roundtheworldflights.com

Me and Shakira - surreal

Los Angeles style culture-shock struck within moments of takeoff from Mexico City. After a summer spent in Central America I was expecting some changes on the other side of the Rio Grande. But I was totally unprepared when Shakira herself parted curtains from the first class section and came back – all flowing golden mane and hypnotically tanned boobs – to ask me in her lilting Colombian Spanish if it would be possible for her to sleep at my place!

As an English gentleman I readily agreed. I’d be more than happy for her to stretch out across the three empty seats I was occupying and I’d gladly take her place upfront in 3F and she’d stretch out for a good pre-concert sleep.

Two Bacardi and cokes later we were already touching down at LAX. The blonde bombshell and I chatted briefly in the immigration queue then she disappeared from my life forever, behind the smoked glass of a black limo.

Meanwhile, I took the ‘Shittle Bus’ (part of the ‘u’ in the sign had fallen off) to a Venice Beach flophouse.

Venice Beach is the quintessential Great American Freakshow. It is the home of the World Gym beachboy body-builders, tattooed Goths and vampires and Mexican surf-punks. In photos the rollerskating babes always look like Shakira (do I sound obsessed…?) but it is not always so. This place is indeed more freakshow than beauty pageant although there are sometimes spectacular exceptions (see the pic above).

Everyone is desperate to find their gimmick. Stroll along this bizarre promenade on any morning and you will see the weirdest variety of toys: snakeboards, skateboards, stilts, laidback low-rider bicycles, tandems, sit-up-and-beg monkey-bar bicycles, and those weird leaf-suspension jogging shoe attachments that make people run like they just got out of NASA training.

There is a talented guitarist who perpetually skates up and down the promenade in a turban and dressed as a Tuareg. A very successful gimmick: he is almost certainly the world’s only professional, roller-skating, Tuareg guitarist. There’s a teetotal wino with a sign bragging that he has ‘the world’s best collection of wino songs and jokes.’ There’s ‘the birdman of Venice Beach’ – another hobo who lives permanently under the fluttering wings of several thousand pigeons. Tourists think he’s crazy but the locals know otherwise. It’s another very successful and unique gimmick. Dozens of tattoo shops buzz with the din of less successful people attempting to decorate their bodies more luridly – or just more completely – then their contemporaries. I don’t have a gimmick (and only one tattoo) so I’m instantly relegated in the eyes of the locals into a mere tourist. In this enthralling parade of humanity I’m utterly invisible. One of the walking undead.

Sales gimmicks are also big business here. Perhaps because everything else has been done so many times before. You can get your writing analysed, tarot cards read, palms read or you can enjoy one of more than a dozen different types of massage (though those with happy endings are in another part of town). You can get your name written on a piece of rice or on a piece of driftwood or on a tie-dyed shirt. There are stores dedicated to hemp clothing and there are at least three clinics where the world’s illnesses are apparently cured by copious amounts of the humble cannabis plant. You can pop in anytime for a ‘medical marijuana evaluation.’ You can buy every conceivable piece of marijuana paraphernalia or a selection of hand painted skulls for your grandma’s mantelpiece. There are clocks, paintings, mirrors, sunglasses and jewellery all shaped like surboards…and there are real surfboards in every shape ever conceived of. It’s a breathless place where pretty much the only place to cool down and take a deep breath of fresh air is in the lineout where the Pacific surf wraps onto Venice’s impressive stretch of golden sand.

Everyone – businesses and individuals alike – have a gimmick. The menu in front of me lists The Sidewalk Café’s famous selection of ‘California Disaster Cocktails’: there’s The Mudeslide (sweet), Wildfire (bizarrely cool) and The Earthquake (limited to 2 max per client!). There’s El Nino (a bit like Wildfire…but blue), Global Warming (like Wildfire…but red) and 405 Freeway (‘a congested mixture of too many things in one place’).

So if this latest posting seems to have degenerated into ranting rabid gibberish…well, now you know why.

Hawaiian Rules and gettin' busted

The ancient Hawaiians believed that the sacred waters of Waikiki bay had great ‘mana’ - spiritual healing powers.

With a head that still thumped – from a combination of Longboard beer, gin and tequila – I was hoping that there might still be some truth in this. I had been at a party in a house full of students from University of Hawaii. Even apart from a fairly raucous round of the student drinking game known as King’s Cup it had been a strange evening. The puritanical 21 year-old age-limit on alcohol had led to a couple of unusual (mis-)adventures. Early in the evening the excessively law-abiding staff of a 7-11 refused to sell me beer because I didn’t have ‘the correct ID.’ I pointed to the ample signs of 41 years of hardship and toil in the lines around my eyes and wondered aloud that although I respected their rules ‘was there no possibility whatsoever that common sense might prevail.’ There wasn’t.

An hour later the party was raided by a convoy of no less than six squad cars and most of the drinkers were forced to leave. The few of us who were left in a house full of booze decided to make up for the absence of the others.

It was mid-morning by the time I paddled out into the gently rolling swell for a rendezvous with the spirits of Waikiki. Surfing is perhaps the best cure in the world for a hangover. As the first wave broke over my head I felt it washing my ills away in a rinse-cycle of white-water.

Waikiki is often said to be the birthplace of surfing. Even today, with the busy boulevard and high-rise hotels overlooking the beach, it is still a magical place to surf. An oversized statue of Duke Kahanamoku – the man who took modern-day surfing to Australia and California and pretty much Hawaii’s surfing god – looms over the promenade. He stands with his hands out as if making a blessing, yet it is strange that the Waikiki authorities thought it logical that he would ever have done so with his back towards the sea. Legend has it that ‘The Duke’ once caught a 35-foot wave and rode it a mile and a quarter right across the bay. Looking at the little peelers that roll into Waikiki most of the time this is hard to believe. But, after all, just because Duke Kahanamoku was once a living legend doesn’t mean that all parts of that legend need to be true. The Waikiki waves in general fall far short of the epic proportions of Oahu’s legendary North Shore but for a mellow, hungover longboarding session Waikiki can take some beating.

As I paddled out into the line-up a big turtle – another of the great Hawaiian spirit animals – rolled onto its side and raised its flipper in what appeared to be a greeting. I was still smiling to myself as the shadow of a set of glassy 3-foot rollers cruised onto the horizon. The ten-foot balsa longboard paddled easily and I slipped down the face of the wave, stepping back and dragged a lazy hand into the face to crank the board around and chart a course towards the great volcanic crater of Diamond Head at the end of the bay. The wave walled up sweetly, but slow enough so that you had to milk it for speed: chase the lip, pumping the board as much as possible, but then pull into a big cutback to get back into the inside section.

The ride was only perhaps 50 metres and was never going to make a place among the legends of Waikiki…but by the time I kicked out I was one happy haole. The spirits of Waikiki had done their job yet again.