California Sunset

Ahhh, Auckland airport. It's like a sixth home to me now (given that Vancouver is like a second, and so forth). I am sitting at the exact same internet terminal I used to write my Da Vinci machines blog many days ago. The trip down to Big Sur was great. Spectacular coastlines, about two hundred radio stations to choose from in the car and even a trip to Hearst family's San Simeon ranch, which was the 1920s version of Neverland, zoo and all.

Of course the return to the airport was another experience again. American roads are like science fiction - overpasses and flyways curl in intricate knots, linesof traffic seem tofly above you, criss crossing mid air, plus there are some of the largest and most absurd cars ever driven by human hand. The landscape of roadways, which on the outskirts of a city like San Fran goes for miles and miles and MILES, is pretty gross in terms of the amount of concrete and the sheer absence of nature but it's not entirely ugly. But it does feel more like the Jetsons than real life.

I had hoped to see my last sunset over the Pacific. Nuh uh, there was fog that evening. So my last California sunset was seen over the outer suburbs of San Francisco, on the airtrain from the hire car garage to the international terminal, gleaming off electricity pylons rather than ocean waves.

It's an interesting place, America. It has its mixture of beautiful and ugly, like anywhere, and I can see how if you ended up in the burbs without the money to go to the touristy areas I was visiting it could become a vision of Hell, like the illustrations to a modern translation of Dante's inferno I saw in City Lights bookstore, with the circles of Hell represented as an urban wasteland of strip malls, car wrecks and rampant advertising.

But then I've seen some of the most beautiful landscape I've seen anywhere - for me Mt Robson in Canada stands with Uluru as a sight so beautiful its effect is like an emotion. The west coast cities - San Fran, Seattle, Portland, Victoria, Vancouver - are as cool as it gets, really. Some things in America are like they leapt out of a TV screen or a movie, but on the other hand it is really quite different to the way we see it in Australia.

On the whole, I loved it over there. Mind you, there was an amazing feeling of relief to get on the plane last night and hear New Zealand and Aussie accents around me. When I got off in Auckland and heard Missie Higgins playing, then I knew I was coming home.