Market fresh

 

Friday 23 May 2025

Yesterday (Friday) once we were up and about we headed for Granville Island - the little ferry goes across from Hornby Street a short walk from here down some leafy streets. The young woman had barely had chance to collect our fares before we docked (so actually $8 for an adult return is quite expensive when you think about it!) and we immediately headed for the shops - lots of lovely little crafty shops, handmade soaps (I bought Fresh Cotton fragrance, finally choosing it over Vancouver Rain), and plenty of native American designed-art though sadly transposed on to mugs and other items and made in China....we spent a lot of time happily browsing all the lovely shops with a few modest purchases.

The food market was glorious in an over-indulgent, cornucopia kind of way. (So much food - what happens to what remains at the end of the day?!) Fruit stalls with exotic dragon fruit, juicy strawberries, raspberries and cherries built lovingly into beautiful pyramids; a food court with delicious takeaway from many corners of the globe (we had Mexican), and stalls with food to take and cook at home (we chose ravioli). It really is shopping heaven and it was only sore feet and a little retail fatigue that prevented us from visiting every outlet, despite a reviving iced coffe and piece of cake.

Once off the return ferry, Lucy headed off to find a Samsonite repair shop for her misbehaving trolley case (and came back with a bargain new one), and Toni and I returned to the apartment having of course got a little bit lost despite the fact that the city is pretty much a grid system...on more than one occasion since being here, we've set off purposefully on the right street in the wrong direction.

I had booked a "Forbidden Vancouver" walking tour for the evening, namely "Lost souls of Vancouver" in the Gastown district (named after the man who helped the development of the area, a loquacious man who earned the nickname "Gassy", hence the district being named after him). We went to a lovely pub/restaurant for a light meal beforehand, and then met up with Billy, a would-be actor wearing a bowler hat, an overcoat and carrying a battery-operated lantern, masquerading as a tour guide. Sorry - I'm being mean, but he couldn't improvise either - when asked a question that was off-script he glazed over, smiled awkwardly and just said "Follow me" as a prelude to moving on. He looked the part, but just didn't have the chutzpah to carry it off.

Not only was his presentation (supposedly his own story) all over the place (I like chronological order please), the content was incredibly dull and disjointed. It says something when one of the high points of was watching a large rat crossing the road from the unremarkable but allegedly historic alleyway where we had paused - much of Gastown was destroyed by fire and what's left isn't terribly well preserved. The famous steam clock on Water Street is very attractive (it toots like a steam train on the quarter hour) but was running at 15 minutes slow and actually only dates from 1977.

Shortly after that, we decided we could take no more, watched the group go off in the distance after the bowler hat, and headed back up busy, bustling Granville Street to the apartment. Not just busy with Friday night revellers, but with people with shopping carts overbalancing with carrier bags of stuff, and men lying down asleep where they had fallen down.

I've found the level of desperate vagrancy present in Vancouver more than slightly distressing, but we've since found out from local that many of the people we've seen comatose on the pavements are homeless by choice, having not only come to Vancouver (the warmest city in Canada) to avoid extremes of weather, but also wanting to congregate with like-minded souls. Just as in London, here in Vancouver there are hostels and the equivalent of Streetlink teams supporting these poor souls. From my experience at Crisis over the years I know this apparent contradiction to be true - that whilst we can't understand why on earth anyone would want to be without a roof over their head, for many it's a way of life without responsibility and commitment which suits them despite the discomfort and indignity of a life on the streets that's only occasionally ameliorated by charitable efforts and social support networks. 

It still makes me sad though. 

Top of the train

Wednesday 21/Thursday 22 May 2025

I've arrived in Vancouver at the tiny and a little bit shabby Air BnB in a tower block that I'm sharing with Toni and Lucy for the long weekend after two days on the Rocky Mountaineer train from Banff, where I've been waited on pretty much hand and foot and organised with great efficiency (paid through the nose for it, mind you!). They're both in bed early following early starts and time zone differences, whereas wobbly train legs notwithstanding, I am now accustomed to being several hours behind and so am catching up on the blog.

The Rocky Mountaineer train company appeares to employ a cast of thousands - the trains (there are several routes) are made up of double-decker "gold leaf" carriages with a top deck containing reclining wide leather seats beneath a glass-domed roof, with a dining car beneath and a vestibule/viewing deck large enough to hold about 12 people. The hoi-polloi, or those who have only bought the "silver leaf" package, are in ordinary single deck coaches where I assume they were served airline-style at their seats - not sure what size of viewing deck they had but was reliably informed it only held a couple of people at a time. Was it worth the extra £300 for the gold package? Hell yes. I've travelled first class on European trains in the past but none were quite so special as this, with a "cabin crew" of young women who couldn't do enough for us. "Can I get you anything to drink?" "Would you like a snack?" "Eggs scrambled? No problem". 

