The Bay Area

If there's a technology still unimagined, a poem left unspoken or a green scheme untested, chances are it's about to happen here. Goodbye, inhibitions; hello, San Francisco.

San Francisco

The best way to enjoy the Mission is with a book in one hand and a burrito in the other, amid murals, sunshine and the usual crowd of filmmakers, techies, grocers, skaters and novelists. Calle 24 (24th St) is SF's designated Latino Cultural District, and the Mission is also a magnet for Southeast Asian Americans, lesbians and dandies. Potrero Hill is primarily a bedroom community for Silicon Valley refugees, who can occasionally be spotted ambling through the neighborhood's famous design district and avant-garde galleries. And down below in the Dogpatch, you can brunch like a champion, mingle with fancy wine barflies or chat up innovators and artists creating in revamped waterfront warehouses.

The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill

Downtown has all the urban amenities: art galleries, swanky hotels, first-run theaters, malls and entertainment megaplexes. Civic Center is a zoning conundrum, with great performances and Asian art treasures on one side of City Hall and dive bars and soup kitchens on the other. Some head to South of Market (SoMa) for high-tech deals, others for high art, but everyone gets down and dirty on the dance floor.

Downtown, Civic Center & SoMa

Hippie idealism lives in the Haight, with street musicians, anarchist comic books and psychedelic murals galore. Browse local designs and go gourmet in Hayes Valley, where Zen monks and jazz legends drift down the sidewalks.

The Haight & Hayes Valley

Dumplings and rare teas are served under pagoda roofs on Chinatown's main streets – but its historic back alleys are filled with temple incense, mah-jongg tile clatter and distant echoes of revolution. Wild parrots circle over the Italian cafes and bohemian bars of North Beach, serving enough espresso to fuel your own Beat poetry revival.

North Beach & Chinatown

Since the gold rush, this waterfront has been the point of entry for new arrivals – and it remains a major attraction for sea lion antics and getaways to and from Alcatraz. To the west, the Marina has chic boutiques in a former cow pasture and organic dining along the waterfront. At the adjoining Presidio, you’ll encounter Shakespeare on the loose and public nudity on a former army base.

The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers

Don't let the quaint Victorians and upscale boutiques fool you: this neighborhood rocks. Japanese Americans have called this area home for over a century and today Japantown is where cosplay kids come to rock Lolitha Goth fashion at anime premieres. The Fillmore has been a nightlife hub since its 1940s jazz heyday and turned totally trippy in the psychedelic 1960s. Hilltop Pacific Heights is ringed with mansions, many owned or once-owned by powerful women - including nude model turned museum founder Alma Spreckles, African American billionaire and Underground Railroad pioneer Mary Ellen Pleasant and US Congresswoman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Japantown, Fillmore & Pacific Heights

Just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, Marin County is a collection of wealthy, wooded hamlets that tenuously hang by haute hippie roots as a more conservative tech-era population moves in. The ‘common’ folk here eat organic, vote Democrat and drive Teslas. Tons of old rock n'rollers, from members of the Grateful Dead to Metallica, reside in the hills and are testament to the county's wilder days of yore.

Geographically, Marin County is a near mirror image of San Francisco. Its southern peninsula nearly touches the north-pointing tip of the city, and is surrounded by ocean and bay. But Marin is wilder and more mountainous. Redwoods grow on the coast-side hills, surf crashes against cliffs, and hiking and cycling trails crisscross blessedly scenic Point Reyes, Muir Woods and Mt Tamalpais. Nature is what makes Marin County such an excellent day trip or weekend escape from San Francisco.

Marin County

Berkeley and Oakland are what most San Franciscans think of as the East Bay, though the area includes numerous other suburbs that swoop up from the bayside flats into exclusive enclaves in the hills. Many residents of the ‘West Bay’ would like to think they needn’t ever cross the Bay Bridge or take a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train through an underwater tunnel. But a wealth of museums and historical sites, a world-famous university, excellent restaurants and bars, a creative arts scene, offbeat shopping, woodsy parks and better weather are just some of the attractions that lure travelers from San Francisco over to the sunny side of the Bay.

East Bay

You can eat a taco here that will leave you speechless, desperate for more, until you have pork and leek dumplings and decide those are your gastronomic destiny. You can play an Atari 2600 in a museum and drink a beer under a wall of skulls before listening to some of the nation's freshest hip-hop – live. These days, Oakland is where San Francisco's diversity and radicalism have fled to escape an astronomical cost of living. Oaklanders are fiercely proud their home retains the mixed ethnic tableau and unapologetic left-wing politics San Francisco once enshrined, and they know this backdrop is threatened by million-dollar residential homes, already present even in middle-class neighborhoods. Is this the last of what the Bay Area was? We're not sure, but between the food, nightlife and fabulous outdoors scene, Oakland is a great example of what the Bay Area can be.

Oakland

South of San Francisco, squeezed tightly between the bay and the coastal foothills, a vast swath of suburbia continues toward San Jose. Dotted inside this area are Palo Alto – home of Stanford University – and Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the Bay Area’s tech industry.

You won't find Silicon Valley on any map: it's a nickname. As silicon chips form the basis of modern microcomputers, and the Santa Clara Valley – stretching from Palo Alto through Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino to San Jose – is thought of as the birthplace of the microcomputer, the region is dubbed ‘Silicon Valley.’ It’s hard to imagine that even after WWII this was still a wide expanse of orchards and farms.

Further west, the 70-mile stretch of coastal Hwy 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz is one of California's most bewitching oceanside drives. For the most part, it's winding, two-lane blacktop, passing beach after beach.

The Peninsula

Berkeley is synonymous with protest, activism and left wing politics. Beyond those tropes is a busy, attractive city, a blend of yuppie and hippie and student, all existing side by side with great Asia-Pacific regional restaurants, twee toy stores, Latin American groceries, high-end organic food halls and the misty green campus of the University of California, Berkeley (aka 'Cal'). It’s easy to stereotype ‘Beserkeley’ for some of its recycle-or-else PC crankiness and occasional overbearing self-righteousness. But some of that attitude is justified: at the end of the day Berkeley has, more often than not, been on the right side of environmental and political issues that have defined the rest of the nation.

Berkeley is also home to a large South Asian community, as evidenced by an abundance of sari shops on University Ave and an unusually large number of Indian, Pakistani and Nepalese restaurants.