Day 353: West Coast Trail

Based on a suggestion from some random German guy I met I decided to walk along the West Coast Trail which runs up the west side of the city. I made my one public transit trip in the city to head out to Lake Merced and start walking north. The trail wasn't clearly marked in many places, so in the end I basically just tried to follow whatever trail/path/beach/sidewalk I could find to keep heading north. The morning was really foggy, which kind of spoiled the coastal view but contributed a special atmosphere of its own.


At some point around Land's End the sky started clearing up and visibility got a lot better.


I continued on until the Golden Gate Bridge, then headed southwest through Presideio.


I eventually got out of Presidio and slowly worked my way back to the hostel zig-zagging down different blocks. This is a pretty brief description of the walk, but it actually took the bulk of the day since it was ultimately probably 15-20km. In the evening I got some dinner with an Uruguayan in my room and played a little late night pool before calling it a day.

Day 352: San Francisco

San Francisco is another of those American cities full of famous things - some of which I feel deserve the fame more than others. San Francisco also has a lot of art and culture, and that immediately made it more appealing for me than Los Angeles was. Because San Francisco is contained by the Bay, it's not all sprawled out like a lot of cities, and I can walk around everywhere pretty easily, and I tended to cover a lot of ground. I started off by heading south-east a bit to check out a specific street art murtal I wanted to see, then turned north-east and followed Mission St. up towards the harbor. Along the way I stopped at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I've expressed my mixed feelings about modern art before, but this is one of the most famous modern art galleries in the world, so I was curious to see what it would be like. Half the gallery was closed down as new installations were going up, but because of that the tickets were half price. It was a pretty cool gallery. The permanent collection had some things I liked and some I didn't. They had one exhibit up of Lebbeus Wood works that I really liked. He's an architect/artist, but a lot of his drawings and sculptures look like futuristic, sci-fi architecture.


When I reached the water I just followed it past all the piers until I got to Fisherman's Wharf, stopping to check out all the harbor seals and Alcatraz. There are lots of ferry tours out to Alcatraz, and I probably would have found it interesting, but it's one of those things where I feel it's reputation probably exceeds it's real interest to me, and I'm trying to save money, so I skipped it.


I stopped for lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, going to one of the famous In-N-Out Burgers. I've had multiple people from California that I've met tell me it's amazing, but I honestly don't really get what the hype is about. It was good, but no better than a lot of other burger chains around. I got some icecream afterwards and walked up the nearby hill to Lombard Street, which is known for being the crookedest street.


That was pretty much it for the day. I walked back towards the hostel from there, stopping to hang out in a park for a bit and cutting through China Town before wandering through the financial district and finally back to the hostel.

Day 328: Ferry Crossing

I got up early in the morning to catch the 8am ferry from Wellington, across Cook Straight to the town of Picton on the southern island of New Zealand. Ther ferry ride is about 4 hours long but it's at least pretty comfortable.

Once we got into Picton I took a shuttle to where my bus was waiting and continued on west to Nelson, which was another 4 hours away. This drive was getting into the part of New Zealand that has nice scenery, and much of the road in was winding around wooded hills and mountains. So much of the north island is rolling grasslands that it was nice to see wide stretches of trees for a change. Nelson is small enough that I found my hostel pretty easily once I was there, and after walking around a bit to get some dinner and do a little exploring I spent the evening in the hostel talking to people and watching movies.

Day 321: Russell

In the morning I went up a short walk of the hill next to town and decided that there really wasn't all that much to do in Paihia. Most of the tourism draws involve boating, either by sailing out into the bay or going on fishing excursions, and neither of those were interesting enough for what it would cost me. Instead I took the ferry across part of the bay to visit the town of Russell. Russell was also small, but I spent an hour walking along the beach and shore and found a trail heading up into the forest. The area around here was protected kiwi grounds and I saw a handful of kiwis running about, although they were quite shy and none stuck around very long. The trail ultimately came out in a little neighborhood of maybe 10 houses completely cut off from everything else, and I had to follow along the road for awhile. Eventually I found another trail heading up to Flagstaff Hill (I think), which gave a nice lookout down at the town and over the bay.


After getting back down I had a late lunch and sat by the docks, watching the fishing parties come back with their catches. The day's winner? Definitely this guy.


That's an 82kg striped marlin, for those interested.

Eventually I took the ferry back to Paihia and spent most of the evening chatting with my roommates and just generally lounging around.

Day 302: Calm Waters

The weather reports had predicted that the second day of the trip would be even worse than the first - but weather reports are terrible. It was a bit overcast but less windy in the morning, and as the day progressed it turned into a beautiful, sunny day.

In the morning I did my one dive of the trip. I'm not a water person, and I was pretty nervous about how I'd react, but I felt it was an amazing opportunity and something I really had to try at least once (especially since it was included in the price). As feared, I'm definitely not a natural. The fact that I'm not a great swimmer made me more concerned about how to react if anything went wrong, and it just led to me being very uncomfortable underwater. I tried, and I did learn a lot from the experience, but I was quite happy to stick to snorkelling for the rest of the stops. If I try scuba diving again, I think I'd want start the more conventional way and do the first few things in a pool instead of open water so that there's less to worry about while I get comfortable with things.

We had a total of 3 stops for diving and snorkelling on the second day, and ended up getting back to Cairns around 3pm. Overall, it was great to see the reef and do some things out at sea. I don't foresee many times where I'll pick being on the water over being out on a mountain or hiking through a forest, but it's nice to mix it up and get some variety when the chance presents itself.

Day 301: Stormy Weather

I got up early, stored most of my things in the hostel luggage room, and headed to the harbor to board the small ship I was heading out to sea with for 2 days at part of the Great Barrier Reef. It was a pretty small group, with just 8 travellers and 4 crew. Because they were having trouble selling space on the boat due to a cyclone warning and a week of constant rain I had got a substantial discount on the cost, and then also got a free upgrade to have the only private room on the ship since it was available and I was travelling alone. The first day at sea, especially the first 4 or 5 hours, were pretty miserable. There was a lot of wind, and it was pouring rain so that no matter what you did you were going to end up getting cold and soaked. All the wind was also making the sea quite choppy and was making me feel pretty queasy. I don't normally get seasick, but I haven't been on small boats in choppy water much either. By the time we got to the first dive site I was pretty nauseous, but jumped into the water to do some snorkelling. It was a lot warmer in the water than on the boat, and as soon as I was floating in the water all my nausea went away and I was feeling great.

Through the day we stopped 4 times for dives. My package only included one introductory scuba dive, and doing extras was going to cost more money than I could afford with my dwindling funds. Even without diving, the snorkelling was still amazing. In many places the reef is so close to the surface that you have to take care not to kick it when you swim, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of types of colourful corals and fish everywhere. I don't know that much about tropical fish, but clown fish (aka Nemo fish now, apparently) were one distinctive type. We also saw a few sea turtles, a sting ray and some small sharks between the thousands of fish and plants.

Unfortunately my camera isn't an underwater one, and it cost a lot more than I wanted to spend to rent one ($30 per day to rent a camera) so I don't have any pictures. Really though, it's one of those things that thousands of other people have posted pictures of online.

By evening the weather had calmed down quite a bit, and I found getting to sleep at night quite easy.