My Impressions

Against all odds and with lots of sweat, I made all connecting flights and touched down at Los Angeles International Airport on the evening of 16 August. My bag, on the other hand, had stayed in London. It would be hard to claim that I had not been warned about flights with layovers in the midst of the post-Covid travel craze. But I’ll save a few bucks where I can, and thus took detours via London and Denver on the way to California.

A short stop in Los Angeles

David picked me up at the curb and we headed straight to Soho in downtown LA to meet his friend Tim and rinse off my jetlag with beers and cocktails. Raj, a friend of Tim’s, pulled up outside a fancy rooftop bar in his Porsche Carrera. The evening was spent with deeply philosophical conversations about how to escape the rat races that are modern day careers and take advantage of the brave, new and post-Covid world to earn a decent living by working less. Tim and Raj would head for the Monterrey Car Week the next morning, an event, so we were told, only attended by elderly men and significantly younger women who were remunerated for their presence. The former of these two groups apparently included a significant number of what Raj fondly referred to as “LA douchebag Porsche drivers.” Although Raj was clearly not among them, it was hard to fully comprehend what distinguished this specific group from the wider population of people who used expensive, German-built sports cars as their means of transportation in Los Angeles or, for that matter, what exactly the appeal was in attending Monterrey Car Week in the first place. My lack of comprehension may be related to that habit of saving bucks where I can and never having spent more than a few thousand Euros on buying cars second- to fifth-hand.

California bid me welcome a second time the next morning at a hip LA coffee shop, with a heart disease inducing breakfast of a sandwich-turned-burger and my first coffee that cost north of 5$. We ate breakfast in the car, as one does, and headed in the opposite direction of Monterrey, towards San Diego. Something reminded us of Dolly Parton along the way but before we noticed we had arrived in Encinitas, David’s home town.

Nothing wrong with coffee shops and food in the US, right?

Encinitas and San Diego

Over the next ten days or so I shamelessly crashed David’s family vacation. Together with Chloé and their two daughters, Rose and Joyce, he was spending his French month of rest that is commonly referred to as August at his parents’. After having dislodged Rose from her bed in the first two nights, I was moved to Ali’s and Jeff’s, college friends of David’s who had just renovated a house with two spare guest rooms and an Airstream caravan in the driveway. Ali and Jeff also extended their exceptional hospitality to Peter, who made his way down from the San Francisco Bay to join us for a weekend.

I was introduced to La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe, where real estate prices were even more astronomical than in other stretches of coast north of San Diego, an completely unreasonable number of taco and burrito, coffee and ice cream shops, and paid visits to downtown San Diego, where the retired USS Midway aircraft carrier was a major tourist attraction. To a kid of the 1980s, the density of Top Gun references and merchandise was as impressive as the size of these frightening war machines, of which two active and even bigger models lay across the bay in the docks of San Diego naval base.

USS Midway, San Diego Naval Base and Point Loma

The Mexican food, which mainly came in the form of tacos, was of varying quality but invariably expensive and outdone only by the eye-popping prices of coffee, with espressos regularly selling for more than 30 minutes’ worth of labour at Californian minimum wage, excluding 15–20% tips. A day of offshore fishing by David, his dad and uncles, yielded several impressive specimens of yellow- and bluefin tuna, one of which was instantly transformed into a lavish family feast. I tried to reciprocate the generosity later that week, with a classic Austrian meal of Fritattensuppe followed by Schweinsbraten and Knödel. Tip Top Meats, an institution of a German butcher’s and deli in nearby Carlsbad, was a reliable source of authentic ingredients, including 2kg of Sauerkraut.

Tuna vs. Schweinsbraten

Summer conditions generally produced small and inconsistent surf, most suitable for longboards. I borrowed and rented boards of varying sizes and explored several of the beaches between Del Mar and Carlsbad, including Suckouts and Tabletops near Cardiff by the Sea, home to 1990s surf superstar Rob Machado. Peter and I drove straight down to Moonlight Beach one morning, where waves somehow looked just a bit better at the end of D Street than anywhere else. I did wonder, while paddling out, why all of the few surfers around me seemed to be less than half my age, were wearing jerseys and surfed circles around me. Only when one of them asked politely whether I was in the heat did I take note of the flags planted on the beach and the judging tower. I tried to leave the contest area quickly and without showing much embarrassment. Meanwhile, Peter was removed from the scene by onlookers who pointed out that his blue rash guard would be easily confused with a contest jersey.

Californian beaches attract a broad variety of creatures

Where to next?

As much as I enjoyed the southern Californian life style, a number of factors, including local coffee prices and the prospect of handmade tacos, roadside ceviche and stupidly cold cheladas, made crossing the border south of San Diego more and more appealing. Baja California seemed conveniently on the way to Mexico City, where I was due to show up in September to pay a visit to another friend, and most Californians I met were raving about its endless surf potential, let alone the cheap wine, food and lodging. With some 1600km in west-facing coast between Tijuana and Los Cabos, however, it was not an easy task to pick a destination. To make decisions even more difficult, Ali and Jeff would not stop talking about a the coast of Nayarit, on the west coast of the Mexican mainland southeast of the southern tip of Baja. They had been particularly enchanted by a town called Sayulita, which, according to Jeff, had some but not unpleasant tourism and always some surf in its vicinity. I booked a bargain flight ticket from Tijuana to Puerto Vallarta and bid farewell to California.