Spinning San Francisco

Dominion Post travel editor Cameron Williamson takes to the streets during a brief stopover to cycle around America's Bay City.

I'm cycling furiously through an exciting harbour city. Wooden Victorian houses tumble down steep streets, there's enough ethnic diversity to spice up a creative cultural heart, fresh organic food fills baskets. There's great coffee, chocolate and bookshops, there's wine and wilderness within an hour . . . sounds like Wellington, New Zealand.

Triple the size, turn on some rain and fog, increase the influence of Mexico, Europe, Asia and Russia and throw up a huge red suspension bridge . . . you're in San Francisco, California.

America's Bay City is about the same age as ours - goldrush money got the timber town thriving in the early 19th century - and it has suffered its share of the earthquakes that come with living on the great Pacific Rim fault line. And just as Wellington has embraced cycling as a no-impact mode of city transport in these days of energy revolution, so the Bay City is full of pedallers.

Arriving late morning on Air New Zealand's 13-hour direct flight from Auckland, Golden Gate Bridge has shrugged off her morning mist, and on this bright winter's day the roads seem alive with bike riders. There are the usual couriers hopping kerbs, some tapered-jean boys on fixed-speed racers, suits with trouser clips, even a mother with a toddler in tow.

I have to sidle past a couple of fine looking black city bikes to check in to the Good Hotel in SoMa, the central district south of Market St.

Good Hotel tries to live up to its name, providing moderately priced recyclable lodging with quirky design and innovative ideas: "second-use" wood frames for the beds; carpets made from milk bottles, water-saving toilets, and a revolving library: leave your airport novel here and replace it with one from the shelf.

The receptionist catches me eyeing the bikes.

"Going for a ride today?" she asks. "The bikes are free for your use." Looks like I'm mobile.

The hotel is perfectly positioned on a downtown corner, just a short cycle to every part of town - 10 minutes' gentle freewheel to the clutch of museums by Yerba Buena gardens, a dip and two inclines to the beat generation hangouts on Russian Hill, a straight run down Market St to the harbour and its gentle promenade around to Fisherman's Wharf.

"We like to think it contributes to a healthy city," says the maintenance guy as he adjusts the seat height and checks the tyre pressure.

That's something of a running theme in a city that boasts hundreds of thousands of cyclists in a population of more than seven million. The sport of mountain biking was invented in Marin County over the Golden Gate Bridge, and it's the birthplace of two significant cycling lobby groups - the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and Critical Mass, a group that runs rallies, plans cycleways and lobbies for safer streets and cyclists' rights.

Downtown seems made for biking, generous cycle lanes and good signage make me feel like we matter, us cyclists, beyond being a nuisance to people in cars. In San Francisco, even important people ride bikes.

Avid cyclist David Chiu is president of the city's Board of Supervisors, a platform from which activist Harvey Milk helped make San Francisco the world's gay capital more than 30 years ago. Chiu considers his bike his primary mode of transport, darting between City Hall and Fisherman's Wharf, Russian Hill and North Beach.

"I've enjoyed riding since I was a kid - my whole family did," he says. "I loved exploring the world on a bike. It was faster and just a lot more fun."

Bicycling is a practical transport choice for Chiu. "I often challenge my friends to get from point A to point B more quickly than I can on my bike," Chiu says. He usually wins.

Chiu's personal experience gives him traction on the road ahead for San Francisco. He supports car-free "Sunday streets" and the city's five-year Bike Plan, adopted last year, which will deliver another 50 kilometres of bike lanes (there are already more than 70km), thousands of new sidewalk parking racks and corrals, and cyclist and motorist education.

Now there's a good idea: a little driver education wouldn't go amiss, I'm thinking. For a start, they're all driving on the wrong side of the road. But it's good of them to toot and remind me to look left, not right, as I glide into another intersection full of screeching brakes.

I sling my chunky lock around a bollard outside the Museum of Modern Art and head inside to be amazed by gallery walls dripping with Pollocks and Rothkos and Jasper Johns. Just to be sharing airspace with these giants of modern art is breathtaking. But there's a bonus: glass-cased displays of the correspondence that led to the paintings' acquisition - typewritten letters between the museum's founding curator, Grace McCann Morley, and her most generous benefactor, Peggy Guggenheim. These onion-skin missives are a window into the genesis of the modern movement. Morley was in charge for 23 years and effectively established the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th- century art.

Leaving MOMA full of new knowledge, I'm then enriched by the creative monument to Martin Luther King in the adjacent gardens. His timeless words, imbued with fresh power in the new O'merica, are carved in stone in a display that winds around the back of a waterfall. Cleansing and refreshing at once.

Back on the bike, I roll down Market St to the imposing facade of the San Francisco Chronicle, the august journal that documented so much of the young nation's history as it happened. I'm just in time to watch removal men vacate the premises, and leave an empty shell where good journalism once stood proud.

That's a punch in the guts for any journalist. But this is San Francisco - surely I can find some good drugs to ease the pain?

Fifteen minutes' ride to North Beach, and I'm standing with the ghosts of Kerouac and Burroughs outside Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Citylights Bookstore. Those beatniks probably "smoked a reefer of pot", or "took a trip on LSD"; I get by with a cup of joe, browse some of the expert selection of books and drink in the 50-year-old store's commitment to free intellectual inquiry.

When Ferlinghetti's helper hears I'm heading for Utah, she sells me some appropriate reading: Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's searing polemic about a Mormon Fundamentalist murder and the history of "a violent faith". Razor-sharp recommendation.

My trusty bike takes me far and wide - to Fisherman's Wharf, through Chinatown and the Mission, the Mexican flavoured oldest part of the city - before dusk and Margaritas lure me off the streets. You'd need a week to cycle the rest - Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and the ultimate ride, across the Golden Gate Bridge. That would really spin my wheels.

The writer was a guest of Air New Zealand and the San Francisco Visitor's Bureau.

Travel Notes

Getting there: Air New Zealand flies five times a week between Auckland and San Francisco with a Pacific Economy fare from $2122 per person. airnewzealand.co.nz or 0800 737 000. Hotel: Intended to be a hip, no-frills hotel with design style and a conscience, Good Hotel takes a green approach and has an organic pizzeria attached. somahotels.com

Brain food: SFMOMA is unmissable, but just one of a clutch that includes a craft and folk museum mocfa.org, the Academy of Sciences calacademy.org, the Cartoon Art museum cartoonart.org and the Zeum zeum.org, which has creative toys, puppets, masks and musical instruments designed to inspire kids.

Cycle Tours: High-quality guided tours across Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and Tiburon, return by ferry. All gear and hybrid, mountain, tandem, road and kids bikes available. baycitybike.com, bikeandroll.com, blazingsaddles.com

- © Fairfax NZ News