I got up at 5am on Wednesday, packed my stuff, checked out of the hotel and caught a cab to JFK Airport. This was it. I was going home.

New York was battered by an electrical storm on this morning, which meant my BA flight back to London took off two hours late. We were on the runway for those two hours too. Just think of it - strapped in with no access to any electrical equipment and no trolley service. I was fucking glad when we took off and I was served a G&T, I can tell you.

The rest of the journey was good. I had four seats to myself, which is always heavenly on a long haul flight, and so I spent the remainder of the journey laid out, drinking more free gin and watching episodes of Peep Show on my laptop. I've managed to convert Aussies, Americans and Kiwis to this show while I've been away. If you haven't watched it, watch it.

When we landed at Heathrow, I didn't really feel anything at all. I wasn't sad, particularly happy or anything else. I was more pre-occupied with the reality of not having anywhere to live. As I made my way across London to the home of my former flat mates - where I was to te-mporarily crash while flat hunting - it occurred to me that of all the places I had been to on this trip, nowhere had the journey been so stressful and expensive as here. Welcome home, Matt.

It has been an eventful, interesting and certainly unforgettable six months. I would be hard pushed to name a favourite destination. So I will put it into categories:

Best scenery: South Island, New Zealand Best sight: Uluru (Ayers Rock) Best food: Melbourne Best hotel: MGM Grand, Las Vegas Best city: New York Best nightlife: Sydney Best beach: Byron Bay (New South Wales) Best shops: New York Best museum: Melbourne Museum

For the worst of the above, just insert Alice Springs or Cairns.

Anyway, this is the last post. Thanks for viewing my jumped up, opinionated rants for the last six months.

Now fuck off.

I went out again on Monday night. Well, visiting nightclubs is a form of sight seeing. I think.

When I returned to the hotel at whatever time it was, I needed a fag. Stop sniggering. So, I attempted to open my room window in order to light up. As I was doing so, the entire window frame and glass came off in my hands, forcing me back on to the bed. Apart from a couple of scratches, I was ok, but it was slightly bewildering to find myself laid out underneath a window frame on my bed in the middle of the night. Still, at least I could smoke now. After a few moments' thought, I considered it best to inform reception immediately. A man duly came up to the room and said I would be transferred to another, but that was before I was grilled about how the frame had come off, which struck me as utterly bizarre. Why on earth would I do this on purpose? For a souvenir to take home? Anyway, the new room I was moved to turned out to be a lot better than the now windowless one. So now you know what to do if you want an upgrade in a hotel.

I got up late again, found a nice little Italian restaurant for lunch, and then caught the subway south towards where the ferries depart from. I went to Liberty Island, where there is of course the Statue of Liberty. I don't know why, but it didn't seem as impressive in person. I've seen worse things, however. The view of Manhattan is spectacular from there, although it was absolutely obvious that all everyone was transfixed by was working out where the Twin Towers had been. Me included. Until a replacement is built, that will be what every tourist does, which is a shame in so many respects.

The ferry then took me to Ellis Island, which includes a very good and interesting museum about immigration to the US. On this occasion, I was more than happy to 'tip' and made a donation to the place's upkeep.

I decided to spend the last night of my trip with a visit to the Empire State Building. The view of New York from the 86th floor was amazing, although the whole experience was soured by the absurd time it takes to get up and down the building. It starts off with an escalator, then a walk through security, then a walk to where you pay, then a walk to a lift, then some stairs, then a walk to where they take a cheesy photograph whether you like it or not, then another lift, then some queueing, before you finally get to the observation level. Then when you've squeezed your way round, repeat the above. Still, it was a bloody good view.

I want to be a part of it .... New York, New York...

