San Francisco seems like an awesome city. I’m really loving the climate here so far… after being in Vegas with it’s 40° degrees plus, with barely 7% humidity – you know the lady at the nail salon was complaining about the humidity in Vegas! She said they normally have 0.5-1% humidity and the 7-10% was ‘killing her’! I shit you not, thats what she said. And I felt like I was being dry roasted in an oven, compared to the sauna heat we are used to!

Anyway, I digress. San Francisco has very pleasant highs of 22-23°, lows of 12-14° overnight, with light to moderate breezes, and blue skies after the fog lifts. I could certainly get used to this! And it is much welcome departure from the Las Vegas heat.

One thing we are finding is at a total premium here is parking. Parking at the hotel gave us a rude shock – not included with your room rate and that’ll be $40 a night (plus tax) thanks for coming! Parking attractions is non-existent and could leave you miles away from your intended destination or in queues half an hour long to make it into a car park. So being tourists, we took a tour and made that someone else’s problem.

With more tour buses per square foot than any other place I’ve ever been, the Fisherman’s Wharf area is where we started out… with a bus driver named Jimmy. Now Jimmy is African American and originally from Memphis, however, we were instructed not to hold that against him (lord knows why though) and he had a bad habit of referring to himself in the third person; starting sentences and not finishing them (with some sort of expectation that we knew what he was talking about); and an unfortunate tendency to refer to people or things as though you already knew who or what they were! Not ideal for a tour guide whose primary function is to impart information.

So we set off on an incomprehensible tour of San Francisco. I can’t tell you much of the history of the city because Jimmy seemed more intent on talking about movie stars and real estate and tourism revenues than the gold rushes and great fires and earthquakes. But, so be it.

We made our way out to a place called Muir Woods, which is a coastal redwood with huge trees up to 800 years old. The view on the drive out was pretty non-existent as the thick (and fast moving) fog was settled over the entire city. Came down a long and dangerous looking windy road, riddled with suicidal cyclists, in our bus to go check out the woods. This little patch of pristine forest was rescued due to the efforts of one John Muir and one President Theodore Roosevelt, who apparently had been the greatest conservationist president the US has ever seen. He was responsible for putting aside more land for conservation and national parks than any other president.

Muir Woods are beautiful. The trees are some of the tallest in the world and we had a very pleasant interpretive walk (yeah, that’s an American weirdness we’ve been discovering everywhere we go – if there is a visitors center or a nature walk or a lookout or anywhere really, that provides you with information plaques and signage… then, those are ‘interpretive’ visitors centers, nature walks and lookouts – no signage equals non interpretive, I imagine). Trees gorgeous and huge, forest was primarily inhabited by tourists so no little forest critters to be seen today. It’s only about 15miles out of downtown San Francisco though, so sitting on prime real estate next to areas where condos rent for $16,000 a month – so well done John Muir for saving the 550ha he did.

After that we went for a drive around the Bay to Sausalito. Sausalito reminded me a bit of Portmeiron in Wales, where someone, who was obviously stoned, decided to build a Mediterranean village about as far from the Mediterranean as they possibly could! So it is a quaint bayside town with some Italianate architecture and lots and lots of boutique shopping and art galleries. Saw some unique and unusual glasswork for sale, none of which was even remotely affordable, and even if if was, there’s no way it’d possibly get home safely. As well as some huge pieces made out of license plates which would be equally stupid to transport. 🙂 So my Visa was spared.

After that we went to check out the famous Golden Gate Bridge. Built during the Great Depression, it is 2.7km long and six lanes of traffic wide, and 67m high above the bay. It’s one of the worlds longest suspension bridges and possibly one of the most photographed bridges in the world. Also considered another ‘Wonder of the Modern World’ by American Engineering Associations. 🙂

Also saw lots of cool cliff housing, low lying terrace houses on reclaimed lands, the Palace of Arts, and other city landmarks that I can’t really say much about thanks to Jimmy’s lack of adequate communication skills! Got back down to Fisherman’s Wharf in time for a late lunch.

So far, I really like San Francisco. It’s the first place we’ve encountered in the US that I could imagine living in.

