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Big
Sur coastline, arguably the most spectacular stretch of California's
coastline. |
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Continuing up the coast,
I entered the northern section of Los Padres National Forest. The forest is
divided between two non-contiguous areas. The northern division is within
Monterey County and northern San Luis Obispo County and includes the
beautiful
Big Sur Coast
and scenic interior areas. Personally I regard this is the most dramatic and
scenic section of the Californian coastline. The "main
division" of the forest includes lands within San Luis Obispo, Santa
Barbara, Ventura and Kern Counties. Los Padres
includes most of the mountainous land along the California coast from
Ventura to Monterey, extending inland. Big Sur is a
sparsely populated region of the central
coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise
abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. It is truly
dramatic, even though the shrubland is brown at this time of the year. I
was in my element and wished I had more time to stop for walks, particulary
the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. The
sheer distances one has to cover when travelling in America are
underestimated. The weather was good, even though the landscape was shrouded in mist. Rockfalls were in evidence along the route,
judging by the roadworks. I stopped to buy a sandwich. It boasts the Waterfall
Trail, showcasing the beautiful McWay Falls. A dramatic man-made
structure appears in the form of
Bixby Creek Bridge,
a reinforced concrete open-spandrel arch bridge
in Big Sur, 120 miles south of San Francisco,
along Highway 1. Further along is Point Sur lighthouse.
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Soon I had reached
Monterey
and then
Santa Cruz. Monterey had long been famous for the abundant fishery in Monterey Bay. That
changed in the 1950s, when the local fishery business collapsed due to
overfishing. A few of the old fishermen's cabins from the early twentieth
century have been preserved as they stood along Cannery Row. The famous
Cannery Row has now been turned into a tourist attraction, with restaurants
and shops in the historical site. It is also the location of the Monterey
Bay Aquarium. In June 1967 the city was the venue of the Monterey Pop
Festival, when over 200,000 people attended. The festival became legendary
for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix,
inspired by Pete Townsend's guitar-smashing, ended his Monterey performance
by kneeling over his guitar with reverence, pouring lighter fluid over it,
setting it aflame, and then smashing it up. The present-day site of Santa
Cruz was the location of a Native American settlement since ancient times.
It was also one of the earliest settlements of the Spanish in the later part
of the 1700s. Now known for its alternative community lifestyles and liberal
political leanings,
Santa Cruz
is a bastion for many sub-cultures and counter-cultures. |
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Bixby
Creek Bridge on the Big Sur in summer -
photo from wiki website |
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Awesome scenery along California's Big Sur. |
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The Santa Cruz Beach
Boardwalk is an oceanfront amusement park in Santa Cruz. Founded in 1907 and
operated by the family-owned Santa Cruz Seaside Company, it is California's
oldest surviving amusement park. The eastern end is dominated by the Giant
Dipper, a wooden roller coaster which opened in 1924, built in just 47 days
at a cost of $50,000. Time was marching on and
the afternoon traffic began to build up. I took Highway 17 up to
San Jose
in the heart of Silicon Valley. This is where things started to go
pear-shaped. I had anticipated a different approach into San Francisco from
the south, in trying, ultimately, to get to
Napa,
my destination that day. Instead of driving up the east side of the Bay area
towards Oakland, I ended up on Highway 280 towards downtown San Francisco,
finding myself in 5 lanes of traffic at peak hour. Coming over a rise, the
sight of San Francisco skyline as it came into view was one I'll never
forget. In fact I was petrified. I realised I could go no further once I
reached the Golden Gate Bridge, turning off into a road that led steeply up
a hillside. Having pulled over to the side, a huge truck came charging up
the hillside from behind but, owing to my presence ahead (I was not posing
an obstruction), he slowed down. Unable to make it up the hill, he came to a
halt and then jack-knifed. |
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Bixby
Creek Bridge, along Big Sur, California. |
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I was off before trouble
ensued and drove downtown to a service station, as I was practically out of
petrol, taking the last exit before the Bay Bridge to Oakland and filling up
in
Bryant Street.
