Lonely Planet - San Francisco

book cover If you're exploring San Francisco, be sure to check out these highlights, brought to you courtesy of our friends at Lonely Planet Publications

1. Go gourmet by the bay

Foodies flock to SF in search of that one dish that induces instant nostalgia - the one you'll wish you'd never tasted, just so you could experience that first bite again. Now add to that flavour a panoramic view of the bay with gourmet-minded seagulls circling overhead in the vain hope of leftovers, and the realization kicks in: you may never have it this good again. That is, until tomorrow, when the Ferry Building opens for lunch.

According to a decade-old survey that's passed into urban legend, San Francisco has one restaurant for every eight people - no wonder it's a town of picky eaters. For even a $10 meal, locals expect inventive combinations of fresh seasonal ingredients; for $50 and up, they demand to know where those organic dry-farmed tomatoes were farmed, when that fish was caught, and everything but the nickname of that cow.

That may sound like a tall order, but the Ferry Building delivers.

Want a million-dollar view with your sustainably caught fish taco and organic jicama/grapefruit salad with toasted pumpkin seeds? Mijita awaits. Craving that local Dungeness crab you saw hauled in at the docks, preferably atop Vietnamese cellophane noodles? Good thing you have reservations at Slanted Door.

Nice Saturday for a picnic? Raid the Ferry Building Farmers Market. Savor that flavor by the bay, and let life exceed expectations.

2. Join San Francisco's party of the year

It never fails when the Gay and Lesbian Freedom Band strikes up 'I Will Survive': someone always breaks free from the sidelines and belts out heartfelt vocals. Pride is always most thrilling when it verges on chaos, with paraders clomping over in rainbow platform boots to greet admirers, and spectators spontaneously joining the moms and dads of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). 'Dykes on Bikes' lead the parade with a pack of Harleys, only to dissolve into Dr Seussian order with 'dykes on mountain bikes' and 'dykes with tykes' pushing strollers.

The crowd cheers for everyone, and goes wild for uniforms - especially LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) firefighters and sailors flagrantly disobeying the US military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. Even the sidelines are sights to see: a wheelchair bedecked with pink streamers, an elderly couple quietly holding hands, a teenager in a T-shirt with 'Yes I'm Queer' scrawled in marker.

And so it continues down San Francisco's rainbow-flag-bedecked Market St, from 11am until the late-afternoon fog rolls in. This parade won't quit until tens of thousands of people are hoarse, elated and covered in glitter and smeared lipstick. Counter-protesters bearing signs warning of damnation are no match for the collective wit and sheer bulk of this crowd: all of SF seems present, with an additional 300,000+ people arriving annually for the city's biggest event.

3. Get lit at the Landmark bookstore

A sign in the doorway by poet and co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads: 'Abandon all despair, ye who enter here.' This is easier than you might think at City Light. Browsers in the Muckraking section meet co-conspirators, lingerers in Lost Continents stumble upon fellow travelers, and the wild-eyed ones in Poetry? That could be love - or seekers of the bathroom.

San Franciscans are serious booklovers, and they don't fall for just any bookstore. They buy more books per person than anywhere else in the US, hoard three times more library books than the national average, and argue passionately about dozens more they've never actually read (ahem). But City Lights proved it was no ordinary pulp purveyor in 1957, when publishing small editions of Beat poetry made it the test case for free speech.

After Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested for having the audacity to `willfully and lewdly print' Allen Ginsberg's magnificent Howl & Other Poems, they won a landmark ruling that books with 'redeeming social significance' could not be banned. City Lights went on to publish Lenny Bruce, Paul Bowles, Noam Chomsky and William S Burroughs, and today gives booklovers a chance to max out freedom and credit cards on incendiary titles like Cindy Sheehan's Dear President Bush, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos' The Speed of Dreams, and Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. When you abandon all despair, you make more room for books.

4. Find Gold Mountain's hidden gems

With 41 historic alleyways packed into 22 square blocks, Chinatown is rich in old stories and new discoveries - if you know where to look. At first you'll be dazzled by the obvious eyecatchers: phone booths with pagoda roofs lining Grant St, and apothecary shops with walls of wooden drawers along Stockton. But it's not until you walk the alleyways that you scratch the surface and discover the city-within-a-city known for 150 years in Cantonese as Gum San or 'Gold Mountain.' These are the narrow streets where San Francisco grew up too fast, surviving booms, busts, bigotry, drug addiction and trials by fire to reach a wise old age.

