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.

WE AT THA' SLATS! - Las Vegas

Las Vegas; a theme-park for adults, where the ride is a rollercoaster of your personal finances and thousands of dreams are crushed and reformed from a pile of smouldering betting slips in a heartbeat.

It's not for the faint-hearted, but even those who detest extensive neon lighting and unrelenting garishness will find a soft spot for this city of the perpetual weekend in the Nevadan desert.

Because we had the foresight to book about five months in advance, we were able to secure a room in OAP Central, The Flamingo on Las Vegas strip for about £115 for two of us for a four night epic.

We crawled into the city, our flame red Dodge Avenger inching past landmarks like the MGM Grand, New York New York casino and the legendary fountains of the Bellagio.

The pavements were crammed with all kinds of curious creatures that form the spectrum of humanity; it was like Noah's sodding Ark for delinquents. Tramps and vagabonds battling for supremacy over the bubble-gum stained pavements in front of McDonald's, rich kids sweating the previous night's champagne indulgence into the doorways of Gucci and Prada, studded motorheads chewing on leathery cheeseburgers at the Harley Davidson casino and bumbag-wearing retirees on holiday from their Florida sheltered accomodation, trying their luck at a game of craps and sucking faces after a few hours at Margaritaville. All were there, all were hopeful.

After throwing our stuff in our pink-fluff bedecked room, we headed out to join the masses, clucking in annoyance when small children and pensioners got in our way. Long gone was the slow, easy stride we'd picked up from the desert. We had a session to get on with. Didn't these slow pokes know there was FREE CHAMPERS to be had on the casino floor?

After submitting ourselves to a screening for the pilot of a TV show at the MGM Grand (the show, starring McLovin of SuperBad, was okay, but a little too try-hard with the jokes) we made it to the glitzy, ritzy and snazmattazmic Bellagio and slid onto the faux leather stools in front of the penny slot machines, trying not to flag down the gliding waitresses too enthusiastically.

I fed the machine a $1 note and slowly tapped the 'Place Bet' button, making sure the 1 cent light was lit. Finally, after losing a dismal 43 cents thanks to my paltry bets, my peripherial vision detected a middle-aged blonde woman picking her way towards me, red-lipsticked mouth stretched into a smile that didn't quite meet her eyes and order book at the ready.

'Drink, honey?' she asked.

'Yes please', I showed her my teeth and said in the hesitant Hugh-Grant-in-Four-Weddings-manner that foreigners associate with every Briton that ever lived, 'erm... Would it be alright if I had a glass of champagne please?'

'SURE! 'Course you can hun', she beamed, properly, genuinely now. 'You want the same sweetie?' she looked at Leah, who was aghast at my request for such extravagance. 'No problem, I'll be right back. Love that accent'.

living the high life

And that was how we whiled away the first portion of our evening in Vegas: playing the pennies but only as a front to attract more waitresses and their seemingly endless shipment of alcohol.

When our bums got sore and we tired of winning scraps on the machines, we made our way to Caesar's Palace where a suited and booted man named Jesus stood guard at the gates, armed with nightclub fliers for tipsy girls on a mission to spend as little green as possible. HELLO.

Despite our jeans and jumpers combo, Jesus flagged us down and furnished us with little pieces of card that entitled us to free admission to PURE, Caesar's nightclub, with free drinks until midnight. Now, under normal circumstances, we're not the kind of girls who go and do MTV-dancing in dark, anonymous nightclubs where banter is out of the question and the primary aim for most attendees is to attract a mate. But, open bar. 
A friend from home was also in town and planning to make a beeline for the same club later that night. So it made sense to go, load up and leave like the casual Cinderellas we were when the clock stuck twelve. How bad could it be?

ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS.

It was a master remix of a night out in Watford, Chingford, Newcastle and Glasgow rolled into one atrocious bump-and-grind session. The women wore tight bodycons (even those with a few extra lumps and bumps had ill-advisedly managed to winch themselves into one, doing that shallow, quick breathing thing to ensure their lung capacity stayed at a minimum and they didn't tear their side seams) with deep necklines. Ankle-breaker heels on, hairspray threatening to breach health and safety regulations, faces frozen somewhere between trying not to shart and utter disdain for anyone that dared to so much as glance in their direction.