Can’t hear that word without hearing it in Eddie Izzard’s voice, which probably means I’ve seen Dressed to Kill too many times. Anyway, Alcatraz as always been a place of fascination for me, along with the Tower of London and other places people are incarcerated. Not sure why… but it pigeon pairs nicely with my pre-existing morbid interest in serial killers, that has seen me ready many stomach turning biographies and download plenty of gruesome documentaries on said topics.

At first sight, you wouldn’t think that ‘the Rock’ would be that hard to get off. It’s only a mile and a quarter off San Francisco and I’m pretty sure if my life depended on it, even I could swim that far if I had enough time. Apparently it’s the freezing cold water and the swift currents that sweep you off to Yokahama if you’re not careful that provided the prisons secondary security system… the cells, steel bars, guards and locked doors and gates doing a pretty good job in the role of primary.

The place was opened as a federal penitentiary in 1934 and closed in 1963 and has pretty much been left alone since then, having been made a National Park to preserve it, so the buildings are showing a lot of rust and decay at this stage… which gives a particularly creepy aspect to the place. I imagine if you were locked up in the place with 200 plus other maxim security, criminally inclined types, it wouldn’t be so much ‘creepy’ as, ‘scary as all fuck’.

Strangely enough, I was always under the impression that it was one of those large super max type prisons who housed the worst offenders the US had to offer, but apparently only 1,545 inmates were ever housed at Alcatraz. With a maximum capacity of little over 300, the place usually averaged around 260 inmates, which is much smaller than I had thought. Some of the inmates were men who had proven problematic in other prisons, were considered to be flight risks or escapees, or were just known plain ol’ troublemakers.

Some of the inmates, of course, were quite infamous – Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, ‘Doc’ Barker, Robert ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz’ Stroud and George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly, etc. Increasing maintenance and operating costs is what led to Robert Kennedy (the then, US Attorney) closing the facility in 1963 – it is said that it would be cheaper to house and feed these men at the swankiest of New York hotels year round rather than costs involved in keeping them at Alcatraz.

So, what did I learn during my Alcatraz Evening Tour…

• Alcatraz Island was originally a lighthouse on the Pacific coast back in 1854 and its primary use at this time was to guide the ships full of gold rush materials, later to become a military defence post and subsequently a military prison. The place had to be tarted up and number of detainees reduced for it to become a federal prison in the ’30s.
• After the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, nearly 200 regular prisoners were temporarily housed in Alcatraz due to damage in San Francisco jails.
• There were no executions on Alcatraz and no Death Row. There were however five suicides and eight murders in the population and numerous deaths attributable to ‘natural causes’, primarily being diseases etc.
• Most prisoners averaged 8-10 years on the Rock, until they were considered no longer disruptive or incorrigible… and this is funny, there were no women prisoners at all but not due to segregation. Apparently, it wasn’t until 1969 that laws were enacted that allowed women to be ‘declared incorrigible’, which was six years after the prison closed.
• The sharks that inhabit San Francisco Bay are most commonly the sand shark, not known for being man eaters at all.
• In the winter time when sound travels well, the inmates could hear New Years Eve revellers partying down on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, which must have been somewhat soul destroying.
• Even in the middle of summer on a fairly balmy evening, the wind howling through the facility meant that the place was freezing!
• The families of the guards and staff who worked on Alcatraz, lived in apartments on the island, had their own convenience store and post office and rarely locked their doors – the locals consider Alcatraz as California’s first secure ‘gated community’.
• Many inmates had only the prison library to rely on for stimulation and entertainment and as a result ended up very well read, and familiar with the classics and philosophy, as the prison controlled the materials available.
• To pass the time, many prisoners attempted to pursue whatever hobbies or skills were available to them, some had musical instruments and played them very poorly with no training, some would encourage and participate in bridge tournaments, some painted or even crocheted and taught others to turn their hands to these pursuits!! *Yeah, can’t quite picture it, two max security inmates in Alcatraz in the 50s, one teaching the other to crochet with pretty pastel yarns! O_o

All up I quite enjoyed the visit, the cellhouse audio tour is a bit of a zoo, but very informative nonetheless. And I gotta tell you, I can’t imagine anywhere worse to be locked up than in a 9×4 foot cell in this cold, austere and brutal place with its views over the beautiful Bay Area and its hustle and bustle of everyday life so close yet so far away. :S