There's always been a mystique about California. Maybe it was the allure of Hollywood, or the pace of Los Angeles, or animal skulls washed by the drifting sand in Death Valley.
But most of all, it was San Francisco, the city that is supposed to epitomise counter culture, where the weirdos of the world gather together in peace and harmony, my kind of people. This thought process kept me humming "If you're going to San Francisco" and "Walking with my baby down in San Francisco Bay" and blowing the occasional raspberry to compensate for the lack of a kazoo. (Clapton fans, you know what I'm talking about.)
You know you are from San Francisco when... This list dropped into my email postbox as I prepared to leave Germany for London and on to San Francisco for my first visit to America's left coast:
- Your co-worker tells you she/he has eight body piercings but none are visible.
- You make over $100 000 a year and still can't afford a house.
- You take a bus and are shocked that two people are carrying on a conversation in English.
- Someone says tenderloin — you don't think of steak.
- You never bother looking at the MUNI line schedule because you know the drivers have never seen it.
- You can't remember ... is pot illegal?
- You've been to more than one baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.
- A really great parking space can move you to tears.
- You know that anyone wearing shorts in July must be visiting from Ohio.
- Your child's 3rd grade teacher has two pierced ears, a nose ring and is named "Breeze," and, after telling that to a friend, your friend still needs to ask if the teacher is male or female.
- You are thinking of taking an adult class but you can't decide between yoga, aroma therapy, conversational mandarin or building your own web site class.
- A man walks on MUNI in full leather regalia and crotchless chaps. You don't even notice.
- A woman walks on MUNI with live poultry. You don't notice.
- You think any guy with a George Clooney haircut must be visiting from the midwest.
- You know that any woman with a George Clooney haircut is not a tourist.
- You keep a list of companies to boycott.
The MUNI, it turns out, is the Municipal Railway — which naturally is mostly made up of buses. I hopped onto the first line I could find and followed my time-honoured method of tourism — choose a stop where interesting-looking people get off and follow them. In this case, I found myself standing at the ferry station with a statue of Gandhi overlooking the plaza with the Bay Bridge stretching off into the distance. The interesting-looking people piled onto a ferry destined for Sausalito, and disappeared out of my life forever.
Fisherman's Wharf is a rather pleasant if somewhat guano-encrusted platform that gazes across at Alcatraz. Off in the distance, the Golden Gate bridge lunges across the waters of the bay — somewhat rust-coloured rather than golden. A half hour walk towards the bridge brought me to the Marina where a sleek black shape glided silently around dozens of tethered yachts breaking the surface for air ever so often — definitely the biggest seal I have seen.
Joggers in designer sportswear zipped past me by the dozen. In a car surrounded by dozens of empty parking bays, a couple steamed up the windows of their battered Volvo. On the lawn beneath a sign saying "NO team sports, NO soccer, NO rugby", two separate groups were enjoying a quick game of soccer.
And I realised my problem. I've been spoiled by Cape Town. San Francisco is an extraordinarily pretty city, but really pales into insignificance against the beauty of the Cape Peninsula. Sunset over the Pacific at Half Moon Bay south of SF is gorgeous, but sunset over the Atlantic from Chapman's Peak is awe-inspiring.
The following day, I went out to hug a giant redwood. "Nice place you've got here," I told the tree which looked down on me with the collective wisdom of thousands of years, "but I think mine is nicer."