Daytime temperatures had risen steadily since we arrived in Yosemite and the snow had started to clear from the roads. On the morning we were due to leave, we woke to find light rain falling, and the tops of the mountains shrouded in low cloud. Road signs indicated that chains were still required. Initially, thick snow still lay at the roadside in some sheltered places, but the road became clear quite quickly and we were pleased to be able to take the chains off after a few more miles. After a long, steep descent, we emerged from the forested mountains into grassy foothills. Large orchards and vineyards appeared as descended further. The rain increased as we made our way towards San Francisco and intensified as we ran into heavy traffic in the commuter area. Crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge, we couldn't see anything of the Bay. Negotiating the steep, one way streets of San Francisco at peak time was somewhat challenging, but we managed fairly well, only having to go round the block a couple of times before stopping outside our hotel. In an extraordinary piece of good luck, we saw that the rental car depot was directly across the road from the hotel. With a couple of trips, we offloaded everything from the car into our room in the hotel, which was a small, European-style bed and breakfast place, run by an American, his German wife, their golden retriever who knew all there was to know about begging and their Manx cat, who had the most amazing repertoire of cat-talk.
As we walked over Nob Hill to a very pleasant restaurant for an excellent meal to celebrate our wedding anniversary, we noticed a loud humming sound at some of the street intersections. It took us a little while to realise that it came from the moving cables which pull the cable cars up the hills and which are located underneath the roads.Saturday 12th December
The San Francisco authorities appear to have an ambivalent attitude towards tourists. There are the obvious tourist attractions such as the cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge and the island of Alcatraz, which are promoted, but it seems to us as though tourism is something that the city puts up with rather than sets out to encourage more generally. The Visitors’ Centre is located underground near several transport hubs but it was not signposted and it was staffed by people who seemed wholly uninterested in providing information and useful brochures. Unlike most other visitors’ centres we have been in, it was virtually empty on the occasions we went in, even though the city centre was full of tourists. We never found an overall map showing the routes, stops and schedules for the city’s public transport system (the MUNI), which includes buses, trams, cable cars and a clever light rail network in which the trains are underground in the city centre, but become trams in the outlying streets. (Our benchmark for city transport maps is the remarkably comprehensive and clear bus services map in Barcelona - San Francisco doesn’t even come close). We gained the impression that the San Francisco public transport system is comprehensive, efficient and reasonably pleasant to use, but information about it is sadly lacking. We had to discover by trial and error what our 3-day “passport” did and didn’t cover and where the various routes went.
Before leaving the hotel in the morning, we spent time on the phone, unsuccessfully trying to get through to the concert hall box office for tickets for a concert by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. In the end we decided to go directly to the venue. It was intermittently raining very heavily, with a strong wind making umbrellas difficult to handle and of limited use. (Memories of Auckland weather sprang to mind). We took the cable car downtown and then watched as the driver and brakesman put their backs into turning the car around on its turntable.
By the time we had wandered around for an hour deciphering the transport systems before finding an appropriate bus, then walked half a mile to the concert hall in Van Ness Avenue, our shoes and trouser legs were soaked. Having found that there were no tickets available, we ran into the nearest and, indeed, the only visible eatery to dry out a bit and warm up with some soup. Because it was so wet, we didn’t really appreciate the grand buildings around the area (the Concert Hall, the Opera House, the City Hall and the California State building), but instead headed back to hotel in mid-afternoon to change our clothes.
The rain and wind revealed the value of a San Francisco peculiarity. The names of streets are imprinted in the concrete at the curbside at intersections, as well as being displayed on signs on posts, in the universal way. When pedestrians are struggling against the wind and rain, with their bent heads covered by hoods or hats, behind umbrellas held at 45 degrees, it is much easier to see the street names at their feet than to search for a sign 15 feet above the roadway, somewhere around the intersection.