Then there were the men. Oh, the men. Some of their shirts where buttoned lower than the girls' necklines, occasionally revealing a perma-tanned peck, but more often than not, a gristly moob. Their eyes hunted the women, searching, waiting for the first wobble that signalled the free drinks were working on lowering their inhibitions, and hopefully their pants too.

Leah and I commandeered a table at the edge of the dance floor and enjoyed our new powers of invisibility. We tried to get as many drinks to our table as we could, racking them up for when they would no longer be free and doing some fantastic comedy R'n'B dancing to the poorly DJ'd music. I bumped into my chum from home, Jeremy, who was thrashing out some shapes on the dance floor and adding his own rap to the smoke and music that swirled above our heads:

'Yeah we're in Vegas! Whaddya make of us? Yo, don't be hatin' on us! We're just happy to be here, don' want no freakin' fuss!'
(Or something along those lines.)

Leah bowed out at midnight but I stayed on for another hour, bouncing around the rooftop bar, paying a painful $10 per beer and watching Jez chatting up the laydeez, fall over and make me try on his glasses.

Then I headed for home, weaving my way out of the throng, through the casino, onto the road and into the Flamingo where I fully expected to open the door to a slumbering Gassonimator. SHE WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN. Awol! How could this be? Perhaps she had been talked into a game of Craps, misunderstood the concept and required assistance and a well-planned exit strategy. Should I contact her relatives? The A-Team? Call a plumber?
No, it transpired that that evening, she was simply more double hard than me and had continued to happily trundle along the Strip, muttering to herself, ordering more complimentary drinks and writing abusive messages on Facebook.
What a trooper.

crab legs, prawns, grilled fish, salad, mexican rice, sausage

nachos, salsa, sesame ball, roast beef, bun

Food was the activity of the day, we decided when we woke up feeling bruised and confused the next morning.

Vegas, the most excessive city in the nation of excess, offers unlimited buffets for every tastebud, every wallet, every fancy.

A welcome pack from The Flamingo in our room contained vouchers for a discounted meal at Flavor's buffet located in Harrah's Casino, so we decided to head over and fill our boots.

sushi, fish, prawns

Snow crab, prawns, sushi, vine leaves, spare ribs dripping in chemically-enriched gloop, fortune cookies, fajitas and thick slices of honey-roast ham, it was all there for the taking. And boy, did I try. After all, there are children starving in Africa. I owed it to them to eat until it started to feel weird around my heart.

I managed three plates and then a dessert plate as well before I admitted defeat. In the battle against Abha and the buffet, this time, the buffet had triumphed.

watermelon adds balance

The next couple of days were lost to Vegas where most buildings have neither a clock or windows, travelling out to Fremont Street on the Deuce, watching free shows outside Caesar's Place and the Bellagio, gawping open-mouthed at cowboys in town for the Rodeo at the Convention Centre and catching Mardi Gras beads at the Rio casino. It was during Rio's Show in the Sky performance that a pudgy, scrunchied she-beast very nearly gouged out my right eyeball, such was her desire to take home some strands of the cheap gold beads herself.

Over the course of our stay, I found myself pushing more and more dollar notes into the slots, placing larger bets each time. There was no point playing a penny a go, you'd never win anything. No, to win big you had to bet big. TWENTY CENTS A BET. That was how I began rolling, Leah clucking in disapproval next to me but egging me on too. My risky stance paid off for a few jubilant minutes, taking my winnings up to a dizzying $15 before the House began to claw back the cash.

Hey ho, that's how Vegas goes. For small fry like us anyway. Leah had somehow managed to transform her 30 cents in credit to $5.45 in real cash and was buzzing with glee that she'd now be able to purchase her dinner as well as a pack of sanitary towels. Some people might have riches, others fame, we're happy with the smaller pleasures in life.

winning

A Dusty Fairytale

There was no way we could have driven through the desert without visiting at least one ghost town. We'd been given advice on the best ones from all the people we'd met so far on our travels. Marfa was supposedly pretty cool, while Shakepeare near Lordsburg in New Mexico was another name we'd had slung at us over a few beers. 

However, tourist-gawping season was over in Shakespeare and they weren't inviting people in over the winter. But there was a place just twenty miles down Interstate 10 from Lordsburg named Steins (pronounced STEEN) in Hildago County that was open and happy to allow us to poke around. 