Here I received directions to "cross the Bay Bridge and keep going
straight" and "head towards Sacramento". I also phoned Barry. It was
bumper to bumper traffic on the bridge and beyond. Still confused, I
took a wild guess and chose to stay on Highway 80 past
Berkeley,
heading north. The next shock in store for me arose when I reached yet
another bridge and a toll station. I turned off again to enquire and
check. I was close to a nervous breakdown. I headed back towards the toll
station, taking the prepaid gate by mistake (months later I received a
fine), crossing over another bridge to the suburb of
Vallejo
on the Eastshore Freeway. From this point on I gained in confidence, my
route finally tying up with the Mapquest directions I had prepared. I
finally reached Barry's house around 21h00 that evening,
a distance of 46
miles from the service station. I was quite proud of
the fact that I did not capitulate and request a "search party". |
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California skyline at night - photo courtesy of wiki |
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Tuesday I went with
Barry to the
Kendall Jackson
Winery in Santa Rosa. It is a long way to go,
especially in the morning traffic,
all of 47 miles
from Napa to Sonoma Valley. We dropped off the car I
had hired at an Alamo station en route, the ensuing conversation with the
suave black attendant proving quite entertaining, as each tried to outdo the
other in the art of smooth talk. Didn't quite know our Barry had such a gift
of the gab. |
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We arrived at the winery and I then borrowed Barry's vehicle for
the rest of the day, heading west all along River Road to the Pacific Coast
through the
Russian River
Valley via Guernville. The Russian River flows from
the counties of Mendocino and Sonoma. The river
takes its name from the Russian trappers and fur
traders who came south from Alaska and explored the river in the early 19th
century, and established their Fort Ross trade colony 10 miles northwest of
its mouth, built with the help of the local Indians. They called it the
Slavyanka River. The redwoods that lined its banks drew loggers to the river
in the late 19th century. They grew in the riverbed with such vigour that
just a few centuries ago, the valley had the greatest biomass density on the
planet, according to local lore. The local Pomo Indians used the
area as a summer camp and called it "Ceola" (Cee-Oh-Lay) which meant "shady
place." Many of the trees were logged in the 1800s, giving rise
to the first English name for the place - "Stumptown."
The Russians remained until 1841, when the area came under Mexican rule. It
is a beautiful stretch, still heavily forested, the valleys along the River
Road route cleared for vineyards. |
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Russian River Valley wine farm, Sonoma County, California. |
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After stopping at Jenner Bay to view the tempestuous Pacific waves pounding
the shoreline, I headed south towards
Bodega Bay,
a shallow, rocky inlet, approximately 5 miles
across. Bodega Bay is protected on its north end from the Pacific Ocean by
Bodega Head, which shelters the small Bodega Harbour and is separated
from the main bay by a jetty. The San Andreas Fault runs parallel to the
coastline and bisects Bodega Head, which lies on the Pacific Plate; whereas
the town (a Spanish term meaning warehouse) is on the North American Plate.
Bodega Bay was discovered in 1775 by the Spanish explorer Juan Francisco de
la Bodega y Quadra, after whom it is named. Bodega Bay was the setting of
the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock film, The Bird. Long before Euro-Americans
inhabited the area surrounding Sonoma County the Miwok and Pomo Indians
lived throughout region. The Coastal Miwok fished, hunted, and gathered on a
seasonal basis in the coastal areas for their sustenance. The Russians
enslaved the Pomo and exploited the area’s natural resources, until they
left in 1841. |
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Bodega
Bay - photo not taken by self; Bodega Bay in relation to San Francisco. |
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Spanish missionaries began inhabiting coastal California in the late 1700s,
setting up missions regardless of prior occupation of the land. By the 1800s
the Spanish had begun to use the local Miwok and Pomo Indians as labourers.
