Silicon Valley fuelled the film-makers’ craft, but it’s only recently that it has fired film-makers’ imaginations. First there was The Social Network, a slow-burning examination of the Facebook phenomenon. This week sees the British release of The Internship (out July 4), in which two losers played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lark around at Google. The intern programme in the film is designed for university high-fliers, but the two fortysomethings blag their way on, with excruciating results. Later this year we should see a biopic of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher in the eponymous role.  All these films give a glamorous sheen to Silicon Valley. The reality is more run of the mill. The HP garage has been christened “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley”, and outside a handsome plaque testifies to the importance of the site.  It was the middle of the day but the place was deserted. Silicon Valley is still, for now, a mystical place that few bother to get the measure of. A hundred years from now, though, a pilgrimage there might be as essential as one is now to Rome, Athens or Istanbul. This is where a new society, a new way of living, is being created.  I met Jesse Warr, a fixer and tour guide, who drove me past the property where Jobs used to live. His widow, Laurene Powell, and three children, still live in the Dordogne-style house. Pointedly, there are no electric gates or high walls. Palo Alto is a perfect dormitory town with perfect houses and perfect-looking people.  We passed the office block in its centre where Facebook once rented space and stopped at Pizza My Heart, a Hawaiian-themed joint where Stanford students and app designers intent on making a million eat lunch and talk about rock music or surfing.  I ordered a slice of Big Sur, which comes topped with garlic, sausage and pepperoni, and asked Warr what his favourite food was while I poured Parmesan and chilli flakes on to my slice. “Salad,” he replied, taking a bite of his veggie pizza. Like Leland Stanford, Mark Zuckerberg (one of the founders of Facebook) and so many more, Warr came to California from the east in search of a new life.  Zuckerberg once rented a house nearby, as did Larry Page and Sergey Brin – two Stanford students who didn’t just want to make a search engine, they wanted to make something with artificial intelligence. Their company seems set on world domination from its base up the road. The nondescript houses of the suburbs, with fanciful names such as Sunnyvale and Mountain View, are still the incubators of the next big thing in the digital world.  Needing more space, Facebook recently relocated to a sprawling office complex that Sun Microsystems used to call home. It’s on reclaimed flatlands surrounded by marsh. I couldn’t stop staring at the birds, the kind of birds John James Audubon painted and documented in Birds of America.  The road running around the perimeter of what looks like the office of an insurance firm in Milton Keynes gives only a tiny clue to what’s inside: its name is Hacker Way. On the corner of Hacker Way and the Bayfront Expressway is a sign that usually displays a giant “thumbs up” – the “Like” logo from Facebook – but that day workers were putting up a new poster.  We passed the offices of Oracle, eBay, Microsoft and McAfee – all strung along Highway 101. Just beyond the road Warr pointed to the HQ of Yahoo – this once-dominant internet player was started by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who studied together at Stanford.  Silicon Valley used to be called the Valley of Heart’s Delight because of the blossom on the fruit trees. In downtown San Jose neat squares and boxy office blocks squat where orchards used to bloom. Adobe’s HQ towers over the city centre. The Tech Museum of Innovation has a series of child-friendly exhibits exploring the world of science, with Segways and astronauts featuring largely.  No one mentions the wars. Defence has made California rich: Hewlett Packard sold its systems to armies and the internet was developed initially as a military machine. It is a great paradox of the online world that, while it has led to a new era of dissent, it also concentrates power in the hands of a few corporations and allows the spooks to do their jobs from a desk with a soda in one hand and a mouse in the other. The enormous hangars at Moffett Federal Airfield, where airships used to be stored, are graphic reminders of the area’s military presence, past and present.  