time to fly to India. I have most everything taken care of and I have been spending a lot of time with my friends and family. I will be leaving on Wednesday August 19th and will be in Mumbai for several days- maybe even a few weeks. From Mumbai I plan to travel north through New Delhi on my way to the headwaters of the Ganges River. It is said that one dip in the freezing waters at the base of the Ganges glacier is supposed to erase the sins of your ancestors. I plan to get up into the Himalayas before winter sets in and the passes get snowed up some time in October. From there I will make a new plan and decide whether to head east or to head south. It's a pretty open ended excursion that I am on. Also... I just wanted to let everyone know that they are more than welcome to come and join me for a little while. I know that it may seem difficult, but really its not that expensive and once you get to India everything is super cheap. You will actually spend less money in India than you would in many, many American destinations. I will be thinking about everyone and I will surely miss my home, my friends, and my family. I will keep the blog going and once I get to India I am going to purchase a cell phone. I also have skype set up on my computer if anyone does the VoiP thing. I will be using skype to call back to America. Take care and keep in touch.

The boat before it broke down...The hike in the Canyon at Lake Powell

The North Rim Grand Canyon Campsite among the Aspens

The Chuck Truck!

Spent a lot of time behind the wheel- 10,000 miles.

The old pin ball machine made it safely to Bagdad, FL.

Watching the Rockies at Coors Field in Denver with Greg.

Caught a snake and scared the hell out of some girls.

Faustine and I at one of the many waterfalls in Yosemite National Park.

Stepping out and looking over the edge at Grand Canyon National Park.

The truck finally crosses over the 100,000 mile mark. Keep on truckin'.

Fast Forward....

I have not been the best at updating the blog and the videos and posts are actually about a month or more old by the time I have gotten around to splicing all the footage together and posting it on the net. And the people who host this blogspot website have been giving me trouble over the size of the videos I am loading online. So I apologize...

In other news... I am back in Milton. One hundred and eighteen days later, 10,297 miles later. The road trip ends. I had a great time, but unfortunately I didn't take much footage from San Fran on so there won't be any videos. After leaving San Francisco I headed to Yosemite National Park. I camped there for a few days with four French women- only one of which had ever been camping before. I must say it was a very memorable camping trip. And Yosemitie looked great too. We did some hiking and caught the waterfalls and even saw some bears. The girls loved it.

From Yosemite I traveled to Los Angeles and hung out with my friend Faustine and an old friend Chris from Gainesville. LA is a crazy place-I'm not sure its the city for me, but you can get anything you want in LA (as long as you are willing to sit in 2 hrs worth of traffic to get there). One of the things that bothered me about LA was the amount of homeless people roaming the streets, but I better suck it up and realize that where I am heading is going to have a thousand times more poverty and despair than Southern Cal. All in all LA is cool and beautiful and it's nice to have the sun and the beaches, but the people there are a little too cool for their own good. Everyone was complaining about how hard it was to make friends there and I understand why when you have to spend 2 hrs every day in a car by yourself stuck in traffic. Doesn't leave too much free time after work and everything else.

From Los Angeles, Faustine and I drove across the desert midday in 110 F heat towards Los Vegas. This was a brutal drive. Even with the windows down, 110 F feels like hell. But its a dry heat... yeah sure it was still too damn hot. It was my first trip to Sin City and I thoroughly enjoyed it however we could only stay for about 36 hours. We stayed in a nice room at the Luxor Resort. We went out and partied on the strip and we also did some shopping and wandering around on Vegas's Old Strip. Its a very cool place to visit and I would love to go back. We were super cheap in Vegas and we didn't have enough time to catch any shows. In fact, neither of us even spent a single dollar gambling.

We rolled out of Vegas and crossed more desert on our way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The scenery in this part of the country is just breathtaking. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is considerably less traveled and has a lot less tourists. It is only about 15 miles to the South Rim, but the drive takes several hours as you have to go all the way around the Grand Canyon to get there- probably 200 miles. We saw some beautiful sunsets and did some quick, but hot, hikes around the canyon. There were hundreds of mule deer around at night. It was almost dangerous to drive at night because there were so many deer near the road.

After two days at the Grand Canyon the two of us drove to meet my father and my uncle in Page, AZ, a city situated near Glen Canyon Dam and the vast Lake Powell. This man made reservoir is a fisherman and boater's paradise and my father and his brother had already been there for several days fishing by the time we arrived. They met us in the morning and took us on a very cool hike. We traveled far up into a canyon via boat and then abandoned ship and started hiking. The canyon was extremely narrow and the colors and contours of the rock are mesmerizing in the cloudless sun. Words could never describe the way the narrow canyon twisted and turned in orange and yellow waves. We saw a beaver and some small beaver dams along the way. On the return trip in the boat the engine broke down. This was not good, but fortunately the boat had a small back up engine. What should have taken us 45 minutes ended up taking about 6 hours. It was well after midnight before we got the boat on the trailer and out of the water. It was a long, hot, sun beaten day, but the only casualty seemed to be the boat motor- we made it outta there no problem.

From Page we drove to Canyon De Chelly National Park. In this park are the remains of Native American civilizations.... there are paintings and cliff dwelling everywhere. It seems that thousands of years ago a prehistoric civilizations lived among the steep cliffs and even made permanent settlements at the base of these cliff and sometimes even high up on their rocky faces. Its really impressive to see the structures perched in the rocky cliffs, kinda reminds me of an eagles nest. The whole of this part of the country is the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation is its own country within the US. Everyone was an Indian and it was very interesting to see their unique, and beautiful faces. Such proud and interesting people, it is sad to see what generations of growing up on reservations and repressive US policies have done to these people. We weren't able to spend long here and that night we drove on to Albuquerque.

