Go By Train: The Amtrak Coast Starlight

Portland Union Station

I’m a lifelong fan of train travel. I love most things about it – the steady pace (ideal for relaxing and sleeping), passing through small towns that a freeway driver would miss, and looking out the windows for hours on end. I was especially excited to take the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Oakland all the way up to Portland.

The Amtrak stations, the visual merchandise (see these posters) and even the slogan “Go By Train” all have an old-worldy feel to them, as if travelling by train in America is a way to reconnect with some kind of Golden Age. I like the idea that long-distance train travel is genteel and kind of a novelty in an age of cheap flights.

The trip took 20 hours. It was meant to take 18 but I had heard rumours of the “Starlate” being delayed so I wasn’t too surprised. We hit a tree, apparently (“tree strike”) and some drunk and rowdy passengers also had to be removed from the train.

It did seem like there were a few intoxicated and shady characters riding with us but for the most part all my fellow passengers were very pleasant. I had breakfast and lunch in the dining car and had some great conversations with a Canadian couple, an elderly lady from Argentina, a grandmother from upstate New York and a Bostonian who was enjoying his new city of Portland.

The economy class seats are pretty comfortable and roomy.

I was certainly able to do get a good snooze. I wish the wi-fi was actually functional though.

But my favourite thing about the Coast Starlight was the view. I woke up soon after sunrise to landscapes that quite literally took my breath away (well, for a few seconds).

I have two more train trips left on this journey – a short one on the Cascades (also Amtrak) from Seattle to Vancouver, and then a much more substantial 24 hour+ trip from Vancouver to Saskatoon on The Canadian (from Via Rail). I am practically counting down the days!

San Francisco Obsession

Ever since I was a young nerd watching music documentaries, I’ve wanted to go to San Francisco.

But strangely, until I got to the airport, I had forgotten all about all those hours watching VHS and dreaming about wearing tie-dye and walking through Haight-Ashbury. It wasn’t until I was settled in my temporary home that I realised. “I’m HERE!” I was so excited. I couldn’t sit still.

The next day was sunny and I walked up Valencia St, then onto Haight. The pastel houses and blue sky were so bright that I actually felt giddy. I was full of energy and it seemed like the city was, too.

My week in San Francisco was really wonderful. The people I met were all positive and interested in the world. The sun shone every day, and all the food was delicious.

Mission

I stayed in two different rooms, because I extended my stay to a full week. They were both in the Mission, which is colourful and vibrant, and very Hispanic. I saw avocados for sale there for 79 cents! It wasn’t really near Downtown but one great point about San Francisco is that it’s quite easy to get around with public transport. You can always use Uber or Lyft as well.

Old-school F streetcar

Fisherman’s Wharf is nice to visit for a few hours but every local knows that it’s where all the tourists hang out. I enjoyed being among all the people and next to the bay.

I didn’t visit Alcatraz. I’ve been to a few prisons before as a tourist and find it consistently depressing. But to each their own. I found a museum of antique arcade games which you could still play for a quarter. They were creepy.

One of my days was spent riding over the Golden Gate Bridge and I’ve already written about that. When the weather turned chilly later in the week I headed to Golden Gate Park.

You could spend days exploring the park and I guess that plenty of people do, but I went straight for De Young museum to explore their art galleries. There was a special exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s works from her time at Lake George. These paintings were compelling but I have to admit I rushed through them so I could see the rest of the museum before closing time. One California-inspired painting really stood out.

“A Particular Kind Of Heaven” by Ed Ruscha

Anyone who has listened to the podcast 99% Invisible recently will have learnt about Sutro Baths. They are ruins of an elaborate bathing complex built in 1898. Imagine my delight when I realised that I could actually visit Sutro Baths! It was every bit as lovely as I imagined. It was windy and cold but the sea was sparkling and the air was fresh and salty.

My run of sunny days continued right up to the Sunday before I left, when I got up early to climb the big hill at Bernal Heights Park, which had spectacular views of the shiny city – my new favourite place.

I even saw a snake. A passerby noticed it and told me that it was a gopher snake. Not very scary.

The people I was staying with (I am now a big fan of Airbnb) invited me to join them at the How Weird Street Faire. People danced and smoked and drank in the sun, every costume more bizarre than the last. It was great.

I hear that the Folsom Street Fair is more crazy though. Something for next time.

I left for Oakland to get my train to Portland, feeling very grateful for everything I’d seen and all the people I’d met. What a beautiful, fascinating place. It was a sad goodbye to California.

I woke up in Oregon.

