Key West: In my end is my beginning and in my beginning is my end

Key West is great! It is the most southerly part of the United States and has a laid back, American/Caribbean fusion sort of atmosphere. Nothing seems a problem and pretty much anything goes. The skies are bright blue, there are palms and sandy beaches, the sun is pretty fierce during the day, despite it being Autumn and the sunsets are fantastic in the evenings. So too are the occasional tropical storms, which provide dramatic displays of sheet and forked lightening that temporarily tear the night sky into serrated pieces. Given that this is the end of America, it seems appropriate that this should be pretty much my final destination on this astonishing journey. I have decided to blow the budget a bit by staying in a really nice hotel, just a few minutes walk from the southernmost beach in the US and the main High Street, Duval, which is full of bars, restaurants and art galleries and loads more.

There are some notable bars here, with a fantastic selection of live music of every possible genre each evening, although I have gravitated towards jazz and blues for some reason and driving blues/rock of the George Thorogood and the Destroyers variety. Even the open mike sessions are fantastic, attracting amateur singers who could easily be professionals, they are so good. One singer, Deborah, who makes and sells donuts during the day and who started singing a little later in life, entranced the audience with just two songs one Sunday afternoon and rightly got a fantastic reaction when she finished. This was at my favourite bar so far, The Green Parrot, established in 1890, which is just up the road from where Hemingway used to live, so I'm sure he would have popped in (well, more than just popped in, given he was a big drinker). It has a good mix of locals and holiday visitors; people who are very friendly. It sells great local beer, puts on good live music and is a little walk away from the main streets, so prices are a bit cheaper (an important consideration now I’m on the last leg of my travels and running short of money). Perfect!

The days run easily together, in a mixture of clear azure skies, swimming in the sea and the hotel pool (listening to cool, ambient chill), walking, running in the hotel gym and eating and beer and music and chatting. Yesterday I spent most of the day at a national park, where there is an old fort (Fort Zachary-Taylor) and a beach and huge, bright green iguanas, basking in the sun! I watched the old men fishing for a few hours, which was interesting as both parties have time to chat and are going nowhere in a hurry. Today again I'm going to do not much at all. I'm reading Lake Wobegon Days, by Garrison Keiller, a tale about life in small town America, which is quietly funny, so I will read and swim and lightly grill beneath the Sun until golden brown! Now and again I go to Tony's Saloon,  where in the early evening they have a guy (Jack Wolf) who does sometimes crude and humourous acoustic songs, some taking the mick out of America. In one song he gets the audince to shout out after him things associated with the US: Starbucks, GAP etc., which the audience shouts out unthinkingly. Then mid-song he shouts out Slavery and the audience shouts out Slavery at the top of their voices and then they realise what they have said. Very funny and it works every time!

I am staying here for 13 nights in total. That may sound a long time in one place and in terms of my travelling it is, but I thought that an extended stay might make it seem more like a traditional holiday rather than travelling and therefore act as a period of transition before I fly home to the UK and start searching for a job and perhaps a course of study. When I started travelling, I felt like a young child at the start of the school summer holidays which seem to stretch out into infinity with no conception of them ever coming to an end. Suddenly, terribly, a stealthy surprise! It is the Sunday evening before the new term starts and somehow, inexplicably, all that time has gone! Where oh where has it all gone?  Whilst I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends again, I’m also going to miss the freedom I have experienced and the beautiful places and the fantastic people I have met along the way.

Miami Bus Station

Bus Views

My home for a while

Southernmost beach in the US

Motorbike Convention

My hotel balcony

Fort Taylor inhabitant. Big Bro!

Little Bro!

Duval Street

The Green Parrot

Just fantastic sunsets!

 

 

 

Goodness me, what an absolutely brilliant, fabulous, amazing 6 1/2 months  circumnavigating the world! And do you know what? I bloody well did it!! :-)

'We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding, V

Charleston Troubles

After travelling for 2 days and nights via Chicago and Washington DC, (with 3 and 6 hours in each city respectively), I arrive in Charleston in the early morning hours and after waiting for the service to start, I get the 6am bus into town. The historic centre of Charleston is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever walked around. It reminds me a lot of Bath, in the UK. There are hundreds of perfectly preserved, symmetrical, Georgian and Regency houses along leafy, calm, tree lined streets and lanes. From the front they look like similar houses in the UK, with solid doors up a short flight of honey coloured stone steps, some with elegant porticos, but they have a colonial twist. On the sides, instead of flat, straight walls, many have decked, wooden verandas on each level, connected by wooden staircases, so they have a more ethereal, open, airy construction. I spend hours just walking these harmonious streets, wandering at random across one beautiful street after another, looking at one picturesque house after another.

My meanderings take me around the city to the Charleston Museum and thinking this would be a good place to get my bearings, I enter and head straight towards an exhibition which gives a timeline of the city, from prehistory, through the War of Independence and the Civil War, to the modern city as it is now. I am amazed at what I find. There are a series of short videos, extracts from a longer piece it is true, which do acknowledge the debt that the city owes to slavery, its wealth being based on rice plantations which used thousands of slaves in rice production, but it is an acknowledgement which is very neutral in tone and simply stated as a fact. At no point is there any indication at all that slavery was wrong, or that the treatment of slaves was inhumane in any way. On the contrary, whilst it is acknowledged that slaves were taken from Africa, it is stated that in Africa there was an indigenous system of slavery already in place in rice plantations there, with the implication that the slaves in America where only doing what the slaves in Africa were doing already! So that’s Ok then! Thinking I may have perhaps missed a section of the exhibition, or a separate room or something, I traverse the exhibition 3 times, but no, I haven’t missed anything. For a while I am angry, no livid. The beauty of this city now sits in a very different light and I’m wondering if I can possibly return to those striking streets, knowing its foundations are built on brutality and enslavement and what is worse, a slavery that is not condemned. I am so incensed I leave the timeline altogether and walk quickly through the Natural History exhibits. On the first floor, I find a visitor’s questionnaire and I write a small essay of complaint on the reverse, leaving my email address and welcoming the museum’s comments. I have not had a response so far.

I understand that race relations are a very sensitive subject, particularly in Charleston, where 9 people were gunned down in a church here only a few months ago and of course, Britain also perpetuated the slave trade for centuries, so is certainly not blameless in that cruel enterprise. Nonetheless I was shocked by the re-presentation of history in that museum. The balance is redressed to some small extent, by the exhibition in the Old Slave Mart Museum, where slaves were once sold and where there is a sobering narrative on the history of slavery in the area, including a list of the names, gender, trades, ages and prices of the slaves that were sold on particular days, hundreds of them, like so many cattle, in this charming and attractive city.

 New York Times Article

 

Chicago

Washington DC Train Station

And again, from the outside

Yep, You've guessed it!

Washington is a very grand city. US Department of Justice

Urinals in the Museum of Modern Art. How fantastic are they?

Charleston's leafy streets

Posh Rubbish! Obviously an intellectual town!

Charleston's downtown theatre

Charleston Railway Station 4:30am. Next stop, Miami and Key West!