HippyGib
Ríchårð Gïbsøn Joined: May 18th 2009
Logged in: January 22nd 2012
Logged in: January 22nd 2012
Traveller. Old China Hand. Student. World Citizen. Geek.
I'm 25 years old, from the Wirral, near Liverpool, in northwest England. I'm currently living in Taipei, Taiwan studying Mandarin Chinese.
I'm writing this blog for several reasons. It initially started as a way of keeping my friends and family back home updated on my experiences living in Shanghai, China in 2008/2009, but these days it seems to be a mix of news, opinions, history and musings. However, it is as much for me as it is for anyone else; I wanted to keep a record of everything I do, as although my memory for events is good, my mind for dates and chronology is not. I thought it would also be nice to remember little details that go beyond the photographs and are interesting at the time but quickly forgotten.
I have really enjoyed keeping a travel journal and updating this blog over the past three years, so much so that I've decided to continue writing about all my trips and travels from now on.
since I left the UK
until I leave Taiwan :(
Travel Blog Posts
Great Salt Lake
It was sad packing away our tents after a fun/serene/adventurous/relaxing week in America's most protected expanse of wilderness with the intent of driving back to civilisation. It was also sad that Seth had to go back to work and so was flying home from Salt Lake City that afternoon. However, it was exciting to think of our imminent road trip across Utah's arid Salt Flats, Nevada's bone dry Great Basin, over Nevada and California's batholith Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, through California's luscious Central Valley finally reaching San Francisco's foggy Bay Area overlooking the second ocean of our trans-continental adventure, the breezy Pacific Ocean! The crack in the car's windscreen was getting larger by the day and now it could justifiably be described as fairly sizeable, being that it now extended half way up a... read more
Jackson Lake, Grand Teton
For our second consecutive day trip outside of the Yellowstone park boundaries we headed south this time for another of Wyoming's national parks, in fact its only other one, Yellowstone's little sister, the buxom Grand Teton National Park. Technically separated by 10 miles entrance to entrance, the two parks are connected by a narrow strip managed by the National Park Service to bring about a sense of continuity, since both national parks and the surrounding forest parks form the gestalt Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. At least a quarter of the size of its older sibling, Grand Teton National Park was established in 1929, breaking with the age old American tradition of putting big business first, in recognition of the need for further protection of the surrounding environment. It was named after the tallest peak of the Teton ... read more
Roosevelt Arch, North Entrance, Montana
Yellowstone National Park was the very first National Park in the whole world. Nothing had really been done like it before - an area of land designated solely for wilderness preservation and public use, funded by the government. Yosemite National Park in California was America's first State Park, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and central to the development of the government's future idea of national parks. It wasn't actually given National Park status until 1890, eighteen years after Yellowstone was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, nearly 140 years ago. The 3,468 m² Yellowstone National Park sits mainly in Wyoming, but the western and northern borders extend into Idaho and Montana respectively, which is possibly where the final notion of a National Park came from, instead of the existing idea of the ... read more
August 18th 2010
Lamar Valley
Another below freezing night was curtailed by warm glowing sun striking through the trees, with instant coffee and porridge (separately obviously). Today was! an early morning as we were driving the furthest away from the campsite we'd been yet. We were heading to Lamar Valley in the far northeast of the park, past the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, off the Grand Loop Road and near Cooke City just past the Northeast Entrance in Montana. It's called a city but actually the population is only 140. People, not thousand. According to the United States Census Bureau, Cooke City has only 10.0 square miles of land, 79 houses and 27 families. I'm not quite sure in what capacity it is a city but there you have it. Once you've reached the Grand Canyon area, you start to ... read more
August 17th 2010
Bison, Hayden Valley
We all got up with the sun rise again (yeah, right!) to get a good start on the day. The night was possibly colder than the previous night and the morning sun was more than welcome. After a quick and simple breakfast we got in the car and started on the Grand Loop Road again heading north for the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Rather worryingly a crack that had appeared on the car's windshield on the drive up to Wyoming had gotten slightly larger over night, probably because of the cold. There wasn't much we could do other than keep an eye on it so off we went due north. This time heading in the opposite direction to Old Faithful, northeast. Before the Grand Loop Road had turned away from the Yellowstone Lake we spotted ... read more
Old Faithful
Everybody woke up early for our first day of exploring the park. After a freezing night it was more than difficult to get out of the sleeping bags, but Seth, being the dependably early riser that he is, set up the camp stove and got the coffee on the go. Breakfast was the campsite staple of cheap, lukewarm porridge. Before we got in the car to drive to our adventure for the day, we went and checked out Yellowstone Lake, the shore of which our campground was right next to. To be specific, we actually camped near the West Thumb Basin of the stunning Yellowstone Lake, which is so huge itself that it looks like the entire lake, instead of the mere fraction that it is. In recent years the ground underneath the lake has started ... read more
Utah
Melinda had gone to meet Seth and his family at the Pocanos while Clare and I were in Boston. The day after we got back, they got back, and that evening we all packed for our road trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, way out west. Our plane to Salt Lake City in Utah was at eight in the morning, but like children we were too excited to get to sleep early, except Seth of course who very much likes sleeping, even more so than me! Instead we stayed up drinking and watching episodes of South Park. Melinda was next as she had a long drive ahead of her the next day driving from SLC Airport to Yellowstone. Clare & I did eventually get to bed, though several hours later at 3.00am, we were up ... read more
Boston Common
In the morning, Clare seemed to be suffering a bit with her nose, but being the trooper she is she still wanted another day in New York City. When we arrived at Penn Station we transferred to the subway and headed north to Harlem. Harlem sits on the north side of Central Park and would extend all of the way up to the top of Manhattan Island if it wasn't for the small neighbourhood of Washington Heights. Since the 1920's Harlem has been a predominantly African-American neighbourhood, although the size of the black majority has been declining in recent years with the gentrification of the area, and also with the influx of Latino-Americans, which has created a Spanish Harlem on the east side. During the 1830s New York became the centre of the slavery abolitionist movement ... read more
White House
Seth left for the Pocanos in the early hours while Melinda got behind the wheel and took Clare & I to the US political capital, DC. Despite not really being all that far away from New York (in terms of American geography anyway), it took a solid five and a half hours to get there, although that was partly due to the heavy traffic. If you'd've spent five and a half hours in a car in England, you'd pretty much have covered it! Luckily for us, after the long journey a rather amazing hotel was already waiting for us, by the way of that fantastic website hotwire.com, which meant we got to stay in the rather plush Westin, usually reserved for the visiting politicians and general wealth of the nation. Instead of something like $450, the ... read more
Lady Liberty
We managed to catch the 09:53am to Penn Station the next morning, and by 11:30 we were already on the ferry to Liberty Island, which sits small but proud in New York Harbour at the mouth of the Hudson River. In terms of geographic politics, along with it's neighbour Ellis Island, it's a bit of a strange one. The land itself is 100% part of Jersey City, NJ, but the buildings, constructions and general concept of government usage 100% falls under New York City, NY. Again the weather was sunny and warm and the breeze on the boat was really refreshing. I must admit it was a little strange seeing something so familiar yet so distant up close. The statue is of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, and is famously a gift from America's "sister ... read more
Where I am now 
Where I intend to go soon 
Where I have visited 
Where I have lived 
