KEY POINTS:
The day began with breakfast; nothing staggering about that. It's the portion sizes that stagger. Hmm, what to have?
Gladstones on Malibu Beach is a fish restaurant with a fantastically mixed Mexican and traditional American breakfast menu. So, the huevos rancheros, Mexican scrambled eggs on a flour tortilla with black beans, jack and cheddar cheeses, guacamole, sour cream and olives?
Or, maybe the enormous portion of towering syrupy pancakes (there's a ginormous portion if you're really, really hungry). Or, God forbid, what's this? The Monte Cristo Sandwich of ham and swiss cheese on french toast, which is first battered and deep fried then smothered in powdered sugar and syrup.
I spend quite a long time chomping through the more sedate scrambled eggs which is enormous enough.
Outside, the beach is heavy with fog, or smog. It's so cloudy we strain our eyes trying to spot the dolphins our guide, Alan, says you often see zooming along the bay.
Nope, none to be seen. On the way back to the van Alan tells us the Spanish explorers of the 16th century called Los Angeles the "smoky place".
The cloudy, foggy, smoggy stuff is what the locals call the "marine layer", he explains, not at all defensively, to our raised eyebrows. No, really, it's all moisture, he says: "If this was smog, you wouldn't be able to breathe."
Along the beachfront are apartments which will cost you US$2000 ($2575) a month to rent for the smallest and upwards of US$10,000 a month for the bigger ones.
Crowding the hills are the Malibu mansions of the rich and famous. It's Remuera on a massive scale and these homes, the ones you can see from the road, aren't even the really posh ones.
Over there, says Alan, waving somewhere into the hills, is Johnny Carson's place. Barbara Streisand lives up there, he waves. Bob Dylan's over there.
All very flash but we're going somewhere which flash doesn't begin to describe. Reclusive oil squillionaire J. Paul Getty lived in these here hills and this is where he decided one day to build a Roman villa.
And I mean a real Roman villa. The Getty Villa is tucked away in the hills and is resplendent with Roman columns and lavish gardens with grape vines and pools with reclining statues.
Inside, the villa has exquisite and very real archaeological finds such as statues from ancient Greece and upstairs very old stuff from the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations.
The place is supposed to give you the feeling of being in the middle of an excavation and it does drum up a feeling of archaeological excitement, as if these ancient relics have not long been dug up.
We head back into downtown Los Angeles for a tour of Hollywood and along the way, from the van window, we see some dolphins go zooming by. Now, that you can't pay for.
Down Rodeo Drive, all the houses have huge, fancy doors. There's a kind of front door one-upmanship among the movie stars and executives who live here.
We have a scheduled visit to the Kodak Theatre where the Academy Awards are held amid the rustle of very expensive, low-cut frocks. Our guide with a big booming voice shows us a real Oscar. The figure with the hands crossed over the chest is dipped in 24-carat gold and weighs in at 3.8kg so is pretty heavy to carry around all night if you've just won one.
The stars do carry them around all night.
But as the night wears on and the stars wear out, Oscars do get left all over the place. Not to fear, they have a little serial number on the back so they can be returned and, if they do mysteriously disappear, they have a lifetime guarantee so will be replaced.
Not far from the theatre is Grauman's Chinese Theatre where movie stars put their hands into cement and the tourists back into each other when they take their photos.
All very glamorous but Hollywood is not all glamour. Most of the folk on the street looked pretty ordinary.
And every now and then there's a flash of real America and real lives. A bus goes by with a sign saying, "Have you got asbestos cancer?" Life's not always a party in the big smoke.
* Catherine Masters went to Los Angeles courtesy of Air NZ.
