Central Valley
The vast interior of California is split down the middle by the Sierra
Nevada (Spanish for "snowy range"), or High Sierra, a sawtooth range of
snow-capped peaks that stands high above the semi-desert of the Owens
Valley. The wide Central Valley (aka the San Joaquin Valley) in the west
was made super-fertile by irrigation projects during the 1940s, and is
now almost totally agricultural. Even if the nightlife begins and ends
with the local ice-cream parlor, after the big cities of the coast it
can all be quite refreshing. However, the real reason to come here is to
reach the national parks of Sequoia and Kings Canyon - whose huge trees
form the centerpiece of a rich natural landscape - and Yosemite , where
towering walls of silvery granite are invigorated by waterfalls. Few
roads penetrate the hundred miles of wilderness to the east, but the
entire region is crisscrossed by hiking trails leading up into the
pristine alpine backcountry.
The arrow-straight I-5 barrels straight up from LA to San Francisco.
Four daily trains and frequent Greyhound buses run through the valley,
calling at the towns along Hwy-99, in particular Merced, which has bus
connections to Yosemite but otherwise doesn't merit a look-in.
Central coast
After the hustle of LA and San Francisco, the four hundred miles of
coastline in between - the central coast - is a welcome respite,
sparsely populated outside the few medium-sized cities and lined by
clean sandy beaches. It is at its most dramatic along Big Sur , one of
the most rugged, savagely beautiful stretches of coastline in the world,
where the brooding Santa Lucia Mountains rise steeply out of the
thundering Pacific surf. The two largest towns are poles apart: Santa
Barbara in the south is a wealthy resort colony, full of old and new
money, while Santa Cruz to the north is a coastal town redolent of the
Sixties - where the local collegians are officially known as the "Banana
Slugs." In between, languorous San Luis Obispo makes a good base for
visiting Hearst Castle , the hilltop palace of publishing magnate
William Randolph Hearst, and the inspiration for the Xanadu pleasure
palace in the film Citizen Kane .
Almost all of the towns grew up around Spanish missions , each a long
day's walk from the next, and once enclosed within thick walls to
prevent Native American attack. Monterey , a hundred miles south of San
Francisco, was California's capital under Spain and Mexico, and still
has attractive early-nineteenth-century architecture.
Amtrak's Coast Starlight train runs along the coast up to San Luis
Obispo before cutting inland north to San Francisco and up to Seattle;
Greyhound buses stop at most of the towns, especially along the main
highway, US-101.
Gold Country
Over 150 years before international techies invaded California in search
of Silicon gold, rough and ready 49ers came to the Gold Country of the
Sierra Nevada, 150 miles east of San Francisco, to look for the real
thing. The area ranges from the foothills near Yosemite to the deep
gorge of the Yuba River two hundred miles north, with Sacramento as its
largest city. Many of the mining camps that sprung up around the Gold
Country vanished as quickly as they appeared, but about half still
survive. Some are bustling resorts, standing on the banks of whitewater
rivers in the midst of thick pine forests; others are just eerie ghost
towns, all but abandoned on the grassy rolling hills. Most of the
mountainous forests along the Sierra crest are preserved as near
pristine wilderness, with excellent hiking, camping and backpacking.
There's great skiing in winter, around the mountainous rim of Lake Tahoe
on the border between California and Nevada, aglow under the bright
lights of the nightclubs and casinos that line its southeastern shore.
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 .
The City
With only limited space between the desert, the mountains and the ocean,
LA has long since filled in the gaps between what were once small and
isolated towns. As a result, it's a massive conglomeration of
interconnected, amorphous districts
With only limited space between the desert, the mountains and the ocean,
LA has long since filled in the gaps between what were once small and
isolated towns. As a result, it's a massive conglomeration of
interconnected, amorphous districts, often with little in common.
If LA has a heart, however, it's downtown , in the center of the basin.
It offers a taste of almost everything you'll find elsewhere around the
city, from upscale avant-garde art along Bunker Hill to the abject
dereliction of Skid Row in the Eastside, compressed into an area of
small, easily walkable blocks. The area around downtown contains some
decaying Victorian suburbs, 1920s Art Deco buildings and the center of
LA's enormous and growing Hispanic population.
Heading west from downtown to the coast, the first major district you
come to, Hollywood , has streets caked with movie legend - even if the
genuine glamour is long gone. Adjoining West LA is home to the city's
newest money, shown off in Beverly Hills and along the Sunset Strip.
Santa Monica and Venice to the west are the quintessential seafront LA
of palm trees, white sands and laid-back living, while the coastline
itself stretches another twenty miles northwest to glamorous Malibu ,
home to the movieland elite.
Suburban Orange County , to the southeast, holds little of interest
apart from Disneyland and a handful of laid-back beach towns. On the far
side of the northern hills lie the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys
, or simply "the Valley," seen by mainstream Los Angeles as nothing more
than depressing tract homes and endless strip malls - not unlike the
generic LA stereotype viewed by the rest of America.
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Vacation Rentals in Los Angeles |
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Northern California
The massive and eerily silent volcanic lands of northern California have
more in common with Oregon and Washington than with the rest of the
state. Its small settlements live by logging, fishing and farming,
though locals have been joined in recent years by New Agers, ex-hippies,
and an ever-growing contingent of tourists. Once you're past the
atypically lush valleys of the Wine Country , the coast stretches for
four hundred miles of rugged bluffs and forests. Aside from the
beautiful deserted beaches that stripe the coast, trees are the big
attraction, thousands of years old and hundreds of feet high, dominating
a landscape swathed in swirling mists. The Redwood National Park teems
with campers and hikers in summer, but out of season it can be idyllic.
