San Francisco Attractions

Chinatown
Chinatown is densely packed and colourful. There are some tacky curio shops, but the 30,000 Chinese - most of whom speak Cantonese - live in a tightly knit, distinctly un-Western community. It's a great place for casual wandering through narrow alleys, where on quiet afternoons you can hear the clack of mahjong tiles from behind screen doors.
The most colourful time to visit Chinatown is during the Chinese New Year in late January or early February, with a parade and fireworks and other festivities.

Downtown
San Francisco's densely populated downtown is squeezed into the hilly northeastern corner of the peninsula. The often dramatic cityscape came about because the streets were laid out as if their planners had never so much as glanced at the city's topography.
They simply dropped a grid pattern onto the steeply undulating terrain, and the result is that streets often climb or drop at ridiculously steep gradients. It makes parking hazardous, breeds bicycle messengers of superhuman strength and sets the scene for some pretty hairy car chase movies.

Fisherman's Wharf
There's no getting away from the unspeakable kitschiness of Fisherman's Wharf, but it remains both fun and hugely popular. The gateway for several top attractions (Alcatraz, the Maritime Museum and the Historic Ships Pier), its focal point is Pier 39, which is as popular with a sea lion colony as it is with tourists.

Golden Gate Park
San Fransico's great playground is a cunningly designed rectangle that appears far larger than it is. Woods line the edges, and nature lovers can wander in the fern dell, the arboretum, the Japanese Tea Garden and the tulip gardens. It's hard to believe it's all artificially created on top of sand dunes.

Haight-Ashbury
Keep on truckin' southwest of downtown and you'll hit Haight-Ashbury ('the Haight'), the locus of San Francisco's brief fling as the home of flower power in the late 1960s. Today, the Haight is still colourful, but its pretty Victorian houses and proximity to Golden Gate Park have prompted increasing gentrification.

North Beach
North Beach is sandwiched between Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf. It's a lively stretch of strip joints, bars, cafes and restaurants that started as the city's Italian quarter and gave birth to the Beats in the 1950s - City Lights Bookstore is here, at the corner of Columbus Ave and Jack Kerouac Alley. The neighborhood is hemmed in on the east by Telegraph Hill, which features tree-shaded stairways that ramble down the steep eastern face of the hill, and Coit Tower. One of the city's most famous landmarks, the tower is a prime spot to let loose your postcard-vista voyeurism. The 360° views from here are superb.

San Francisco Bay
A tad shy, this bay always seems to be around the corner, glimpsed in the distance. It is spanned by bridges, surrounded by cities, dotted with sails and crisscrossed by ferries. It's the largest inlet on the California coast, stretching about 100km (60mi) in length and up to 20km (12mi) in width.
The beautiful Golden Gate Bridge crosses the 3km (2mi) mouth of the bay. Completed in 1937, the bridge remains the symbol of the city despite competition from modern constructions. At the time of its completion, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.