Me and geetar at my "Intentional Community House" in Eugene, Oregon

Organic yoghurt. Organic pea soup in a tin. Organic cornflakes. Organic oranges. I felt a wave of excitement as I perused Hanna's shelves. She seemed to personify all that I had heard about alternative, sustainably-minded, ecologically-aware, bicycle-militant Eugene Oregon.

Despite crashing at the Costa Rican time of 3am I woke at 7.30 am. Her apartment was comfortable and non-threatening, a good transit lounge between cultures. It was part of retirement village recently opened to a younger crowd, and the only issue seemed to be the wafer-thin walls.

The company I was going to work for was the maker of the bicycle I had been riding for the past four years, and Hanna was the boss's daughter. She had travelled much of the States by the tender age of 23, and was now being groomed as vice president of the family business. She had started college but quit after a year, declining to walk the walk expected of young Americans who aspire to having any kind of remotely respectable job. I admired her resource. It seemed that many people study to do (or delay doing) what she had been doing for eight years - helping grow a successful family business. As far as I could see the little company was fuelled by the do-or-die passion and vision of the two brothers, Alan and Hanz, who had a dream about making a folding bicycle that was not a toy, and were persuing it with the unstoppable energy of a runaway meteorite.

We got on out Bike Fridays and pedalled to work along a serene bike path that flanked the Amazon Creek, the rather grandly-named slew canal running along the back of the bike shop. Fat mallard ducks waddled along the embankment, occasionally accompanied by the kind of long necked bird I had seen languishing on the banks of the Rio San Juan between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This 'soft splashdown' as one colleague put it, eased my gear-change from third world to first world, from steamy rainforest crawling with strange bitey things to well-tended indoor plants in plastic pots, from potholed track to unblemished concrete, from rice and beans to sandwiches with five different breads and twenty five different toppings.

The climate was not the bucketing rain and damp drizzly chill and I had been told about by everyone south of Florida. It was brisk yes, but politely so - a finger of cold wormed its way through my sleeve but let go when I kept moving. Although the cars moved swiftly along the perfect wide roads, the traffic was as sparse as the trees slicing into the grey sky, making Eugene a lot quieter city than most.

The clapboard houses were gracious and Christmas-card quaint, styled in a time before wars, aluminium sliding doors and remote control garage doors, and painted in subtle hues of pink, yellow, blue and blue-grey. A covered porch with chairs was a prominent feature, harking back to a time when garages did not exist and people walked through the front gate and paused to say a few words to a neighbour sitting on his own porch. The modern man now drives straight into his garage and disappears into the bowels of his boxy and bland brick veneer dream (sans porch), a dream that lacks the grace, charm and rampant cherry blossom trees growing in the front yard of these charming old relics.

The office and bike factory was at the semi-industrial west end of town, where the quaint clapboard houses thinned out and became low-slung tin and concrete warehouses. Right across the road stood a concrete horizon of supermalls, megamarkets and fast food outlets, beckoning visitors quietly into their cavernous confines rather than reaching out screaming for their custom - clearly Eugene was an example of understated America.

Right next to the office was a giant compound of tin warehouses each with a line of identical, small blue doors that converged to a vanishing point. This was Self Storage Inc., where all the stuff that had spilled out of the megamalls into these quaint clapboard houses, ballooned like Elvis in the living room and finally burst through the back door eventually came to rest, incarcerated under lock and key, the final resting place of a consumer's whim.

I hiked across the concrete and bitumen plain to the first double sliding jowl on the horizon. By the time I got there I needed a rest stop. I ordered a a sub sandwich by verbally ticking off the multi-levelled, multiple choice quiz of options presented to me, and spent $5 in five minutes.

There was a similar array of options to get my film developed, including spurning the hallowed Kodak processing to have a pimpled college student with a pierced tongue pass it through a dish of whiteboard cleaner for the cheapskate price. I went for it.

In the cavernous food section of Safeway, I saw bananas for ten times the price I had been paying a few latitudes south, but ten times less tasty. Something orange and fluorescent caught the corner of my eye. It was a table of mandarins, perfectly shaped as if plopped out by a donut machine, and glowering with a disturbing orange radioactivity that reminded me of the day-glo reflecters on my safety vest. Beside them was a giant pyramid table of lettuces, each encased in a fancy two-colour hinged plastic container the size of a hat box to protect the hundred or so grams of air, water and fibre within. I left the fluoro-mandos and the inedible lettuce incubators and hiked around to the next aisle.

Something inedible hanging from a hook between bagel varieties caught my eye. I strode towards it. It was a coupon wallet, or rather a clutch of them. Yes, someone had invented a special multi-compartmentalised holdall to organise the plethora of discount coupons appearing in the slab of the Sunday paper dedicated to coupons. I suspect you could order them by date and set a little buzzer to ring when a coupon is up for redemption.

Somehow had I managed to spend $25 in half an hour.

I had barely reached my desk when Steve, the bespectacled theatre-graduate-cum-webwally, emerged from his becabled hideout and told me to go out and see a slice of America. He cringed. I did, and it was huge, a street machine on steroids. Gravedigger!

...to be continued...