LOS Angeles is a strange and rather puzzling place.

I'm on holidays in California at the moment and have just departed LA for San Francisco.

I spent the last four days walking and cycling around LA thinking I was enjoying myself, only to realise as I stepped on my overnight northbound Greyhound bus how happy I was to leave.

I think there's something incompatible between the city and regular humans - those of us outsiders who are not fully prepared for or conditioned to the LA way of life.

It's something about the city's sheer scale. Or maybe it's the people who live in it.

It's not that it felt like an unfriendly atmosphere or that it gave off a menacing vibe.

It's more that the city itself felt completely foreign to me. As though I had travelled to a far more unfamiliar country than the United States.

The city is huge. Far bigger than we expected.

We decided to stay in Santa Monica, on the coast to the west of LA, which was both a blessing and a curse.

The streets of Hollywood are far less glitzy and glamorous than you might think and we were glad not to have to navigate downtown LA after dark.

On the other hand, while Santa Monica looked like a nearby outer suburb of LA when we glanced at a map, it definitely wasn't.

We didn't have a car (which in hindsight was a mistake) and the bus from the city back to our hostel took nearly an hour-and-a-half.

We just couldn't believe people could live, work and simply stay sane and functional in a city this enormous.

I now understand why the whole city is entirely dependent on cars and why so many people warned us we would need to hire a car to get anywhere easily.

While if I went back to LA again I'd definitely hire a car, the bus drivers in LA - likely via pure necessity given their clientele - had a hilariously entertaining amount of attitude.

The female bus driver who dropped us at our bus ride out of LA got more and more sassy as the trip went on.

She shouted out the window to cars who had apparently cut her off, she barely took her hands off the horn, and she was a force to be reckoned with if passengers disobeyed her instructions.

But she was a sweetheart really. When she heard we were planning to walk three or four blocks at 11.30pm at night from the bus stop to the Greyhound station in a fairly sketchy part of town she diverted the full, already running late bus and dropped us right at the Greyhound doors as a "courtesy stop".

So that was LA. Equal parts frustrating, equal parts amusing, with a lingering bit of heart under all the attitude. I feel as though I could write about it for days.

But I think I'm happy have escaped the City of Angels for the time being.