You'll notice that these alleyways aren't exactly paved with gold, as once advertised in Chinese labor-recruitment posters - but from the start of the Gold Rush, cooks, launderers, barbers, porters, tailors and laborers found steady work here. Many of these trades are still practiced here on Waverly Pl and Spofford Alley, where neighborhood associations, social clubs and temples share storefronts with mom-and-pop businesses.

Head to Ross Alley, and wherever you see flowerpots being watered and laundry airing in open windows, stop and listen: whistling tea kettles, radio news reports in Cantonese, kids being called to dinner for the third time. Hard to believe that this is where bootlegging and gambling operations once flourished, and unescorted women lost their reputations. In the 1870s, with the price of gold in decline, a corrupt police force, and anti-Chinese laws restricting legitimate employment, immigration and housing, Chinese San Franciscans found themselves confined to cramped quarters where vice thrived. Sailors stumbled up from the port to Commercial St brothels for 25-cent recreation, and society swells headed downhill to gamble on Ross St and smoke opium in discreet Duncombe Alley.

Then came the 1906 fire, and the city's demand that Chinatown refugees relocate to Hunter's Point. But while the altars were still smoldering ruins, worship services were held in Waverly Pl and Chinatown residents got organized. They stood their ground, rebuilt their homes, and reinvented Grant and Stockton as the distinctive Chinatown deco shopping and dining streets you see today - and in the alleyways, the dream of Gold Mountain has been kept alive.

5. See the gate to the west at its best

Leftists pretty much run SF, but fierce right-wing and left-wing debates rage over the best bridge viewpoint. On the bridge's left are Seacliff mansion owners with multimillion-dollar vested interests in believing their view is best, plus nudists on Baker Beach convinced that the only way to appreciate the bridge in all its glory is to see it in theirs. To the right are Crissy Field fitness freaks with Ironman jogging strollers who brake for beauty, and cinema buff s who believe Hitchcock got it right: seen from below at Fort Point, the bridge induces a thrilling case of Vertigo.

No matter how you look at it or obsessively photograph it, the 1937 engineering marvel never fails to make a scene. Sunny days make you wish for afternoon fog, which spills over the towers like dry ice at a Kiss concert, to the tune of foghorn blasts.

6. Frolic among Bison, Bonsai and pagan altars

Smack in the middle of this fair city and any San Franciscan's affections lies a 48-block stretch of greenery and imagination. At one end the drum circle of Hippie Hill provides an off beat soundtrack to the sweater-clad exertions of the Lawn Bowling Club; at the other, bison stampede through their paddock toward seaside windmills like shaggy Don Quixotes. Wiccan offerings are made on the marble remains of a Spanish monastery behind the baseball diamond, and curiosity-seekers follow cracks in the pavement made by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy into the MH de Young Museum.

Meanwhile, overstimulated travelers enjoy a moment of Zen in the Japanese Tea Garden.

San Francisco's most forward-thinking feature is one of its oldest, a testament to the positive influence of local environmentalists like John McClaren and John Muir as early as 1870. The park has changed a bit since the 19th century - the wacky Eskimo village is gone, and the Conservatory of Flowers has been retrofitted - but thousands of visitors still enjoy the live music, outdoor festivals and constant blooming of San Francisco's green wonder.

7. Get artistically inclined

Blame it on the rolling fog and the happening arts scene: not only is it perfectly fine to have your head in the clouds in San Francisco, it's actively encouraged. The Yerba Buena Arts District was a sensibly drab, business-minded area until the SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Cartoon Art Museum moved in. There went the neighborhood, daydreaming of Matthew Barney films, musing about Mexican street graphics and doodling political comics on company time.

While attendance at Sony's flagship consumer-tainment Metreon complex flagged, independent-minded nonprofit arts organizations flourished: the Museum of African Diaspora, established a landmark presence, and SFCamerawork and the Museum of Craft & Folk Art relocated to new digs here.

Now any foggy day finds active thinkers adrift in the upper galleries of Yerba Buena Arts District, lost in thought, and found in inspiration.

8. Relive the sunmmer of love

It was the summer of 1965, maybe spring 1966, possibly October of 1967...as the saying goes, if you can remember it, you weren't there.

