From San Diego, we took a short flight up to the highly anticipated San Francisco. Almost everyone that we spoke to about San Fran had rave reviews of the city, and we couldn't wait to get there. Once again, we stayed in the downtown area near Union Square. This seemed to be where almost all of the hotels and hostels are located. We quickly learnt that the city is pretty small and getting around with public transport is quick and easy and makes the whole city very accessible. This ease of getting around meant that we could get in all of the city's main attractions: the Golden Gate bridge, the world's crookedest street - Lombard Street, a ride on the cable cars/trams, Pier 39 and Union Square and its surrounding area. The transport there needs to be good though as its near impossible to walk around the city given that its built on mountains and walking up or down streets is literally walking up and down the mountains.

Whilst there we managed to do two day tours. The first was to Sonoma wine valley. We chose Sonoma over Napa as it was a half day tour as opposed to a full day tour. We were also told that they are exactly the same and that you wouldn't know if you were in the one or the other. On our tour, we were further told that Napa has become very commercialized and overpriced. We took in two beautiful wine farms and got to taste some of the types of wines that aren't readily available in South Africa. The tour also had a stop in the Sonoma city centre and a drive through Sausalito. Our second day tour we took with our ex-Contiki chommies Matt and Hayley (who were in town for a couple of days with us) and ventured to Alcatraz, the Rock. This was very interesting and the walking tour itself is brilliantly done with the included-in-the-price-of-the-ticket audio tour.

San Fran is a great city for filling up your days but we were unimpressed with the nightlife. We did manage to get in one cool night in the Mission where we were taken on a pub crawl by our local guide, Ben Raviv. It definitely helped having a local on hand and it was also great to have a lekker Sunday arvie braai with his crew in Delores Park.

One last unexpected event that we stumbled upon was the Haight Street Fare. This was a closed off street affair with thousands of people browsing the flea market shops, watching street performers, eating and drinking (non-alcoholic beverages only) and dancing to funky local bands. The crowd was definitely a bunch of all-sorts, but that's what made the fare a fair affair! Post-fare drinks at one of the bars on the street was also an interesting experience and filled with odd characters.

So in summary, we found San Fran to be great for touristy sites and chilling during the day but not as lekker for night life as other cities - hopefully our timing or game plan was wrong and we will be proved wrong by others or on our next trip to the hilly city.

Trek on…Brett and Darren