Checking in with ABC Radio

On May the Fourth I chatted with Rod Quinn on Overnights, the show on ABC Local Radio that I was producing before I left the country. We talked about my travels in San Francisco and Mexico City as well as Airbnb and basketball.

Five Days in Mexico City

On my last night in Mexico City I went up to my hostel rooftop with bare feet. There was a cool breeze which carried music from a bar somewhere, and I could see the city lit up all the way to the glittering hills on the horizon.

Before visiting Distrito Federal I had never set foot in Latin America. Stories and photos from more adventurous amigos had persuaded me to buy some flights from California. It was my first dip into a world that I had previously never given much thought.

I was immediately out of my depth. Arrogance or laziness, probably both, had convinced me that I would get by easily with a couple of vaguely correct (in pronunciation) words of Spanish and a cheerful demeanour. I was completely useless. I couldn’t even order what I wanted to eat (my attempt at procuring a milkshake was a mild disaster) and I stood out painfully with blondish hair and misguided wardrobe choices.

But that was no reason not to enjoy the beauty of the Centro Historico – slightly leaning monuments to colonial grandeur like the National Palace, Palacio de Bellas Artes and the city cathedral.

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Cathedral

Mexico City has, I’ve read, more museums than any other city in the world, and displays its turbulent history with pride. Pre-hispanic cultures are honoured everywhere and I had the opportunity to see a whole lot of artefacts from the Mexica (Aztecs) – the massive Anthropological Museum is one example.

One night I drank some beers at nice little bars in well-to-do areas with some Australian friends who were studying at the biggest public university there. They had a lot of stories and said that they felt like the vastness of Mexico City meant that they hadn’t really been able to scratch the surface. One of them was living in a beautiful casa in lovely Coyoacan, painted red and with a front courtyard where we had a, well, energetic fiesta.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived together in the same neighbourhood as my friend, for many years in the famous Casa Azul (Blue House). Walking through the museum that is there now, I was almost teary at the love and admiration that had obviously been employed in arranging the objects of the wonderful lady’s colourful and troubled life. Her studio remains intact, with bottles of paint next to the easel with a wheelchair in front of it. Her death mask lies on her “day bed”, wrapped up in a scarf, and her ashes reside on the dressing table in an urn shaped like a toad – apparently referencing her pet name for Diego. There was a special exhibition of her wardrobe – colourful dresses and scarves, but also her medical apparatuses like corsets and braces, decorated with drawings and little mirrors stuck on them. It made me uncomfortable to think that we were all looking at something so personal of Frida’s, but maybe she would have enjoyed the thought.

Diego Rivera’s work is pretty hard to miss in Mexico City. A very notable example is his mural of Mexican history which adorns the top of the staircase at the National Palace, from where Cortes once ran his new dominion. It’s vivid and slightly unsettling, but striking – what I imagine all his and also Frida’s work to be.

Behind the National Palace, archaeologists discovered the ruins of the old empire’s centre point – the Templo Mayor.

On my last morning I left my hostel and rushed over to the Palace of the Inquisition. I didn’t even know that it existed until the night before, when, to my delight, I discovered that it now housed a Museum of Mexican Medicine. When I arrived I must have been the only visitor. This grand old building with its bright yellow walls and sunny courtyard – all to myself, although I could only imagine what horrors it had seen in past centuries.

I spent so long there that I ran out of time to have a last meal of street food tacos with plenty of chilli and lime. I felt like I had seen and learnt so much in a few days that if that was my biggest regret, I did pretty well.

Hermosa, Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a vast, sprawling mess. Palm-tree lined streets clogged with traffic disappear into the hazy distance, and it’s impossible to make sense of where you actually are. Heading straight to Hollywood was a mistake. It was grimy, sleazy and strange, and completely overrun with tourists and people trying to sell things to tourists. After my stay in San Diego I had to return to LA to fly to Mexico and was unenthusiastic. But that was before I went to Hermosa Beach.

I walked out to the end of the pier. The air was clear from smog, the sun was out and the sea and sky were both an impossible blue. Families were fishing along the sides of the pier and some cheery people were walking around. A few scattered surfers braved what I imagined to be very chilly water. With a hired bike I rode along the beach all the way to Redondo, past housing that was a mix of kitsch and splendour. Fellow cyclists smiled and said hello as I went past.

Santa Monica had been buzzing, and the ride to Venice Beach a bit of a journey into the weird, but Hermosa was calm. How this could be part of the same city as messy, exhausting Hollywood, I couldn’t understand. I wanted to lie on the sand and drink up the sunshine all day. I began to understand why half the world wanted to be there. I never wanted to leave.