The remote wildernesses of the interior can be enchanting, especially
around the Shasta Cascade and Lassen Volcanic National Park .
Public transportation is, not surprisingly, scarce, though Greyhound
buses run from San Francisco and Sacramento up and down I-5 and US-101.
San Diego
Relatively free from smog and byzantine freeways, SAN DIEGO , set around
a gracefully curving bay, represents the acceptable face of southern
California. The second biggest city in California may be affluent and
conservative, but it's also easygoing and far from smug. Although it was
the site of the first mission in California, the city only really took
off with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1880s, and in terms
of trade and significance it has long been in the shadow of Los Angeles.
However, during World War II the US Navy made San Diego its Pacific
Command Center, and the military continues to dominate the local economy,
along with tourism.
The City
With its mix of laid-back libertarians and military-minded conservatives
(drawn from its adjacent naval base), San Diego embodies both work-hard
and play-hard lifestyles. With an easily navigable central area, scenic
bay, 42 miles of beaches and plentiful parks and museums, the city is
hard not to like from the moment you arrive
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Vacation Rentals in San Diego |
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San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a
slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast.
Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US,
it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small
city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to
their cousins in LA the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic
fringe of America. It's a compact and approachable place, where downtown
streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the
city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to
envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue
skies and slothful warmth the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies,
and even during summer can drop much lower.
The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone Indians , were all but
wiped out within a few years of the establishment in 1776 of the Mission
Dolores , the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran
the length of California. Two years after the Americans replaced the
Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills
precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush . Within a year fifty thousand
pioneers had traveled west, and east from China, turning San Francisco
from a muddy village and wasteland of sand dunes into a thriving supply
center and transit town. By the time the transcontinental railroad was
completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of
bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite who hit it big
on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load worked hard to mend,
constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable car system and elaborate
Victorian redwood mansions.
In the midst of the city's golden age, however, a massive earthquake ,
followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the town in 1906.
Rebuilding began immediately, resulting in a city more magnificent than
before; in the decades that followed, writers like Dashiell Hammett and
Jack London lived and worked here. Many of the city's landmarks,
including Coit Tower and both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, were
built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II San Francisco had been
eclipsed by Los Angeles as the main west coast city, but it achieved a
new cultural eminence with the emergence of the Beats in the Fifties and
the hippies in the Sixties, when the fusion of music, protest, rebellion
and, of course, drugs that characterized 1967's "Summer of Love" took
over the Haight-Ashbury district.
In a conservative America, San Francisco's reputation as a liberal oasis
continues to grow, attracting waves of resettlers from all over the US.
It is estimated that over half the city's population originates from
somewhere else. It is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast
gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end towns on earth thanks,
in part, to the disposable incomes pumped into its coffers from its
sizeable singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San
Francisco has also been the scene of the dot.com revolution's rise and
fall. The resultant wealth at one time made housing prices skyrocket
often at the expense of the city's middle and lower classes but the
closure of hundreds of start-up IT companies has brought real-estate
prices back down to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the city's
current economic ebbs and flows, your impression of the city likely
won't be altered it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to
be found anywhere.
The City
San Francisco is a city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a
general rule, geographical elevation means wealth - the higher up you
are, the less fog you endure, resulting in better views. Commercial
square-footage is surprisingly small and mostly
San Francisco is a city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a
general rule, geographical elevation means wealth - the higher up you
are, the less fog you endure, resulting in better views. Commercial
square-footage is surprisingly small and mostly confined to the downtown
area, and the rest of the city is made up of primarily residential
neighborhoods with street-level shopping districts, easily explored on
foot. Armed with a good map and strong legs, you could plough through
much of the city in a day, but the best way to get to know San Francisco
is to dawdle
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San Francisco's Bay Area
Of the six million people who make their home in the vicinity of San
Francisco, only a lucky one in eight lives in the city itself. Everyone
else is spread around the Bay Area , a hodgepodge of either very rich or
very poor towns located down the peninsula or across one of the two
impressive bridges that span the chilly waters of the exquisite natural
harbor. In the East Bay are industrial Oakland and intellectual Berkeley.
To the south lies the gloating new wealth of the Peninsula , known as "Silicon
Valley" because of its multibillion-dollar computer industry. Across the
Golden Gate Bridge to the north is the woody, leafy landscape and rugged
coastline of Marin County , America's richest suburb.
Southern California's deserts
The deserts of Southern California occupy a quarter of the state.
Untouched but for the three million acres used for military bases, this
hot and often inhospitable wilderness exerts a powerful fascination for
venturesome travelers. There are two distinct regions: the Colorado or
Low Desert in the south, which is the most easily reached from LA,
containing the opulent artificial oasis of Palm Springs and the primeval
expanse of Joshua Tree ; and the Mojave or High Desert , dominated by
Death Valley and stretching along Hwy-395 up to the sparsely populated
Owens Valley , infamous as the place from which the city of Los Angeles
stole its water.
It is impossible to do justice to this area without your own wheels.
Palm Springs can be reached on public transportation, but only the
periphery of Joshua Tree is accessible and it's a long hot walk to
anywhere very interesting. You can get as far as Barstow on Greyhound
and Amtrak, but no transportation traverses Death Valley, leaving only
the Owens Valley with its daily Greyhound service between LA and Reno
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