In some ways, the west coast is the ultimate "now" society. Anywhere so vulnerable to the constant threat of the Big One - a massive earthquake of unimaginable terror - is bound to have a sense of living for the moment. However, its supposed superficiality is largely fictitious. Although home to such reactionary figures as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, it has also been the source of some of the country's most progressive political movements . The fierce protests of the Sixties may have died down, but California remains the heart of liberal America, at the forefront of environmental awareness, gay pride and social permissiveness, and increasingly a bulwark of the Democratic Party. Economically , too, the region is crucial, whether in the film industry, the music business, the financial markets, or the all-consuming sector of real-estate development.

California is too large to be fully explored in a single trip, but in an area so varied it's hard to pick out specific highlights. Los Angeles is far and away the biggest and most stimulating city: a maddening collection of freeways, beaches, seedy suburbs, upscale neighborhoods and extreme lifestyles. From Los Angeles you can head south to the growing metropolis of San Diego , with its broad, welcoming beaches and easy access to Mexico; or push inland to the desert areas , most notably Death Valley , a barren and inhospitable landscape of volcanic craters and salt pans that in summer becomes the hottest place on earth.

Most people, though, follow the shoreline north up the central coast : a gorgeous run that takes in lively small towns like Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz . California's second city, San Francisco , at the top end, is about as different from LA as it's possible to get: the oldest, most European-styled city in the state, set on a series of steep hills, its wooden houses tumbling down to water on three sides. It is also well placed for the national parks to the east, such as Yosemite , where waterfalls cascade into a sheer glacial valley, and Sequoia/Kings Canyon with its gigantic trees, as well as the ghost towns of the Gold Country. North of San Francisco the countryside becomes wilder, wetter and greener, approaching Oregon through spectacular and almost deserted volcanic tablelands.

The climate in southern California consists of seemingly endless days of sunshine and warm dry nights, with occasional bouts of torrential flooding in the winter. LA's notorious smog is at its worst when the temperatures are highest, from July through September. All along the coast mornings can be hazily overcast, especially in May and June; in exposed San Francisco it can be chilly all year, and fog rolls in to ruin many a sunny day. Much more so than in the south, winter in northern California can bring rain for weeks on end, causing massive mudslides that wipe out roads and hillside homes. Most hiking trails in the mountains are blocked between October and June by the snow that keeps California's ski slopes among the busiest in the nation.  TOP

Frequent Amtrak trains connect LA and San Diego , with a stop at Fullerton for buses to Disneyland, and one daily service runs up the coast from LA, stopping at Oakland and Emeryville , the nearest stations to San Francisco, and continuing via Sacramento to Seattle. Another line from Oakland runs along the Central Valley, but only connects with LA by bus. Cross-country routes leave LA for Florida (the Sunset Limited via Tucson, Houston and New Orleans) and for Chicago (the Southwest Chief daily via Flagstaff, Albuquerque and Kansas City). Oakland has its own direct service to Chicago. Foreign visitors can cut fares greatly by using the Rail Pass program. Greyhound and Green Tortoise buses link all the main cities.

For quick hops between the major cities - especially LA and San Francisco - you can't beat flying . Services are extremely frequent, and prices competitive - if your plans are flexible enough to take advantage of off-peak deals. Regular scheduled fares are high.

If you plan to do any long-distance cycling , traveling from north to south can make all the difference - the wind blows this way in the summer, and besides, you're on the right side of the road for the best views. Be careful if you cycle along the coast on Hwy-1: despite its stunning views, it has heavy traffic, tight curves and is prone to fog.  TOP

When Mexico gained its independence in 1821, in theory it also acquired control of California. However, Americans were already starting to arrive, despite the immense difficulty of getting to California - three months by sea via Cape Horn, or four months overland in a covered wagon. Though the non-native population was a mere ten thousand in 1846, the growing belief that it was the Manifest Destiny of the United States to cover the continent from coast to coast, evident in the aggressively imperial policies of President James K. Polk, soon led to the Mexican-American War . Virtually all the fighting took place in Texas; Monterey was captured by the US Navy without a shot being fired, and by January 1847 the Americans controlled the entire west coast. In 1850 California became the 31st US state.

By chance, a mere nine days before the signing of the treaty that ended the war, flakes of gold were discovered in the Sierra Nevada. Prospectors flooded west, in the most madcap migration in history; it took just fifteen years to pick the goldfields clean. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, built using Chinese laborers, was a major turning point. The crossing from New York now took just five days, and a railroad rate war brought fares down to as little as $1 for a one-way ticket.

California was perceived as immune to the worst effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s - thanks in part to the images of prosperity promulgated by its now-established film industry . From the Dust Bowl Midwest, entire families of " Okies " packed up everything they owned and set off for the farms of the Central Valley, though they often found bleak terrain and a hostile attitude to newcomers. Heavy industry came during World War II , in the form of shipyards and airplane factories, and many workers and military personnel stayed on afterwards.