Steins Railroad ghost town is fantastically preserved, thanks to the efforts of the town's current guardian Melissa Lamoree and her late grandfather Larry Link, who bought Stein back in 1988. 

Larry worked on this town his whole life, living out of a trailer at first when there was no electricity and then eventually moving into one of the timber houses with his wife. Their grandkids would come and play in the abandoned homes that smelled like a thousand musty charity-clearance-rail jumpers, littered with rusting horseshoes, spiky cacti and toys that were last played with by children of the frontier. 
Larry rebuilt the schoolhouse and was fixing up the blacksmith store when he was murdered in Steins last year. No one knows why, and the culprit is still at large. 

The incident made international headlines, even finding its way into the Daily Mail's website (who in its signature style pointed the finger at illegal immigrants from Mexico). 'I don't think it could have been', Melissa explained. 'We're ninety miles from the border so if any illegals do come our way, they just want food and water and for us to call Border Patrol to take them home. They're that tired'. She believes the murderer was someone her grandfather knew, and that he had to die because he'd seen and recognised their faces. 

Melissa made the tough decision to continue preserving the history of the town and reopened in May this year. She's a lovely lady - sharp in her knowledge and articulate with her storytelling - blonde and petite with a cheerful four year old, who scared the beejeezewax out of me in one faded forgotten room by pulling at my dress and singing nursery rhymes, and another little 'un on the way. She led us through the gated-off remains of Steins, revealing tidbits about each of the buildings as we passed by, into and through the guts of them. 

Steins was abandoned in the mid-1940s when Southern Pacific railway switched from using steam engines for its trains to diesel. It had a population of just over 1000 and helped trains along their way between the Gulf of Mexico and the Californian coast. 

Chinese labourers were made to live outside the city (where they were vulnerable to attacks from surrounding Indians), in the foothills of the mountain where they quarried stone. When they did the census, they counted the Chinese and their families as livestock. Deep. 

The last train going through the town offered people a ride out, but there was no time to pack the delicate lace and silverware. They had to leave then and there. The entire community upped and went, carrying what they could and left behind.
Steins vanished. 

We walked around, fascinated at the things people had chosen to abandon and yelping with surprise when we spotted familiar, used-in-2012 homewares. 1940 isn't that long ago and there's stuff here that you probably still use at home. 
An iron sits on the board, clothes are laid out on the bed, spices in glass jars topped with four inches of dust sit waiting for their long-dead (probably) cook in the pantry. Prostitute's knick knacks lie on the beds of the Bordello and yet more dust coats the kitchen tables, like icing sugar on a birthday cake. It's the worst case of housekeeping I've ever seen, and I used to cohabit with three footballing boys. 

This was not a Disney'd up, cartoon version of the West. There were no cardboard cutouts for cheesy photo opps, artificially faded posters of John Wayne, air-conditioned gift shop stocked to the rafters with cowboy tat or cafe set up next to restrooms. 
Steins was, by and large, exactly how it was back in the '40s. 
Wild West proper. 

A number of the original buildings, made of timber, adobe and railroad ties, are still standing including the Bordello, a room where they prepared bodies for burial, laundries and some apartments, as well as the town's outhouse and communal kitchens. Cactus' stretching into the cobalt sky, reaching heights of a London double decker, sprout from the perimetre of the wooden shacks, cracked and dying in the New Mexico sun. 

However, the hotel on Main Street which used to run alongside the train tracks, burned down years ago. All that remains are some sad stumps of foundation, left to the mercy of the desert winds.  

It's an amazing place that really hits home how hard it was back in the day, for the poor and ethnic minorities in particular. 
Melissa allows visitors to make their own donations for the Steins tour, staying true to her granddaddy's vow to keep the town preserved for history's sake, not for profit gains. 
It sees its share of visitors over the course of the year, but as tourists are its lifeblood, Steins is a ghost town that could always use a couple more to keep it alive.


