San Francisco: Vietnamese Delights, Street Hikes and Lonely Alcatraz Nights

Although there is no actual entry requirement to wear flowers in your hair when going to San Francisco, I felt obligated to make some sort of effort. This was the last stop on the road trip extravaganza, after all. With no fresh blooms in sight at the grimy Megabus stop at LA's Union Train station, I made do with flower print leggings from the H&M sale and stepped aboard, ready to part-sleep the eight hour journey.

I arrived in the early hours, tumbling out onto the corner where I'd waved Leah goodbye a fortnight and a half ago amid crowds of merry students and hipsters dressed in their yuletide finest for SantaCon. My hostel was in North Beach, tucked in among tired nightclubs, depressing strip clubs and a grimy looking pizza/kebab shop that was surprisingly spitting out the most delicious aromas, even at eight in the morning.

I clambered up the narrow staircase, ready to plop into whichever bed I'd been allocated, but as is always the case, it was never that easy. The fat, beardy receptionist sweating behind the counter, who I just knew had a neat collection of perfect-in-their-box action dolls alongside his sticky hentai comics on his bedroom shelf, arrogantly denied me admittance. No check-in's until 11am.
I was knackered. I was having my period. I just wanted to sleep. Show some mercy, El Beardo. He stood steadfastly by his 'dems the rules' ethos. Frickin' jobsworth.
I was forced to hang about, drowsily looking through San Fran city guides in the common area and checking at my watch every six minutes, willing the hands to turn faster.


Restless and frustrated, I gave up at the 10am mark and went for a wander around Chinatown. It was here, at the unassumingly named Latte Express, that I found sanctuary in my first ever Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich. A new love affair with a filled baked good was born.

Glazed cuts of hot pork, chicken or beef came encased in a warm flaky baguette, the savory flavours colliding with slices of pickled carrot, daikon radish, fresh cucumber and sprigs of coriander. A crunch of jalapeno brought up the rear while some sort of pate (of which I usually am not a fan) spread across the bread reminded me of herby stuffing (of which I am a massive fan) and warded off any creeping dryness. How had I not encountered the simple Banh Mi earlier in life? I found plenty of cafes and restaurants in the city that were vying for the title of Best Banh Mi in San Francisco and made a vow to try at least one every day until my flight back to Heathrow.

There are hordes of homeless in San Fran, thanks to the generous benefit system and heavy duty soup kitchens. Most city guides I'd read had waxed lyrical about the delights of the Mission district, with its graffiti muraled walls, scores of thrift shops and multicultural vibe. To be fair, you can find this sort of community in any major city. London has Brixton and Harlesden, New York - Brooklyn and Harlem.

Read between the lines and it simply means a quarter where the poor, spirited and colourful were forced to live, but in recent years has caught the eye of developers, yuppies and hipsters. I'm pretty certain there was a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's lurking about (the Waitrose counterpart) and if that's not a sign of gentrification, you and your skinny Cheap Monday jeans can take a hike. 

I walked into a ghetto Dickensian tableau the moment I turned the corner into the Mission. One of the homeless was aggressively shoulder smashing a Chinese tourist, demanding he hand over the 'money, drugs and hoes.' The poor bloke looked petrified, despite being half a foot taller, and slightly stockier, than the (most likely disease-riddled) tramp. His flashy camera quivered as he looked about for possible saviours to rescue him from this street madness. I wound the shoulder strap of my bag, already strategically placed in an anti-theft position across my body, tighter in my wrist. 

Apart from the murals and odd kitschy shop, there wasn't much else to look at or do down in the Mission. Not that I stuck about to explore. Charity shops and down-and-outs make me nervy itchy. The depressing hopelessness of all the poverty was enough to propel me out of there and back towards the twinkling lights of the city after a mere few hours. 

The next day, after a pit stop at Saigon Sandwich in the Tenderloin for a $3.50 grilled pork de-frickin-light, I headed east towards Haight and Ashbury. This is where the Summer of Love happened, where hippy central was headquartered and where the theory that peace and love would heal international conflicts was conceived. Men in parked cars murmured 'Hey grrrrrl, oh hey', as I wheezed past them.  It reminded me a lot of Camden; clouds of weed dancing above the pavements and shifty dreadlocked stoners anchoring street corners, except it was very hilly. Some streets were so steep in fact, it was in that bit in Inception where the pavements turn vertical as you walk up to them.

No trip to San Fran would be complete in my eyes without a trip out to Alcatraz. Trips to the former US fort and prison are in such high demand, visitors are advised to book up to a fortnight in advance to guarantee tickets, advice which I duly followed. I left it until the morning of my final day, taking an early ferry out of Pier 33 across choppy waters and under a suitably grey sky to the Rock. Alcatraz sits on one of the most hostile, desolate lumps of land in the world, at the mercy of violent waves rolling into the Bay and San Francisco's temperamental weather. 