Classy San Diego

Before coming to San Diego the only things I knew about it, ridiculously, were from Anchorman. It’s actually a wonderful city will friendly locals who smile at you on the street, clean, wide streets and lots of sunshine.

California actually “began” in San Diego. Tourists can visit the Old Town, which has a lot of original or restored buildings from the Spanish colonial years. The stories of people living and working in the fledgling state were amusing and at times, very sad. Plus the Old Town has a beautiful old hacienda with a garden that was especially lovely under the California sun.

San Diego is an important military city as well. There are numerous military bases, including the large Pacific Fleet navy base which most people know about, and, consequently, a lot of handsome military men.

I trekked out to a gargantuan bunch of malls outside the city and bought a new camera, and then tested it out at the famous San Diego Zoo. The entry price is fairly steep ($48) but it provides a whole day’s worth of entertainment. One of my Lyft drivers (it’s a rideshare app that is big in California) told me that his main motivation for visiting the zoo would be not to see the animals, but to check out the people! He had a point. It was Easter Saturday, so Californians in their thousands were enjoying a day out at the zoo. I took some shots.

And the one I am most proud of, the Sad Tiger.

Pre-adventure interview on ABC Radio

So, I’m off. I’ve actually left the country already but this is an interview I did with Sally Knight on ABC Overnights – me, as producer, the interviewee. It’s all about the trip I’ve been planning and how somebody can learn to drive on the “other side” of the road.

The Necklace

“A part of me will always belong to you.” (Street art at Mauerpark, Berlin)

By the time I had the necklace, it was too late to find out anything about it. I had never seen my grandmother wear it, but somehow I knew that she must have loved it. An oval pendant with a cut-out design of hieroglyphics, it would have reminded her of dusty bazaar from whence it came, in the days when far fewer people were as worldly as my grandmother was. So then it was my turn to love it, just like she’d loved me.

In the middle of an otherworldly European summer, I was forced to farewell the man I was convinced was my Prince Charming. He went home, and home was on the other side of Atlantic. It felt like being dumped by a cold, heavy wave. I went back to Berlin alone, feeling smaller than ever in the big grey city. “Come to Paris!” said my best friend, who was on a glamorous trip around the continent. I sensed it would be my only opportunity to be so miserable in such a luxurious setting. I went, and wandered around the streets, and the sticky heat and sunshine were surprisingly good medicine. On holiday in the shimmering alternate universe of Paris, I could pretend that I was riding some warm current, ultimate destination unknown, and just drift.

I got my first inkling that the necklace was missing when I arrived in my next destination, the brainy city of Basel. I hadn’t slept and had just shot across the countryside in a super fast train. Everything was new, and the necklace was not around my neck. It must have been squashed in my bag. But over the next few days, it did not reappear. By the time I left, it was making me distinctly uneasy to think about it. I was missing its shape in my hand, the feel of the cold chain on the back of my neck, and just knowing that we were travelling through unknown landscapes together.

But I was in denial. Surely my necklace wouldn’t just be gone. It was much too important an artifact, and it was mine to take care of. I didn’t lose important things the way other people seemed to, did I? Especially when the necklace was one of my last remaining mementos of my grandma Ethel, who had been everywhere, and been everything to us. I could only fantasise about the stories that those little silver-plated Egyptian figures would tell. Everywhere I went, I had had it hanging on my chest. It was my go-to item of glamour, because I always imagined my grandmother wearing it and reminding herself of exciting times. Having been twice left mysteriously at other people’s houses, it had always found its way back to me – but my luck had run out.

It had travelled halfway around the world with me, and now might be left in a Parisian hostel, or in a French train, or somewhere else entirely.

My Swiss hosts hadn’t seen it. In fact, I hadn’t seen it. With a lump in my throat, I lodged a lost property report with the railways, and never got a response. My necklace had left me. Without my necklace, and my prince, I didn’t feel like I had much left to hold onto. I was losing pieces of my life, one at a time.

The necklace and me in happier times. (pic: Kate O’Dwyer)

I felt like even if the necklace turned up and showed itself and told me about all its adventures, I wouldn’t be worthy of putting it back on. My grandfather trusted me with my grandmother’s necklace, and I had let her down – my Big Ma, the woman with a million stories and a heart as big as the whole blue sky.

Switzerland in summer was a Technicolor wonder. And travelling alone had become my cause. But without my necklace I was more alone than ever.

Lucie Heather Ethel

heart on sleeve etc

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