San Francisco!

Well, after a week at home i've finally found the time (and being able to face the fact that im not travelling anymore) to begin writing up the trip. My journey started on september 4th as I had a free flight to use up and wanted to spend more time in San Francisco. Lindsay saw me off at the airport and it was a strange feeling being on my own for a couple of days before the rest of the gang made the trip down from Seattle.

On arrival it really hit me how hilly this place is! They really dont exaggurate in the films! Downtown looked nice, that was until of couse I arrived at the hostel which just so happened to be in the "tenderloin" district, the roughest area of San Francisco. OK i admit, that should have been researched a little better but that was probably the only slip up on an otherwise flawlessly planned month. Already getting late in the day I decided to walk around a little, bought myself a Nintendo DS, an excellent investment to kill some hours on the train (well it is run beating paul and ian at mario kart) and went back to the hostel.

In my room I find a guy who lives about 2 blocks from my house and a guy from Newcastle about 15mins from my house in Durham, crazy! Go out for a game of pool and get back before midnight. On the way home about 20 "crazies" come up to us offering us a wide variety of drugs, sex, and generally begging for money, great fun.

Onto day 2 and my first day of doing stuff! I decided to get up nice and early and head for the uber-touristy Pier 39.

Part of the fun of getting here was riding the F-Line trolley, a very popular method of transport in the 1940-60's that is still going in San Francisco. From here I rented a bike with the intention of going across the bridge and coming back.

There it is, I worked this bike pretty hard that day (harder than I intended)

Now, people had told me about the fog over the Golden Gate Bridge but I didn't ever think it would be this severe.

This is the view of downtown.

And this is bridge (both pictures were taken at the same time)

Me at the bridge (later in the week!)

Still feeling pretty fresh and with hours left on the bike rental I decided to head into Sausilito a fishing village on the other side of the bridge, the scenery was spectacular and I decided to push on another 5 miles to Tiburon. This is where it went wrong and a 2 hour detour up a 25% incline meant that I missed the ferry and had to wait around for 3 hours, still i needed a rest by this point.

The ferry back to San Francisco

That night I stayed in due to fear mainly as I could see 2 rival gangs of about 20 people right outside the hostel. In the morning the gang arrived! Fresh from a 23 hour train journey (which we now class as easy) we all headed out to the "lovely" golden gate national park. Problem was, it too was more than a little rough, and after convincing tens of people that we did infact not have any change we found the good bit of the park.

Not looking very impressed at Shakespheres garden

The first of the "hilarious" jumping pictures, and a particularly good one of Andy

All the men, hang on where's Paul? Not like him to miss a picture

My attempt at an arty picture

On the night we went out for a posh (well posh for us) Italian at North Beach. We even made sure we got a certain bus that stops near the hostel to avoid the army of wierdos.

Day 4 meant it was back to Pier 41 and a ferry ride to Alcatraz. We went on a fun audio tour

We felt very welcome, even though we werent Indian
Actually very similar to my room at first year of Uni
Paying our respects to this national landmark
The second "hilarious" jumping picture. Slightly miss timed
Geeks

After a quick "in and out burger" (magic) we headed for a pub, just a pub, any pub will do! Came to the conclusion that there arent any pubs in San Francisco

We started our last day hiking up to the Coit Tower for a view of the city.
As you can see, much of San Francisco is low rise
Lombard street with its twisty turns, it was quite a hike too

The night was spent seeing Crank, an absolutely terrible film, but produced brilliance such as "You, and your whole crew are dead!"

Hope you enjoyed the first instalment of BUNACTOUR06. You can expect instalments to become smaller as I run out of pictures and my motivation decreases :)

Simon