No, I don't care who shot the Sheriff.

For the record: I am sick of reggae music.

(and Eric Clapton for that matter) It all sounds the same to me. And I'm
not just being a music snob here, it really does sound the same. I know
this because the the guy who is renting me my deckchair has been playing
the same damn song on repeat all day. The one CD, the one long song, the
repeat button.

And this is not an isolated case, every beach bar has their one CD, and
they keep them all on repeat. It is worse than Christmas shopping. If I
hear one more person waxing lyrical about "his brothers" I'm going to have
to kill someone. What I don't know is if this is revenge on the tourists, or
just a scam the get people like me to give them money to turn the music
off. ( I considered this option more than once ). I figure it can't be a
revenge plan because the locals have to endure it as much as we do. Or at
least I hope that's the case.

Then again, it could just be the whole "Things aren't quite right
here, but that's the way we like it" setup they have going on.

Renting a car is, for example, an experience. The car I have must be very
old. I say this because it has 30,000 miles on it and in the last 2 days
I've added about 10 miles to the clock and won't need to refill the gas
tank when i return it. When i was collecting the car the guy had only 1
word of advice 'use first gear'. He was right. If you just leave the
thing in 1st all the time you get the joy of Caribbean cruise control.
It's like being at Disneyland, you just turn the engine on, get in and
steer.

But after two days of driving around in the heat I'd decided that I had
enough of avoiding dogs, chickens, goats, garbage and young children and
needed to get back to the beach for some serious drinking. I also was a
bit worried by the fact the local boat rental guy had five boats in the
water but at least ten rotting away up on blocks in a back street.

Either way it is probably a gentle reminder that you don't want to stray
too far from the beach, you might see the ugly underside of your tourist
bliss.

Besides it is still too hot to do anything useful. A few bars down I
can get "Mikes Hard Lemonade" for $1.

A bottle of water will cost me $1.50.

Ditch your laptop.

I just found out that I can post to this page directly from my
mobile phone.

Great, now I have no excuses. Before I had to wait until I had an hour or
two to focus and get some of this down in writing. Now this page is
going to be riddled with random missives everytime something curls my
interest.

I'm just lucky my phone doesn't have a camera.

Please settle your tab at the end of the week

Jost Van Dyke, I'm still here

I've been drinking at a place called something like "Ivan's stress free
bar". According to a regular, this place started out 15 years ago as a
guy with a cooler, and now it is a ramshackle collection of driftwood and
shells with at least 2 working fridges. In this place, that's significant
progress.

However, what keeps me coming back to this establishment is not the
decor but their method of service, or more correctly the complete absence
of it. Most of the time there isn't even a bartender. Instead there is a
book and a simple process :

You make your own drink
You write it in the book
When you leave you add it up yourself and pay what you owe.

It is deceptively simple. You can't blame anyone else if the drinks are
bad, you can't complain about the rate of service and you can't really
skip out on the bill. You see, you're kinda stuck on this island. There
is not really that much to it and there is not that far you can go.
Everyone basicly knows everyone else so if you cause trouble you won't
last that long. Instead you do your best not to overdose on alcohol and
just enjoy what you have.

At one point, while I was mixing something deadly involving rum and an
unknown fruit juice, I noticed that there was a 'TIP' jar at the end of the
bar. This didn't make much sense since I couldn't see the point in leaving
myself a tip, but there wasn't anything else you could call it. If you
named it the 'Building Improvement Fund' I don't think it would attract
any more attention. Perhaps they should have just left it there with a
note

"Help keep things the way they are"

Or perhaps it should have said "Help keep away the cruises".

No matter how cool they look in the advertisements, you do not want to go
near a cruise. We had one invade the island during the week and it was
not a pretty event.

One minute it was a quiet morning of rum and skittles, the next we're
being invaded by a stream of fat suburbanites with nothing better to do
than sing too loudly, yell too loudly and generally cause a nuisance for
themselves. And this was one of the small ships. It was a nice
four-masted, wooden decked, sailing number that probably tries to attract
the hippies by putting ads in the outdoor magazines. The thought of being
stuck on a boat with them for seven days makes my skin crawl.

It was perhaps good that this happened on the last day and I was able to
use it as an excuse to get out of dodge before everything went to crap.

