An old travel note about Venice Beach
Soundtrack by Billie Eilish:
I hadn't done any solo travel since 2018, so the trip felt slightly daunting, specially at the beginning. Unlimited champagne at the Emirates Lounge certainly helped to muster some bravery and kick off the eternal 16 hours flight with the right foot.
During my first month in Dubai, an “experienced resident” told me that there would be times like this. Times when it would feel absolutely necessary to escape from this town at least for a little while. I wasn't expecting to feel that way anytime soon: The blinding lights of Dubai and the sight of sunset with its unfathomable towers on the foreground still moves me to awe, 1 year and some seven months into the adventure.
But yes: Back in April (2023) this town made me feel extremely lonely. It was a bad case of the Dubai blues. I am opposed to the silly petit-bourgeois misconception of Dubai as city of bling (It seems to obscure the fact that it was built and is kept alive by the laborious hands of great immigrants of the working class), but I did feel like escaping to a place with more grit and odd faces and fewer Ferraris. A place with landscapes, a penchant for art and happy-go-lucky people not afraid to show themselves without the makeup. LA was (obviously) not it: But Hank Moody’s Venice Beach struck me as a more suitable, grittier option.
And it delivered: For starters, I have never been to a place with people so eager to be photographed. The street portraiture opportunities were off the charts. Plus: You can consider yourself lucky if you have walked from Venice in the direction of Santa Monica on a spring afternoon, the sun setting somewhere behind the mountains and turning the afternoon orange as the silhouettes of the pier in the horizon promise an evening full of amusements. If you are travelling solo, there is very little appeal to the pier’s roller coasters and ferris wheels, but the beachfront delivers an incredible little journey when the sun is ready to set: It is somewhat of a concoction of California’s free spirit, hollywood’s showmanship and Baywatch vibes (minus Pamela) all embodied in the movement of the roller skaters, the agitated theatrics of all kinds of buskers, the dog strollers and all the other characters that seem to flow from a river of endless odd and endless cool. I dare say that there is no other place in the world that offers this kaleoidoscopic ensemble of happy-go-lucky company to a fella' strolling solo towards the sunset.
And so, to keep it short and at the risk of sounding like an Instagram reel, I will say that Venice was healing indeed. In my case: Venice, with a small dose of LA (The LACMA has an incredible collection of Picassos). But Hell no: I will not succumb to the platitude of saying that this trip helped me “find myself”. I felt lonely and slightly lost before I started it, but this social media self-help trend wherein solo travel is recommended as a way to “find oneself” strikes me as very corny and as part of the affliction (or at least a symptom of it), not the remedy. If at all, in the Instagram-obsessed Zeitgeist that we live in, in this strange moment of history where you can be an “influencer” with very little in your head to “influence” about, what we need is exactly the opposite: We need more people able to “lose themselves”, to get over themselves.
That strikes me as a more sensible proposition: F%k your aggrandised sense of self. Solo travel with its endless silences and opportunities to think is more interestingly viewed as a way to put yourself in context. In the context of this incredible blue marble that we inhabit and the nooks and crannies of another city, another culture, another patch of land and the joys and sorrows of its denizens. If experiencing all that first hand in complete solitude doesn’t put yourself in context, I don’t know what will. The epidemic of homelessness and destitution and general decadence that some American urban centres (even previously affluent ones) are experiencing, for example, should give you some pause and some hints on why the MAGA crowd seems to be such a loud voice in American politics. This is a very complicated and incredibly interesting planet and you are just a tiny part of it. A very tiny part.
And so I am now a fervent advocate of solo travel. I am proud of counting myself as part of this group of brave people who don’t flinch at the adventure that is seeing a new part of the world in silence. I think it’s immensely more interesting to use travel as a recipe against the blues if you carry the humble intention to listen carefully and learn, if you go out and about trying to find reasons to be in awe with this world and its landscapes and man-made contraptions. I am not entirely sure what is meant by “finding oneself”, but with some luck, the right kind of solo travel can put someone in the position of meeting fascinating “new” people and the way they lead their lives. A close and careful and compassionate look at the lives and ways of others might indeed give us some insights about ours’.