We diverted back through Palo Alto. Posters lined the road – Oliver Stone was due to give a talk that night at Stanford about his new television show, Untold History of the United States, in which he talks at length about how modern America has been shaped by commercial interests.  The fetishisation of technology brands reaches its apotheosis at Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. In the company store there, I deliberated whether to buy a T-shirt saying “Cupertino – Home of The Mothership” or a Babygro with an Apple logo on it. Apple aficionados were bulk-buying souvenirs all around me.  The shop at the nearby Computer History Museum is better – a paean to progress, to nerds and to geeks. You can buy books with titles such as Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, biographies of Alan Turing, and posters of Google’s first server and the 1984 Apple Macintosh.  The museum’s zoomed-in photos of diodes and circuits and chips fascinated me and I couldn’t stop looking at the man-made patterns. As my eyes went dizzy I imagined the future. A future when all of us would be inextricably linked to a world where computers were legion and key to everything. A future that was imagined and created here in northern California. People will come here in the future. People will come in droves – to worship, to protest and to see where it all started.  From May to October temperatures are around 20C-27C (68F-80F), with low rainfall; winter can be cool.  Flying time and time difference  It takes about 10 hours to fly to San Francisco, which is eight hours behind Britain.  Virgin Atlantic (virgin-atlantic.com) has direct flights from Heathrow to San Francisco. Virgin also flies to Los Angeles, from where you can catch a domestic flight with Virgin America (virginamerica.com) to San Jose, which is the closest airport to Silicon Valley but less handy for downtown San Francisco. Caltrain (caltrain.com) links Silicon Valley's main points of interest and San Francisco, but hiring a car or taking a tour is easier. It's 45 minutes by car from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.  Virgin Holidays (0844 557 4321; virginholidays.co.uk) has fly-drive packages; a trip from September 28 to October 5 costs £1,712 for a couple, excluding hotels.  Jesse Warr will take you on a full day's tour (eight hours) of Silicon Valley for £400. The price is the same for up to six people and he'll pick you up and drop you off at your hotel (001 510 533 9211; toursanfranciscobay.com; afriendintown@hotmail.com).  Aloft Cupertino Cool little bolt-hole where people visiting Apple's nearby HQ pitch up. Nerdy but nice and with some signature funky Aloft décor (408 766 7000; starwoodhotels.com/alofthotels; double room from £65).  Hotel Zetta Brand new tech-themed boutique hotel in SOMA, the heart of San Francisco's net district, which opened in February. Art, design and amenities are tailored to geeks (415 543 8555; viceroyhotelgroup.com/en/zetta; double room from £90).  Garden Court Swanky and opulent surroundings suited to guests who prefer tradition and class to the bright, sometimes infantile style found elsewhere in the Valley (650 322 9000; gardencourt.com; double room from £115).  Pizza My Heart Surf-themed pizza joint serving award-winning slices such as the Big Sur – with sausage, portobello mushroom and garlic (220 University Avenue, Palo Alto; 650 327 9400; pizzamyheart.com).  Café Zoetrope The Caesar salad was invented in this building in 1924, but the best thing at the film director Francis Ford Coppola's restaurant today is the lip-smacking spaghetti with meatballs (916 Kearney St, San Francisco; 415 291 1700; cafecoppola.com).  La Forêt A traditional, chic place whose six-course tasting menu (£90) has a reputation as one of the finest meals in Silicon Valley (21747 Bertram Road, San Jose CA; 408 997 3458; laforetrestaurant.com).  Download Silicon Valley Roots & Shoots, an app that is essentially a self-guided tour (siliconvalley.sutromedia.com/about-silicon-valley.html).  If you "look" like a Googler, you can take an incognito stroll through the gardens of the Googleplex. If anyone stops you, say you got lost.  The same goes for Facebook – the perimeter isn't fenced. If you're stopped by security, be polite, sound English – then scarper.  The gigantic former dirigible hangars of Moffett Federal Airfield are among the most striking sights in Silicon Valley. Larry Page and Sergey Brin land their private jets there now.  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'The Internship', out this week, is a film set in a fictional Silicon Valley.   But what's the real one like? Christopher Beanland went to find out.