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Published: July 13th 2008
Us in Hollywood
The background is so familiar that it looks fake, but it's definitely real.LA City Tour
Due to our short time scale in LA, we really hadn't too much time to see a lot so we opted to do the LA city tour that our hostel offered. Los Angeles is a
ridiculously big city and the only comparable place we have ever been in size is London. Only the public transport system here is practically non existant, save for a few rickety buses and a beleagured subway system. It means getting from one area to another is a task, particularly since most places of public interest are located at opposite ends.
The tour looked pretty good as it covered most places we were interested in seeing and took up most of the day. We were introduced to a guy we think was called Dave (we can't actually remember his name) who turned out to be an informative guy; in fact, he never really stopped talking. As we drove out, he started going on about any place of significance, mainly in regards to celebrities. This included the bridge referred to in the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Under The Bridge", schools people went to, bars that rock stars hang out, places people died etc.
Capitol Records
Another LA landmark. Some good albums too. Pretty much any random fact you could think of. It was interesting enough and understandable considering it was Hollywood in Los Angeles. Our guide himself was an actor and former roadie and apparently worked on a number of shows and films as well as toured with a lot of hair metal bands from the 80s. It was a bit tricky to work out how much he knew the people he claimed to though.
Hollywood
First stop was Hollywood Boulevard and we were dropped off for a while to explore the street and the "Walk Of Fame", where actors, producers, directors, artists and theatre performers have been awarded a slab of concrete for their contribution to the art. It was fun to try and find recognisable names (a lot of behind-the-scenes guys were included), although navigating through the hordes of tourists was a bit tiresome. This included terrible star impersonators (photos are free but tips expected!) and people trying to sell maps to stars homes. This seemed to peak outside
Grauman Theatre which also included hand and footprints from stars throughout the ages.
After reboarding, we drove through the original Hollywood Land, for which the sign was created. Basically
a housing project from near the turn of last century, it was marketed as high end real estate near the city of Los Angeles (they were seperate places then). The studios moved in (courtesy of Charlie Chaplin) choosing the locale due to its proximity to Mexico, should they need to leave the country for any dubious tax reasons. The real estate now is still pretty upmarket compared to the relative downmarket area of Hollywood itself.
This drive took us up the hills and near the sign, where we had to navigate around people filming (they never stop!). It was good for pictures as the actual sign is pretty hard to see from the city itself, not least of all because of the permanent smog that seems to haze around the city.
Downtown, Santa Monica Pier & Venice
Afterwards, it took a while to get onto the famous highway 101 road and to the main downtown area. LA has nightmarish traffic too. Downtown has all the civic sites and museums, but is quite a distance from Hollywood. It also is generally a rougher area of the city and was where we were catching the Greyhound bus that night!
Downtown goes towards South Central LA which includes the more impoverished and high violent-crime area of the city of Compton, although we never visited there. Again though, it's reputation as being a complete gun-totin' gang hood is a bit exagerrated, not that it doesn't have high crime. It's strange though how LA has really just formed from many different cities merging together, which goes someway to explaining the urban sprawl.
Following another longer drive (crawl?) through gridlocked traffic, we soon arrived at Santa Monica, a high profile suburb of LA. It's home to the famous Santa Monica Pier, which houses an amusement park which we thankfully never visited. The lead singer of Everclear attempted to clock out of life early at this pier, as Dave(?) informatively let us know. Athough, Chris Penn DID manage to make his early exit in the area too. Instead of stopping for a ride on the carousel, we headed onwards to Venice, home of one of LA's top beaches: Venice Beach. We stopped here for lunch and got a look about the area which seemed a lot more bohemian than the rest of LA. It had a lot of tourist traps as well as
countless food stalls, souvenir shops, and would-be rappers trying to sell their newly recorded CDs. The beach itself was pretty nice and would have been fun to lie on. The place itself seemed like a more developed version of Bondi Beach in Sydney on the whole.
Beverley Hills, Bel-Air, & The Sunset Strip
Next stop was after a fairly lengthy drive up into the most affluent part of the city. Beverley Hills is pretty much where a lot of the bigger stars of Hollywood have at least one of their houses and our tour encompassed this. For a lot of people (judging by the touts on Hollywood), seeing movie stars homes is a big draw card, but we never really saw the appeal. Particularly since you can normally see the insides on the MTV program "Cribs". Some of the houses did look really nice, but the chances of any of the owners even being in them were slim (most have more than a couple of homes and/or are filming a lot), never mind the fact that all shades were drawn.
It was pretty cool to see the area where "the other half lives" on the famous Bel
Theater (American spelling noted)
The Chinese Theater and probably the most famous in LA. Air road in Beverley Hills though as a lot of the addresses were pretty opulent. It's also weird how close most of the stars stay to each other too and we got a rundown of around 40 different celebrities and their homes as well as short anecdotes about them from our tour guide.
Afterwards, we headed to Rodeo Drive which is one of the most expensive shopping avenues in the world consisting of countless designer names at designer prices. We never bought anything funnily enough, although Emma was tempted by a bag or two. Again, this is another celebrity shopping haunt and we were treated once again to more celebrity anecodotes. It was a wee bit "Heat" magazine by this point.
The final journey took us from here down Sunset Boulevard and back to Hollywood. This was fun as we got to take in this pretty cool and varied area. It consisted of a lot of bars, clubs, and restuarants and most of them aren't that exclusive, despite the clientele. The Viper Room was where River Phoenix died and is owned by Johnny Depp, and most people in our hostel had been and is a good music venue.
The Rainbow is another famous place where musicians tend to hang and a few other places on the strip were of reasonable pedigree too. Sadly, we never got to stop for a cheeky drink at any of them.
The Greyhound...
Once we finished the tour, we headed out in the hot sunshine down Melrose and onto North La Brea and had a
Pinks for dinner. Tasty, and I appreciate how much they appreciate the noble Jalapeno pepper in America. We then had to head back after a walk around the area to get our bags and transport sorted for our impending night journey to San Francisco.
The taxi trip took ages from our hostel to the bus station and ended up costing as the same price as a bus ticket to San Francisco! So much for the hostel's price estimation or maybe our driver decided to take a scenic route. It was a bit annoying, but the hassle with Greyhound was worse.
The bus station itself was pretty damn dodgy; a lot of dubious characters skulking about. After some gruff customer service from the desk clerk, we were directed to a queue of bags to wait
for our bus. The geniuses at Greyhound had decided to combine both the 9:40pm and the 10:00pm into one queue in the order of which passengers got to the station first (we were there an hour early too). The 9:40 bus itself then took on anyone in the queue until they were full, regardless of which bus they were booked on. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but these buses took completely different routes to San Francisco and got in 4 hours apart, with the 10:00pm one actually arriving earlier! So, if anyone had arranged pickup from either bus, these were completely void. We had deliberately booked the earlier bus to avoid the 10pm one which got in too early.
Another minor quibble was how obnoxious some people were in the queue as we got skipped by a guy who wore a "Vietnam Veteran" hat who then felt he had the right to shout at another woman, even though admittedly, she was very annoying. He then got on the bus though and decided to elevate his legs up on the seat next to him, despite it being a full bus. Wearing his Vietnam hat, the driver didn't even try
to move him once he saw his attire and it meant they couldn't seat a paying passenger.
Still, we eventually made it out of LA and as we tried to drift off to sleep in the uncomfortable seating, we looked forward to the more chilled out climate of San Francisco.
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