A bird's eye view of the real LA

Starting from a base of zero expectations of Los Angeles (I’d heard way too many poor peer reviews), and after two days of typical tourist action including an incredibly drab Hop-On-Hop-Off bus ride through downtown LA, I was hanging out for New York and the promise of a real cultural experience. It took just one misjudged trek and a chance meeting with a Jewish Native American hipster to change all that.
I had four days in LA with a friend before heading to San Diego for a conference and then to New York. Another friend suggested we stay at Venice Beach and go hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains. We Google mapped it and the mountains didn’t look far from where we were staying. On our third day we donned our joggers, packed our paleo snacks and set off on our trek at 5.30am. We headed north along Venice boardwalk and past the Santa Monica pier. At 7am we stopped and considered turning around. The mountains seemed like the end of a rainbow, constantly beyond reach. We asked a lady who was walking a dog for directions. “You’re still a long way away,” she said, but suggested we hike up Temescal Canyon. “It’s just up the road.” We turned inland to Temesal Gateway Park, just off Sunset Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades, and followed the Temescal Canyon Trail loop. The higher we trekked, the sparser the landscape became, and greater LA – from the Hollywood Hills to Malibu – spread out before us like a slanted view on Google Earth.
During the 13 kilometers trek back to Venice, we were on a high. We joked in previous days that we could smell our way back to Venice (there are stores on every corner selling ‘medicinal’ marijuana), but our state had absolutely nothing to do with that. Sure, we didn’t make it into the depths of the Santa Monica Mountains; instead they framed the northern part of our view from Temescal Canyon. We ended up exactly where we were meant to be. The same was true the next afternoon.
We were on North Venice Boulevard hunting for a payphone to confirm our transfer to San Diego when a guy wearing low-slung maroon sweat pants, moccasins and a beanie, no shirt, covered in tattoos and sported long, black, curly hair and Dr Dre headphones offered us his mobile. Turns out he’s a Santa Monica-born Native American, raised by Jews who thought he was Hawaiian. He’s also an artist who speaks three languages, including Hebrew, and lived in Jerusalem for a short period. So much for my impression of the west coast being devoid of culture!