Party Animals

Here's a final retrospective post about the first round-the-world ticket I ever bought. This time we're off to the USA, that is, Los Angeles and Honolulu, the final two stops on my three-week global-trotting circuit. 

I visited Los Angeles for the first time as a 17-year-old exchange student in July 1983. It was my first time overseas. Along with more than a hundred students from Australia and New Zealand, I spent a week undergoing an orientation program while housed in student accommodation at UCLA. AFS, the organisation responsible for our exchange program, typically conducted this program to help non-native English-speaking students adapt to American life. However, for us Antipodeans, brought up on American films and television, the week was a bit of a joke.

Much to our frustration, we never got to explore the city. As a result, when I finally returned in 1996, I was determined to see as many of the city’s iconic sights as possible. As was my habit, I collected a fistful of brochures at the airport and mapped out my sightseeing schedule. I flew in from Frankfurt on October 22 and was scheduled to fly out again two days later to Hawaii. I’d just spent seven days attending my brother’s wedding in Austria and travelling through Prague and Berlin with my parents. With less than 48 hours on the ground, I had plenty of bucket-list sights to tick off in a relatively short timeframe.

I decided to book a full-day LA highlights bus tour. The tour initially took us to the city’s historic Spanish quarter for a walking tour (that's the LA Town Hall in the opening image of this post), then to the original Farmer’s Market in Melrose for another wander. With Halloween barely a week away, the market was filled with pumpkins and appropriately themed displays. It was the ideal location for a classic taste of America’s enduring obsession with Halloween.

Our next stop was West Hollywood, where we visited Mann’s Chinese Theatre to walk the pavement littered with the footprints and handprints of hundreds of celebrities. Like all first-time tourists, I was delighted to finally see the giant Hollywood sign in the nearby foothills. Although it was much smaller than it appears on television!

The tour then ventured up into the hills to the Hollywood Bowl lookout for an iconic view of the city's smoggy skyline stretching south along the Pacific Coast. The tour then concluded with a drive-by tour of celebrity homes in Beverly Hills. To be honest, most of the time all we could see were high walls, security gates and hedges. We finished our tour of Beverly Hills with a final stop at Rodeo Drive, where I was in awe of the exclusive designer labels and their equally eye-watering price tags. That's me on Rodeo Drive above.

The following day, October 24, I boarded another flight, this time bound for Hawaii. Once again, I was off to explore a destination I’d visited in transit in 1983. Back then, Air New Zealand’s Boeing 747-200 couldn’t reach the USA in a single leg. As a result, our flight stopped in Honolulu for a couple of hours to refuel in the middle of the night. However, passengers had to disembark and congregate in a secure, nondescript transit lounge before reboarding and continuing to Los Angeles.

For this return trip, I was keen to finally see Oahu. I spent four days in Hawaii before catching a final flight back to Sydney. However, I never did get to see much of the island. A few hours after I landed in Honolulu, a good friend flew in from Sydney to join me. Richard took one look at the pile of brochures I’d collected at the airport and laughed. They went straight in the bin. He was in town to celebrate his birthday (October 27) – and what a celebration it was.

We booked ourselves into the Hotel Honolulu, an LGBTQI friendly venue. Back then it was promoted as Hawaii’s only gay hotel, and was renowned for its somewhat camp and kitsch decor. The hotel had a sundeck on the roof. We were allocated a Japanese-themed room on the top floor directly below the sundeck called the Samurai Room, accessed via a small faux-Japanese arch bridge. Within hours, Richard had turned our room into party central, and for the next four days, that’s all we did.

We hit the local LGBTQI-friendly bars at night and continued the party back in our room after they closed, eventually venturing out to bask in the sun along Waikiki Beach before repeating the cycle. By the time we were done, we’d collected a gang of three new American friends who did their best to keep up with us. This included a guy called Ken, who kept pace for four days straight. That's him above. The other two lads simply gave up after two days.  Hand on my heart, it was the most decent overseas experience I've ever had.

After partying non-stop for four days, I caught a late-evening flight back to Sydney on 27 October, while Richard stayed on for a few more days. It was another eight years before I returned to Honolulu and finally ventured out to explore Oahu. This time with Garry in tow. Let’s just say our return visit in 2004 was a more civilised affair! 

I finally landed back in Australia early on 29 October 1996, having completed my first-ever round-the-world ticket. What an adventure it had been. I’d gone on safari in Africa, flown a microlight over Victoria Falls, walked the cobblestone streets of Kitzbühel and Salzburg, explored the medieval heart of Prague and shown my parents where I’d once chipped off my own piece of the Berlin Wall.