Ideal for caging America's dirty and dangerous. 

 Although its life as a prison is long dead, you can't help shuffling around the damp cells mournfully, as if you yourself had been banished here for a stretch. The worst bit was when I was having a look around the isolation block and someone briefly closed the door. I'm not afraid of the dark, and it was only for a second, but it was enough to give me heeby jeebies that took at least twenty minutes to shake off.
The free audio guide that comes with a standard ticket walked me through the main facility, giving me facts and figures and former inmate accounts that explained in detail just how grim it was to live in such a place. Didn't seem that bad. The cells looked a mere hygiene rung below some of the motel rooms we'd had to sleep in when Leah and I had the car.

A recording of the experience of one former inmate said one of the worst things about the prison was its proximity to downtown San Francisco. When the wind blew the right way, it carried laughter and music from clubs in the harbour across the bay, over the rocky cliffs, right through the concrete walls, mocking the miserable jailed with the sounds of the free. Torture in itself. I could have spent most of the day rattling my plastic water bottle against the cell bars, muttering lines from the Shawshank Redemption into the shadows, but my flight was departing in the early afternoon and I had to get a wiggle on for my ride to the airport. 

I stood waiting to dump my swelled backpack at Virgin Atlantic's departures lounge, idly flicking through my photo album and looking back at three months in the most fascinating nation on the planet. Clam chowder, Elvis fanatics, leis, hurricanes and voodoo superstition, cowboys, ghost towns and deserted desert highways. Home simultaneously to the brave and free, and Earth's most notorious penitentiary. 

What a hot mess of a country.

Hey Hollywood!

Los Angeles is a peculiar one.

When I told people that I planned to spend six days there and my last three in San Francisco, I was met with a wary shake of the head and told umpteen times that I should have done it the other way round. 

But the hostel was booked and New Year's Eve fast approaching so there was no other choice but to buckle up, settle down and have a good time. 

I booked into USA Hostels Hollywood, about fifty metres from Hollywood Boulevard, it's streets lined with stars, armies of tourists, crack heads and the world's most decorated hobos. 

My room mates included a ridiculously upbeat Japanese nursery teacher and a Dutch girl who felt comfortable enough to sit me down later and regale in minute detail a recent INTIMATE liaison with a jazz-loving tour guide by the name of Doug. Doug the sex god. Why do people feel the need to unzip such personal secrets to me? I must have a trustworthy face. Another woman once whinged about her incompatibility with certain sanitary products as a result of a complicated labour following pregnancy. SHUT UP.

I woke up in the evening, in time to cash in on a hostel-run barbecue and have a look at the other guests. Arriving in a new hostel is like looking at an identity parade for disposable friends. They form a line, you size them up and select a partner in crime, you friendship expires the day one of you leaves. Perhaps a bit ruthless but completely true.

And it was at this juncture the hemispheres collided, the moons aligned, a butterfly in Chile fluttered its wings and I met my New Zealand double, Hailey. We were so alike, it was freaky. 

From her flicked black eyeliner, can't-be-arsed indifference with begfrienders, to the affection for leopard print to the chipped, glitter polish on her nails, to the beds and lockers (unallocated) in our rooms, we were the same. 

The weirdest thing of all was that she had done the exact same job in New Zealand to the one I'd left behind in London. It's not like our jobs, or even the sector we work in, are well known. It's the Diagon Alley of media. 

We swore a blood oath over cups of moonshine-spiked cocktails to knock about together the next day - Hailey's last and my first. I had heard about a World of Leggings on Melrose Avenue (rubbish and overpriced, so if you were considering going, don't) so we ambled in that direction, weaving past the hoardes of snap happy tourists outside Mann's Chinese Theatre and ducking tour hawkers screaming up and down the street for business. 

Los Angeles is so huge, with no nucleus or core, it makes it difficult to know the city. It's like a set of towns really close to each other but no one place, like Trafalgar or Times Square, where all the major events happen. There are Scientology Churches on every corner, adding to general air of surreality. The skies are circled by LAPD and tour choppers, giving you the sense of being constantly under siege and surveillance. 

Having already spent a couple of days around Venice Beach and Santa Monica pre-Hawaii, I had no urge to return to the shore, and Universal Studios held no attraction as a solo traveller so I spent most of my time wandering in and out of steam punk and vintage shops, being made to stalk celebrities around the gold-plated streets of Beverley Hills, exploring the hipster quarter of Silver Lake and gulping down the best sushi in the world. 

I was introduced to Kino Sushi by my perpetually-cheery Japanese room mate. The chef and staff cheer greetings - 'HELLO! WELCOME!' - as soon as you wander in off Hollywood Boulevard. I got a bento box which included spicy chicken teriyaki, sticky rice, prawn and vegetable tempura, miso soup, weird but tasty salad gunk and California roll sushi pieces, all for $12. Delicious. 

