San Francisco travel info

At the top of Hyde Street the cable car clangs its bell and tips over the crest, and the road drops away almost like a cliff, with blue water and Alcatraz hanging at the bottom. People riding the running boards grip a pole with one hand and hold up a phone with the other. Nearly the whole city is hills, and your calves notice before you do.

Then there's the fog. On summer afternoons it pours in off the Pacific, swallowing the Golden Gate Bridge towers halfway up, and a 20-minute bus ride west from the sunny Mission suddenly calls for a puffer jacket. Every neighbourhood really does get its own weather, which is why, every July, travellers who packed only T-shirts end up buying 'San Francisco' hoodies in the Fisherman's Wharf souvenir shops.

The food leans toward the sea: clam chowder poured into a hollowed-out loaf of sour sourdough, whole Dungeness crab steamed in winter, cioppino with every kind of shellfish in a tomato broth. In the Mission you eat a burrito the size of your forearm straight out of its foil, and in Chinatown the dim sum carts still roll. Prices and tipping take some getting used to, but it's a city made for walking, and that makes up for a lot.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO)