On the water

Being yet another American city built around the water, we took a boat tour onto the river and Lake Michigan. The best part was the detail around the architecture. And this is why Chicago was unlike anything I’ve seen before on our trip – it’s my first city of skyscrapers.

Higher and higher

My neck hurt from looking up the whole time. I’ve never seen so many incredibly tall buildings so densely packed. Imagine the Johannesburg CBD and triple the height of every building. We went up the Sears Tower (now renamed the Willis Tower thanks to a recession property sale), which is still the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. 103 floors of gleaming steel and concrete, it welcomes over 1.3 million tourists to its skydeck every year.

View from the top of Sears Tower

The dizzying architecture, bustling streets and vital business dealings are why Chicago is referred to as America’s “second city”, the “first city” being the more populous New York. Once a derogatory term, Chicagoans are now proud of this. More than one told me that they have everything New York has, but Chicago is “less intense” and “more laidback”.

The original Playboy mansion (before Hef headed west)

“Second City” is also the name of Chicago’s improv comedy troupe where many legends got their start, including Alan Arkin, the Belushi brothers, John Candy, Steve Carell, Tina Fey and Mike Myers. Al and I were lucky enough to catch a highly amusing 4pm show (just pitching up at restaurants and shows an hour before has actually worked pretty well for us). I’d never watched improv before and now I love it. When the actors are good, the humour is even funnier for its raw authenticity.

Funny Alistair in front of funny people

Then there is the food. We tried the famous deep-dish pizza, as well as Polish sausages and pastries, although my favourite restaurant was the 10:00pm porcine meal we had at The Purple Pig. Their motto is Cheese, Swine & Wine, which I took as an invitation to try the roasted bone marrow pate, pig’s ears with kale, balsamic pig’s tails, pork neck rillette, monte crudo cheese and half a bottle of Bordeaux. By the time we left (after midnight) I was oinking all the way back to our hotel.

Alistair, playing with the bean

On our last day we strolled along Lake Michigan’s beach, watching beach volleyball and rollerbladers, before heading to the famous “bean” sculpture and gardens of Millenium Park.

Millenium Park amphitheatre by Frank Gehry

One thing about American cities – they sure know how to care for and promote their public spaces. It was a sweltering Sunday and children played in the water fountains while their parents relaxed under the trees. Chicago definitely demonstrates how urban living can be quality living. That’s why it is in my top five US destinations.

America’s first national park (created way back in 1872) is enormous – sprawling nearly 9,000 square kilometres across north western Wyoming and the adjoining states of Idaho and Montana. But while there are plenty of bigger national parks out there (our own Kruger Park is more than twice as large), there are very few as varied or fascinating as Yellowstone.

Snowcapped mountains, a spectacular gorge, dozens of waterfalls, back country lakes so clear they seem contrived for an oil paintings – Yellowstone is like many different parks combined into one. But most of these sights require work to get to – long drives on heavily speed limited roads or hikes into queasily precipitous canyons. That only made us appreciate them even more.

The same doesn’t apply to the wildlife, which is so plentiful that the park’s roads are frequently snarled with traffic as tourists frantically snap pictures of grazing buffalo or elk by the side of the road. Yellowstone has the biggest remaining herd of North American buffalo in the world, and they are truly wonderful creatures to behold – shaggy, comically top heavy and deceptively endearing. Several times a year a witless tourist decides to get out of his car and pat one and gets badly gored or trampled.

But most people come to Yellowstone primarily for its most unusual feature – the world’s most prolific and predictable concentration of geothermal activity. We stayed at the charming but somewhat crusty Old Faithful Inn, right next to the world famous geyser from which it gets its name. And the old bugger is indeed faithful – shooting tens thousands of litres of boiling water 40+ metres into the air every 90 minutes or so.

But Old Faithful isn’t the biggest, the hottest, the highest or even the most frequently erupting of Yellowstone’s hundreds of geysers. Nearby Steamboat geyser, for instance, shoots water nearly 100 metres into the air during its unpredictable major eruptions.

And the geysers are only one part of the story. Dotted around the park are incredibly beautiful hot springs, rendered spectacular by rainbow hued thermophilic acheons and bacteria growing around their rims. One, the Great Prismatic Spring, pumps 2,000 litres of hot water per minute into the Yellowstone River – warming the normally chilly water for hundreds of metres downstream.