To put me in my place I was given the royal treatment on the way to the
ferry. The taxi was not only late because the driver fell asleep, but the
doors were held closed with old seat belts (probably from the drivers
seat) he dodn't go faster than about 10 miles an hour and he took pains to
stop along the way and have a chat with some friends. Meanwhile I'm in
the back sweating about missing the last ferry for the day.

The taxi got to the dock with 15 minutes to spare.

I wouldn't want to change a thing.

"Is it hot, or is it Just me ?"

Jost Van Dyke, The British Virgin Islands.

Should you ever end up here, as I have, you only really need to remember
one thing - what you want for dinner.

You see, you not only have to make all evening reservations before 4pm but
you also have to select what you want from the menu as well. Given that I
was on an island with a population of about 200 and there is little to do
here but sleep, swim, drink and eat, this initially struck me as far too
stressful a decision to make so early in the day.

But it didn't take long to realise that this is not weird behavior by the
locals but a clever design driven by selfish laziness. If no-one makes a
reservation, the restaurant doesn't open and the local can all go do
something else. It actually makes a lot of sense. I'd rather know that I
have a free evening earlier in the day, then finding out half way into the
night.

As to the problem of choosing from the menu, well you'll just have to
trust me when I say that any combination of BBQ chicken, Ribs, fish or
lobster is going to be ideal. And make sure that you get lots of BBQ
Corn.

So, plan your meals. Oh, and get bug spray. The really good stuff, make
sure it has lots of DEET. The insects here show no mercy. Not only are
the flies and mosquitos a force to be reckoned with, but there are these
insatiable sand fleas that, unfortunately, make it almost impossible to
sit on the sand after dark.

So don't say I didn't warn you. Oh, and did I mention the heat ? Or the
humidity ? It is really, really hot here. I'm not sure how hot because
no-one had a thermometer, so I never sound out (I think this was
deliberate to avoid putting the tourists in shock). But it is really hot.
The only way to deal with it is to go as deep into the water as possible
and just stand there with a cold drink.

So, yes. I'm stuck on an island wasting away my time with nothing to do
but drink rum, read a book and go for the occasional long swim.

I couldn't be happier.

"Don't ask about my divorce"

I'm at a payphone in Philadelphia. The person at the other end, who does
not want me to know about her divorce, is Gina. I only know this because
I happened to be walking past the payphone when it rang.

I wasn't going to answer it, but someone else on the street also gave the
phone a second glance, so my competitive side got the better of me. That,
and it had already been a strange night.

I started in the hotel bar where I was doing my best to explain, without
much success, to the waitress the difference between a "Vodka, Lime and
Soda" , and a "Vodka tonic". As a result, the whole exchange tweaked the
interest of the person next to me and I thus met Anna, who was from
Brazil, I think.

I don't recall a lot about her, not because the conversation wasn't
interesting, but because of what happened about 20 minutes later. You see,
she was waiting at the bar to meet a friend from work - Mike or someone
like that. Mike worked in a remote office and was staying at the hotel.

So Mike showed up after a while, and we made the usual polite conversation
that strangers are forced to do. But eventually Anna and Mike had to go
off to their next appointment. So they did. They said good bye, crossed
the lobby, got into an elevator and went, presumably, straight back to
Mike's room. From the on the night only got stranger.

Looking for somewhere to eat I later found myself at some South
American-Cuban fusion bar offering mojitos and ceviche. I ended up
staying there longer than I expected because the kids at the end of the
bar were having the an incredibly interesting, and not very quiet,
conversation about their whole on-again/off-again relationship. The
bartender and I were taking turns to keep them plied with alcohol just so
we could get more dirt.

However they eventually had to go home, or find a hotel room, I'm not sure
which. So I paid up and went for a walk. I vaguely recall passing a a
jazz bar in the theatre district where Lou Rawls was playing, but I can't
be sure because that's also around the time I walked past the payphone.

Gina had called me, or, more correctly, the number for the phone. Now she
sounded like a Heavy Chain smoker, or a Drag Queen, or both and before I
could get a word in beyond "Hello ?" She started asking me a few too many
personal questions. "How tall are you?", "How old are you?", "What do you
weigh ?". and then the drop dead question :

"Are you well hung ?"

"Um, What ? " I asked.

She replied with another question..

"Will you tell me to rub my bits ?"