I arrived in the Big Apple at around 9pm on Saturday after a five hour flight from San Francisco. After surveying the subway map, I decided I couldn't make head nor fucking tail of it and thus decided to get a cab from JFK Airport to my hotel in Manhattan. The journey turned out to be one of the most frightening experiences of my entire life - the driver was an utter lunatic who paid scant regard for any law or safe practise. We were very nearly killed in one remarkable escape on a freeway, which to me confirmed this was a reckless driver rather than someone who knew what they were doing. So when we got to my hotel, I thought there was no way on sodding earth that I was going to give this man a generous tip - as is custom here - so I gave him a couple of dollars on top of the actual fare. He grabbed it off me without saying a word. What is it with this fucking country? You nearly get killed, and still you are expected to tip a handsome amount.

I have never been a big fan of tipping, partly because I'd admittedly rather spend the money on myself, but also because generous tipping unquestionably gives employers an excuse to keep wages low. The tip, in effect, is a payment to the boss - not the worker. But, when in Rome etc, I have been tipping over here in the States. I just resent how it's expected for the most innocuous tasks - like doing your fucking job! Perhaps I've got the wrong attitude. When I get back to work next week, I might start insisting on a tip every time I'm asked to write a press release.

Anyway, on Saturday night I ventured out to a club called 'Splash' in NYC's Chelsea area. It was, by some considerable distance, the best club I have visited during my six months away. It was modern, relaxed and the music was amazing. Unfortunately it was a bit too good, and I didn't leave the place until after 5am, which rendered me completely and utterly useless for the whole of Sunday. I just about managed a walk up to Central Park, where I stayed for all of 20 minutes before spending the evening in my hotel room.

Fortunately, today (Monday) I had a bit more spunk about me. Or something like that. I got up at a reasonable time, and walked from my hotel in Times Square to the United Nations. I was quite excited in a strange kind of way to see the headquarters of one of the 20th century's most important institutions.

In truth, the UN tour was a let-down. The tour guide said very little of any interest, and the place itself reminded me of various local authority buildings I have visited across England. You would not have thought you were visiting Norfolk County Council rather than the United Nations. The guide summed things up when she said a refurbishment of the building was planned because it leaked water onto delegates whenever it happened to rain in New York...

From the UN, I deliberately took a long walk through Manhattan to my next destination - Ground Zero. As I made the long journey, I was struck by how vibrant the city was. I had always expected New York to be just a series of long, straight streets with faceless skyscrapers on the side. In fact, it reminded me more of London than any other place in the world I have ever been to. Restaurants, cafes, bars and shops thrived wherever you looked.

When I finally made it to Ground Zero, there were only a handful of tourists milling around. Everyone else was making their way home from the various places in the financial district. There is no real memorial here yet - just a few signs indicating that the new 'Freedom Tower' will actually include one. I was surprised to see the place still appeared to be a building site and that remnants of the Twin Towers were still visible. What has been going on here for the last six years? It looked no different from the pictures I first saw of Ground Zero a long time ago. Even so, I didn't feel comfortable photographing such a place. I stayed only a few moments before heading back to the hotel.

I flew back to San Francisco on Friday, where I would be departing from the following day for New York.

San Fran on a Friday night, New York the night after. A pretty rock n roll lifestyle, only without the drugs, much cash or physical energy after weeks of incessant travelling.

On Friday afternoon I went to see Alcatraz. And by that I don't mean the pop band Alcatraz, who had a hit in 2002 with the G-A-Y floor-filler 'Crying at the Discotheque'. Oh no. I was going to the famous former high security prison on Alcatraz Island, which is in the middle of San Fran's bay.

It was a very surreal place. I couldn't quite work out why, given that the prison shut in 1963, the whole place stunk so much of piss, but it was a thoroughly interesting afternoon. I've not been inside a prison before, unless you count the faux paus in Ipswich in 1998 that led to me sharing a police cell with a window cleaner. It was, erm, like a prison. I couldn't understand why the tour guides were trying to make out how horrible it was here, with things like cells and solitary confinement, as if none of this has ever existed in other prisons.

