Silicon Valley - Apple, Googleplex, Tesla, Airbnb and Twitter are now tourist magnets

Want to play spot-the-geek at the world’s centre for entrepreneurs? Here is where to look, eat, drink coffee and sleep.

Silicon Valley overview Photo: iStock

Silicon Valley is not a destination. But try telling that to the tourists who pass through San Francisco and decide to visit the home of tech giants, the playground of geeks and the ecosystem that is reinventing the world.

It might not have a postcode but the Valley is increasingly being asked to open itself to public scrutiny or, at least, busloads of phone-snapping visitors. So far, it’s resisted techno tourism but let’s not be dissuaded. After all, the most interesting destinations have always required visitors to take the road less travelled and Silicon Valley, too, rewards those with an intrepid spirit. So, in the absence of tour guides, let’s hack the place.

Most techo tourists have ­Google at the top of their list. They’ve heard about the bicycles, bean bags, sleeping pods and free beer and they want to share that excitement.

A trip to Googleplex at Mountain View gives a good impression of how the 21st-century workforce works. It’s a campus of buildings linked by bike paths, gardens, eating areas and odd sculptures, such as a T-Rex and Google mascots. You might even see self-driving cars tootling around or a conference bike, which has five bikes welded together so people can cycle as they confer.

An employee rides a Google bike pool bike past an Android foam robot at the Googleplex.

A Google Visitors’ Centre has been in Beta development for at least a year and a gift shop is curiously only open to staff, nevertheless, it is possible to befriend a Googler to get access into buildings and a few visitors have made use of the Google-coloured bikes that lie scattered throughout the campus.

BUSINESS: Tech-savvy Australians flood Silicon Valley

At the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, visitors can get access to the recently opened gift shop, The Infinite Loop. This shop sells all the usual Apple products but also some gifts that are exclusive to the store, including the coolest Apple T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Tesla is another giant that attracts people who want to see a factory that has more robots than humans under its roof. While visitors can browse around the car salesrooms and arrange a test drive of gunned-up electric cars, only buyers of the cars get a tour of the factory. Some say it’s worth the price of admission.

Over the past few years, more of the action of Silicon Valley has migrated to San Francisco as new teams of entrepreneurs decide to stay in the place where they like to live, work and play.

Uber, Airbnb and Twitter are a short walk or a short drive from downtown Market Street. But, again, they don’t make visitors very welcome. Uber’s headquarters in Market Street is generally off limits but if you’re an Uber driver, you can arrange access to the Groove clubhouse, South of Market, where drivers take pit stops, get free coffee, watch TV and generally ­mingle.

Airbnb is a little more accessible, if you can find it. Located at 888 Brennan Street, there is no signage outside (or inside) but it is possible to wander into the foyer and appreciate the way an old carpet factory has been redesigned to cater for the world’s most pampered workers. Sitting under a giant green wall and surrounded by gallery-like work spaces, visitors can observe workers arriving on bikes and scooters and often with the family dog on leash.

Like many of these innovation spaces, Airbnb’s cafe in the foyer has some of the best coffee in the city.

MAGAZINE: Airbnb is on a mission for world peace

Still in downtown San Francisco, techno tourists will feel more welcome at the NASDAQ entrepreneurial centre at 505 Howard Street. The exchange best known for its tech stocks has event spaces, media studios and the biggest living wall in the city. It regularly holds free classes and hosts pop-up stores for companies to test new products.

While window-shopping at corporate headquarters can be fun, a better way to appreciate the energy of the technological revolution is to visit museums, galleries, markets and events.

One of the latest museums to showcase innovation is the Autodesk Gallery down the Bay end of Market Street. This is a showcase area for the artistic and futuristic uses of computer design and it features a lot of 3-D printed works. On display recently was a 3-D printed dress that begins smoking when someone gets close; a driving console that gives commuters a taste of a highway being built down the road, an aircraft engine that’s light enough to be lifted by hand and a backpack incubator for premature babies in developing countries. It’s free and it welcomes visitors.

Back in the Valley, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is the place for digital nostalgics. It has most of the computers that have ever existed, including a few quirky ones such as the kitchen computer with a built-in cutting board. The Tech Museum in San Jose is aimed at inspiring innovation but most of their interactive exhibits seem designed for kids. The original garage that housed HP in 1938 and is considered the cradle of the Valley can still be viewed at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto; and the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began Apple is a historic site and is a popular drive-by at 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos.

Stanford University has several tours for visitors, including a golf cart tour, and, if you’re lucky you might run into an exhibition or art event happening while you’re there. Don’t expect to be welcomed at Singularity University, it doesn’t even welcome journalists, but it does have a forbidding and futuristic parabolic arc.

Perhaps the best clue to capturing the vibe of the place that’s remaking the world is to hang out with the start-up entrepreneurs. And there are many of them. They say everyone in Los Angeles is writing a script but in San Francisco everyone is writing code in the local cafes.

The San Francisco financial district, where start-up types go to drink at night.

Think about sharing an Airbnb bedroom with locals (and the special type of accommodation called hacker hostels), catch an Uber car or even download the app for an Uber-type bus service. The Leap bus service, for instance, can be hailed with an app and does a loop around key areas of the city. Better still, the buses have been reconfigured as cafes with Wi-Fi, lounges and lots of ports for people to plug their laptops into.

The city’s cafes are literally full of people with laptops. In some, there seem to be more laptops than customers and many of these cafes boast about having coffee as good as Melbourne. Blue Bottle cafe is best known downtown; there are good cafes in South Beach, there’s The Grove cafe, which is home to one of the first avocado smashes and is said to have hosted many a unicorn (billion dollar business) in the early days.

Bars that attract people from start-ups, incubators, VCs and accelerators are found in The Mission area, South of Market, Nob Hill and in the financial district. Check out the Clift bar, Benders, Zeitgeist and S & R Lounge.

When you need a bar that has no clock, no TVs, no digital displays and just a few entrepreneurs drowning their sorrows, the House of Shields should do it for you.