It took us dumb humans until the 1960s to twig what was causing all this activity. As recounted by Bill Bryson in his brilliant “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, a geologist named Bob Christiansen was searching for the visible cone or caldera of the volcano that would explain all this heat and sulfurous gas. It was only when we saw the first satellite photographs of the park that he realised the awful truth: almost the whole park was the crater, a 40 mile wide monster that would destroy much of the planet were it to erupt again.

It might seem crazy for millions of people to not only visit a super volcano, but to actually sleep and eat and live right inside its caldera. The thing is, were Yellowstone to erupt, we would all be in trouble, regardless of how far away we might be at the time. It would eject enough ash to cover the entire planet to a depth of several inches. And we can’t comfort ourselves with the idea that Yellowstone might be extinct (it last erupted 630,000 years ago) – all those geysers and springs are hallmarks of only one thing: active magma.

So I was oddly comforted when we were in Yellowstone. Where the “big one” to suddenly happen, we would not even know what hit us. Far better than trying to survive the several hundred years of nuclear winter that would follow the decades long eruption of the world’s biggest active volcano.

Cheerful stuff, right? Still, you immediately forget about it the moment you stumble on a grizzly bear digging for grubs by the side of a river, or a 12-point elk stag grazing peacefully in a meadow. Because, volcanism or not, Yellowstone is an incredibly sublime place. You get swallowed up by it. Very much like our trek down into the Grand Canyon, we both felt apart from the rest of the world while at Yellowstone.

So despite the traffic, the tourists, the indifferent food and expensive accommodation, Yellowstone is worth the trek. And hell, if it blows while you’re there, at least you’ll go out in style.

Like San Francisco, Seattle is surrounded on three sides by water – hence the reputation for rain. But what the cliches don’t tell you is how beautiful the city is when it isn’t raining. The city’s PR team came up with “The Emerald City” a few decades ago to promote their town to the world. And it really does glow a brilliant, verdant green in the sunshine. Thousands of trees and dozens of parks dot the city, giving it that same rare beauty as Southern England in the summer sunshine.

And the “green” goes much deeper. We thought San Francisco was an environmentally conscious, but Seattle is even more committed to the cause. Virtually every establishment we visited boasted locally sourced goods and produce, a commitment to recycling and a focus on energy saving. People cycle year round, regardless of weather, and the public transport system is exceptionally good.

But it’s the people and the food that we really fell for. Seattleites are softer than their southern kinsfolk, gentler and quite endearingly shy. There’s a strong streak of Anglophilia in the Northwest and the people have a kind of English deference and discretion about them (but thankfully without the tendency to whingeing and negativity).

But the food is nothing like cliches of English cooking. The French are said to love San Francisco for it’s gourmet culture, but they should visit Seattle to compare. Neither is better than the other – both are excellent in their own way. Seattle is slightly more traditional in its tastes – a focus on fresh local produce like beef and salmon – but both cities produce vast quantities of world class food.

But the coffee was the real culinary highlight for me. Coffee isn’t an obsession in Seattle – it’s a religion. I thought the Californians were intense about coffee, but Seattleites are on a whole new level. And it’s not just wankery – I had some of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted, and (more importantly) some of the most challenging. We went on a guided coffee tour of the city (awesome, right?) and it gave me entirely new insights into the drink I so adore. (And I didn’t drink at Starbucks once, funnily enough)

And then there is the architecture. Seattle isn’t as obviously beautiful or historic as some other US cities, but it’s almost uniformly elegant and understated. From the clean lines of the old red brick market building, to the sweeping elegance of the remaining Deco skyscrapers, to the fascinating geometry of their beautiful public library (designed by Rem Koolhaas) – Seattleites clearly have good taste in more than just food.

We only had three days in Seattle. Unlike Las Vegas, Crescent City and Sacramento we really didn’t want to leave. Seattle is just as warm, well meaning and genteel as Frasier Crane, but not nearly as snobbish. And, just as when Frasier finally ended, we were sad to leave.

Sky vs water

Many South Africans haven’t heard of it and it is one of the lesser known national parks in America, but I stumbled across a picture of it many years ago and have wanted to visit ever since. When we drove up snowcapped peaks to reach the Lodge (the only hotel inside the park) and first sighted the lake, Al and I were speechless – a rare thing for us.

