San Francisco

The first stop after Yosemite was Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood is mayor. We did not manage to meet the great man. It is a leafy seaside town, reeking of big money, with designer shops and art galleries everywhere, very clean, and with flowers on every street corner. We wouldn’t want to live here, but it’s well worth the visit.

Then up the Pacific Highway to San Francisco. Views from the road are dramatic: long sandy beaches, crashing waves, surfers in abundance. It’s classic Beach Boys country.

We duly arrived at San Francisco with flowers in our hair, and the sun shone for most of the time. We left the car at the airport, and got the shuttle to our hotel in Chinatown. We then had three days in San Francisco. The hotel was superbly situated, a short walk from Union Square, the main shopping area of the city. In San Francisco you don’t need a car. You can either walk or use public transport: buses, trolley-buses, trams, metro or the cable cars. 

The cable car system is a wonderful anachronism, dating from the late nineteenth century. An underground cable runs permanently at 15 kph, and the ancient coaches are pulled up the hills by a handle that grips onto the cable. Passengers may hang onto the outside of the coaches. We realised that you cannot really appreciate the car chase scene in Bullit (Steve McQueen) until you have seen the wildly undulating streets of San Francisco.

We visited Alcatraz, the maximum security island prison in San Francisco bay. We had great fun exploring its dark cell blocks with an audio tour that included the voices of former warders, inmates and other residents of the Rock. Al Capone spent four unhappy years here. It’s now rather decrepit, a shadow of its former dark, bleak, forbidding self. It’s now just a bird sanctuary and tourist attraction. Peter wanted to live there; remote, lots of birds and flowers, sun shining. Is it for sale?

Fisherman’s Wharf is the tourist area of the seafront, buzzing with seafood restaurants, attractions and souvenir shops. We had a superb meal at Scoma’s restaurant, famous for its Dungeness Crabs. We later discovered that the crabs are named not after the nuclear power station in Kent, but after the port of Dungeness, Washington State.

We took a bus up to the Golden Gate Bridge. Our intention was to walk across the bridge, and then get a bus back, or perhaps a ferry from Sausalito on the other side. The first part of the plan worked well, but we then found that there is absolutely nothing on the other side; no bus, no footpath, no nothing. So we walked back over the bridge. Very bracing and photogenic in the bright sunshine. Apparently the colour of the bridge is “International Orange”, although we have yet to discover why this shade of orange is any more international than any other shade, or indeed why orange should be any more international than any other colour. But, hey, this is the USA; one can’t expect too much logic.

We visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some weird and wonderful stuff, housed in a splendid modernist building designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta in 1995.

We generally ate quite well in San Francisco, but the cost is high. Then we found a great little Chinese restaurant patronised by the locals; great food at a quarter the price of the tourist places. Yum yum!

Overall we loved San Francisco. It is one of the most cosmopolitan places we have ever visited. You can hear every language and accent under the sun, and sometimes you feel as though you are not in the USA at all. It’s open and friendly and has a buzz of excitement about it. And we were very lucky to have visited the city in bright sunshine, a city which is so frequently swathed in fog.

Thus ended our Round the World trip. Ninety days of constant travel and activity (and sometimes lazy inactivity), which we have enjoyed thoroughly. We are going to need a holiday to recover...