5 May, lobby of Bourbon House Hostel, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 7:47am

I'm not sure what is normality any more. I've just arrived at my hostel in New Orleans after a 12 hour greyhound bus ride overnight from Austin, via a stopover in Houston. It seems strange to me that riding an overnight bus to a town I've never been to before actually feels like the normal thing to do in life. The past few days in Austin have been fantastic though. Hanging out with Amanda and Ian (the guys who held the bbq a few weeks earlier) playing darts in the Draught House pub. Going kyaking with Lindsey, starting from Barton Springs to Lady Bird Lake and seeing countless river turtles whilst getting my nose really burnt.

I've also partially changed the objective of my trip from photography only to including more music videos. After finishing up an edit for a video for You Are An Airplane for the demo of their song 'wastin' time' I think I'm going to use some of the wonderful locations I go to, to make more interesting videos.




On Wednesday, we took a trip out to one of Austin's green belt areas. These are big chunks of land, closeby to the city but undeveloped, natural woods and creeks. So early on a wednesday morning we were swimming in a glorious clear pool, in the bright sunshine, without anybody else around, an entire river and woods and stunning scenery to ourselves (apart from more turtles everywhere obviously) Going to have to bring some bands out to locations like these to make acoustic videos.

After all my river kayaking and swimming and segwaying and eating great food in places like the 24 diner (hash with chilli) and east side cafe (acorn squash with meatloaf) it was off to the greyhound station last night. It is strange how poor the american bus services are compared to South America. Very little leg room, disorganized queuing system and the buses seem to have no other travelers like me on them. Mostly rather overweight people, squeezed onto seats that are too small for them, coughing and eating chips. But that's the fun of traveling isn't it. Being squashed by a smelly man who's eating doritos whilst not having enough room to stretch your legs out for 12 hours.

But the coming 4 days will surely make up for the difficult journey, 4 days of great music in what at first glance seems to be a rather unique city. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2011, here I come.

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