San Francisco to Sydney - Day 9

Day 9 : Monterey

Things are tough in the tourist industry right now.

This afternoon we took the Monterey Bay Scenic Tour in a tour bus that seats about 80 people. Including Debbie and I, there were three people on the tour, four if you count the driver. We could just as easily have hired a taxi and split the fare.

Our driver and tour guide was also the owner of the business, so I asked him whether the events of September 11th had significantly effected his business. The impact, he said, had been swift and dramatic : he'd had four tour groups cancel immediately in the days after the 11th, and business was only now beginning to rebound a little. I assume today wasn't part of the mini-recovery.

To his credit though, the owner was still completely professional throughout the three-hour tour (no S.S.Minnow jokes here thanks) and conducted himself just as I'm sure he would have had the tour been fully booked.

The tour started by driving past downtown Monterey's places of note. These included the building in which California's first constitution was drafted and the house in which Robert Louis Stevenson lived for a time while summoning the inspiration for "Treasure Island".

A short distance out from the centre of town, we drove by the spot in the bay where John Denver crashed his ultra-light plane and which has now become a shrine to the singer. It was a little eerie.

The entire Monterey area is a magnet for the rich and the well-known, such attraction stemming from the area's natural beauty coupled with its reasonable proximity to the major cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Being popular among people of means has had an extraordinarily inflationary effect on land prices in the area; properties with water views sell for more than US$20m.

The day's first stop was at a place called Bird Rock, a pretty spot, with spectacular views of the coast. I think I've seen one too many dropping-encrusted rocks to get excited about the rock from which this area gets its name, though. You can see it in the photo at left. We'd hoped to see some otters here as well, but we've discovered that they're hard to reliably locate in the wild. We spotted a few greyish, shiny protuberances in the water and contented ourselves with the thought that these were probably otters.

Leaving the rock and its avian inhabitants, we stopped at a checkpoint to obtain permission to enter the gated community of Pebble Beach. Four gates, staffed by the community's own security force, control the flow of traffic into the Pebble Beach community and onto the roads which the community itself owns. We continued past three of the region's four major golf courses - Links at Spanish Bay, Cypress Point and Spyglass Hill - marvelling at the views and gasping at the prices.

Next, we paused to take photos of the famous Cypress Point tree : The Lone Cypress. It's apparently one of the few things in nature whose appearance has been copyrighted. The Cypress is a hardy tree - it has to be to survive in these wind-blown parts - and it lives for a couple of hundred years. The tree in the photo is approaching the end of its life though; it's only expected to live for another 40 years or so and even now is being supported by a few guyropes - sort of the Cypress equivalent of a life-support system.

Around 3pm we arrived at the most famous of the area's golf courses : Pebble Beach. The view in the photo is of the 18th hole, taken from the back of The Lodge. Pebble Beach is a public course and has no memberships. The waiting list to play a round here is 10 months long and the green fees for a single round are US$350. That works out at about US$5 a shot for a scratch golfer, maybe US$4 a shot for someone with a handicap of 15. (Golf is a curiously egalitarian sport in the narrow sense that poorer players get more 'action' for their money than do stronger players).

Lengthy waiting times are, it seems, another feature of the Monterey Peninsula driven by its popularity. For example, the Monterey Conference Center is now taking bookings for 2007.

The last stop of the day was at the Carmel Mission. The photo at left is of the front of the Basilica, a building whose architecture and colouring highlights the Spanish and Mexican influences in the area.

Economically, Monterey is heavily dependent on two broad sectors : agriculture (strawberries and artichokes), worth US$4bn a year; and tourism, worth US$2bn a year. It'll be an interesting place to keep an eye on to gauge the extent of recovery in the US economy.

Originally posted by TC