Explore L.A.’S Beachfront - Carless The Bicycle Is The Vehicle Of Choice For Exploring L.A.’S South Bay Area

The Beach Boys sang of a sandand-saltwater Elysium, where nothing mattered but playing in the ocean, romance and tanning rays. And millions of ‘60s kids became daydream surfers, fantasizing their way to Southern California and the Pacific.

The fantasy endures on L.A.’s South Beach, a crescent of wavewashed shoreline more than 20 miles long. The very strand that inspired the Beach Boys is only about 20 minutes by car from Los Angeles International Airport. It still looks like the old album covers, and it feels like the surf songs sounded, a dream of warmth and freedom.

Doing L.A.’s South Beach is one of the country’s great urban outdoors experiences. It’s also unlike any other L.A. experience. For one thing, it’s possible to go to the beach and envy, rather than pity, the Los Angelenos who live there. L.A.’s heavily publicized problems - earthquakes, riots, smog and congestion - are very little in evidence.

And you don’t need a car. The vehicle of choice for exploring L.A.’s South Bay, which has great beaches and a rock-and-cliff-bound peninsula, is the bicycle. The South Bay Trail follows the beach for 21 miles, paved and entirely free of cars, from Santa Monica southward to Redondo Beach. South of Redondo, a marked seven-mile bike route on roads follows the higher and more rugged coastline of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Biking the L.A. oceanfront is a worthy recreational end in itself, or the means of getting to great ocean sport. The beaches have near-infinite possibilities for swimming, surfing, body boarding, skimboarding, boardsailing, sunbathing, ogling, showing-off and practically anything else human beings might want to do at the ocean’s edge. Bicycle and equipment rentals are legion, and guides and teachers are available. Palos Verdes, a miniature of more rugged, wild Central California coasts, has good tidepooling and diving. The peninsula’s Point Vicente, dominated by a lovely lighthouse, offers whale-watching.

Besides the recreational possibilities, the trail is a living cultural essay on beach life, taking in Santa Monica, once frowzy but now ridiculously chic, and Venice, where public weirdness is an industry.

Marina Del Rey, bordering Venice on the south, is the best place for outof-towners to book a hotel room. What “the Marina,” as locals call it, lacks in character, it makes up in medium-to-high-priced hotels and motels and proximity to the airport.

Just south of the Marina, the trail passes a sewage treatment plant and the seaward runways of the airport.

The cyclist’s payback for these eyesores, the only urban ugliness on the route, is a particularly uncrowded stretch of trail, wide and curving, for fast riding.

After the sprint, the trail fronts a trio of lovely towns, all names ending with the word “Beach” - Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo.

This is where the West Coast surfing lifestyle, dream and reality, began. In 1907 in Redondo, man first surfed in North America.

The pioneer wave-rider was George Freeth, a half-English Hawaiian brought to California by a Redondo promoter and billed as “the man who could walk on water.” Freeth is honored with a bust on Redondo’s pier.

Hermosa memorializes a popular local youth, killed in a car accident on the way home from surfing, with a statue of a young man on a surfboard.

It was these South Bay beaches that moved the Beach Boys to sing oo-wah about surf, sand and girls in bikinis, making the rest of the country unbearably jealous.

South of Redondo, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which feels strangely isolated and quiet, as if it were hundreds of miles from Los Angeles, cuts off the beach with westward-jutting highlands.

In calm water, the peninsula’s rocky oceanfront parks have good snorkeling and scuba diving from shore.

Those who’d rather not submerge can poke in tidepools, or follow the bike route to the bluff-top Point Vicente Interpretive Center, one of Southern California’s premier whalewatching spots.

December through March, hundreds of gray whales pass close offshore, and docents and trained whale census-takers help visitors understand what they’re seeing.

If you prefer your sea creatures wild, such as the gray whales passing Point Vicente, there’s a message of hope in the buildings and pools of the defunct MarineLand, about a halfmile beyond the interpretive center.

This used to be one of L.A.’s megaattractions, where Disneyland-style crowds paid to watch captive cetaceans and other animals put on shows.

The ocean theme park didn’t make it.

The gray whales did, proving that wildness and beauty do stand a chance, even in Los Angeles.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: If you go Orientation: Ask the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau (213) 689-8822 and the Marina Del Rey Visitors Bureau (310) 305-9545 about beach area motels and hotels, public transportation and other basics. Cycling maps: The most current and colorful map of the South Bay Trail and other L.A. County bike trails is free from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (213) 244-6539). Bikes: Rentals are legion in beach towns along the South Bay Trail. Bring your own helmet and U-lock. Hardcore cyclists will want to bring their own bikes. Major air carriers provide bike boxes and charge supplemental baggage fees of about $50 each-way. Call your airline to check on the charge and packing requirements. Reading matter: Loren MacArthur’s “L.A. Bike Rides” (Chronicle Books) includes the South Bay Trail in its description of 37 rides. For off-bike activities, from shopping to ocean sports, look into the chapter on the Los Angeles Coast in Ray Riegert’s excellent Hidden Southern California: The Adventurer’s Guide (Ulysses Press). Boating, snorkeling and scuba: Call the Redondo Beach Visitors Bureau (310) 374-2171 to find out about whale-watching by boat, and about dive shops that rent gear and wet suits and point customers to the best shoreaccessed dives on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Learn surfin’: George Beard, manager of E.T. Surfboards (310) 379-7660) in Hermosa Beach, guarantees that neophytes will be up and surfing in the first 1-hour session. Private lessons are $75 apiece. Santa Monica Beach’s professor of wave riding is Todd Roberts, whose home surf shop is Z.J. Boarding House (310) 392-5646). Todd charges $35 an hour for private instruction, with a minimum two-hour opening lesson. Watching whales: The Point Vicente Interpretive Center (310) 377-5370) is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, adult admission $2.