Around The World In 11 Months Firstly, it's been a ridiculous delay, but after finally managing to get our New York blogs up we made a start on writing this but never got around to finishing it. Job applications and interviews got in the way (back to earth with a crash). Since we've returned, we've had a hundred and one things to do and unfortunately our blog fell off the list of priorities. Partly because we were now able to speak in person to a lot of people who read it but mainly because it doesn't seem as relevant now that [View Full Entry]

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Panoramic View: Goodbye New York The Last Full Day It was now our last day in New York and our last proper day of our trip. Although there was still loads we wanted to do in New York, it obviously had to be condensed for our last day. We'll be back sometime, this city is great. It started off with the usual 96th Street Subway journey, although this time we got off at Canal Street to have a nosy about Chinatown. Outside of China, Chinatown in New York has the largest Chinese population in the world. Walking down Canal Street was [View Full Entry]

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Statue of Liberty One of the main tourist attractions in New York is The Statue of Liberty, visited by hundreds of tourists on a daily basis. We had been previously advised to get there as early in the day as possible otherwise we should be prepared to stand in long queues. Eager to beat the crowds, we set off from the hostel around 8am. The Statue of Liberty stands tall on Liberty Island as a welcome to all visitors, immigrants, and returning Americans. The statue was given to the Americans as a gesture of friendship from France in 1886 to strengthen [View Full Entry]

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Panoramic View: Manhattan Skyline Through Empire State Building Safety Bars Skyscraper Views On Thursday, we got up early. We wanted to beat the queues as today was the day we were going to climb (or at least take the lift) the Empire State Building. Famous for King Kong and being the tallest something or other at one point, it's a New York tourist must-do and as such is awash with crappy souvenirs. We took the subway and wandered in, surprised by the lack of queues, as we weren't extremely early. After going through stringent security, we headed up the lift to [View Full Entry]

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Late Night Arrival Our flight left San Francisco a wee bit later than we had wanted to and the journey over was mainly spent playing the in flight Trivia game on the screens. Aside from the ridiculously tricky aviation questions, it was a lot of fun and both myself and Emma won different rounds. We eventually landed in JFK airport, New York City and by the time we got our bags, it was half past eleven in the night. We were tired and still had a long way to go to our hostel. Being cheapskate travellers, we took the lengthy route [View Full Entry]

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City Exploration Following a slightly longer lie in than normal, we enjoyed a free breakfast at the hostel (never get tired of those bagels) and then headed to the Union Square Information booth to buy our travel pass for the next three days and also to see if there was any special offers on. The travel pass entitled us to unlimited travel on any mode of transport around the city, giving us the freedom to travel slightly further out of the centre of town taking in all the sights. We headed down to Market Street to catch the tram out to [View Full Entry]

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Be Sure To Wear...A Jacket Yep, compared to LA, and in fact most places during summer, San Francisco is a pretty chilly place. It's just as sunny as most other places, but it has an almost permanent fog shrouding everything (basically huge scale condensation) and has some nasty coastal winds. That being said, the weather doesn't exactly make or break a place for us. The overnight Greyhound as mentioned in the last blog wasn't bags of fun; we didn't get much more than the dozing flat rate of forty winks and didn't get to see much scenery during the night obviously. [View Full Entry]

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LA City Tour Due to our short time scale in LA, we really hadn't too much time to see a lot so we opted to do the LA city tour that our hostel offered. Los Angeles is a ridiculously big city and the only comparable place we have ever been in size is London. Only the public transport system here is practically non existant, save for a few rickety buses and a beleagured subway system. It means getting from one area to another is a task, particularly since most places of public interest are located at opposite ends. The tour looked [View Full Entry]

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Los Angeles: The City Of Angels Arriving in LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), we were sitting on the runway for an additional hour before one of the largest airports in the world found an available gate for the plane. At this point we were beginning to think that it would be a bit of a nightmare getting through passport control and customs, making our estimated arrival at the hostel of 4pm a bit of a dream. Much to our surprise, those stages went exceptionally well and we were standing in the entrance to the airport in no time. Los Angeles is [View Full Entry]

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Panoramic View: On The Approach To Mala Mala Island South Sea Island We got up early to catch the transfer to the port where we set sail. Our destination was the closest island called South Sea Island, which allowed us for the most time to spend on any island resort. It is the island next to Bounty Island; famous for being the setting of Celebrity Love Island. South Sea Island is one of the smallest islands in Fiji, with one backpackers resort on the island providing overnight packages (much like the other islands). It literally only takes around 2 minutes to [View Full Entry]

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