nearlyhere

Yep. Sipping a green tea on a sunny morning in Downtown Vancouver… last nights kip was the best in quite a while, despite the street noise from below and Laura’s regular coughing bouts. Nothing that a plain pair of ear plugs and sleep deficit couldn’t fix. It feels like we’ve made it – just one small hop to the “rock” on thursday, which will take longer than our flight up here from California, yesterday, but as the stone is thrown we can now reach Vancouver Island and Victoria with a relatively lazy lob. For now though, the plan is to lay up here for a couple of days and give Lala some time to recover from her beastly bout of flu.

San Francisco… i guess i’m not the only visitor left sleep-deprived and nursinga pair of achy feet; in fact i can be certain of that because Laura, like me, has bags as big as our carry-on luggage under her eyes and is hobbling around like a homeless person. Interestingly, many of the street folk in San Fran appear to have taken to wheelchairs, probably due to the wear and tear associated with constant trapesing.

Everybody i’ve talked to about the city has basically loved it, “except for the homeless people”, and it’s hard to not feel an uncomfortable mix of guilt, sadness and apprehension when walking through the lower financial district, especially at night. For a New Zealander it is probably a little harder to deal with the fact that so many folks have fallen through the cracks – it’s like another kind of fault line has opened along the pavement – but for most, it is simply a matter of getting used to it. For many others, moving through the city in groups on cold nights handing out blankets, or, like the woman we watched praying over an elderly man while we ate our breakfast one morning, “dealing with it” takes on a different meaning.

The disproportionate number of down-and-outers is not neccessarily an indictment on the City’s social policy. Various people we have met allege that the homeless problems of New York and Washington DC were simply herded up and transported to liberal San Francisco. Somehow I don’t find that difficult to believe.

Our first night in the city was a liberal one, in the sense that we liberally coated our brains with alcohol. The generous pourings of the barstaff. Americans know how to serve a stiff drink. The last, and our favourite, bar of the tour that night was the Specs Museum Cafe, an authentic maritime settlers bar, full of locals and a few tourists. The staunch barmaid dispensed two gargantuan “shots” of Laphroig, costing us each $8 and an enhanced headache the next day. Sitting at the bar we met Don, a middle-aged ex-hotelier, contemplating retraining in computers, who leapt out of the business due to the frustrating bed-bug problem affecting many of the local establishments. He recommended taking the lift to the Carnelian Room atop the Bank of America Building, where you may sip on a cocktail at sunset and take in the town from the 52nd floor vantage point, an endorsement we planned to explore in the coming days.

We awoke around midday and ventured to the relaxed neighbourhood of Castro. There are few public toilets in SF and naturally shopkeepers were unenthusiastic about random visitors taking advantage of their inner sanctum, and buying a drink in order to access a toilet seemed a small price to pay. We soon found ourselves caught in a physiological feedback loop; so it was the pang of a stretching bladder that motivated our investigation of many stores in the city. From Castro we walked over the hill through Bueno Vista Park and down into Haight Ashbury.

Haight street was humming. The city was generally teeming with tourists at this time of the year, most of whom were Americans on their summer break, but the locals were present in great numbers also, everybody drawn out by the fine weather. I was a little surprised to discover that SF is not well known for it’s sushine hours; cool foggy air often blankets the city, seducing it’s residents back inside for another beer or coffee. Many will have sampled the famed dark bean percolation from “Coffee to the People” cafe, just off the main street in Haight. There i thought i’d try ordering a Flat white, just in case they’d caught on, but as expected the assistant looked at me blankly. A small Latte was something he did understand, so that was what i was drinking when we began perusing the wide and colourful variety of goods and services available along the strip. Zam Zam’s looked inviting, and after a mean G&T, metered out by Bob, we were ready to re-enter the fray. We visited Amoeba records and the Giant Robot store, bought an obligatory pair of jeans and feasted at Magnolia, a brew pub eatery with a scrummy menu, a vast array of boutique beers and a super-cool bar manager.

It’s the quiet ones you really have to watch out for. Well at least i think that’s kinda how the saying goes. It makes sense, don’t you agree? Vocalising your pain is like lancing a boil; yell, scream, speak in tounges… just get the poison out of your system. Silence when you are bursting apart inside is seriously abnormal. Fortunately the crazy aggressive guy on our packed bus home was really loud.

Easily the low point of our stay was our baffling experience at a hostel in North Beach. In an attempt to free up a little spending money, we opted to spend the second two nights at the Green Tortoise, a characterful travellers lodge with a long and reputable history: Laura had stayed over there on her last visit to SF and her memories of the joint were pleasant. So after relocating ourselves and our haul of heavy bags from the stately Westin St Francis in the central city, we bused downtown and caught the BART to the Mission; a creative, “up-and-coming” area to the east of town.

After a long afternoon of striding through the unseasonable warmth, our spare cash distributed to a variety of arty retailers in exchange for their fine screenprinted apparrel, we arrived back at the Green Tortoise. Greeted with a worrying accumulation of revelling young tumbleweeds at the controls of a large stereo, we allowed our appetites to guide us around the corner to an eatery named “Dupont Thai” and definitely the finest thai meal i’ve ever had the good fortune to ingest. A-roi!

By the time we had had a pot of tea at the Trieste Cafe just down the road, it was way past the ailing Lala’s bedtime and we ducked back to the hostel to find the sunday night celebrations in full swing. “Around 4.00am …” was the response from the night-staffer, when questioned on the approximate time the festivities were likely to wrap up and the music switched off. He shrugged and reassured us that this was in fact a “party hostel” and it was a pretty tame night compared to the previous few; his words wedged in our full stomachs at an awkward angle and worked their way free around 4.30 that morning when we nodded off.

The same bleary-eyed fellow was a little more aplologetic when we appeared at reception the next morning, and surprisingly he refunded the fee for our entire stay. He explained that the partygoers in charge of the sound system were actually off-duty staff members, and his repeated attempts to tone down the carousal were dumbly repelled. Even still, he felt responsible and was sure he would be sacked. We offered to write a supportive note to placate his manager, then wrestled our belongings into a cab to take us back downtown to another hotel.

We arrived to find out that the check-in time was 3.00 in the afternoon… visions of a comfy quiet bed faded so we left our luggage with the unfreindly bell-hop who didn’t know how to count bags and shuffled off with our bulging daypacks. By now Laura was feeling pretty wasted. We lay about in Union square and rested our heads, bought a pack of Tylenol, then wandered the back streets to to Washington Square to lie on the Grass and have a frisbee skud about us for an hour or two.

Laura was an absolute trooper; whatever she was coming down with I could tell the bottom was a long way off. She needed an early night. We knew it would be difficult to sleep as our body clocks were a shambles, and there was one more thing we wanted to tick off the list. We figured that a shower and 40 winks might just do the trick … and it did.

I didn’t get to thank Don, the ex-hotelier, but his tip turned out to be a absolute gem, and provided the perfect ending to our long weekend in San Francisco. The cocktails were strong, the view was sublime and the waitress so confident of her abilities that she demanded a 15% tip from me at the close of the evening. Because i am a Kiwi, I happily indulged her impertinence, and tottered from the bar and into the mysterious steel box that was to plunge us to the lobby far below.

As it turned out, we slept like a pair of narcoleptic logs that night.