Any serious travel is looking like it’s some time away at the moment – I’m thinking of New York (and looking through old photos) and wishing I was over there.

This is a remarkable building which still holds its own in a city full of amazing skyscrapers.

There’s a lot of older people, senior citizens, people in their 60s, war veterans, people who have cancer and AIDS. It’s not a very healthy environment down there – just very enclosed and wet

Above ground Vegas struck me as a horrible, bleak place hiding under a very thin surface veneer of glamour and excitement.  It seems fitting somehow that the city literally hides such a dark and hopeless world below its streets.

Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, travel and the wild, strange sound of jazz are unexpectedly available – and the purposeless drifting and nihlism of living without any great force of history or pre-determined role or destiny to drive one along.  The 1960s were about to shake American society to its core, and the real life characters portrayed by Kerouac hum with the barely contained energy of the coming explosion.

In San Francisco we stopped in at Vesuvio for a beer – a bar visited by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac:

We were stuck in traffic going through the Hoover Dam for nearly two hours – the Nevada police were operating some sort of mysterious checkpoint on the way into the state which slowed traffic to a crawl. Behind us Arizona was covered with scattered thunderstorms. As the sun set the stationary traffic was treated to this amazing light.

Travelling around the States, however, it became apparent that there were many fantastic regional foods which despite mostly being combinations of grease, beef, sugary bread and fake cheese were far from vile.

Below are some of the standouts from around the USA.

Name: Underdog hotdogs Location: San Francisco, California Comments: Excellent organic hot dogs served with potato gems/tots – probably the best hot dog I had in the USA.  Went down very nicely with flavoured iced tea, which is ubiquitous in the US and cheap.  Underdog is near the science museum in western San Francisco and worth the walk of a couple of blocks to visit if you are ever there. Rating: A-

Name: Fresh fruit Location: Somewhere on the side of the road between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park, California (near a drive-through gun shop) Comments: So fresh food does exist in this country…  Surprisingly juicy and delicious; blueberries were particularly sweet and the strawberries were about twice the size of Australian ones.  These stalls are dotted along the highway to Yosemite, which travels through a large fruit growing region east of San Francisco.  Compared to most food in the US this was cheap, too. Rating: A-

Name: Deep dish pizza Location: Pizzeria Uno, Chicago, Illinois Comments: Without exaggeration one of the best things I have ever eaten.  Insanely filling but insanely good.  The crust was buttery and delicious, closer to something cakey or biscuity than italian pizza dough.  The rest of it was made upside down, with filling, cheese, then tonnes of tomato sauce dousing the whole thing.  Even the green capsicum, which I ordinarily dislike, was delicious. I was pretty hungry and could only eat one slice from a 9″ pizza (i.e. an Australian ’small’). Rating: A+++

Name: Chicago-style hot dog Location: Street stall, Chicago, Illinois Comments: It is some kind of crime to eat a hot dog with tomato sauce in Chicago.  Instead it must be served as shown – mustard, relish, chillis, salad.  This combination was ok but a little underwhelming – the chillis seemed to be hot for the sake of it rather than adding much, and the actual dog was nothing special, just a typical watery street hot dog.  The relish was a good addition though. Rating: C+

Name: Beef, gravy mashed potato sandwich thing Location: Eleven City Diner, Chicago Illinois Comments: A mountain of roast beef and mashed potato on bread swimming in gravy.  Simple, but extremely tasty.  The restaurant was a New York/jewish style diner with all kinds of specialties.  After too much oily American food this was nice and straightforward.  I did feel like I was having heart palpitations by the time I finished.  Eleven City is open late and located in downtown Chicago, which is another thing to recommend it if travelling. Rating: B+

Name: Philly cheese steak Location: By George, Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Comments: An epic combination of bread, roast beef and cheez-wiz.  Absolutely delicious although very greasy too.  Half of a standard sized cheese steak was more food than a normal human needed (but of course this is America we’re talking about, so these were available with chips and various other additions to make sure that at least 50 mega-calories could be obtained by starving workers in their lunch breaks).  Quite hard to eat due to high density and grease factor but… well worth it. Rating: A-

Normal service to resume shortly, if all goes well, including the fabulous tale of travellers from a far flung outpost voyaging to the New Rome just as the empire begins its decline and fall (translation: we are going to the USA).

Unlike, say, the Romans, many of our large buildings are only built with a 50-100 year intended lifespan – perhaps the ultimate monument to consumer culture would be a civilization whose relics crumble to dust as a result of designed obsolescence, while the relics of far older peoples still stand.

One ruin which does seem to be lasting quite well is Pripyat in Russia, home to Chernobyl.  These pictures are incredible (especially if you happen to have played this).