Snowcap, not the ice-cream stuff

We took a boat cruise on the lake and marvelled at the alien landscape of the crater walls and sheer depth of the crater. The perfectly cylindrical crater formed when a volcano erupted 7000 years ago. Once it had cooled, it gradually filled with water from falling snow in winter and snowmelt in summer. It is now, at 600 metres, one of the deepest lakes in the world.

Reflective indigo

The unparalleled clarity of the lake led physicists to readjust their theories on our deeply light could penetrate water. Indeed, the water is such an intense blue that at times it appears almost purple.

OHMIGOD IT"S SNOW!

The air was bracingly clean and clear, and I also got to see and touch snow for the first time in my life. Amazingly, despite the year-round snow, the lake has only frozen over once in known history (in 1949). Still, the water is usually a bone-aching 3-5 degrees Celsius.

Don't go chasing waterfalls

Even though we were only there for two nights, Crater Lake sticks in my heart for its sheer otherworldliness. It defies my meagre description and the photos don’t do it justice either, although I tried.

It’s easy to see why so many Americans see their country as the greatest in the world. They may not appreciate public good the way Europeans do, but things work here, and (mostly) work extremely well. Roads, airports, trains, hotels, restaurants and department stores all tick along like well-oiled machines, and at a scale that makes even a city like Joburg seem small potatoes. There are more than three hundred million Americans, (almost) all of them striving to be and expecting the best.

Service is uniformly excellent, from the crappiest diner to the swankiest hotel. People actually give a shit about doing their jobs well. They’re jacked up – they understand that you can take your business elsewhere and they’re happy you’ve chosen not to. To suspicious South Africans they can seem almost insincere in their pleasure at helping you, but they’re just doing their jobs.

There cities aren’t uniformly beautiful or interesting, but when they set their minds to it the Americans can build beautiful, elegant, efficient and fascinating cities that rival anything on the planet. San Francisco, New York and Seattle are three obvious examples, but there are dozens more (Boulder CO, Sante Fe NM, Portland OR, Savannah GA, Austin TX etc etc).

And then there are the hundreds of national and state parks. Yes, many countries have natural wonders, but the sheer scale and number of wonders here and their incredible variety are hard to beat. The Grand Canyon really is amazing. Yellowstone really is wild and incredible. Ditto Yosemite, Zion, Crater Lake, Redwood National Park – and scores more.

All of this bounty – natural, monetary, political, infrastructural – has made Americans into the most confident nation on earth. Most Americans don’t just assume they live in the world’s greatest country, they know it. And yet, despite all the confidence, the wealth and the geopolitical clout, many Americans still have that weird colonial deference to history and “high” culture that I still feel so keenly in South Africa.

And so, dotted all around the country are pockets of what I’ve come to call Quaint America. The town of Carmel is a great example – the whole place dolled up to look like Yea Old English Towne. All along the West coast are precious little lighthouses (now rendered entirely ornamental by GPS). In every city are historic buildings and restaurants, lovingly preserved in their original state. People will tell you, in hushed tones, that a building is over 200 years old – a vintage that makes some Europeans smile condescendingly.

Another manifestation is cheesy roadside attractions – mostly dating from the 1950s. All of these tourist traps are focussed around some kind of folk myth or legend – Paul Bunyan is a perennial favourite throughout the north of the country.

When an interesting background doesn’t exist, they’ll often make one up. We stayed at a cute little motel in Mendocino called the Blackberry Inn. All of the little rooms were made up like buildings in a tiny wild west town. We stayed in the saloon. It was actually a very nice, comfortable place, and the decor was really beside the point for us.

All of this hints at something quite unexpected about the Yanks. They’re quite concerned – even a little obsessed – with history and provenance. They’d never admit it, but there’s a certain envy for Europeans, with their millennia of pure history on display at every second street corner.

This obsession also manifests itself in less quaint ways. The Civil War still grips whole families and towns like some kind of lingering mania. The Tea Party are morbidly obsessed with 4 July 1776, even though they frequently misunderstand or intentionally misinterpret the actual facts in favour of their preferred “history” of the nation.