Paydirt - I'd hit on a mis-dialed phone sex callback. So with nothing
better to do I decided to mess with the protocol and started asking her
all the same questions. I'd got as far as finding out basic personal
statistics, the fact that she lived with her cousin, and her general
mental welfare before the conversation came around to her divorce.

As soon as I asked her about that she hung up on me. I guess I hit
a sore spot.

The night was still early, so I found another bar that was playing hip hop bar
with a live percussion act.

Who says Philly is dull ?

"I hope you realise this is Your Fault"

The passenger sitting next to me just picked up his mobile phone and had
the following conversation :

"Tom, I'm in still stuck in Boston, and it is all your fault"

"Well, apparently there are thunderstorms in Chicago, or storms near
Chicago. Or somewhere within 3000 miles of Chicago there is a
thunderstorm and, as you know, this has a tendency to cause
problems..."

Never fly at the last minute, The tickets are expensive and you can never
get the good routes. So I'm stuck here, where we've been sitting for the
for the last 3 hours, waiting for the rain to stop. All this because my
route takes me through Chicago.

Now, while this incident was just the usual a case of (a) me getting to the airport to find that all my flights had been delayed, (b) all the flights on alternate routes were booked out and, (c) I had to play the shell game of picking a flight that might actually leave tonight, You have to consider the bigger picture :
my last 3 days of travel were like this.

On my way to the east coast I was also routed through Chicago. Of my 3
nights away I have managed to spend 2 of them in Chicago airport hotels.

Simply trying to get out of San Jose turned out to be a problem when I
discovered that my airline has an inability to realise what 'special
assistance' means and decided to board the 2 wheel-chairs last. At a gate
that had no jet-way.

So we were entertained for the first few minutes as we watched a very
chipper young man crawl around on his knees and very slowly prepare his
wheelchair for flight. But after about 20 minutes, when he was finally cranked
up the stairs and we took off 45 minutes late most of us had lost our
sense of humour.

When the pilot got on the horn and explained that there were 'headwinds' it became abundantly clear that I was not going to make my connection - the last for the day. So we bombed into Chicago during in that terrible limbo period where I had about 20 minutes to get to my connection but had to endure the longest taxi ever and then discovered that my connection was at the furthest gate possible. Despite what anyone may tell you :

NEVER RUN FOR YOUR CONNECTION

You won't make it, you never will, the airline already gave up on you,
sold your seat and closed the doors way before you ever landed.

When I did finally reach the gate I had to wait for a pair of sweaty and
wheezing customers take great pains to explain to the agent how it was
"their fault" and the "airline was hopeless" and generally do everything
possible to try an make someone (who did not cause the delay) feel they
had to do something (which they could not do) to get them on a plane (that
had already left)

I merely showed the agent my worthless boarding pass, and he apologised
and gave me a free hotel room for the night. Sitting in the hotel bar
making phone calls I watched as the rest of the people on my flight slowly
trickled in.

So, Thinking that I'd done my time already, I really wasn't mentally prepared for the failures of the return journey.

We probably spent about 3 hours sitting at the gate, and another hour or
more at the end of the runway waiting for the green light to get the hell
out of dodge. Every time we seemed close the pilot would offer another
snippet of Chicago weather

"..Apparently that storm left the airport, but now it is in our fight
path.."

"...There is now a second storm at Chicago..."

"...Golf ball sized hail stones..."

I was wondering where they were getting all this useful information before
they opened the cockpit door and I saw one pilot showing another the
latest weather.com map on his TREO. Technology, gotta love it.

When we did finally land, 5 hours late, the airport was so closed there weren't even agents to even handle re-bookings. There was just a very tired manager at the customer service centre handing out a 1-800 number for hotels, knowing full well that everything was booked. I also realise, in hindsight, that she failed to mention that the arrivals area was in chaos and there was a 45 minute wait for a taxi.

I had spent so much time in transit I had killed the battery on my mobile, my iPod and most of my laptop, so I had to scrounge for change and a payphone to find a hotel. Luckily (thanks to a corporate travel 24 hour number) I found one and legged it over to the international terminal where the cab line was much shorter.

Sometime later (i think it was 2 am) I crashed in my hotel room, left a few voicemails for people and failed completely to charge either my laptop or my phone - it seems the power outlet was connected to the light switch.

As I write this I have less than 5% left.

Next time, I'm booking in advance and getting a direct flight.