California came under Mexican control during this time and plots were
granted to Mexican citizens, who built ranchos along the Sonoma coast. Many
of the area’s Indians went into servitude for Mexicans who through state
confiscation now controlled much of the land that was previously under the
stewardship of the Native Americans who laboured for them. By 1850 those
Native Americans who were not working as farm labourers, engaged in fishing
to earn a livelihood. I explored the coastal
region, then headed for Healdsburg, a town which serves as a commercial
centre for the northern Sonoma County. It was still raining heavily as I
wandered the 19th century plaza of up-market boutiques, art galleries,
restaurants and cafes. Healdsburg hosts a jazz music festival in June. I
drove back to the wine-tasting room where Barry worked. I wanted to purchase
some wine but Barry wouldn't hear of it. i did buy some KJ merchandise in
the form of a jacket, so I could argue that I have "been there, done it and
got the T-shirt". The Kendall-Jackson Vineyard Estates vineyard and winery,
under the Kendall-Jackson brand started by the Jess Jackson family in 1974,
now continues under the umbrella company, Jackson Family Wines, that Jackson
later created. In the 1980s, Kendall-Jackson rejected the California
wine industry's trend toward vineyard-specific wine
labelling. It ignored the concept of terroir in favour of
blending wines from different regions to achieve desired wine
characteristics. |
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The winding Lombard Street, comprising eight sharp turns. |
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Over the next three days
I went into San Francisco. In certain ways it was a disaster. For starters,
the weather was awful, raining incessantly. Secondly, I was hood-winked into
purchasing a sub-standard camera lens and the memory of this unpalatable
experience still sends cold shivers down my spine and sends me into a state
of deep depression. On the positive side, the aforementioned article now
serves as a useful paperweight in Barry's home study! The first of these
visits, on Wednesday 21st December, Barry took the day off and drove in to
San Francisco, as he had an appointment elsewhere.
We stopped off at TripTel in
Van Ness Avenue,
a cell phone rental company based in downtown San Francisco and at LAX and
SF airports. I needed one for the rest of 3-week trip and purchased a
contract from a rather petite, young Russian girl. Barry then could not
resist taking me down arguably San Francisco's most famous tourist
attraction, a steep one block section in
Lombard Street
that consists of tight, hairpin bends. I was dropped off at
Pier 39,
Fisherman's Wharf, which I explored for the rest of
the day. Queues lined up outside the ticket office for Alcatraz cruises. I
was hoping the weather would improve and I missed the opportunity in the
days to follow. Instead I explored the pier, wandering along
Jefferson Street
towards The Cannery. I purchased an African thumb piano at Lark In The
Morning, a brilliant musical instrument shop located in the Cannery Shopping
Centre at Fisherman's Wharf. Handmade instruments made by at least 200
International family businesses around the world provide a tremendous
quantity of styles and types of handmade instruments for aficionados and
beginners. Both ancient and modern grace this imaginative and magically
intelligent shop.
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Lombard street in summer -
photo from wiki website |
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Balclutha at San Francisco Maritime Museum; View from the deck of the
ferryboat Eureka; Balclutha, a square-rigged sailing ship built in 1886. |
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The Cannery, formerly
the largest peach cannery in the world but now a vibrant marketplace,
similar to Canary Wharf in Cape Town, and many others. It boasts a
world-class jazz club. Many of the restaurants and stands serve fresh
seafood predominantly, most notably dungeness crab and
clam chowder (soup thickened with flour) served in a sourdough bread bowl. I
loved the arts and crafts at the Kachina Indian gallery,
where I became engaged in a conversation with the Indian shop assistant,
going by the rather Anglo-Saxon name of Amy Thompson. Purchasing an entrance
ticket, I toured the San Francisco Maritime Museum and the historic vessels
along Hyde Street Pier. The entire fleet include Balclutha, an 1886-built
square rigged sailing ship, Eureka, an 1890-built steam ferryboat, two
schooners and two tugs from this period. I later met up with Barry
and his son, Carter and we had a late lunch together.