But, right wing nut jobs aside, I’m quite touched and encouraged by this streak of anxiety in the national temperament. Americans long for history and context in much the same way I do. They want to feel not only that they belong, but that their past has the same meaning and direction they demand from their future. The Europeans may scoff at this urge, but I understand it all too well. And so I don’t mind Quaint America. It reminds me that even the most confident of us have our secret insecurities. There’s something deeply enduring, and human, about that idea.

Our trip to Yosemite turned out to be quite ill-fated in terms of accommodation, but in ten years all I will remember is the Giant Redwoods, not the crappy B&B. The grove we visited – Mariposa – has the third largest (and oldest) tree on earth.

Grizzly Giant stands over 60 metres high – nearly as tall as a 20 story building. But his girth is the really impressive bit: 29 metres in circumference. That means the base of his trunk occupies more area than most Londoners or New Yorkers live in. He’s nearly impossible to capture photographically. Hell, he’s pretty hard to take in when you’re standing right next to him.

This old guy is over 1,800 years old. When he was a sapling, the Romans still ruled over all of Europe, and our continents were a couple metres closer together than they are now.

But all of those are just stats, and can’t capture how these trees made me feel. Surrounded by their towering trunks I felt the same sense of perspective and ancient tranquility I felt at Monument Valley. I came to the New World expecting to revel (only somewhat ironically) in their irrepressible popular culture. Instead it’s these implacable monuments to the slow creep of time that have really dazzled me.

As we traveled back to the coast and up towards Seattle, we encountered the cousins of the giants at Mariposa – the costal sequoia. These “true” redwoods (the giants are actually another, related species) are slimmer than the giants, but much taller. Some are literally hundreds of metres tall. They keep the locations of the very tallest trees secret, to avoid deluging them with tourists who will trample their delicate shallow roots and generally mess with their ancient business.

Although the competitive stats nerd in me wants to say I’ve seen both the biggest and the tallest trees on earth, I’m actually grateful for the secrecy. Early efforts to protect these great trees against logging and encroachment were seminal in the birth of the current ecological movement.

And, though friends may tease me for mean capitalist tendencies like reading The Economist and blaming Greece for its own woes, I can see why these trees inspire such passion in people.

When you’re gazing up into that canopy, with your hand on the distinctive light red bark, you feel just how small and unimportant you are. You feel that this majestic organism is not only worth saving, but worth saving at the expense of your own relatively brief, noisy and impermanent existence.

When I think of how many loggers took axes and chainsaws to these trees before the practice was banned, I get cold chills of rage. To me it is like shooting an elephant, harpooning a blue whale or causing a massive oil spill. It’s manifestly vile and selfish and ludicrously short sighted – as repugnant allowing a newborn to be eaten alive by ants because you are too busy watching game shows.

I like to believe that, as a species, we have the power to evolve past the kind of myopic rape of the environment that we have practiced for the better part of a millennium. For me these trees are a litmus test. If we ever do something, or fail to do something that causes these trees to die or otherwise cease to exist, then our days on this planet will be numbered not in millennia but in decades.

More importantly, I challenge any self confessed expansionary capitalist and hippy hater to spend a day with these giants and not come away forever changed. I don’t believe in a deity – at least not in the traditional sense – and so assigning these trees any kind of agency is too sentimental even for me. These trees weren’t “put” here to teach us anything. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them anyway.

Street art in Clarion Alley - bears rule!

The landscape

I’ve never been in such a considerate, cosmopolitan and young-at-heart urban environment. It’s not immaculately clean but it’s not gritty either. Rather it is softly worn, with a bit of dust and dirt to keep it real. The majority of the buildings were built after the great earthquake of 1906 and this has ensured SF has a shabby Edwardian feel that is quaintly beautiful, paired with many public parks where people walk their many dogs (everybody seems to have at least one canine here).

Francis Ford Coppola's office in North Beach (Little Italy)

The very steep streets and many hills are accents to the domination of sea and linking bridges – the Bay Bridge being just as impressive as its more famous brother, the Golden Gate Bridge – and this has been subsumed into the spirit of the people, creating a brotherly community spirit that reflects the physical landscape. The best thing we did was take The Real SF walking tour on our first day – it gave us a brilliant overview of the city and what else we would like to see.

