Time travel
Casamara
John & Susan Simpson
Wed 21 May 2025 21:52
If you’ve been following our recent travels you’ll know that we’ve been gradually making our way east after leaving Casamara in Malaysia. The thinking was that we’d enjoy a few months exploring SE Asia, then fly back to the UK through the USA before heading to Greece and then back to Malaysia to pick up the boat. 'That way the jet lag shouldn’t be too bad’ we said and we’re pretty used to jet lag. How wrong we were! We left Japan at 1.30 pm on a Wednesday afternoon and arrived in San Francisco at 3.30 pm the same day, except that we’d been travelling for 18 hours! Our body clocks didn’t know whether they were coming or going as we drooped our way around the sights of San Francisco for the first couple of days. The iconic trams passed close to our city centre hotel San Francisco’s hills were as steep as they appear on TV, and tiring for jet lagged legs! After a walk to Fisherman’s Wharf from our hotel in Union Square it was a great excuse to take one of the driverless electric taxis back to the hotel. These were available all over the city centre and looked a bit sinister as they roamed silently about. Once in the back seat of the taxi it was disconcerting not to have a driver in the driving seat, particularly on the steep downhill sections where I’d have liked a human foot on the brake pedal, but an interesting experience nevertheless. The ride was efficient and we didn’t come close to hitting anything or anyone, though the technology governing acceleration and braking could do with a bit of smoothing out.  Driverless taxis waiting at the traffic lights We took the ferry out to Alcatraz and had a walk around the former high security jail. Alcatraz is now run by the US National Park Service and the tour operators ran an impressively slick operation ferrying thousands of tourists a day out to the island and back. A few days later President Trump announced that he would be turning Alcatraz back into a state penitentiary, which we suspect would have come as a nasty shock to those working in San Francisco’s tourist industry!  Alcatraz The last time John was in San Francisco (on a business trip in about 1992) he went on a day trip, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge. This time we hired e-bikes and rode across the bridge from San Francisco to Sausalito. The weather was grey and blustery as we crossed the bridge, but it was the weekend and there were lots of yachts and wingfoilers about making the most of the windy conditions so we had plenty to watch and reminded ourselves how much we’re looking forward to being back on the boat.  E-bike excursion over the Golden Gate Bridge After travelling through the major cities of SE Asia we were surprised to find that we felt less comfortable in San Francisco that we had on any of the city streets we’d walked over the past few months. We were very careful about where we walked after dark, and even during the day there were places where we didn’t want to linger. We also found the tipping culture very different. In SE Asia tips were not encouraged, and in some cases refused, whereas in the US tips of 18-25% are expected. Once taxes, gratuities and tips were added, we found our bills were considerably larger than we’d anticipated. From San Francisco we flew to Miami, putting our body clocks out of sync by another 3 hours! Fortunately we had planned a relaxing few days in Miami Beach doing not very much so that we could catch up before we flew even further east to London. We loved the white sand beach stretching for miles and the Art Deco buildings. Miami Beach has the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world and in January this year hosted an Art Deco Centennial weekend commemorating 100 years since the design style first emerged in Paris in 1925.  Art Deco architecture amongst the palm trees in Miami Beach Miami has a large Hispanic and Latino population - nearly 70% of residents speak Spanish at home. The ‘Google Translate’ app was a godsend in SE Asia but we hadn’t anticipated that we’d use it in our hotel in the US! Linguists at a university in Florida have, over the last 10 years, tracked the emergence of a new dialect called Miami English in which Spanish grammar is retained but English words are used. So we said ‘Adios’ to the USA in Miami and boarded our flight back to London looking forward to seeing family and friends in the UK, but not relishing an extra 5 hours of jet lag!  Boardwalk to the beach |