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Images
of the devastation caused by the San Francisco earthquake and resultant fire
of 1906 -
photos from wiki website |
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The San Francisco
earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that the
city and the coast of northern California at 5:12 A.M. on Wednesday, 18th
April, 1906. Shaking was felt from Oregon to Los Angeles, and inland as far
as central Nevada. The earthquake and resulting fire is remembered as one of
the worst natural disasters in the history of the USA. The death toll from
the earthquake and resulting fire represents the greatest loss of life from
a natural disaster in California's history. The earthquake was caused by a
rupture on the San Andreas Fault. This fault runs the length of California
from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino to the north, a distance
of about 800 miles. The earthquake ruptured the northern third of the fault
for a distance of 296 miles. The most widely accepted estimate for the
magnitude of the earthquake is a moment magnitude (Mw) of 7.8.
As damaging as the earthquake and its aftershocks
were, the fires that burned out of control afterward were much more
destructive. Fires broke out in many parts of town, some initially fuelled
by natural gas mains broken by the quake. Worst of all, many were set when
fire-fighters, untrained in the use of dynamite, attempted to dynamite
buildings to create firebreaks, which resulted in the destruction of more
than half of buildings that would have otherwise survived. The fires lasted
for four days and nights.
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Jetty scene at dusk, with Alcatraz in the background. |
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The two
days that followed, I took a bus to Vallejo and a Baylink ferry across the bay to
Ferry Plaza,
between
Piers 1 and 2. I walked
North Beach along
Columbus Avenue,
taking in a number of prominent locations famous in the 1950's, including
the
City Lights
Bookstore (no. 261), founded in 1953 by then
unknown Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, as the nation's
first all-paperback bookstore. The Beat
Generation is a term used to describe both a group of American writers who
came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the cultural
phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called
"beatniks"). Across the renamed Jack Kerouac Alley from the bookstore is
Vesuvio's,
(no. 255), a bar founded in 1948 by Henri Lenoir, once frequented by the
Beat Generation celebrities. A beloved, beret-wearing fixture of San
Francisco's Italian-themed North Beach neighbourhood was Enrico Banducci,
who founded the city's first sidewalk cafe, the eponymous
Enrico's on
Broadway, where the clientele included fire-fighters
and felons, Frank Sinatra's rat pack and performers from nearby strip clubs.
Enrico Banducci, who provided a stage for up-and-coming comedians such as
Mort Sahl, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby at his hungry i nightclub during the
1950s and 60s, died of natural causes in October, 2007. He was 85. |
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On the
Bayside ferry approaching Bay Bridge, San Francisco - note the inclement
December weather. |
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Another
famous bar and cafe was Tosca's (no. 242), the walls of the
bar and cafe lined with murals of Tuscany and a jukebox
playing selections from Italian opera. I passed a salon with
large windows, where some guy surrounded by a bevy of
women, looked as if he was having his legs waxed an his nail
clipped, for all to see. What a sight! Caffé Trieste
is a famous chain of five
Italian-themed coffee houses, founded in 1956
by Giovanni Giotta (or "Papa Gianni" as he came to be
known), who hailed from the small fishing town of Rovigno,
Italy (now part of Croatia). The first location,
which still survives, is in San Francisco's North Beach. It
quickly became popular among the neighbourhood's primarily
Italian residents. "It was all Italian people," Giotta said,
"But I got the American people to like cappuccino." The cafe
also became popular among the many young Beat
writers and artists who lived in North Beach in n the
1950s and 1960s. Caffe Trieste celebrated its 50th
anniversary in April, 2006.