Later, through cancellations, we managed to get a couple of seats for the evening concert so we retraced our steps, had a quick meal, then walked briskly to the concert hall. Fortunately the rain had eased off. The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is very modern and has a grand and distinctive interior design, mostly in white plaster and light-coloured wood, with idiosyncratic touches such as the several small ruched drapes, rather like roman blinds, fitted along the tops of the walls on both sides. The imposing organ has silver-coloured pipes. The concert was an excellent combination of romantic classicism and modern atonality, with well-known works by Beethoven set alongside two unfamiliar pieces by Webern, one a surprisingly accessible and delightful arrangement of Schubert dances. The orchestra and the celebrated piano soloist, Emanuel Ax, were highly impressive and the music was thoroughly enjoyable. The audience seemed to be comprised of a range of people with varying knowledge and sophistication, similar to those at most concerts we have attended in the UK. However, as in most aspects of US life, the two ends of the range were more exuberant and objectionable than in Britain. Some of the audience managed not only to applaud between movements, but actually within a movement. At the other extreme, there were many who expressed their sophisticated appreciation of the performances with prolonged applause, punching of the air with their fists,shouts and whoops, and one announced to his companion, in a voice audible to everyone within thirty feet, that “you’ll never hear another performance as good as that, ever”. We wondered how he knew.
Sunday 13 th December
Carolyn realised that she had left her reading glasses in the rental car but the rental company, who traced the car to Monterey, could not find them. We suspect that the spectacles are still lying in the natty and useful lidded compartment at the top of the dashboard. We were also not very surprised to hear that the car, which we had driven for 9000 miles, without an accident, along busy freeways, through city streets, across deserts, and in snow, ice and rain, had been crashed by the next hirer.
It was overcast with traces of rain as we walked through the financial district, whose buildings, though not the height of those in New York, still created a canyon-like effect. All the buildings here, like most buildings in San Francisco, were put up after the 1906 earthquake and the even more disastrous fire which followed it a few days later. As in all of the US cities we have visited, most of the commercial buildings are very recent.
We walked to the stylish Ferry Building, which has recently been restored and turned into a gentrified market area, while continuing as a terminus for some ferry routes across San Francisco Bay. We took the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail service, which we found is not covered by our 3-day transport pass, contrary to the information in our guide book. The automatic ticket machines employ an extraordinarily complicated, slow and frankly barmy procedure which defaults to a mid-price fare, then requires the user to add or subtract amounts in one dollar or five cent steps to reach the desired fare! Fortunately, while the lack of public information and official assistance for tourists has dismayed us, we have been impressed by the helpfulness and friendliness of the locals who have often come up to us as we puzzled over a map (or, in this case, struggled with a ticket machine) and offered to help.
We made our way to the Mission area of the city for a free City Guide walk on 'Murals and the multi-ethnic community'. As is often the case with these volunteer-staffed walks, it was interesting and informative, giving a better picture about the lives of ordinary people than commercial or municipally-run tours do. There are numerous murals in this area of San Francisco, some very large, with a few covering whole ends or sides of buildings.
As in most parts of the world, the murals either create narratives for largely illiterate local populations, or make political statements. 
Most of them in the Mission area were created in the latter part of the 20th century, initally linked to protests about Central American issues and the involvement of the US in the region. A few of those have been targets for defacement and a couple have had to obliterated by the authorities to stop repeated vandalism. More recent murals, often created with regeneration funds, tell stories about people who lived and worked in the area, often for the benefit of the local community.
The tour also covered the architecture of houses in an area which was on the edge of the three-day fire in 1906. Hence, most of the buildings are Edwardian, but there are Victorian houses remaining where fire breaks were established. The descriptions of the architectural features and the changes in use of some of the buildings were quite interesting, but inevitably for those of us from a much older built environment, it’s difficult to get excited about a building only just over 100 years old.
Before returning to the hotel, we had a quick bite in a simple Peruvian cafe in a rather tatty small arcade in a low- income area. The concentration of the hispanic population was brought home to us by the difficulty we had in communicating with the young server, whose English was little better than our Spanish. With a couple of the household staff at the hotel also speaking Spanish and very little English, the changing demographic of the US is very apparent.
