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After an unbelievable 2 months in South America, it was straight to Los Angeles from Lima, with no stop in Mexico as originally planned because of the swine flu. I had high expectations of LA, home of the stars, land of the rich and famous and the entertainment mecca of the word. So I was expecting bright lights, fancy billboards and pearly white smiles to greet me at LAX airport. What I found was a dark run down dump with flickering lights seemingly pleading to be put out of their misery but strangely no employees whatsoever in sight to do the job. A peculiar start. Our travel agent at STA had pre-booked us a night in a nearby hotel in Inglewood so that we could settle for a night before coming up with a game plan. Now Ben has family in LA that we were hoping to catch up with, but we had trouble reaching them at first so we had to stay put for a couple of days. Christ that was an experience. Inglewood is quite simply, a massive s***hole. Large grids of wide but empty roads lined with nothing but dingy mini-marts and a ton of fast food joints. To be politically correct, all passers by were of African-American or Mexican origin, and when we caught the bus to a nearby shopping mall to pass the time, I encountered pretty much every stereotype depicted in the movies. There was the drunk preacher, the tattooed up badass latino, the obese black woman babbling 'no he di-ent' to her girlfriend on the phone, the 13 year old gangsters giving each other some skin after every statement and the pungent smell of weed floating throughout the bus that could have come from any of the aforementioned. To say it was a nervy couple of days hanging around in Inglewood would be an understatement, as I said, not the LA I was expecting. Luckily we eventually got through to Ben's aunt who came and picked us up and took us to stay with a guy called Jim who had been married to his other aunt. He lived in a much nicer area in West Hollywood and it was great to stay with him whilst we were in LA.
So our rough plan was to buy a car and then drive across the country, finishing in New York for our flight home at the end of August. We weren't sure of which route we were going to take but had a rough idea of the places we wanted to go so were planning to play it by ear. But first things first was getting some wheels. Now with our tight backpacking budget, we weren't exactly in the market for some vintage American muscle, despite Ben's aspirations. Not that it would have got us across anyway given the reputation of American cars. So, with the necessity for reliability in mind, we decided to go Japanese and look for used Hondas and Toyotas that were in half decent nick and didn't have ridiculous amounts of miles on the clock. Jim was an absolute legend driving us around LA to look at all the cars we had come across advertised on Craigslist. So we actually got to see a lot of the city just by cruising around all ends trying to find a car. Anyway we looked at a load of cars over the space of about 2 weeks or so, some not too bad, a lot pretty s***ty, and pretty much everyone being sold by a Mexican. It did not install the greatest confidence. At one point we had actually decided on a Toyota Corolla that looked pretty good, only to arrive at the dealership half an hour after some f***er had just bought it. So we were pretty deflated after that, and growing increasingly tired of trawling around LA looking for the elusive motor, we decided to take the next day off, seeing as it was my birthday as well, and actually do something. So we spent the day on Hollywood Boulevard, taking in all the sights like the Chinese Theatre, the Kodak Theatre (where they have the Oscars), the Hollywood Wax Museum and of course the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That night we let off some steam with our first night out in the USA. Ben's other uncle (he has a lot of relatives in the states) is actually an oscar winning director who's done a lot of work with none other than Spielberg, and he got us on the guest list for Les Deux. Now if you don't watch The Hills, it's basically where all the pretentious rich kids go and spend Daddy's money. Worth mentioning we began the night at Geisha house, a well known bar and restaurant in the LA nightlife circuit. It was a really nice fancy place, and also the barmaid who I was chatting to about the best time to go to Les Deux, was quite simply the most gorgeous girl I have ever seen in my entire life. She was earth shatteringly fit it was a disgrace. And so I was lulled into high expectations for Les Deux, only to find exactly what I was originally expecting, stuck up preppy Paris Hilton wannabes and slicked up douchbags with enough cologne to choke you. One chick even asked me to show her my ID to prove I was from England and not some wannabe actor putting on an act. Apparently it happens. But the venue was pretty sweet and the music half decent so we had a good time nonetheless.
After that it was back on the hunt. We looked at many more pieces of s*** and heard many more Mexicans say 'da car runs gret mayn' until we came across a young Chinese lad who was selling a 97 Honda Civic that looked pretty decent. So we test drove it and it ran pretty smooth and its records checked out, so it all looked pretty encouraging. So we put a deposit down to hold it whilst we checked out a couple more on the list to make sure they weren't any better, but in the end decided to go for it. After bringing him down on the price, we eventually parted with 2500 bucks, to then begin what we thought would be the painstaking process of the paperwork. Now the guidebooks and internet traveling forums strongly advice against buying a car because apparently they rape you on the insurance for being a foreign driver and ask for police records to be sent over, and you need like ten million things at the dreaded DMV which we've all heard horror stories about. But there was one thing going for us that trumped all that b******s, California is broke. Yes there had to be some perks to this whole recession malake. The AAA were more than happy to insure us with our British licenses, for really cheap as well, and we were in and out of the DMV in half an hour with the registration (using Jim's address which was handy) feeling pretty smug. We didn't even have the infamous pink slip because the guy had lost it, and they still let us have the car. So it was fingers up to the guidebooks as the state clearly needed our business, and we were more than happy to oblige. Ultimately the joke would be on us, but that's another story.
So feeling very proud of our acquisition, we could relax and actually see LA properly. Driving on the right-hand side of the road was a bit tricky at first but we soon got used to it and the fact that all the streets are grids means it's pretty easy to get around. Having said that, the Americans are the worst drivers I have ever experienced, and I'm no Schumacher myself so that's saying something. So we decided it might be best to minimise my city driving given my road rage and the off chance of offending the wrong kind of person if you catch my drift. Hey, it's LA. I'll get down to the nitty gritty of what we got up to in the next blog.
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