On our second night in LA we were woken up by what sounded like a car exploding, followed by gunshots and police sirens.
Nominative determinism has finally brought us to North America. After a long and stressful journey, during which our paid-for seats and baggage were cancelled and had to be re-booked and paid for again during our short stopover in Paris, before we boarded an ageing charter A330 (rather than the A350 we were meant to have) and were separated (before I managed to persuade the staff to move us to be together – neither of us like flying much), we arrived at LAX at about 18:30 on Friday. Getting through the immigration system was convoluted at both ends – we had to show our passports three times on the French side and were interrogated and all our fingerprints taken once in the US.
It took a few hours to make our way by bus the ten miles or so to our accommodation, a large caravan Air BnB in someone’s garden. We were staying in Westmont, an area of South Central Los Angeles. Ten years ago, Westmont had the highest rate of gang-related killings in LA, and one of the main roads bordering the area, ten minutes walk from where we were staying, was known as ‘Death Alley’ – sixty people were killed on that stretch over seven years. I’m only revealing this now that we’ve left so as not to worry certain people!
Neither of us has ever felt as uncomfortable, hemmed in and out of place as we did in LA. The levels of poverty are incredible, given that it’s one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. The juxtaposition of extreme wealth with extreme lack of wealth is present all over the city – at least those parts we visited. There are homeless people in tents in the middle of the road, rubbish strewn everywhere, people who aren’t particularly old shuffling and muttering or shouting to themselves and others, clearly the victims of prolonged drug abuse, apparently a big issue in LA. The racial segregation was new to us as well – not state-sanctioned perhaps, but many neighbourhoods are defined by the colour and culture of the people who live there, more so than anywhere I’ve ever been. Maybe it’s an effect of how saturated we are with American culture, but seeing people conforming so closely to stereotypes from films was odd. People in LA seemed either wary and mistrustful, or extremely pleasant and helpful.
We had three nights in LA to adjust to the time difference before travelling on to our next destination. On our first day we travelled on the bus up to Hollywood, just to see what the fuss was about. We saw the Hollywood sign, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Walk of Fame, none of which were particularly overwhelming. On the way there we passed various groups of people – unrelated – shouting or singing through megaphones about their particular sect of Christianity and how everyone who didn’t follow them was on the way to hell. On the second day we went up to the La Brea Tar Pits, where bitumen bubbles up from the ground and where there’s a museum full of the bones of mammoth and sabre-tooth cats which got stuck and died in the tar pits during the last glacial period. That was much more interesting and definitely worth a visit for anyone in the area, though you have to go through LA to get there so maybe it’s not worth it after all.
On our third day in the USA, we hired a car and drove out of LA to the mountains, where we were heading to help out on an ecological restoration project in a place called Black Canyon, in the mountains in inland Southern California. We’ve been here now a couple of days and I’ll talk about that in the next blog. Needless to say it’s infinitely better here than LA…
JH Woodcarving 