What witnesses can recall is that it was psychedelic, man, and people were giving it all away for free: music, love, food, truth, poetry and then-legal LSD. At some point the drugs got heavy, and so did the scene. As '60s Haight resident Hunter S Thompson said: 'With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.' But like a very groovy tidepool, the Haight still has some love left in it. For decades, the Haight Ashbury Food Program has volunteering. Flowers are still left on the doorsteps of the Grateful Dead house and Hunter S Thompson's former abode, and there's free live music on the streets and at Amoeba Records. Collective eff orts still succeed here, including the Red Vic Movie House and Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective - and Green Party candidates are the incumbents.

There have been improvements since the '60s: the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics have helped kick tricky habits, there's free wireless at Coffee to the People, and although the Hippie Hill drum circle doesn't seem to have found rhythm 30 years later, no one seems to mind. Peace and love, people, peace and love.

9. Make your own great escape

Even before your ferry arrives on The Rock, you'll start plotting your getaway. The obvious gambit is laundry duty, and sneaking out in a load of sheets. But then what? If you're caught you'll get sent to solitary, a tiny cube where days are marked by a light shaft traveling across the wall. Or you'll be interrogated in the dungeon, using techniques only alluded to in the otherwise thorough Alcatraz audio tour.

Take off your headphones for a moment, and notice the sound of carefree city life traveling across the water. This is the torment that made perilous prison breaks and flying leaps into riptides worth the risk.

Makes you wonder about the people who chose to be here - prison guards and their families, but also the American Indian Movement activists who occupied the closed prison island from 1969-71 to protest US occupation of Native lands. The FBI eventually stormed the island, and in a later settlement the US government was obliged to open a museum on Alcatraz commemorating the protest. It's easy to miss at the dockside processing center, but the raised fist and 'Red Power' painted near the dock are unmistakable. Each Thanksgiving Day since 1975, an 'Un-Thanksgiving Day' ceremony has been held at dawn on Alcatraz by Native leaders and supporters who believe the best way to escape history is to confront it.

10. Discover your secret mission

Picture a neighborhood where you walk past dozens of murals to get to the corner store, where you walk right through another - and your school, your favorite takeout joint, even your garage door are works of art. The Mission has more than 200 murals, bringing vital living color to gritty city streets.

Legendary muralist Diego Rivera painted mural masterpieces in San Francisco in the 1930s and '40s, and reunited with his ex-wife Frida Kahlo here in 1940 - you'll notice the couple making cameo appearances in works by local muralists, giving credit where it's due.

The murals Rivera and his Works Project Administration?funded contemporaries created during the Depression were revolutionary in style and subject, risking public and corporate funding with monumental tributes to workers and bold critiques of big business.

Funding for such controversial art tapered off with the onset of WWII and the rise of McCarthyism - but in San Francisco, the muralmaking continued. In the 1970s, Balmy Alley became a site for sore eyes and inquiring minds, with works by muralist groups such as the Mujeres Muralistas (Women Muralists) and PLACA (meaning 'markmaking') challenging US policy in Central America. Today Precita Eyes restores these murals, commissions new ones by rising San Francisco artists, and leads tours that cover 75 Mission murals within an eight-block radius of Balmy Alley.

11. See Victorians gone wild

Can you blame turn-of-the century San Franciscans for wanting to bust out a little? They had influenza, fires, economic crashes and the 1906 earthquake to deal with - not to mention corsets and mustache wax. Yet as buttoned-up as ladies and gents of Victorian society appeared in public, their home decor reveals a Barbary Coast wild streak.

Today's real estate speculators consider Victorian tastes garish enough to bring down property values - hence most of the Victorian 'Painted Ladies' in swanky Pacific Heights have been repainted tame, saleable shades of white and taupe. But in the nonconformist Haight and the Castro, there are still many Victorians that stay true to their original outrageousness. Several houses around Alamo Sq Park feature lavish Victorian trimmings: high-contrast color palettes, stained glass windows, fish-scale shingles, gilded finials, and peaked roofs with carved wood 'gingerbread' trim. The famed Postcard Row on the east side of the park is cookie-cutter Victorian - for more outlandish Victorian photo ops, wander along the north side of the park and the blocks of McAllister and Golden Gate between Scott and Steiner.