 

Photos show the dining car and one of the top-notch loos, and my Aperol spritz pre-lunch (I held out as the bar was open from 0930 - the glass on the right is apple juice along with addictive chocolate and peanut snack mix...)

Amazing food (best smoked salmon ever), quality wine, proper cutlery, crockery and glassware, and an incredible landscape which was at times so breathtaking I wanted to weep at its beauty (nearly lost it at Nicomen Creek and falls). Sadly I missed the occasional shouts of nearby wildlife "Bear to the left!" or "Moose to the right" as it always seemed to be on the other side of the carriage, but I did see a number of eagles and an osprey in the semi-arid valley of the Thompson river on day 2, where their nests are often gently moved by the telecoms companies to dummy utility poles to avoid electrocution when they settle on the real ones. At the highest point of the journey on day one, I rushed out to the vestibule with my camera to take pics of the sheer drop and rapids below, only for the battery to die on me and to curse the fact that my phone was in my handbag at my seat upstairs.

Much of the early part of the route (a total of about 600 miles, split in two by an overnight stop in the railway town of Kamloops which nestles in a valley surrounded by mountains and at the end of a plateau created by an enormous lake) is quite a feat of engineering, including the spiral tunnels carved beneath Mount Cathedral turning 220 degrees so that what's right when you enter is left when you emerge. we travelled alongside 7 rivers on the first day - Bow, Kicking Horse, Columbia, Beaver, Illecillewaet, Eagle and the South Thompson and a number of lakes. On day two, we were alongside the North Thompson which is clear and then it meets the Fraser which is muddy and the two run alongside each other for some distance with the obvious contrast - weird! 

An especially spectacular viewpoint on day two was at the Cisco crossing, where one railway bridge passes over another with the Fraser river beneath. Because of an early lack of co-operation, the Canadian Pacific and National railways built west and eastbound tracks on separate sides of the Fraser.

The Rockies are visible from space, running like "a giant scar" for 250km. Once they were one range with the Columbian mountains to the east, but the shifting of tectonic plates separated the two ranges. I didn't see any beavers (the raucous septuagenarian, rather annoying Australians in my coach couldn't resist lots of dirty jokes at the word beaver, which our lovely cabin crew pretended not to understand), but - fun fact - their teeth never stop growing (hence they need to gnaw everything), they live for 10 - 15 years, and they can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes under water. That's beavers of course, not the septuagnearian Aussies.

Incidentally, I felt quite the youngster on the trip with most people blowing their children's inheritance and heading for Alaskan cruises after Vancouver. But the Australians were in the elderly majority, and it all got a bit much when they actually started singing "Waltzing Matilda" as the trip drew to a close. I turned up my headphones at that point and swore FFS quietly. Other English and Scottish people in the coach also maintained a stiff upper lip. When dining at breakfast and lunch with my fellow travellers, they were friendly enough, but as on many occasions it seems a single woman travelling alone is a bit of an oddity ("Yes, just me for lunch") and I was given a pretty wide berth by all the heterosexual couples in my coach. The only other single person was a woman from Saudi - sadly her English wasn't great (I did try without much success to engage with her at breakfast), and far too much facial surgery and botox had given her a somewhat alarming appearance, so like me she was a bit isolated - but hey I had a double seat to myself!

For much of day one, our speed was quite slow - maybe around 40mph - for much of the route as it wound around acute angles and the vast lakes and foothills. Much of it was also single track, so occasionally we had to wait in sidings for interminable (200 trucks' worth) freight trains to pass through. A few interesting settlements along the way, and some sad stories like the town of Lytton in Fraser Canyon, destroyed in 15 minutes by wildfire some years ago, or the ghost town of Walhachin which was created in 1907 on the basis of false advertising and was then decimated by young men being called to fight in WW1 who never returned, so that only about 30 people live there today.

 Day two was generally faster as there were longer straight stretches of track in a quite different landscape in the semi-arid river valleys and through lots of woodland towards the end, with lakeside dwellings, farmland, small holdings and cows - and lots of stockyards which were not quite so breathtaking. The low point of the trip was the amount of time it took for the final leg where we seemed to spend forever in sidings in less pretty surroundings, taking over an hour to get to the transfer coaches from the outskirts of the city. Oh and the aforementioned train legs, which I am suffering from again tonight, hoping sleep will again cure. But what a trip - a budget buster but unforgettable, and I'm only sorry that my cheapie camera and poor technique doesn't accurately represent the true majesty of the landscapes. 

