It's a heck of thing to look in your passport to
find you haven't been out of the country for two and a half years but that's
what we discovered while waiting to board United Flight 870 at Sydney airport:
but it certainly heightens the anticipation.
Which is good because it was a 13 hour flight at
the back of a fairly venerable 747. It was not merely the aircraft that was up
in the numbers a bit...so were the crew. They took understandable pity on us
(you know the pairs of seats just in front of the dunnies in the tail?) but
they were all well up in the paint cards age-wise, as Runyon would have put it.
That was confirmed when the purser announced one of the hosties was having her
last flight after 42 years' service with the airline. That got a big clap, as
much in awe of how long she'd stuck it as it was wishing her a good retirement.
And we lobbed in SF around midday, having left
Sydney at 3pm the same day. Time travel on the cheap. Got a shuttle van
into our Hotel, the Handlery in Union Square, and aside from feeling totally
knackered and our having gone for a walk in the wrong direction, to get over
the smell of kerosene, plastic and age old airline meals, it's all good.
Turns out we were walking through the Tenderloin
area which one well dressed man warned us was "a bit sketchy', which is a
line to remember. But the various hoboes and characters were actually less
full-on than the panhandlers around Union Square. One man with a sign saying "Why
Lie? I want a beer'' told us later that for some reason "all the Aussies
stop by'' so we gave him a dollar.
We decided there's no time like the present to
give things a shake and took the famous cable tram up and over to Fisherman's
Wharf just as the sun was setting. This was more like it. Yes, it is a totally
touristy thing to do but it's also unique. Keener travellers hang onto the
outside of the tram but we were taking it easy inside.
The wharf is actually huge and very good because
there are real fishing boats and real wholesalers down there. Anna had
fettucine with mussels and garlic sauce and a perky Californian Pinot Grigio
that handsomely outclassed the plastic bottled stuff on the plane. I kicked off
with a clam chowder and plan to eat everything ever mentioned in Damon Runyon
while I'm here, kicking off with a cheese blintz or two.
A couple from Texas explained the cloudy
weather by saying that until about September each year the currents come down
from Alaska, then they switch to come up from Hawaii. Our first day was colder
than Sydney but things picked up later.
Day two: went mad on a tandem bicycle. Magic
stuff. After a leisurely breakfast in David's delicatessen over the street we
took the 30 Bus back over to Fisherman's wharf (cable tram being chokkas) and
hired a tandem from an Irish boy who started off spruiking in a strong West
coast accent and finished in broadest Dublin once we'd rumbled him.
There's a great bike ride over the Golden Gate
Bridge to Sausalito (very chi-chi but after the panhandlers, a nice relief) and
then on to Tiburon, on the bother side. It's 18 miles in the old money and then
you get the ferry back. A perfect day out, particularly as the sun came out
later on as we were having Mexican lunch in Sausalito.
Riding a tandem requires a bit more communication
than we started with, since every gear change gives the rear passenger a bit of
a jolt. There were lots of jokes from other riders about the passenger not
pedalling but as a test I asked Anna to put her feet up, on a flat stretch, and
after a couple of hundred metres was ready to concede that her contribution
actually made a big difference.
Had
dinner in a not very exciting Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. We guessed it
was going to be a bit ordinary when we noticed that there was only one Chinese
looking family dining there. We were also told by a lady we met on the tram
that she lived in Chinatown and never
ate out there, despite (or rather because of) her being a foodie. She has
recommended a place called Brandy Ho’s
which we will give a shake to in due course.
Day
Three…Wed July 18. Bit of a sluggy day after our bike exertions. We went to the
Earthquake exhibition at the California Academy of Sciences and discovered it
was opposite the De Young museum which featured a major exhibition of Jean-Paul
Gaultier dresses. So we went our separate ways and did well.
Then
we grabbed a bus through the Haight-Ashbury area and went up to the Coit tower,
a local lookout point, and then looked at Lombard Street, the zigzag street
that has featured in a number of films we can’t currently identify without help
from Google.
From
there I went back down to Fisherman’s Wharf to look at some historic ships
while Anna went off shopping. My great (or maybe great great) grandfather used
to sail from Port Glasgow to San Francisco and back in about the 1890s, having
children at four year intervals, so it
was great to see the Balclutha, built at Connells in Glasgow, from that time
and find it fitted the narrative. He was killed by a block coming out of the
rigging , a common fate for seafarers.
And
the USS Pampanito was a World War two submarine that not only spent time in
Fremantle but also picked up 73 Allied POWs (mostly Australians) off Hainan
island after torpedoing the ship that was taking them to work in the coal mines
in Japan. There is film footage on YouTube of the oil-covered survivors being
pulled up onto the casing so it was very moving to see exactly where that
happened. It was of course amazing to see how small the sub was inside, even
being a long range job that was 115 feet long and around 1500 tonnes. Crew of
90 plus 75 survivors!
