Life in FNQ - Matto & Jess: Holidays - San Fran, and the Long Trip Home

Unfortunately for us, San Francisco marks the end of our epic holiday. But what a way to finish! Jess completely fell in love with San Fran, and wanted to go back straight away. I must admit, there was a certain charm to the city that I'd like to experience a bit deeper. It's a very pretty city, with the steep streets, the trams, and the bay right at your doorstep.

Unfortunately, it was also the "scammiest" city we'd been to, with homeless bums and just general people in the street trying to beg or talk you out of your money. The homeless were generally harmless, there was just a lot of them, and they all wanted a dollar or two. But it was the "professional" scammers that were the worst. We had a fellow come up and start talking to us, and we assumed he was a city official or something. Gave us a bunch of touristy stuff, then wanted $10-$15 each for his crap - SF stickers, and other such junk. So we told him he could have his stuff back, and didn't give him a cent. But it underlined the begging sub-culture that had become more evident the further north along the west coast that we travelled - if you touched anything that was thrust in your face, then you owned it, and you had to pay whatever the person then asked of you. Very confronting at first, but you quickly learned to simply ignore such people and look straight through them as if they didn't exist. You felt extremely rude to not even return a friendly "hello", but you knew it would lead to someone trying to get a "donation" for the work they do with street kids, or some other sob story that we fell for a couple of times. Hopefully the local gov will step up and do something about the issue, as it was our only mark against the place.

All that said, we still enjoyed ourselves immensely in San Francisco. We hired mountain bikes from the pier and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge, with a ferry ride back across the bay. We rode the trams across town, hanging off the running boards as they edged up streets too steep to consider walking up. We had a boat ride around the bay, under the bridge and around Alcatraz. We watched the sea lions that live at the pier. We visited the much vaunted SF Aquarium Of The Bay, and found it to not be a patch on the Monterey Aquarium that we had visited a couple of days prior. We bought a third suitcase so we could bring all our hastily-purchased jumpers back home with us, along with some souvenirs!

One thing that does deserve to be mentioned, however, was our hotel. At 5pm every afternoon, the manager of the hotel hosted wine tasting in the lobby. All guests were free to come and mingle by the fireplace and taste a variety of wines. Officially, it was one glass per guest per day, but the bar staff were happy to continue offering you different wines. It was such a lovely idea, and within an hour of arriving all manner of unrelated guests were chatting about their holidays, where they lived, what they had been doing, and so forth. I'm not a very social creature, but even I enjoyed this immensely. It really set this hotel apart from all the others we stayed in (along with the Hollywood Heights motel, where ALL the staff were happy and friendly ALL the time!)

Unfortunately, it was all over mere days after we arrived, and we were back on the big plane for the long trip home. 11 Hrs from SF to Narita. 4 hrs in Narita, changing terminals, and trying to work out whether or not we needed to collect our bags, clear customs, change terminals and re-check in, or whether we just needed to get ourselves to the right spot, and the bags would take care of themselves (ProTip - it's the first option, even though we were told by half a dozen different airport and airline people that #2 was what would happen). Then, finally, 7hrs from Narita back to Cairns, where we disembarked at 4:30 on an already hot and muggy Thursday morning, thoroughly exhausted and just happy to be home.

What a trip!