San Francisco and Yosemite

Well, at least I got here! At one point it looked as if the Greyhound bus would never leave Los Angeles - no-one in the terminal seemed to know what was happening. There were no buses for ages and then they all turned up at once! Luckily an American guy did some asking around and we eventually found the right bus. Finally got into San Francisco at about 8:00am and quickly made my way to the hostel. Was going to try and catch up on some sleep and then get a shower but my bed wasn't available yet so I ended up heading straight into the city. It is actually quite easy to get around here, especially once you figure out the one way systems (and hence don't wander around for ages looking for the bus stop - doh!). There are also the cable cars which are not the same as any cable cars I had seen before. They are basically street cars / trams (although you can't call them trolleys - they don't like that around here!) which are pulled along by cables which run under the roadway (and not overhead like the ones I'm used to). They get very busy because of their age (and hence photo opportunities) and are not particularly fast but you have to go on them at least once. I used one to get upto Fisherman's Wharf in the afternoon and then decided it would be quite good to take a walk over to the Golden Gate Bridge. About 4 miles later it didn't seem like such a good idea, especially as I still had to cross the bridge (and get back). Managed to do that whilst it was still light (and hadn't gotten too cold - the city is a lot cooler than you would expect - apparently Mark Twain wrote the the coldest winter he ever endured was the summer he spent in San Francisco). I then jumped onto the bus that I was expecting to take me back downtown. It was a very scenic route with no landmarks that I recognised - not surprising as it was the bus to the university in the southern outskirts! Apparently the bus stop at the bridge serves for both directions - I'll check the destination sign on the side of the bus next time, rather than just the route number on the front! Unsurprisingly I didn't do much else after that as I still had to get back to the hostel to sort myself out.

Saturday started slowly - more days seem to be starting slowly at the moment, must be due to constantly trying to do stuff - you don't get a weekend off with this travelling lark ;-) Took a walk back to Fisherman's Wharf to book a trip to Alcatraz, expecting to do this on the Sunday as it is normally booked out. However, travelling alone sometimes has it's advantages and hence got the last space on one of the afternoon tours. You probably all know about Alcatraz so I won't bore you here. Suffice to say that the tour (especially the audio tour) is well worth doing.

Sunday was spent doing a lot of hillwalking (kind of unavoidable in San Francisco to be honest). So took a look at Lombard Street, an incredibly twisty road due to the steepness of the hill slope. Cars have to be parked at 90 degrees to the slope here to prevent them rolling away! Then it was over to the Coit Tower which a bit like the end of a fire hose. The hill here overlooks most of the city and you can go up the tower itself if you want to get even better views (but you have to pay for them). I used the steps to get back down to the waterfront (there are still streets on these hill sides but no roads). I wandered along to waterfront to the ball park but there wasn't a game on so I took the streetcar over to Ocean Beach. This is meant to be a bit of a retreat for the locals but it looks a bit run down now, although it probably didn't help that the weather was overcast.

Monday was the day to meet up with the Green Tortoise tour of Yosemite but that wasn't until later in the evening. So I did some more aimless wandering around, basically chilling out. I did go and see the sea-lions at Fisherman's Wharf, having forgotten to do that when I was previously there. They're all wild and had turned up at the wharf following the earthquake in Loma Prieta in 1989 (actually arrived at K-Dock on Pier 39 in 1990) and have never left - in fact the group is growing in size. Spent an hour or so just watching them sunning themselves, with the males competing for the best sun spots. Met up with the Yosemite group at about 8:30pm, standing around the back of the Greyhound station, with everyone saying 'Is this the right place' as it had nothing to indicate it was the pick up point. Can't remember the names of everyone in the group but please step forward and take a bow: Jess, Leah, Manus, Emily, Chris (Kiwi), Carly, Siou-Yu. First stop on the first night was at a supermarket to stock up on the essentials: nibbles and more importantly, beer - and lots of it! There wasn't much to see on the first night's journey so we just concentrated on making an impact on the beer mountain.

Tuesday saw us arrive in Yosemite, going past El Capitan on the way to our first hike. If El Capitan sounds familiar, you've been playing too many videogames (it's one of the tracks in Gran Turismo 4)! The first hike wasn't too stressing, up to Vernal and Nevada falls. The falls weren't as impressive as they could have been due to it being the middle of summer, but at least they were still flowing (most of the falls having already dried up). We didn't actually realise until later, however, that we had taken the harder route up and the easier route down - maybe we should have taken that as an omen, but more on that later. The next stop was meant to be to see the sunset but we got caught in a downpour, which meant we spent the next 4-5 hours driving around Calfornia and in and out of Nevada in order to find somewhere to camp for the night. Still the campfire and singing (some better than others - Jess and Kiwi being the stand-outs) made up for it.

Wednesday was effectively the 'wet' day. The morning was spent in Mono Lake. I was about to say swimming but you can't actually do that as it is full of salt and minerals (a bit like the Dead Sea) so you spend most of your time floating amongst the tiny green shrimp, not quite freezing but not far off! By the time you get out and dry off in the sun everyone looks a bit like a zombie due to the salt. Not having a shower nearby we made do with a shower off the bus - a window is opened outwards and a couple of people pour a bucket of water over it! Lunch was spent in Mammouth, after we had managed to drag the girls away from the chocolate shop that is! The final stop for the day was at a hot springs. Now for most people this would conjure up an image of highly commercialised purpose-built pools with an entrance price to match. But this being a Green Tortoise trip there's none of that! The hot springs are basically on the side of a river so you get hot and cold running water - normally when you're least expecting it! Add in more beer and melon taken from a bowl that was left to float from person to person and a good time was had by all. All that was left to do was to head to the next camping spot and make a dent on the next batch of beer (collected in Mammouth)!

Now remember I mentioned about taking to hard route up a trail, well we did it again on Lembert Dome. We were told that it was quite an easy trek up to the top and there were great views of the surrounding areas once you got there. So we started heading around to dome looking for the trail. A few of the group started clambering straight up but that didn't look like the right path so the rest of us (separately to begin with) carried on looking for this easy path up. After a while we met up having not yet found the trail but we did find what looked like a fairly straightforward route up the dome so we headed off up it. After a while of climbing we finally had to admit that it wasn't a route up but it did have a very nasty looking slide to the bottom! Luckily we came across one of the Japanese members of the group and followed him down. However his definition of a simple way down kind of got lost in translation - in order to get down safely we basically had to wedge our backsides into a crevice in the rock (no double entendres intended!) in order to stop slipping down. How were we to know that the path was on the other side of the dome! That was followed by a cold dip in a lake before heading off to see the giant sequoias in Tuolumne Grove. The day was rounded off with karaoke (I did a very bad version of Satisfaction - not helped by the fact that the other 3 guys chickened out!) and very drunken journey home (well we had to finish off the beer!), topped off with the latch on top of bus blowing off, which effectively gave us a very cold air conditioning unit!

Friday was spent recovering from the hangover before heading back to the Green Tortoise hostel for a free meal and a night out in San Francisco with some of group. The only downer (apart from the fact that not all of the group could make it) was the fact that everything closed at 2:00am, just as we were getting started!