Hippy days are here again?

March 30, 2000, 14:59

SAN FRANCISCO

Getting there: carriers include American Airlines, British Airways, United (which has a hub at San Francisco International) and Virgin.

When to go: San Francisco’s weather is notoriously unpredictable but is basically mild all year with quite a lot of rain in the winter and fog in the summer.

Main attractions: Fisher-man’s Wharf, a sort of seafront Covent Garden featuring seafood restaurants, shops and museums; Alcatraz Prison, once the most notorious prison in the US, now a tourist attraction; Chinatown, the largest in the US and a dominant feature of the city; the cable cars – a quaint but effective means of getting across the city.

Eating out: this is no place for dieters. The range of food on offer is staggering, but Chinese food is exceptionally good and there is a bewildering choice on offer. For the best of all worlds, try a Californian restaurant for real east-meets-west cuisine that now has a global following. Also worth a visit is The Stinking Rose in North Beach. A San Francisco institution, everything on the menu features garlic – and that includes the desserts.

Getting around: taxis are plentiful and reasonably cheap. There are also the cable cars (a limited service of three routes, but fun) and excellent bus service or, for covering longer distances, the underground Bay Area Rapid Transport system.

Tours: get your walking shoes on to learn about the city’s history. Just about everything is covered from the Flower Power ’60s to the ‘Wok Wiz Tour of Chinatown’ – which comes with a Dim Sum meal to round off the itinerary.

city, in the early ’90s, I had been disappointed. It seemed that an American friend’s description of ‘San Fran’ as ‘the Old Maid of the West Coast’ was all too true.

Maupin’s San Francisco was nowhere to be seen. Youcouldn’t even smoke in a public building. Aids had cut a swathe through the huge gay population, the hippies that had survived the ’60s heyday of flower power were looking distinctly dishevelled and the yuppies had moved in with a vengeance.

But, almost 10 years on from that initial encounter, I finally struck gold and at last realised what makes the city so special.

Walking tours are very popular in San Francisco – and once you’ve experienced a hair-raising taxi or cable car ride up and down the incredibly steep streets, it’s easy to see why.

With just a day to see as much as possible, I began my own tour at the city’s beautiful and imposing Museum of Modern Art, located in the district known locally as SOMA (South of Market Street).

The museum was celebrating San Francisco’s hippie past with a small exhibition of ’60s art and artefacts – accompanied by a suitably psychedelic soundtrack. While the museum’s permanent collection won’t give Europe’s galleries any sleepless nights, it has a good selection of 20th-century art and is well worth a visit.

From there, it was off to the Coit tower, one of the city’s major landmarks. On the map, this looks like a modest walk – basically from one side of town to the other – and San Francisco is a small city.

But what a map can’t show you is just how steep the streets of San Francisco actually are. The cable cars which cross the city north to south are more than just a tourist attraction – if you’re unfit, they’re a necessity.

Kidding myself that I was up to the job, I started walking. Within minutes I was lost. Though planned on a grid system, the streets can be confusing, mainly because of the extraordinarily steep gradients involved. A wrong turn can leave you several blocks out of your way – and gasping.

I finally found the tower and enjoyed spectacular views of both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges as well as the financial district – home of the famous Transamerica Pyramid.

The views were great – but something was still missing. Where were San Francisco’s fabled radicals?

Fortunately, fate was about to take a hand and show me the real city.

Walking back (thankfully downhill) through the mainly Italian North Beach area, I heard what I took to be a Salvation Army band playing Abide With Me. Following the music, I arrived outside the Green Street Mortuary, where a funeral procession was assembling. At its head was an open-topped Cadillac containing a large portrait photograph of an elderly Chinese woman.

The music was provided by the Green Street Mortuary Band. I asked a policeman, whose jacket proclaimed he was on ‘Funeral Patrol’, who was being honoured.

It turned out I had stumbled across the funeral of Daisy T’u Ching, whose daughter, the writer Amy Tan, had immortalised her experiences as an immigrant to the US in The Joy Luck Club.

Quite the celebrity, Daisy was to be given a traditional send-off – traditional if you are a Chinese-American living in San Francisco, that is. The procession moved off and I followed a large crowd of well wishers, friends and family as it weaved through the streets of Chinatown.

The band, lead by a fierce-looking Italian-American woman, played several more hymns before arriving outside Mrs T’u Ching’s home. There they struck up with Daisy, Daisy – apparently her favourite song.

This surreal mixture of cultures is what the city is all about. If the US really is a melting pot, then it is here that they’ve perfected the recipe.

At this point, I found myself chatting to an elderly woman who was out doing her grocery shopping and had decided to join the procession.

Helen, it turned out, was a former psychologist who had been married to a celebrated philosopher and theologian. Drawn to the city in its radical ’60s heyday, they had stayed on to raise a family.

Now deep in conversation, I forgot the rest of my itinerary and we went off to sample one of North Beach’s numerous cafes.

Helen, it seemed to me, summed up everything that is good about the city – a mixture of the radical and the homely. Small, but perfectly formed, San Francisco may have put its psychedelic past behind it, but it can still delight and surprise in equal measure.

If you believed everything you saw at the cinema or read in a book, San Francisco would be a city full of eccentrics. No wonder no-one turned a hair when Whoopi Goldberg donned a habit for Sister Act – this is, after all, the home of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – an all-male order of nuns.

Armistead Maupin wrote about it throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the celebrated Tales of the City books. And his account of a hedonistic lifestyle where anything went fuelled my imagination.

But the last time I visited the city, in the early ’90s, I had been disappointed. It seemed that an American friend’s description of ‘San Fran’ as ‘the Old Maid of the West Coast’ was all too true.