SF from Dolores Park in the Mission District

The culture

Edgy and flamboyant, SF is a freeing place. From the naked sunbathers on the city’s main street and the stylish men of the Castro, to the ridiculously pretty, post-grunge teenagers in the Mission district and the elegant energy of downtown. Public transport, pedestrians and bicycles rule here, with a highly functional public transport system consisting of trams, buses, trains and subways. We were relieved we didn’t have a car; parking can cost up to $10/hour (nearly R100) and driving is more trouble than it’s worth.

Down with cars

There are also still hippies, albeit the modern day equivalent that is the Occupy Movement. They are either standing outside Chase Bank or chilling on the green banks of Golden Gate Park. The museums, galleries and academies are interesting without being stuffy or pretentious, and the people we met were quirky and fun – they all agree they live somewhere special.

Warhol at the SF Museum of Modern Art

Al and I were so happy we stayed in an apartment in the Castro rather than an impersonal hotel. Living like a local is the best way to experience all that SF has to offer. We loved:

• The Castro: Home of Harvey Milk and the birthplace of the gay rights movement, the vibe was phenomenal.
• The Mission District: Great thrift stores, incredible street art and live music bars.
• Hayes Valley: Boutique shops, chic cafes and quirky stores such as “Dark Garden” for handmade corsets.

Pretty buildings everywhere

• Haight-Ashbury: Vintage clothing, record stores, taxidermists and steampunk speciality shops.
• Academy of Sciences and Museum of Modern Art: Fascinating fun and enchanting exhibits.
• Golden Gate Park: We bought a deli lunch from Whole Foods and had a picnic.
• Chinatown: Get a freshly made fortune cookie – this is where they were invented.
• Ferry Building Market: Best place to shops for cheeses, meats and food truck deliciousness.

Window dressing with Ken and Barbie

The food

I easily put on a kilogram while we were here. The food is so uniformly good that it’s much harder to find a bad restaurant than a good one. Dim sum, Californian Chinese, Indian, American, seafood, Italian, Russian, French bakeries, homemade ice-creams… San Francisco is an epicurean’s wonderland. We loved:

• Mission Chinese: A stir-fried pork jowl and winter radish dish that I have been dreaming of ever since.
• Dosa on Fillmore: Great South Indian cooking and delicious cocktails (try the Peony).
• Ton Kiang: The best dim sum I’ve ever had.
• Galette 88: Fantastic hidden lunch spot serving savoury buckwheat galettes and sweet crepes – we went twice.
• Tartine Bakery: Legendary for a reason, I almost inhaled my buttermilk scone and cafe au lait.
• Arlequin Cafe: Incredibly fresh, hearty sandwiches and salads in the uber-cool Hayes Valley.
• Smitten Ice-Cream: They invented their own ice-cream machine, called Kelvin. I love Kelvin.

Dum sum heaven at Ton Kiang

And these are just the highlights. San Francisco was so much, so wonderful and so heartbreaking to leave. There were a hundred other things we wanted to do and a thousand more meals we wanted to taste. Out of all the places we have been to so far on this magical trip, this is the one that I will be returning to as soon as possible. We have been invited to Alistair’s cousin’s wedding there next year and I’m already doing the mental arithmetic…

The physical comparisons to Cape Town are obvious. Both are ports, both are crammed onto narrow peninsulae, surrounded on three sides by sea, and both are clustered around the hills and mountains that dominate the centres of their peninsulae. This gives both of them the kind of changeable, maritime climate and year round fresh air that people from smog bound cities like Los Angeles and Johannesburg deride and envy in equal measure.

But though Cape Town is renowned for being cultured, environmentally conscious, gay friendly and cosmopolitan, San Francisco is simply in another league. They have a public transport system that puts many European cities to shame, and are busy making it even more difficult to drive a car into their inner city districts. They are relentless recyclers – confronting you with not two but three different classes of bin. Everything is “compostable” – even disposable knives and forks.

Many in America’s vast hinterland scoff at what they see as affectation. But San Franciscans have something very rare in this country of rugged (and often deeply selfish) individualists – a real sense of public good and active citizenship. They care about their city, about the ocean it abuts, about the state and country in which it sits, and about the planet to which we all cling.

