I got to Hollywood with Sarah and went off to Banana Bungalow while looking at all the names on Hollywood Boulevard. It certainly does distract you from carrying two rucksacks a mile down the road! I had time to drop my bags and get picked up by Angie - a travel friend I met in Poland a couple of years ago - to go to Universal City for iFly freefall and food. It was great to see Angie and her new husband again and it was fun to hang out. It was so lucky that Angi...

I'm on a bus to Los Angeles following a great trip with Green Tortoise to Yosemite National Park. Two full days of enjoying the beauty of this vast granite valley and a bunch of new friends to boot, almost all of whose names I can't begin to remember... Green Tortoise is a bus company that takes you on tours of America, favouring natural beauty over city life, and everyone mucks in to help with cooking, washing and cleaning. The bus runs overnight while the pass...

Brace yourself. This is going to take a LONG time. San Francisco is the city on my world trip where I spent the most time, partly through choice and partly through necessity. There was a horrible lull in the middle but the rest was pretty cool. So it turns out that Mark MacDonald (producer, Midsummer Night's Dream, York Uni) lives in San Francisco and it was his birthday on the 25th when I arrived late in the evening. I joined him quite far into the night and go...

I left the Big Island a little sooner than I had planned, and after a triumphant pass through security where nobody actually took anything from me, I was headed to Waikiki, the famous beachfront of Honolulu. There I lay for most of the afternoon and I enjoyed some hula dancing after sunset on the same beach. Lazy and chilled out. The only full day I had on O'ahu I dedicated to visiting Pearl Harbor. It's a eye-opening and sobering place and the sunken USS Arizon...

Last night was cold. I'm in Hawai'i, people, what's happening? Pat and I are staying in a "cosy" tent for two, where Pat froze last night and I repeatedly added layers to my clothes inside my powerless one-season sleeping bag. What a night. But it was free! The Big Island is vast and beautiful; it would fit all the other Hawaiian islands inside it with room to spare. It's also the youngest and most volcanically active island in the chain. Today Pat and...