In Albuquerque we did some shopping and checked out a lot of art. We were feeling a little burned out from all the traveling so we took a nice relaxed day to wander around the city and plan our next move. One of my personal favorites in this city was the Rattlesnake Museum. It was a small placed but stocked up with real live rattlesnakes and venomous snakes from around the world. I got to see one of the workers fed a snake a rat and I thought that was pretty cool, but some people may not share my enthusiasm for life and death in such plain view. There was an amazing We didn't stay long and left after just one night driving south through Roswell (where I got some cool stickers) and on to Carlsbad Caverns.

Carlsbad Caverns was in the middle of the desert. Above ground is barren, but below ground and entire new world opens up. Faustine especially loved the caverns and was awestruck with the size of this cave system. We took a self-guided tour through the cave and it took us probably about 3 hours to do the entire cave. Far, far below the Earth's surface exists a gigantic 600,000 sq. ft. room. This cave room could hold something like 16 football fields. It was huge and was the largest cave in the western hemisphere. The stalactites, stalagmites, and limestone columns form phantasmal shapes and the dark can play tricks on your eyes. If you ever in this part of the county, this is not to be missed.

We left Carlsbad Caverns and then started our long, hot, boring, dusty drive across Texas. Hours and hours later we stopped for the night in San Antonio. In the morning we witnessed the Alamo, sweated like crazy, and then cooled off with some drinks at the San Antonio Riverwalk. We were in fast forward mode and had to get to Houston so shortly thereafter we left and drove to Houston. The reason we didn't take more time crossing this part of the country is because Faustine had to catch a flight out of Houston, which was fast approaching.

We arrived in Houston and I spent some time with my old buddy Raymond. He and his girlfriend have a very nice apartment in a very nice part of Houston and I really appreciated the air conditioning. I liked some of the zany stuff in Houston. After saying goodbye to Faustine I saw some good films, some good art museums, and caught some strange folk art expositions (one guy covered his entire house and yard with beer cans over 3 decades and another guy built a "circus" dedicated to the citrus fruit the orange). Houston was great and I would like to go back, maybe when it is a little less hot though.

Upon leaving Houston I drove to New Orleans, LA. That night I camped in the bayou in the back of the truck and had the worst night of sleep of the entire trip. It was so hot and humid and there were tons of mosquitoes that somehow got into the back of the truck. At one point in the night a police officer woke me up while he was running my tags through his radio. He was surprised to see me sleeping in the back, but I was able to convince him I wasn't causing any trouble an he let me be. In the morning I felt like garbage, but traveled into New Orleans to get some good food before making the drive back to Milton. I had a mufalata at my favorite New Orleans Po Boy shop and that sandwich made my day a little bit sweeter! I also stopped by Reverend Zombies Voodoo Shop and picked up some good luck charms and things to protect me in India.

That afternoon I drove back to Milton and arrived in one piece. I had a blast on this trip and I am so thankful that the truck ran flawlessly and I didn't really have any trouble or a bad time at all. I am so lucky and nothing bad happened to me at all! Something that I learned along the way... the more I see, the less I know.

Driving to San Francisco!

So after leaving the Redwoods Parks of Northern California I continued south towards San Francisco. I had a great time driving past the redwoods and also driving along the Pacific Coast Highway which was all curves and cliffs. It was exciting, but it would have been extremely difficult to ride in the passenger seat with me at the wheel. I was probably going a little too fast around some of the curves! I made it to San Francisco for the 4th of July so there is about a 1 month lag in my video updates right now. I really liked this area of the US, from San Francisco north to Seattle. It seems like a very nice place to live...

Redwoods!

I had a great time camping among the redwoods in Northern California. I would recommend that everyone at some point in their lives must walk among these silent giants. The shear scale and age of these organisms is mesmerizing. A single tree can live 3000 years and even after it dies can take as long as 1000 years just to rot and decompose. There aren't many areas where there are still old growth redwoods, but I am glad that we have taken the necessary steps to protect these forests for future generations. Its just peaceful and somewhat mystical walking through a foggy forest of millenia old trees. I hope you enjoy the video, but in no way does it do the real deal any justice. This is something you just have to see for yourself. Ok... so I keep changing up the format too.. Click on the picture below to take you to the video on YouTube's website. It is just easier to do it this way, because the people that own the blog site don't like how long my videos are so I have to use YouTube.

Click on the Image Above

Grand Tetons!

I enjoyed my time in Grand Teton National Park. There was an amazing amount of wildlife in this park and the shear number of large mammals was really awesome. There were huge herds of a hundred or more buffalo, tons of mule deer, and I even saw a moose. The weather was warm and sunny for the most part and I did a difficult but beautiful hike from Jenny Lake at the base of the mountain range up to Lake Solitude, a glacier fed lake deep within a narrow valley. The hike was tough, but entirely worth it. Check out the video to see a montage of my 2 days in the Tetons.

Oh... I started to have some trouble with my videos and this blog site. So I had to host a couple of the longer videos via YouTube.... Click here for the link YouTubeVideo Allow some extra time for the video to load.