Hipper than thou

Another trait they seem to have in endless supply is good taste – in both the literal and metaphorical senses. Most American architecture ranges from bland to eye wateringly dire, but San Francisco is full of truly beautiful buildings. From the rows of Victorian houses that survived the great quake and fire of 1906 to more modern structures like their Museum of Modern Art, San Franciscans care about the buildings in which they work and live.

They also care deeply about what they put into their bodies. The food is some of the best I’ve ever eaten anywhere in the world. We ate food from every corner of the globe – China, India, France, Greece, and (of course) the USA – and didn’t have one bad meal in our entire nine days in the city.

The people, too, have an easy sense of style. This is hipster central, so there is no shortage of handlebar mustaches and bushy beards, of neckerchiefs and pork pie hats and plaid pants. But when San Franciscans order their artisanal beer and unpasteurized cheese on organic sourdough bread, they aren’t doing it self consciously. Here it isn’t affectation – they aren’t imitating anyone. The rest of the world is imitating them.

Fabulous!

We were lucky enough to find an amazing apartment on the edge of the Castro – a district famous for being the first openly gay neighborhood in the city, the country and (quite possibly) the world. Amanda and I batted around ideas about why San Francisco, in particular, has always been so permissive, open and tolerant.

We decided it was probably the result of several different factors. One major factor was the cities initial remoteness – at the very Western edge of a vast continent, at first reachable more easily by sea than by land.

This made it a multicultural hub, much like New York, from its earliest beginnings. Pioneers, sailors, Chinese railway workers, gold rushers, vagabonds and misfits of all kinds ended up here, collected at the edge of the country as though shaken loose and swept together to get them out of the way.

And so, at the end of World War 2, when the US Navy dishonorably discharged thousands of sailors for being gay and dumped them in this convenient port, many of them found the city beautiful, tolerant and cheap and decided to stay. And so the now world famous Castro was born.

Two decades later another wave of misfits, the hippies, descended on the city to squat in the many empty Victorian houses of the Haight. Their culture and their music sought to change the world forever, and elevate the city into a gleaming mecca of a new age of peace and love.

Alas the more feverish of the hippy’s dreams never came true, but 50 years on the city is still the most loving, open, creative and inspiring place I have ever been. Everywhere you go, people are trying their best to do something great – whether it’s a great cup of coffee, a great piece of software, a great charity, a great painting or just a great tour of the city.

Sausage fest

Of course all this tolerance and openness can be a bit startling at times. Homeless people flock to San Francisco – cities like Reno are rumored to provide free one way bus tickets to their indigents. Here they are tolerated, accepted and taken care of, just as all the other misfits have been. And so their panhandling isn’t a bashful exercise so much as an entrepreneurial one. “Give me a dollar, I want to buy a slice of pizza.” Well… ok… sure. At least you’re honest.

The Castro can also be a bit hair raising for WASPy types like us at times. There’s a nude sunbathing area at the junction of two very main streets – Castro and Market. The sunbathers aren’t any more bashful than the panhandlers – it all hangs out, all day long. Walking home one night, Amanda and I came upon a couple of fellows strolling stark naked down Castro, with no one even giving them a second glance. The only thing funnier was how inexplicably grumpy both of them seemed.

Come on summer, come on!

There are plenty of bad things about San Francisco, of course. It’s fiendishly expensive, relentlessly snobbish, militantly eco-friendly and never much warmer than 20°C. Blue collar San Franciscans complain that they are slowly being pushed out of the city itself by an unending tide of hipsters and internet millionaires who are the only ones who can afford to rent or buy property. And, like any city, it has crime and grime, problems and irritations. The Metro is wonderful until rush hour, and then… not so much.

But in the end this is a truly great city – a city that acts like a grown up, unlike so many of its compatriots in this great but hugely wasteful and selfish country. It’s an inspiring and enlivening city – a city that makes you believe you can live better while helping the planet at the same time. It’s a city of healthy aspirations and balanced life. I may have left my heart here after all.

Big Sur (as this coast is called) is truly beautiful – mainly because it has been left so untouched. We took the legendary Highway 1 – a narrow (by American standards) and winding road with many stops for roadworks.

For much of the route the coast simply drops straight down into the sea as high cliffs. Where there are beaches, they are small and beset by waves. This isn’t the warm and inviting Pacific of Southern California – this sea looks cold and unforgiving.

