Los Angeles, Fri 22 May - Sun 25 May 09

We spent a couple of days in LA on the way back over the London and I found it quite different to what I had been expecting. Hollywood certainly isn't glamorous by any sense of the word but is a lot of fun. The weather was incredible and there are so many crazy people there. LA is also one of the only cities I've been to where the main downtown is one of the least interesting places in the city.

Flying in we realised how huge LA really is and how it is flat like a pancake! There are a couple of hills out the back but otherwise it is a completely flat, very wide, grid like system. Unfortunately we also found out that LA has the most dreadful public transportation system (it could rival Auckland!). The metro is frequent enough but limited in it's destinations so it was pretty much buses for us. Sadly the buses are a lot more infrequent (sometimes only 1 an hour), you have to change often, finding a timetable is impossible and stop information once your on the bus is virtual non-existent. Getting from our hostel back from the beach took close to 2 hours. The one good thing is it was very cheap!

We spent most of our time in LA exploring the town and the famous areas. It was memorial day weekend so everything was packed which meant we decided against any of the adventure parks. We did spend a whole day down at the beaches including Venice beach and Santa Monica beach (although technically it's just one really long beach). Venice beach is fantastic for people watching. There are some crazy cats around that area. We watched the beefed up muscle men in the outdoor gym and wondered the market stalls selling everything from permanent tattoos to a 2 headed turtle.

We walked from Venice beach along the bike track up to Santa Monica. There was every type of bike you could imagine including apehangers (bikes with huge handlebars) and tricycle bikes. It was too cold to swim but I enjoyed just laxing on the beach for the day. The beach is really wide which means it feels like nobody is there, it could have been a quiet day though too.

Santa Monica beach has a pier full of stalls and fairground rides. It also has a great shopping district that we checked out. We found this delicious frozen yoghurt shop called PinkBerry where you can choose your flavour and toppings. I had a pomegranate frozen yoghurt covered in fresh strawberries, blueberries and chocolate chips. Yummy!

Of course we checked out the Hollywood walk of fame and the Chinese Theatre with the hand/foot prints of the stars. There were a lot of people dressed up in costumes on Hollywood Boulevard. We also went down into Beverley Hills and checked out Rodeo Drive with every designer label you can imagine. The car spotting was incredible too from Ferraris to Porsches there was a lot of money in that area. We had a wonder through the Beverley Hills neighborhood to check out all the fancy houses too.

As something a bit different we went to the Famers Market which has been around since the 1930s and has lots of food stalls and wondered through the Grove, a nice shopping area next door to the Farmers Market. We also went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which are a collection of pits where tar has seeped up from the earth over thousands of years and created a kind of tar 'quick sand'. Of course back in the days when the animals were roaming around they were death traps, so the tar pits hold a large collection of fossils. One of the pits has excavated over 50,000 fossils alone. All a bit science geeky I know but I found it fascinating.

The hostel we stayed in was really cool with a bar (cheap drinks, yay!) and lots of events like comedy night which was a lot of fun thanks to the 5 local comedians who came and performed. We could even see the hollywood sign from our room. We went on a walking tour with the hostel up into Runyon Canyon Park, a dog park up in the Hollywood Hills.

The climb up is pretty tough but its worth it with the views over LA and the Hollywood sign. It's also a good location for celeb spotting cause a lot of them take their dogs up there to walk and exercise. I saw the actress who played Jean Grey on Xmen but no-one else over our couple of day in LA.

We had a lot of fun in LA, more than I expected to.