Canadian capers

 Wednesday 21 May 2025

 I've actually been here since Friday 16 May when I flew into Toronto from Gatwick (spare seat next to me - hurrah - but slightly disappointing choice of movies), but haven't had a lot of time as I've been spending  a few days with my dear friends Toni and Donald Graham at their lovely home in Mississauga which is kind of like a suburb but supposedly a city in its own right. 

I arrived mid afternoon in lovely sunshine and a heatwave of 26C, which sadly dropped by about 10 degrees the following day together with some fairly biblical rain when we visited St Jacobs market and joined the march of the penguins in the covered food market - it was rammed and as Toni already had a very full fridge we weren't purchasing. We spent a pleasant half hour wandering the antiques market and then headed off to the little town of Elora. 

After a lunch at the Handsome Devil bistro, some light retail therapy followed (though this was somewhat challenging, as despite the fact that it was a Saturday afternoon many of the merchants of Elora saw fit to close at lunchtime and there were no tea and buns to be had after 4.30pm). We wandered down to take a look at the gorge and falls for which the town is famous. Have to say we were rather underwhelmed as there's been little attempt to create any kind of viewing platform or to cut back trees obscuring said views. and the falls are really just a fast-moving river at that point, so we headed off to the country park to try and get a better look, only to be told that we would be charged $9 for the privilege even if we only wanted to stay a few minutes. It was starting to rain anyway, so we headed back home, where Toni's youngest Dougal was cooking dinner - it was not his finest culinary hour, due to both burning and undercooking, but much merriment ensued which he will not be allowed to forget for a very long time.

On Sunday Donald joined us for a jaunt to Niagara on the Lake, which is a pretty, tulip-filled though touristy town, and again lunch and some retail therapy was the order of the day, together with some very good ice cream. On Monday, Toni and I caught the train into the city (it was a bank holiday, but most things seemed to be operating normally). We went to the Art Gallery of Ontario, a very lovely, light and airy building which was mercifully quiet. We very much enjoyed a very brief stay in a Yayoi Kusama infinity room

and then split up so that we could look at art which appealed to our rather different tastes - I like modern, and saw some Rothko/Warhol contemporaries along with some photography by the likes of Jeff Wall, whereas Toni likes her art a bit less abstract and a bit more 19the century. We met up again for a typically galleryesque overpriced lunch in their bistro, taking a tram afterwards down to the waterfront for a wander in the sunshine (annoyingly cold in the shade!) before heading home after a gutbusting cinnamon bun.

Early start on Tuesday when Donald took me to the airport to catch a 9.15 flight to Calgary, where I was then due to catch a bus to Banff. All was fairly uneventful (though I did flounce from the queue at Tim Horton's - take a bow Pret a Manger, you know how to do fast food fast) and I flew with Porter, which appears to be the Canadian equivalent of Easyjet, with considerably less charming cabin crew. 

The flight was at least early, meaning I was able to catch the highly efficient 1230 bus driven by the lovely helpful Lucas to Banff, and got my first glimpse of the mountains. 

Banff itself is terribly touristy - I went for a wander as my room wasn't ready and there are more gift shops selling hats, T-shirts and Boss bear souvenirs than you can shake a stick at. (Boss bear is a local legend - despite being hit twice by a train, he has fathered around 80% of the local bear population.) Everywhere I went there were young people from the UK working in shops and restaurants, and it was really busy but pleasant enough - and yes I did do a bit of shopping. My hotel was rustic, clean and comfortable, though was one of the dingiest rooms I've ever stayed in with a dearth of conveniently-placed plug sockets. I had a disappointing meal at a restaurant nearby, watched a film on Netflix, packed my suitcase and carry-on carefully as neither would be accessible to me on the train the next day, and slept badly.

I was probably excited for the Rocky Mountaineer train trip next day and I'll write more about that tomorrow, because now as I write in my hotel room in the very spread-out town of Kamloops (which appears to be on about seven different levels), I have disorienting "train legs" and am feeling very wobbly. I also need to be up at stupid o'clock again tomorrow to get on the bus at 7am, but for now here's me this morning awaiting take-off on the budget-busting gold leaf service coach with glass roof, mahoosive leather seats and constant delicious food and drink served by charming young women who must have core muscles of steel...