Montréal, Canada

Salut! Quand je suis au Québec, j'écris en français; mais parce que le Canada est un pays anglo/francophone je complète cet article en anglais.

Well, the month of May has rolled around already! It's hard to believe that in less than a week I'll be home again, but it's true and means that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about what I'll do when I get there. I haven't come up with anything much yet other than "get a job", but I do have a feeling that I'll wake up next Monday morning with itchy feet!

I left Chicago on Sunday evening, a little earlier than I'd planned, but it meant that I got to "Norlins" on Monday afternoon. I had contemplated stopping off in St. Louis or Memphis just to increase my state count, but I decided against it as either option would involve middle-of-the-night transfers, which I find hard to bring myself to do.

Unwittingly, I was in New Orleans during their Jazz Festival, which is slightly less insane than the Mardi Gras... but not by much. The upside was that there were people playing saxophones all over the city, but the downside was that they expected money for their services. The youth hostel also jacked up their price to $25 a night, which is expensive in any case, but I have to report that it was the worst hostel I have stayed in since Malaysia in January - and that cost the equivalent of $5! I was rather amused to read an advert in a backpacking guide available at the hostel touting the "fully equipped kitchens" - when I went in clutching my packet of noodles I stood around for several minutes thinking I must be missing something. Eventually someone asked me, "What are you looking for?" to which I replied "Anything?". All the cupboards bar one were bare. There wasn't even an oven, which I would have thought was rather essential for any room described as a kitchen. The cooking equipment consisted of a rice cooker, a crockpot and a microwave, all of which were in use by other people. I went to McDonald's.

It's a close run thing, but I think New Orleans didn't have quite as many beggars as Chicago. Either way, the number of homeless people in America is pretty disgraceful, and hardly a beacon to the countries that some sectors of the population are so keen on liberating. A walk from the hostel to the French Quarter of New Orleans (about 2 miles away) felt like running a gauntlet where the prize was to reach the destination with all the contents of one's wallet intact. There is a streetcar running down the middle of the road, whose tracks seem to be a popular running/cycling track as well. On my main day there (Tuesday) I splashed out $5 for a day pass on all the streetcars and buses in the city, which led to much random travelling, thankfully not to too many dodgy areas! (I kept recalling the introduction to the Bond film "Live and Let Die" where a man is watching a funeral procession and asks the man next to him whose it is. The answer "your's" precedes a knife to the gut... anyway, I digress.)

The famous part of New Orleans is of course the French Quarter. Many of the buildings could have been transplanted from Marseilles, but fortunately the tourist shops that line their ground floors would not be found in France. Had I wanted to collect Voodoo skulls or tarot cards I would have been in luck there; as it was, I saved my money for lunch. A quarter is quite a generous description as the area only stretches about 10 blocks in each direction, which is dwarfed by the rest of the city.

With the "kitchen" at the hostel presumably still occupied, I followed my nose to "Bubba Gump's" shrimp restaurant - while Forrest Gump came from Alabama, this was the closest I would get to it, and it's a nationwide chain in any case. (I can't imagine the shrimp on sale at Navy Pier in Chicago are caught locally!)

Having had my fill of New Orleans hospitality, I got up at 6.30 the next morning to walk to the train station. Thankfully, this time around I was able to avoid the "projects" that I blundered into on my way in. Safely ensconed in the train, I sat and vegetated for a while. I couldn't sleep, I didn't have anything to read and my CD player was in the bag overhead, so I just sat and the next time I looked at my watch 5 hours had gone by! Travelling by yourself certainly provides plenty of opportunities for sitting and doing nothing for extended periods of time, especially on public transport, and it's a practice I've become quite accomplished at.

It never ceases to amaze me how much I never cease to amaze Americans, whose idea of a long exotic travelling experience is two weeks in Cancun. In New Zealand or Australia, people would take one look at me and say "Backpacker?" Here, most people have never heard of youth hostels, wouldn't know a backpack if it hit them over the head and, while they can understand I'm on "vacation" have considerable difficulty grasping the scale of it. Often I haven't the heart to tell them I'm not just travelling around one part of the USA, or even the whole of it.

"How long are you here for?" they'll ask, to which my reply is:

"5 weeks in the US."

"Oh", they'll say, "did you fly into Chicago then?"

"Well, actually I started in Los Angeles."

"Ah, you flew there then."

"Well... yes." Seeing as 82% of Americans don't have a passport, it would be difficult for them to grasp going abroad other than to Canada, which, let's face it, is American anyway.

25 hours after getting on the train, I arrived in Washington DC for a whistle-stop visit (almost literally) of about 7 hours. Rail is the only way to arrive in a city like this, and the Union Station is suitably grand and imposing, with marble floors and columns abounding. Furthermore, it's only 3 blocks from the Capitol building, which makes it rather more convenient than any other form of transport. I was able to do a tour of the Capitol building (a small part of it anyway) and spent the rest of my time walking around the city. Rather bizarrely, I managed to miss the White House, that is, I walked straight past it without noticing, for which I think I deserve a medal. I found it eventually of course, but the hordes of tourists are so ubiquitous it is hard to discern where they're congregating. I would have liked to have had time to walk around Georgetown and the other districts of this District, but the way it's set out at least allows for concentrated photo taking; so in a few hours I managed:

• The Capitol Building
• The Smithsonian Air/Space Museum
• The Washington Monument (as if the whole city weren't enough)
• The WWII Memorial
• The Korean War Memorial
• The Vietnam War Memorial
• The Lincoln Memorial
• The Jefferson Memorial
• The White House (eventually)

At 5pm I jumped back on a train and headed north to New York, where I was to spend the night. In a rare double-whammy, I also managed to miss the Empire State Building on my way from the station to the hostel. (I didn't walk right past it, but it is rather tall and, let's face it, hard to miss.) The next morning, I rolled out of bed, down the stairs, over the street, down a few more flights of stairs through Penn Station and onto the "Adirondacks" train which takes 11 hours to get to Montréal. (You can drive it in 6, apparently.) The route follows the Hudson River for several hundred miles and then the western shore of Lake Champlain, where I could see the state of Vermont over the other side. While I haven't gone out of my way to visit any particular states, I have still clocked up 24 on this trip (plus DC), and two Canadian provinces. My railpass is wheezing from 9200 miles and over $1000 worth of travel, and my passport has picked up another couple of stamps from two Canadian border crossings.

I'd love to tell you about Montréal, but I'm running out of time. I will merely say that it's a very interesting city which mixes French driving style and pigheadedness about the French language (even the stop signs say "Arrêt") with American culture and people. More to come next time!