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Caffé
Trieste, frequented by beatniks of the 1950s and 1960s. |
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Images of the cable car system in San Francisco, near Chinatown (the lens
used for these shots now serves as a paperweight in Barry's study in Napa). |
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View of downtown San Francisco in Jackson Street, which serves as the route
for the Powell Street cablecars. |
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San Francisco's
Chinatown
was the port of entry for early
Taishanese and Zhongshanese Chinese
immigrants from the southern Guangdong province
of China from the 1850s to the 1900s. The neighbourhood was completely
destroyed in the 1906 earthquake that levelled
most of the city. I paid a visit to
Grace Cathedral,
an Episcopal cathedral located on Nob Hill. The cathedral community is known
for its open-mindedness, and is willing to accept teachings from religions
besides Christianity. The cathedral has become an international pilgrimage
centre for church-goer and visitor alike, famed for its replica of
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, two labyrinths (one
outdoors and the other indoors) on the floor and varied stained-glass
windows, an impressive building indeed. Heading back
towards the bay, I spotted the
Hard Rock cafe
and popped in for a coffee. The walls are lined with memorabilia such as
guitars and clothing, of famous musicians such as Grateful Dead, Jimi
Hendrix and Van Halen. On the 18h45 ferry to Vallejo I met Lyn, a federal
investigator for Civil Rights. I politely declined a lift to Napa but
settled for a drink in the pub, waiting for the Napa bus. |
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Memorabilia at San Francisco's Hard Rock Cafe, on the Embarcadero. |
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Taking the 10h30 ferry
on the Friday morning, it was very misty. Birds scurried across the surface
of the water. I walked up Market Street by the
San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
in 3rd Avenue, it's location since the transformation
in 1995. The iconic architectural showpiece facility was
designed by Mario Botta, from Switzerland. One of the exhibits was by Chuck
Close, an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a
photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits.
Though a catastrophic blood clot in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has
continued to paint and produce work which remains sought after by museums
and collectors. Also of interest were paintings by Mexican artist Diego
Rivera, active communist and husband of Frida Kahlo (her life inspired the
famous movie "Frida"). Rivera's large wall works in fresco helped
establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance. The San Francisco cable car system
is the world's last permanently operational manually-operated cable-car
system, and is an icon of the city. There are three lines, the
Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason street lines, which share a section of the
lines up to Mason Street, and the California Street line. Unlike the
double-ended cable-car cars that are found on the California Street line,
the Powell Street cable cars were built to move in one direction only, hence
the need for a turntable at the end of each line. After the last passengers
have disembarked, the car is pushed onto the turntable and rotated manually
by the conductor and the gripman, the latter being a highly skilled job
requiring great upper body strength. By 1979 the cable
car system had become unsafe, and it needed to be closed for 7 months for
urgently-needed repairs. A subsequent engineering evaluation concluded that
it needed comprehensive rebuilding at a cost of $60 million. In 1982 the
system was closed again for a complete rebuild and reopened on 21st June,
1984 and upgrades have continued. I walked up to Powell Street and
bought a ticket, travelling down to Fisherman's Wharf, where I had grilled
salmon for lunch at the Hard Rock. I found the cable
car conductor amusing and highly entertaining, only adding to the fun. I
then walked back all the way to the
San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and spent
two hours till it closed at 18h00. |
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, designed by Mario Botta. |
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Christmas Eve proved a
quiet affair in Napa at the Dodds household. Barry's wife Kim was wrapping
multitudes of Christmas presents for kids from dysfunctional homes, which
had to be dropped off late in the evening. Barry left with Carter, who has
something on. Upon his return, we had a snack. I believe that Kim continued
with her task till the early hours, so on Sunday morning she slept while I
accompanied Barry and the others to the Christmas morning service at his
local Free Baptist Church. The evening meal turned out to be a lavish
affair, with Barry's sister Mel and her husband present, as well as Barry's
parents, all of whom I had last seen in 1982. I began to look ahead to the
next leg of the journey. I went online and booked a hotel in the Las Vegas
area and a flight from Flagstaff to LAX, as I had anticipated I would not
have sufficient time to drive to Los Angeles through the Joshua Tree
National Park. |