Who: Melissa Lamoree (operator) or Linda Link (owner)
Where: Steins, Hildago County, New Mexico
When: Fri- Sun 0900 -1700
Don't miss: The outhouse!
Email: steinsghosttown@gmail.com
Call: 001 602 821 8495 

Desert Drive: Kiss My Texas

PHASE ONE: KISS MY TEXAS
We started our Desert Road fairytale in Houston, TX crashing at Friends House Downtown hostel. Run by a couple so sweet you might need an insulin shot after leaving reception, Danny and Leah were sympathetic to our horrendous night's sleep in the dorm and moved us into a spare private room the next night for no extra charge. We had been sharing our dorm with a bunch of hugely irksome manchildren who shot each other over-playful jibes and spent most of the night shouting their heads off to illustrate how amazingly fun and party ready they were. Leah and I were becoming telepathic with our constant shooting of annoyed looks. For the forty-eighth time in my life I cursed the Gods for failing to bless me with Carrie White's telekinetic powers. I could have exacted fiery revenge on these dweebs. It's Sunday night - DIAL IT DOWN.

Thanks to our over-exertions in NOLA, neither of us had the sufficient number of functioning electrodes to operate properly. So we went to Macy*s, where we found the shelves stocked with cowboy boot Christmas stockings and racially segregated Santa Claus's. Then we went to Walmart to balance everything out.

It wasn't until we were leaving the city that we actually got it together enough to see some sights. First stop was the Beer Can House.
Built in 1966 by John Milkovisch, who still lives there, the house looks like the secret den of a bored alcoholic. We stood outside on the pavement marvelling at yet another American roadside oddity, this one  created by approximately ten million cans of Texas Pride.
The Beer Can house sits weirdly among the other suburban homes and even in a gentle breeze sounds like an elephant trampling on a hot tin roof. It's only open on the weekends though, so we loitered outside gawking for ten minutes before heading on out to...

sleeps three. cosy.

The National Museum of Funeral History! You can't spell funeral without a smattering of FUN. We pulled up outside a suitably sombre building on the outskirts of Houston, ready to delve into the macabre world of the Grim Reaper. The museum began predictably with the funeral traditions and corteges of late US presidents and the lives and deaths of various popes (this exhibit's only draw being the actual POPEMOBILE! Duhna duhna duhna duhna POPEMAN!) before dissecting the Mexican's Day of the Dead ritual and the oddball world of Ghanaian fantasy coffins first chiseled by sculpturer Kane Quaye. They know how to go out in style those Ghanaians, commissioning coffins styled as cockrels and rockets and rowing boats to capture the essence of the departed. Why go for boring ash or dry old oak when you can travel to the afterlife in a marfuckin' lobster?! 

There was also a coffin covered in dollar bills and coins, protected from grave robbers' sweaty paws by three inches of impenetrable perspex. For those who believe you can take life's riches with you. It's the Kim Kardashian of deathware - flashy, trashy and without a drop of soul, but super photogenic and strangely desirable. It's really shiny.

There was also a section on celebrity passings, focusing largely on US entertainers and accomplishers but also a death wall dedicated to The 27 Club featuring our very own Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. No idea what Christopher Reeve was doing there though. 

Austin next. We drove west under skies that seemed pregnant with rain but never came good on that threat. We'd been in Texas for three days but as yet had no recorded sighting of that elusive rhinestone cowboy. Or any cowboys at all for that matter. I'd been expecting a line of John Wayne look-a-likes lassoing cacti in perfect synchronicity on the Louisiana/Texas border, but to no avail. Oh well, life can be hard, that's one thing this trip has taught me. That, and that Britain has the best selection of salty snacks in the world. Took me near on two months to find a pack of salt and vinegar crisps, yet pickled pig lips are freely available at farmer's markets across the land. What kind of world is this?

In Austin we met up with a teacher we befriended back in our hostel in Boston, Marcela. She had entertained us the weekend before Halloween with stories of gangland kidnappings in her Mexican homeland. Austin, a tiny drop of blue in an otherwise hardcore Republican state, was now her town and we arranged to liaise at a bar called the Lustre Pearl on Rainey Street  for a few drinks and a chit chat. Rainey is lined with houses renovated into bars, so that the entire street looks like it's in the running to host the world's biggest house party. There was one bar fashioned to look like the White House with an alien landing on its lawn and another that felt like the inside of a gentleman's country cabin. The Lustre Pearl was doing drink combos including a can of beer and measure of whiskey for three bucks (named Long Hair Don't Care. Charmant) and it sounded like Austin was a hip little town too. Marcela told us about the cute boutique stores and shops making me wish we could have stolen another day from our tight travel schedule and stuck around for longer, but the clock was ticking and our desert trek still had a way to go.