Hello all!

So welcome to what will be my last blog of the trip! So my last entry was in Kaikoura, New Zealand which seems so long ago now. Anyway, having not been able to do any whale watching there, we left the next day to Wellington for one night. As we arrived in the evening didnt really get up to much besides going for dinner with some people off the bus and going to see Bruno which was pretty funny. The next day I caught the bus to New Plymouth to meet up with Nige Hunter (my old housemaster from Bearwood) for a couple of days which was pretty cool. He's got three kids now who are all awesome and very funny. So after a few days there, I caught the bus to Auckland. I had to spend around 4 days there and unfortunately there isnt a lot to do there. Its a pretty boring city, not even that great to look at! Anyway, I finally caught my flight out to America landing in LA. The jet lag on the flight was pretty annoying as my flight left Auckland at 3pm on the 25th July and landed in LA at 7am on the 25th July so having not slept on the flight it was a bit of a marathon to stay up for another 15 hours.

So... LA! First off, the city is huge and very spread out. I was staying in Santa Monica which had been reccomended to me by some people and is also regarded as one of the safer places in LA. It was a very nice area, with the hostel only 1 block away from the massive beach and pier and also 2 blocks from 3rd street promenade which is where all the designer shops, cinemas and street performers are. There wasnt a great deal that interested me in LA besides Universal Studios and doing the creepy celebrity home stalker bus thingy. So thats what I did. Although I did a city tour that took me all over and gave you time to get out and walk around places such as the Walk of Fame, Kodak Theatre, Hollywood Bowl etc as well as being satisfyingly creepy enough to see plenty of celebrity homes.

After a couple of days in LA, I took the Greyhound down to San Diego to stay with some friends who used to live in England a long time ago, so it was great to see them again. Spent a couple of days down at the beach doing some bodyboarding and snorkelling through caves, which was awesome. I also cooked up my thai red curry that I'd learnt from my time in Bangkok which, I have to say, was AMAZING! So besides that, it was nice to chill out for a few days and save a bit of money as at this point I was really struggling.

Anyway, I left San Diego on the 8th arriving at Vegas later on that night. I was staying at the Luxor hotel which is the giant pyramid on the strip for $50 a night and seeing how I was paying $37 to stay in a hostel in LA I thought that you may as well stay on the strip for a bit extra. So Vegas was pretty cool, it was okay staying there on my own, but would have been way way better with friends and I didnt really have a lot of money to spend and in Vegas, everything is expensive. And that story that you get free drinks at the tables.... bullcrap. I didnt see anyone get free drinks, the only way it happens is if you start spending serious money and tip the (ugly 60 yr old) waitresses walking around. I ended up being only $100 down, which is better than I had budgeted for but you always feel that niggle trying to get you back to the table to win it all back! Even the airport had slot machines in! Anyway, my big spend in Vegas was my trip to the Grand Canyon. I did an all day trip travelling in a customised pink jeep (which was state of the art awesomeness) out to the Hoover Dam, Joshua Tree Forest and then finally the GRAND CANYON!! So once we arrived at the canyon, we immediately got our helicopter flight down to the bottom of the canyon where the temperatures are around 6 degrees higher. Then we got a chance to go on a 20 minute boat ride down the Colorado river before disembarking and getting the helicopter back up. Now the ride down in the helicopter was good, but the flight back up was amazing, the views were much better and our pilot seemed a little more crazy too! After we landed we grabbed a spot of lunch before watching an amazing card magician for 20 minutes or so. Then we were off to a remote area of the canyon that only the pink jeep company is allowed to go to for some more photo shots and history before heading back home to Vegas. The next day I left to my final stop in America, and of my trip... San Francisco.

I'd heard lots of good things about San Fran, especially about Yosemite which I was pretty excited to go see. However, Yosemite is a good distance away taking 4 hours to get there by car, so when I eventually went for the day the majority of it was spent within the mini bus. But the park was really cool and very interesting, especially with all the giant Sequoia trees. However because it was peak summer all of the waterfalls had virtually dried up to a trickle over the side, so that was kind of dissapointing. And I also thought that the south island of New Zealand was on a whole, way more spectacular and stunning in terms of scenery. The next day back in San Fran I met a couple of girls in my hostel from Oz and we went down to Fishermans Wharf one day to see the sights there and then walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, which is way longer than it seemed when we started! Anyway, later that night we found out we'd missed the hostel pub crawl so decided to try and catch up. Having asked the receptionist simpy where to go and recieved the longest and vaguest answer in the world, we finally learnt that they'd gone down to a place called the Castro, so we jumped in a taxi and headed off. Well, by the time we got there we found that everyone had left a while ago so we decided to just hang around and try a few of the bars there and seeing how it was a Sat night everything would be open late. Anyway, all of us were pretty uneducated in what the Castro was, so when we walked into a bar and saw 4 guys completely naked we realised that, yes, we were in the gay district. Well it freaked me out quite a lot, one of the naked guys came up to me and asked me if he could hug me and lets say that the expression on my face was not one of the pleasant variates. We had a few more drinks before we decided to leave and head back to the hostel for the bottle of vodka we had stashed there which was soon polished off once we got back!

The next day I took off down to Golden Gate park to have a walk around there, I ended up deciding to walk around the entire park which didnt look that big on the map, but then I noticed the little words "Golden Gate park is not to scale on this map" and that was after a solid 2 hours walking! I then learnt that it is also the worlds largest mad made park, so thank you map for being completely uninformative. Finally making my way back to the hostel completely knackered, had a quick shower before heading up to the theatre room to watch some more Family Guy and discuss the plans for the evening with the Oz girls. In the end we just went down the road to an irish bar called Foley's then had some more vodka back at the hostel ha. So whilst San Fran is a nice city, with some really nice areas and nice people, it is also FULL of hobos and crack heads. One example that springs to mind is as I was walking down the street near union square I walked past a lady (who did look a little odd) but then as I got past her she turned around and spat on my back. I was like WTF?! I didnt really know what to say so I turned round looked at her in astonishment and she is just glaring at me in hatred (for whatever reason) and so I turn around and carry on walking and she starts screaming at me using various expletives, so that experience safely put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Yesterday, I went back to Golden Gate Park and spent a few hours walking around the museums there. Today I took the boat to Alcatraz and spent a couple of hours over there doing the tour which was really cool and very interesting. I had been before way ago when I was very young with my parents, but I couldnt remember any of it so it was good to go again. And so that brings me up to date. Tomorrow is my last full day out and about so I'm gonna head to Ghirardelli Square for a mooch and then I'll ll take a boat cruise around the bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge for some final pics.

So that brings me to the end of my travels and the end of having to write this damn thing! Anyway I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I have writing it (in fact its not really that enjoyable spending hours writing this, so I hope its been more fun to read. I hope everyone's found all my experiences funny or insightful and I appreciate everyone that took the time to send me a message or write a comment, its nice to know that some people are reading this. Anyway, thanks also to everyone who I have met on the way its been great getting to know you whether for 4 months or 1 day, I hope I'll see some of you again. And to those at home who have read this, I'll see you in a few days!

Bon Voyage!

(better late than never)