Big Sur also has some of the most beautiful forests in the country – including the southernmost groves of the Coastal Redwood – a cousin species of the Giant Sequoia which are the largest living things on the planet.

You could compare Big Sur to the Garden Route. The two do share some similarities – the cliffs around Wilderness, the groves of ancient trees near Knysna, the winding and crumbling road. But there’s something altogether wilder about this coast. At least until you arrive in Carmel.

Imagine Plett or Hermanus with a lot more money and building regulations which mandated cutesy yea-olde-style buildings. This is a seaside “village” with a dozen major golf courses within a few miles, including the world famous Pebble Beach course. A village with stand alone Gucci, YSL and Rolex stores. Parking is, of course, impossible. So Carmel, while cute, is mostly a pricey pain in the ass.

Compare that to Monterey, a bustling town with both a working fishery and a tourist district. After the expensive artificiality of Carmel, Monterey is like a breath of fresh air. Sure, it’s touristy. They’ve transformed Cannery Row – the setting for one of John Steinbeck’s best loved novels – into a chintzy tourist attraction. I think he’d find it marvelously ironic that his tales of Depression era poverty are now used to shill fudge and shrimp po’ boys.

But, despite the chain restaurants and expensive sweet shops, you still get a sense that this was Steinbeck’s country. He was born nearby in the Salinas Valley, a thriving agricultural community known as the “salad bowl of the world”. He worked on Highway 1 when it was first being laid. He lived in Cannery Row in the ’30s after the great sardine fishery had collapsed and all the jobs had left. His experiences here, and on the farms in the hinterland, were the inspiration for his masterpieces – The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

The fishery has now recovered, thanks to careful conservation, and supports a local industry again. And Monterey bay also supports a marine conservation area, including a wonderful aquarium (allegedly the largest in the country). We’re used to thinking of the Americans as uncaring rapists of the environment, but here they are living in substantial harmony with it.

And, as much as I dislike Carmel, the same applies there. It may butt right up against several state parks, and perhaps the most beautiful stretch of coast in the country, but it does its part for the environment too.

Steinbeck (who died in 1968) might smile wryly at the silly tourist attractions and the golf courses, but he would be thrilled to see Big Sur has been preserved. He loved this coast. Now we do too.

King of the castle

As a boy, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst went camping every summer with his family on this sunny spot. His wealthy businessman father had bought the land and hundreds of acres around it. When his mother died and he inherited it, William decided to build something a little more permanent. He hired legendary Californian architect Julia Morgan, and so began 30-odd years of building, renovations and sourcing of prized European sculptures, paintings, tapestries, furnitures and ceilings.

View from the top

Winding our way up the road, the guide pointed out where Hearst kept his animals – he created the world’s largest private zoo – and when we finally reached the top it was at least five degrees warmer. This is why the Hearst family had chosen this spot. Even when the icy fog rolls in on the California coast, Hearst Castle rises above it, bathed in sunshine and warmth. No wonder Hearst called it “the Enchanted Hill”.

Impressive from the outside, inside we were witness to 14th-century Moorish ceilings, carefully shipped over from Europe and installed in various sections of the 75-room “house”. Flemish tapestries and Roman marble statues from 700 BC also graced the living rooms.

Tapestry, not by Carole King

Hearst’s bedroom obviously had the best view and was right next door to the quarters of his mistress, actress Marion Davies. While his wife stayed on the east coast, William and Marion lived together in the castle for decades, entertaining everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Upon his death in 1951 Marion inherited 51% of Hearst’s estate, but she gave it all to his family. She was a wealthy woman in her own right, being a savvy investor in property, and had even lent Hearst a million dollars when he was in financial difficulty (which he never paid back). That’s pretty classy.

Bible parchment bedroom lamp

Of course, I kept thinking about Citizen Kane the whole time we were touring the estate. The similarities are there, yet they are quite superficial, Marion being nothing like the wife in that film. Another difference is that the castle is quite obviously unfinished. Hearst was constantly changing his mind about things (as multi-millionaires are wont to do) and asking Julia Morgan to add a room here and extend one there.

Tiny pool, really

Yet this constant work-in-progress now attracts over a million tourists a year to see the priceless gems Hearst surrounded himself with. Say what you like about the man, but I can’t see anyone going to tour Trump Tower in 60 years time.