Los Angeles Travel
San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys
The northern limit of LA is defined by two long, wide valleys lying over the hills from the central basin, starting close to one another a few miles north of downtown and spanning outwards in opposite directions east to the deserts around Palm Springs, west to Ventura on the central coast. You wouldn't miss an awful lot by not visiting the valleys at all, but they do give a picture of life in LA's suburbs.
Los Angeles
The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.
LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops. The biggest group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.
The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood , as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu .
Santa Monica, Venice and Malibu
Set along an unbroken twenty-mile stretch of white-sand beaches, the small, self-contained communities that line Santa Monica Bay feature some of the best LA has to offer, with none of the smog or searing heat that can make the rest of the metropolis unbearable. The entire area is well served by public transportation, near (but not too near) the airport, and a wide choice of accommodation makes it a good base for seeing the rest of the city.
South Bay
Heading south from LA along PCH, beyond the runways of LAX and the oil refineries of El Segundo, begins the eight-mile coastal strip of the quieter and less pretentious South Bay beach towns: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach . Each has a beckoning strip of white sand much more open to the public than those around Malibu and Manhattan and Hermosa are especially well equipped for surfing and beach sports. They're also well connected by the regular #439 bus to downtown LA. To the south are Long Beach and Catalina Island .