Monday 14th December
We woke to an overcast day, but it was not raining. After taking the cable car to Market St, we caught the so-called “Historic Tram” along the waterfront to famous Fisherman's Wharf, a large area of redeveloped docks which is now home to pointless shops, tacky tourist attractions and mostly low-end eateries. It is also the departure point for many of the boat tours in San Francisco Bay, which are heavily promoted by hustlers on the pavements. Most of the boat tours do not run at this time of the year, but we were able to take a tour out to the Golden Gate Bridge and back, with a quick circumnavigation of Alcatraz Island. With only a small number of people on the boat, there was no difficulty in getting to the side rail for unimpeded views.
The Bridge was every bit as impressive as various familiar photographs of it had led us to expect.
Alcatraz (or, at least, the famous maximum security prison built on it) appeared to be as grim as suggested in the several Hollywood movies in which it has featured.
We learned three surprising bits of information about Alcatraz, which is only about 1½ miles from the city. The first was that most of the prison staff lived on the Island with their families, and their children went to school on the mainland by launches, which were also used to convey prisoners to and from the Island. Secondly, there is no water source on the Island, so all of the water required for the prison and the families of the prison staff had to be transported there from the mainland. (This was one of the factors contributing to the closure of the prison in 1963, on grounds of the expense of maintaining and supplying it). Thirdly, some years after the closure of the prison, the Island was occupied for 19 months, by a group of American Indians who claimed it as tribal land, until they were evicted and the Island was designated as a National Park.
While we were out on the water it was a real thrill to see a pelican skimming the tops of the waves. Though these are now returning to the area, with breeding pairs on Alcatraz and other sites around the Bay, the appearance of one during our boat trip was so unexpected that we didn’t manage to photograph it as it passed by.On our return to land, we walked up Telegraph Hill, to Coit Tower, named after the benefactor whose bequest enabled its construction.
Lillie Hitchcock Coit was a feisty young woman who ran away to marry a man disapproved of by her family. She later returned to the city, displaying some eccentric characteristics, in wearing men’s clothes on occasions and becoming the mascot (and later the only female full member) of the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No.5 Fire Brigade. The tower is thought by some to resemble the nozzle of a fire hose. Its interior is decorated with murals, painted by several Diego Rivera-inspired artists, depicting the life and times of the city and the US in the 1930s. There is an elevator to take paying visitors to the top, but there were few takers for it, as the overview of the city from the carpark at the base of tower was panoramic and unimpeded. The streets in the area are among the steepest in the city, at about 30 degrees, with stepped pavements for pedestrians.
We took a circuitous route down through an old warehousing area of the city, much of which has been redeveloped into offices. Unfortunately, there was no historical information on the buildings in the area (or elsewhere in the city) for visitors. We made our way through the famous Chinatown area – the large Chinese population is very evident across the city, but nowhere more so than in Chinatown, where (at least at this time of the year) there was little English being spoken on the streets, even among young people. Later in the evening, we returned to Chinatown for a decent meal in a large, nearly full restaurant, in which half the customers were Chinese.
Wednesday 15th December
We made our way by underground rail/streetcar out to the Golden Gate Park, in the west of the city, passing through the Haight-Ashbury district, made famous by the beat generation of the 1960s (“tune in, turn on, drop out”), to an area that appeared to be predominantly populated by Chinese. Again, there were very few signs for pedestrians around the perimeter of the park but passers-by spontaneously assisted us with directions. It is a large park, with some semi-wild spaces, a lot of mature trees and a lake with an astonishing range of birds. Several men and women, largely Chinese, exercised by walking vigorously (or, in a few cases, ambling) around the perimeter of the lake. With limited time, we saw only a small part of the Park. We walked quickly through the Botanical Gardens, with areas dedicated to plants from different countries and zones around world, mostly within the Pacific Rim, including an area with familiar New Zealand trees and shrubs.
Philip under a very large Pohutukawa!
Making our way back to the hotel, we congratulated ourselves for having become moderately proficient in finding our way around and using the different parts of the city’s transport system, after four days, just in time for our departure.
Although the BART system includes a service to San Francisco International Airport, in view of the size and weight of our luggage we took a taxi. As standby passengers, we had to wait until embarkation was well under way before we were allocated seats for the flight to London. It was an uncomfortable and gruelling flight, but we finally made it back to cold Blighty.
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