Now if only we could find one of those obelisks…

Aurora Australis photographed from the Space Shuttle in 1991

Aurora Australis from an observation satellite (enhanced, I think).

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic “lese majeste” laws, which make insulting the royals an offence punishable by 3-15 years prison.  As this website shows, lese majeste appears to be a tool of choice for the current Thai regime for suppressing dissent and anything else they don’t like. The BBC helpfully gives us the current law:

Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of 3 to 15 years.

It seems like a fairly straightforward case of a backwards country applying antiquated laws to impose a harsh penalty for something which would not raise an eyebrow in any modern and progressive society.  Pen UK has taken up the cause.  Harry himself says:

This is an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ experience. I really believe that I am going to wake up and all of you will be gone. [...] I would like to apologize. This can’t be real. It feels like a bad dream. I respect the king of Thailand. I was aware there were obscure laws (about the monarchy) but I didn’t think they would apply to me.

However, there’s something a little odd about it.  Specifically, that the book in question doesn’t seem to be available anywhere [Edit: ok, it's here, online, but it doesn't seem to be available for purchase anywhere, and seems to be self-published].  It appears that Harry himself has done a bit of self-promoting: here, and here, for instance, wherein his novel is described as:

a trenchant commentary on the political and social life of contemporary Thailand. It is an uncompromising assault on the patrician values of the monarchy, the insidious infiltration of religious missionaries in the education system and the intimate relationship between American foreign policy and Thailand’s battle against Muslim insurrections in the south.

Furthermore, Harry seems to be somethign of a self-styled gonzo journalist – see for example this.  Misinformation and taking advantage of foreign cultural mores seem to be ‘educational’ techniques in his eyes.

Further digging turns up this blog.  Some posts there seem to be suggesting that Nicolaides may have intentionally brought his book to the attention of Thai authorities as a kind of publicity stunt (or perhaps political protest?).  Foreigners have been sentenced and then pardoned in Thailand for this very “crime” before.  Is the whole thing simply a case of appallingly bad timing, given the current upheaval in Thailand, combined with appallingly bad judgment?  I personally know nothing about Nicolaides – is it conceivable that a struggling author with a gonzo bent might tip off the Thai authorities in an ill-conceived attempt to get arrested, convicted, pardoned (or otherwise diplomatically rescued), and then take advantage of the resulting publicity?

Yet more digging shows pre-arrest discussions of Harry’s novel and the likelihood that it would get him into trouble if published in Thailand: here, and here.  For example, from the first link, on 15 June 2005 it was remarked that:

With comments on royalty like that I presume it isnt being printed in Thailand ???

to which a source allegedly in contact with Harry says:

He told me the book may be little controversial, but yes, it is being printed in Thailand.

The second link also allegedly gives us a taste of Harry’s writing, which is, er, interesting (again, please note that I cannot be 100% sure that this is his writing, as the relevant Thai websites have rapidly removed anything relating to him [Edit: see update at the end, it's real]):

June is a bargirl who works in Patong’s Soi Eric. I met her at her bar and have seen her several times over the last month…

June could have walked out of the pages of Nabocov’s salacious and controversial book “Lolita”. She was young, playful and sexually alluring. She aroused prurient thoughts of the illicit defilement of a minor.

She was petite and graceful in proportions, fleet of movement and radiated the innocent charms of a 12 year old girl.

The night of unbridled sexual passion between June and me was as cataclysmic as a tropical storm. Torrid thrusts and tussles of sweaty lovemaking ended in almost complete physical exhaustion. Breathless and sated we embraced. I wiped June’s forehead of perspiration while the small beads of sweat that formed on her upper lip belied a salty hunger for more. Her appetite for sexual fulfillment was insatiable.

The second link also suggests that Harry had plenty of critics in the expat community in Thailand – some of the discussion is downright vitriolic, and there is talk of tipping off his employer as to the anti-royal flavour of his new novel.

In the end it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if he is a good writer or not, it doesn’t matter what kind of guy he is, it doesn’t even matter whether he deliberately or recklessly got himself into this mess.  What matters at the moment is that a man is in prison for nothing more than exercising free speech and making a poor choice of travel destination, and at the moment he seems to be getting less help from our government than a certain group of convicted drug traffickers in Indonesia.

So please, consider doing what you can to bring attention to his cause – and if you’re Australian, it might (yet again) be time for an email to your local MP or Senator to try to provoke some significant government action.

Update: Wayback machine to the rescue, here are some examples of Harry’s writing:

• Love Under the Tamarind Tree
• Western Union Love (warning: descriptions of torrid and seedy tropical sex within)

Update 2: Thanks to Robert Merkel at Larvartus Prodeo for the link.