Los Angeles to Nadi, Fiji

We spent our last day in Los Angeles as well as the USA taking a picnic to the nearby Wattles Garden Park, which was once part of the Wattles Mansion estate, built by architects in the early 20th century.

The sun arched over the palms trees that line the park's lawn whilst dog walkers and hikers past through, the latter on their way to the adjacent Runyon Canyon Park. We sat and watched this from our vantage point at the back of the park's sloping lawn. Reflecting on our time in the USA it felt like we had been in the country for a long time because of the amount we had done, seen and travelled. Yet at the same time it felt as if it had gone by quickly. However much we looked back over our fond memories from the last month, we were also very excited about the next part of our adventure, New Zealand.

We returned to our hostel for a shower before taking a shuttle bus down to LAX. Our 11 hour flight to Nadi, Fiji, where we'd connect for our flight to New Zealand, departed Los Angeles at 11:30pm on the 1st June. However we would cross time zones and crucially the 'date line', which meant that we wouldn't actually arrive in Nadi until 5:50am on the 3rd June. We would then have a 3 hour stop over in Nadi before a further 3 hour flight to our destination Auckland, New Zealand. This made our eventual arrival time in Auckland, 11:45am on 3rd June. Technically 36 hours after we started...

We managed to catch some fitful sleep on the flight to Nadi but we were still dead on our feet once we arrived. Fijians in colourful shirts played traditional music as we filed off the plane and out of our arrival gate. However even they seemed tired after a couple of songs, perhaps sensing a difficult crowd at that time of day. We struggled to stay awake but managed to board our second flight to Auckland in bright morning sunshine, which seemed to slightly lift the heavy humidity as well as our fatigue...Read more