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Hollywood
America Baby yeah! Firstly an apology; despite what you may think America has very few internet access points, on those rare occasions when I have located an internet cafe it has been incredibly expensive and has not allowed me to hook up USB devices to upload pictures. I am now over two weeks into the trip and have found time to locate a library and have 1 hour to write what I can. Secondly, there will likely be no pictures on my blog. The expensive ‘giga pocket’ storage device I purchased in the UK is refusing to charge despite it claiming that it can work with 110v. This means I cannot upload photos to the device from my camera and I can not upload to the internet. Its gonna get expensive with memory cards!
Back to the trip…
I awoke very early to catch the bus to Heathrow airport, after a full day of traveling I arrived in LA only about an hour late, I spent another hour trying to get through customs, I had to show my detailed plan complete with air tickets to the US customs official who did not believe that I only wanted to stay 63 days.
Unbelievably
Binocular Building
A building in the shape of binoculars. I met with Ben at the arrivals lounge of the terminal as we had agreed some 5 months previous and we both headed towards the hostel whilst catching up. And believe me there was a lot to catch up on.
Our hostel was located at Venice Beach, and was about 1 minute walk from the famous muscle beach, both were quite shabby and run down, with a lot of crazy hoboes sleeping rough along side the boulevard. We also explored Santa Monica beach which is the famous Baywatch beach, again the quality was poor and left a lot to be desired. The following day I took a bus into downtown LA. This was the first opportunity to see how gigantic the city really was. It took 40 minutes to get to the freeway and then a further 30 minutes on the freeway doing 70mph just to get into downtown. LA is vast! There are no major areas to the city, everything is spread out and it requires a great deal of time and effort to get to where you need to go. There is no real network of transportation in place either so getting anywhere became a real pain,
Venice Beach
Venice Beach in the early morning its no wonder the freeways are notorious for being gridlocked. The foremost problem with LA is that there is no one central focal point for people to gather, no sense of community, the city just doesn’t have a heart.
The following day we ventured out to Hollywood, Rodeo drive, Sunset Boulevard and Griffith park and did the typical tourist thing. We walked down Hollywood Boulevard and saw the famous Hollywood stars and Mann’s Chinese theatre. We did not go on the stars homes tour but were able to see a collection of plush looking houses along Sunset. Its at this point that you realise that in this city you are either very rich or very poor. The majority of the very poor are of Mexican origin and all work in the service industry. We finished the day by hiking upto Griffith park. Once at the top we were able to get stunning views of the city beneath us and also of the famous Hollywood sign.
We decided to cut short the LA portion of the trip by 1 day and spend the extra time later at Grand Canyon, so for our final day we took a trip out
Muscle Beach
Muscle Beach in the early morning to Universal Studios. We went on the backlot tour which had changed a little since I was last there. We saw a small part of Wisteria Lane but they were filming ‘Desperate Housewives’ at the time so we were not able to see the entire set. Also saw the crashed plane used in War of the Worlds. I went on a few rides and ate a lot. Ben and I shared an all you can eat pass, one of us would go up eat, then the other would do the same, we figured together we were only eating as much as an average American, so it was alright.
We did not go out in the evening in LA as Ben was feeling unwell after Fiji and was constantly having to go to the toilet or ‘restroom’ this continued for the first 2 weeks of the trip but has eventually cleared.
The Following day we hired a car, a white Chevrolet of some description, after driving on the wrong side of the road a couple of times, negotiating the confusing traffic light systems and navigating our way out of the sprawling LA, we headed off towards San Diego and
Downtown Los Angeles
The Downtown Los Angeles skyline. Mexico both of us thinking that LA was not as spectacular as the American tourist board would have us believe.
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