As home to the Beats in the Fifties and the hippies in the Sixties, and a host of radical political and ecological movements since, California was at the cutting edge of cultural change. However, the illusions of the Flower Power days were shattered by the violence of the 1969 rock concert at Northern California's Altamont Speedway, and once the anti-Vietnam War struggle was over, popular culture seemed to withdraw into smug self-satisfaction. The junk-bond boom of the Eighties, however, crash-landed in a tangled mess of scandal, and for California the Nineties kicked off with a stagnant property market, rising unemployment, escalating gang violence and racial tensions in LA, and an appalling death toll from AIDS in San Francisco - compounded by earthquakes, drought and flooding . Yet despite all the problems, and with more-conservative Californians fleeing the state for more hospitable climes in Colorado and Arizona, at the turn of the millennium the state continues to attract countless new migrants from the rest of the US and the world, who continue to provide much of the economic growth and cultural vitality of this dynamic, ever-changing place.  TOP

The arrow-straight I-5 barrels straight up from LA to San Francisco. Four daily trains and frequent Greyhound buses run through the valley, calling at the towns along Hwy-99, in particular Merced, which has bus connections to Yosemite but otherwise doesn't merit a look-in.

Central Coast
After the hustle of LA and San Francisco, the four hundred miles of coastline in between - the central coast - is a welcome respite, sparsely populated outside the few medium-sized cities and lined by clean sandy beaches. It is at its most dramatic along Big Sur , one of the most rugged, savagely beautiful stretches of coastline in the world, where the brooding Santa Lucia Mountains rise steeply out of the thundering Pacific surf. The two largest towns are poles apart: Santa Barbara in the south is a wealthy resort colony, full of old and new money, while Santa Cruz to the north is a coastal town redolent of the Sixties - where the local collegians are officially known as the "Banana Slugs." In between, languorous San Luis Obispo makes a good base for visiting Hearst Castle , the hilltop palace of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the inspiration for the Xanadu pleasure palace in the film Citizen Kane.

Almost all of the towns grew up around Spanish missions , each a long day's walk from the next, and once enclosed within thick walls to prevent Native American attack. Monterey , a hundred miles south of San Francisco, was California's capital under Spain and Mexico, and still has attractive early-nineteenth-century architecture.

Amtrak's Coast Starlight train runs along the coast up to San Luis Obispo before cutting inland north to San Francisco and up to Seattle; Greyhound buses stop at most of the towns, especially along the main highway, US-101.

Gold Country
Over 150 years before international techies invaded California in search of Silicon gold, rough and ready 49ers came to the Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada, 150 miles east of San Francisco, to look for the real thing. The area ranges from the foothills near Yosemite to the deep gorge of the Yuba River two hundred miles north, with Sacramento as its largest city. Many of the mining camps that sprung up around the Gold Country vanished as quickly as they appeared, but about half still survive. Some are bustling resorts, standing on the banks of whitewater rivers in the midst of thick pine forests; others are just eerie ghost towns, all but abandoned on the grassy rolling hills. Most of the mountainous forests along the Sierra crest are preserved as near pristine wilderness, with excellent hiking, camping and backpacking. There's great skiing in winter, around the mountainous rim of Lake Tahoe on the border between California and Nevada, aglow under the bright lights of the nightclubs and casinos that line its southeastern shore.

Northern California
The massive and eerily silent volcanic lands of northern California have more in common with Oregon and Washington than with the rest of the state. Its small settlements live by logging, fishing and farming, though locals have been joined in recent years by New Agers, ex-hippies, and an ever-growing contingent of tourists. Once you're past the atypically lush valleys of the Wine Country , the coast stretches for four hundred miles of rugged bluffs and forests. Aside from the beautiful deserted beaches that stripe the coast, trees are the big attraction, thousands of years old and hundreds of feet high, dominating a landscape swathed in swirling mists. The Redwood National Park teems with campers and hikers in summer, but out of season it can be idyllic. The remote wildernesses of the interior can be enchanting, especially around the Shasta Cascade and Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Public transportation is, not surprisingly, scarce, though Greyhound buses run from San Francisco and Sacramento up and down I-5 and US-101.

San Francisco's Bay Area
Of the six million people who make their home in the vicinity of San Francisco, only a lucky one in eight lives in the city itself. Everyone else is spread around the Bay Area , a hodgepodge of either very rich or very poor towns located down the peninsula or across one of the two impressive bridges that span the chilly waters of the exquisite natural harbor. In the East Bay are industrial Oakland and intellectual Berkeley. To the south lies the gloating new wealth of the Peninsula , known as "Silicon Valley" because of its multibillion-dollar computer industry. Across the Golden Gate Bridge to the north is the woody, leafy landscape and rugged coastline of Marin County , America's richest suburb.

Southern California Desserts
The deserts of Southern California occupy a quarter of the state. Untouched but for the three million acres used for military bases, this hot and often inhospitable wilderness exerts a powerful fascination for venturesome travelers. There are two distinct regions: the Colorado or Low Desert in the south, which is the most easily reached from LA, containing the opulent artificial oasis of Palm Springs and the primeval expanse of Joshua Tree ; and the Mojave or High Desert , dominated by Death Valley and stretching along Hwy-395 up to the sparsely populated Owens Valley , infamous as the place from which the city of Los Angeles stole its water.

It is impossible to do justice to this area without your own wheels. Palm Springs can be reached on public transportation, but only the periphery of Joshua Tree is accessible and it's a long hot walk to anywhere very interesting. You can get as far as Barstow on Greyhound and Amtrak, but no transportation traverses Death Valley, leaving only the Owens Valley with its daily Greyhound service between LA and Reno.  TOP