In reality, what makes Alcatraz such a chilling place is its location. San Francisco Bay is cold, windy and foggy on a July summer day. Fuck only knows what it's like being stuck on an prison island in the middle of it during winter. Only the most serious offenders ever found out - Alcatraz was where they sent people who were basically deemed beyond rehabilitation. Freezing half to death every day in a piss smelling cell, I think capital punishment would have been an act of mercy.

While we are on the subject of crime, I returned to the same hotel on Friday night that I had stayed in on my first trip to San Francisco a week ago. You may recall from an earlier post that it is very nice and centrally located. It is, however, also next to one of the dodgiest areas I have ever been to. On Friday afternoon on my way back to the hotel, a drunken and drugged looking homeless woman was kind enough to show me that she was carrying a kitchen knife in her coat pocket. I didn't think this was the sort of thing I should just ignore, and so I went to find some coppers I had seen patrolling a nearby street. While I walked to find them, I was verbally abused by probably about 15 people. Eventually I found an officer, and as I was informing him there was a deranged looking bird wandering around with a knife, a baseball bat cluttered against the back of my neck. Somebody had actually thrown it from the window of a nearby flat. Fortunately, it didn't hurt. I then went back to my hotel and vowed not to venture back to that area again. All of the above happened in the space of five minutes.

Later on in the evening I ventured out to a club night called 'Fag Fridays', which probably gives a hint to its orientation. During the course of the evening I had a bit of a snog with someone, and when we got to the normal 'what's your name and where are you from?' stuff, it transpired he was half English and would be visiting the country soon to see his mother's family. In Ipswich. For crying out loud, I was in a club in California and I had come across someone from Ips***. Fortunately, he wasn't into football!

I returned to my hotel at 4.30am, set my alarm and realised I would get four hours' sleep before heading to the airport. Fuck.

The temperature soared above 40 degrees on Thursday, and at some points I felt like I was being fried alive. Still, it was an opportunity to top up the tan. Or rather get one at all.

I had finished reading my latest book, and so I went into Vegas in search of a shop to buy another. It wasn't until I had been walking for over an hour and had visited three shopping malls that I found somewhere which actually sold bloody books. Given that this all took place in probably the hottest temperatures I had ever experienced, I wasn't best pleased. I must have passed hundreds and hundreds of shops, but there were no book stores. If I wanted a handbag or a new pair of shoes, I would have been laughing. At one point I thought I was going to pass out from heat stroke, and so I went into a hotel to ask someone where the nearest book shop was. By the look on the face of the woman I spoke to you would have thought I'd asked if I could have a feel of her tits. Evidently the visitors to Las Vegas are too busy gratifying every possible desire to do something conventional like read. Eventually I found a small shop, bought one of Al Gore's books and returned to the pool side of my hotel.

It was ironic that, while I was here, the British government announced it was going to review plans to create Vegas style 'super casinos' back home. The principal argument in favour of these venues has been that hell holes deemed beyond redemption would be regenerated so long as enough slot machines were installed. If you look at Vegas, it is undeniably a city booming at an incredible rate. More super resorts are springing up, more and more visitors keep coming and its population has doubled every decade since the 1940s. To attribute all of that to casinos, and to think this could somehow be replicated in places like Margate, misses the point entirely. Gambling is what started the Vegas phenomenon when it was little more than a tiny town in the middle of the Nevada desert. It remains what it is infamous for, but it is not what makes it so popular. Couples don't come here on honeymoon to spend all day playing poker. People flock to this place because it has thousands of decent bars and restaurants, you can shop in endless malls and pick up designer gear for a fraction of the price elsewhere and if that all gets a bit tiring you can relax in perfect sunshine by the pool. You wouldn't be able to do any of that in fucking Blackpool or wherever else after you've finished playing the pokie machines, so enough of all this bollocks about casinos regenerating dumps. All a casino in these places would do is provide a few more jobs paying the minimum wage, suck a whole section of the local population into gambling and attract endless amounts of wankers on stag weekends.