'Down Mexico way'

Of course, one advantage to being in San Diego is the ability to go down to Mexico so easily.

And you get there via a trolley car which, at the beginning of its journey, travels through the city streets of San Diego like a tram. (We went down for lunch.)

I guess as an Australian I'm quite knocked out by the ability to travel so far in so short a time. Victorians can travel across the Murray to Albury, of course, and New South Welshmen (or women) can go across to Wodonga, but 15 minutes after alighting at San Ysidro, California you're in the land of Dia de los muertos, toreadors...

Amerindian traditions...

and requesting 'Dos cafe con la leche' in a McDonald's where the young kids behind the counter do not speak English.

It's bustling and noisy (both in colour and sound) and contrasts with San Diego, which strikes me as a once-beautiful city where an eraser went through and left swaths of carparks

(although definitely once beautiful).

In Mexico, 15 minutes after leaving the States there are the typical shortcuts of poorer countries - unsecured lights and unfinished wiring hanging down over the rough, uneven steps of a pedestrian overpass, for example.

It makes me wonder why it hasn't occurred to anti-regulatory Americans that the absence of regulation can be a pre-condition for Third World standards. But, sigh, people hug their entrenched positions...

I noted also, on the way down to Mexico, the wonderful mountain ranges you see all the way down the Californian coast to Tijuana.

There is a grand beauty in the mountainous spine of this state. Which gives me another chance to extol the beauties of Los Angeles - once you get away from the freeways and culverts. Because this is what you can see in the Santa Monica Mountains between the coast and Thousand Oaks.

Seriously. This is maybe 8 miles from the Ventura Fwy. There are warnings about mountain lions at the beginning of the trail. How come no-one ever talks about the remnant beauty of this city?

Perhaps because this hidden gem is less easy to get to than Mexico?

City views

Bear in mind, this between Ventura Boulevard and Santa Monica.

A daily reminder

LA gets such a bad press. A shop assistant in Van Nuys even said, 'You came from Australia to Van Nuys!!?' And yes, parts are obviously barren - concrete and trashy shops.
But there are beautiful pockets. There is still an orange grove on the university campus at Northridge. We went walking up in the Santa Monica mountains at the end of Reseda Boulevard. You can reach the sea from here. It felt familiar to me as desert, hot, dry and scrubby, and yet, look closely at this picture and you'll see snow-capped mountains in the distance. This is a real buzz for me.

I know people love to knock LA, but out in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley where we stayed, I would sum it up as 'birdsong, grapefruit and sunshine'. Don't forget that that when someone once couldn't understand how the arch-European intellectual Arnold Schoenberg could live in LA after Vienna, he said, 'I get to play tennis every day.'