After learning that Beirut, Mogadishu and Belgrade were booked, I reluctantly agreed to make a trip to Los Angeles. A city most famous for the innumerable ways you might die while visiting, L.A. has all the charm of a Siberian prison camp with few of the amenities.

Unlike my home city of New York, which has become significantly less dangerous, L.A. has been a leading innovator in creating new ways to harm people. Random shootings, riots, road rage, gang violence and carjackings all have a special place in the city's culture.

On some days, your only hope of avoiding the various mobs of Crips, Bloods and out-of-work actors looking for blood is to hide in the suffocating smog that envelopes the city. Even on a nice day, L.A. has a dark gray color that offers a striking contrast to the blond-haired, orange, perma-tanned species that make up its populace.

Because of the smog, the entire city has a vague dirtiness, like a kitchen after a grease fire. Though the air technically supports life, you'd be better off doing all of your breathing before you get off the plane.

Should you survive the aforementioned dangers and manage to avoid being caught in the crossfire created by various rappers shooting at each other, you're likely to be killed by an earthquake. And if you escape that, all you'll get for your trouble is a chance to visit a city that could make a Kosovar refugee wistful for his makeshift tent in Macedonia.

When not hiding from imminent danger, Los Angelenos spend their time sitting in traffic. The city has almost no public transportation and to get to work on time, most people have to leave home before they've gotten there the previous day.

Although L.A. has enormous eight-lane highways, they all become backed up as soon as they open. This happens because the guy who needs to get off at the next exit stays in the farthest lane until the last possible moment. He invariably waits to make his move across seven rows of traffic until the moment his action can cause one of those of multicar pileups you have to call Ponch and John to clean up.

New highways are constantly added, but this seems to be done in a haphazard manner. Some enormous roads merely trail off into nowhere, while the ones that lead where you're going slowly shrink from eight lanes into a narrow dirt path.

Luckily, Los Angeles has few destinations worth visiting. The city has no culture to speak of, and its roster of restaurants consists primarily of places serving fusion cuisine.

For those unfamiliar with the term, "fusion" means taking ingredients that have no business being in the same dish and combining them. Chicken with chocolate sauce, salmon milkshakes and hybrid Mexican/Chinese or Thai/Italian dishes represent the fare in this genre.

Compared to spending a few days in Los Angeles, a Peace Corp trip to bathe lepers seems relaxing. You may not get to see a Dodgers game while visiting the Chad, the Sudan or Angola, but I'll take a pack of roving lions over a gaggle of rampaging Los Angelistas any day.