Well, here's a turn-up for the books. It is indeed as ironic as Alanis Morissette would have predicted. And yet there is a whole range of mitigating factors that have to be considered. First of all, I've spent a sizeable portion of the last 5 days boucing back and forth between British Airways, Quantas and STA Travel (by phone, e-mail and in person) trying to find out exactly who is responsible for my ticket and who has the authority to change it. I have...

Way-hey, a computer that works! Haven't found one of those for a while... OK, this entry is from New York, but the story has to be picked up from where it left off in San Francisco. The car hire plan ran into a few snags from the start. First of all, Felix the German backed out at the last minute to return home ("my heart is broken", he explained cryptically) leaving just me and Andrew the Cornish animator. Then, when it came time to get the car, i...

I finally left LA after six nights, which was enough. Transport to my next destination was organised by Boogie Fever at the hostel, and it was a minibus which offered cheap travel to San Francisco. I was on the bus with a strange, androgynous skinny bloke wearing make-up and with rock star clothes and hair, whose entire body language screamed "junkie"; also a fat guy in his 30's with an actual classic American mullet hairstyle, tied back into an abs...

After spending the last few days in Fiji drinking beer (that's what happens - you walk down the beach, some of the locals invite you to join them for a beer and you stagger home several hours later) it was time to prepare for the journey to Los Angeles. Thanks to the International Date Line, this meant leaving Nadi at 10:50pm on Tuesday, flying for just over ten hours, and landing at 1:10pm on Tuesday. I worked out that Tuesday lasted 44 hours, so the jet lag...