'Looks Just Like Devon'. Welcome to Californishire.

Shooting across Death Valley, leaving glittering Las Vegas behind, we headed to one of our final states and the Pacific Ocean. California, once governed by Arnie, home to Hollywood, land of sunshine, medicinal weed and beach bums.

The plan was to skirt around Los Angeles and head north, taking our time meandering up the Big Sur coast - a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that National Geographic voted a Drive of a Lifetime. 
We had set aside days to visit San Luis Obispo (the happiest place in America) and Monterey on the map, but had a week to fill with whatever else took our fancy.

Along the way, we stopped off at another roadside attraction, an old mining town called Calico, a couple of hours west of Vegas.
It marketed itself as a ghost town but unlike Steins, was still home to a collection of workers and gift shop owners. It was tidy and neat with a wide main street, souvenir shops serving Starbucks coffee and those old time saloon swing doors that we so longed to see. While it was fun to wander around and look at all the Western kitsch for ourselves, it lacked the soul and eerie-ness of Steins, New Mexico.

We stayed until sundown and headed further west, ending up at an appalling dive of a motel out in the Santa Clarita woodlands. The carpet was littered with the detritus of previous occupants that clung to the soles of our feet after we had wrenched our sweaty All Stars and socks off. There was also a mysterious smattering of dried blood in the shower. Luckily the TV offered some respite by allowing us to view the latest episode of Jersey Shore so we could watch Snooki, Deena and Mike 'The Situation' et al and forget about our glum surroundings.

It was probably one of the only mornings we were up, packed and on our way before 9am, such was our desperation to get out of there. We pointed the car up to Lompoc for the night and then San Luis Obispo the day after, where we explored bubblegum alley, a revolting piece of audience participant 'art'.

The short alleyway was completely covered, top to bottom, in millions upon millions of coloured gum. Some had been squeezed into tiny models and statues before being pressed onto the wall, displaying a weak stab at creativity, while others had been allowed to dry and then decorated with permanent marker. I had the strange sensation of being in Ms Trunchbull's torture chamber so hastily took my shots and made like a tree out of there.

The Californian countryside looks a lot like southern England. There was an abundance of lush green hillside from which I expected a Teletubby or Hobbit to come bouncing down, along with paddocks of lazy cows and fields full of chestnut-coloured horses. Very pleasant on the old eyeballs indeed.

We rolled into a car park on the side of the highway, facing the ocean where we had been told a seal sanctuary lay. Sure enough, there they were glistening in the winter sun, fat and slug-like, rubbing their eyes like teenagers suffering hangovers after an illegal house party.

Elderly volunteers in blue windbreakers were on hand with factoids about the creatures - the males entered into vicious battles for sexing rights with the females, and sometimes they broke free of their fenced pads and wiggled along the highway. I never saw this for myself but the lady was the expert so SHUT UP.

We stood cooing and calling to them from the elevated walkway, attempting to engage them in conversation and clapping like excited toddlers when they bothered to raise their heads in our direction.

And then we drove up in a leisurely fashion to Monterey, where using her top notch booking skills, Leah had secured a four night stay in a motel for a ridiculously cheap amount. We took it easy, sliding into holiday mode, mooching in and out of 'treasure' stores (secondhand shops), eating clam chowder on the sea front and fresh samosas in the local market and perching on the bar at various British pubs where the owner got us free entry into the 17-mile drive, a scenic route through the north end of Monterey. All we had to do was say at the gate that we were there to see our Uncle Iain. Easy as.

As the 12th of December 2012 grew closer, discussions of how to mark my 26th birthday became more persistent. What did I want to do?, Leah asked. My mum also rang from India, bellowing down the phone (which is the way most Indians talk to people on international calls) demanding to know the ins and outs of my celebration schedule. In all honesty, I wasn't bothered. I'd be happy stewing in a bar for the entirety, slowly mourning the loss of my early twenties and wondering once more, how I'd become so bloody ancient. Melodramatic.

In the end we settled on kayaking in the open sea and I'm glad we did. We saw a wild seal in action, mauling a crab in its sharp, slippery claws as if it was a cheeseburger. I stuck my feet in the terrifically cold Pacific ocean for the first time, dangling my toes in the seaweed and freaking myself out by imagining a shark gnawing my leg off, while quietly trying to race ahead of the Gass; Expert Kayaker.

the Gass fails to give way. OFFICER!

In the evening we made use of the motel's hot tub and sat drinking $7 Californian champagne under a clear sky, making absurd wishes whenever I caught a shooting star.

'I wish for a tumble in the hay with Captain America!',

'I wish for the power to command all the creatures of the sea!',

'I wish for a real-life hoverboard!',


'I wish for more champagne. We've bloody run out'.

Et fin.