The first thing that happened to me in Canada was that I received a parking ticket. We had been in the country less than fifteen minutes. I had simply walked from the pier to the car rental office and returned to the pier to pick up Monika and Milada. As I walked across the parking lot with their bags I saw a lovely pink ticket flapping against our windscreen. In hindsight it was merely one in a series of issues and inconveniences that have marred our journey through Canada. On the other hand I drove straight down to the office of the meter maids and after explain the situation had the fine ($54 reduced to $32 if paid within 3 days) annulled and had to pay an administrative fee only. So at least this initial Canadian experience finished on a brighter note!
We arrived in Canada at the start of the Canada Day holiday weekend, a celebration of the creation of the country back in 1867. Unfortunately the weather here has the same attitude to bank holidays as in the UK so one sunny day in Victoria was followed by three days of rain, fog and miserable weather on Vancouver Island. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, a fact that surprised me, and resembles something like a quaint, pretty Scottish town. There is very much a British influence, from the colonial architecture of the government buildings to the botanical gardens (the most famous of which, the Beaufort Gardens, we didn’t visit due to the astronomical entrance fee) and also a cricket theme pub, The Sticky Wicket. I found Victoria a little bit too prim and proper though, I wouldn’t like to live there, I would be in constant fear of scuffing the pavement with my shoes or something.
Half way up Vancouver Island on the Pacific coast lies the old surf village of Tofino. In years gone by this has grown from a small leftfield community of surfers and hippies to a developed tourist town with a booming whale watching industry. The weather of course put paid to most people plans of surfing or spotting a pod of Orcas swimming by. We visited the region to go hiking in the Pacific Rim National Park though so our plans were only slightly impacted. We made a few short hikes through the forest trails, some emerging on to beaches being patrolled by bald eagles, others to streams that at certain times of the year are visited by salmon who make those death defying journeys up river to spawn. The only disappointment for us in Pacific Rim was not finding the Bombers Trail, a trek that leads to an old World War II bomber plane that crashed in the forest. The lady who quashed my parking ticket recommended it but the guys at the Visitor Centre would not tell us where it was as they discourage people from walking on that trail. Which was a shame.
On the way back to Victoria we made a detour to Lake Cowichan and the Cowichan River Trail. This is the final section of the Trans Canadian Trail, a trek that crosses from Nova Scotia all the way across Canada to Vancouver Island. This part of the trail was very scenic, running along the river but high up on either side giving great views over the whole river canyon. We did not actually see the lake itself as it was hidden behind a variety of private residential areas and industrial parks.
Back in Victoria we were given four options to cross over to Vancouver. The first was to charter a sea-plane (yes, the Visitor Centre actually recommended that!) and the second was some sort of hoverjet. Predictably we went for the fourth option, a local bus from Victoria to the port at Swartz Bay, across on the BC Ferry, then a bus and metro combo from Tsawwassen port to downtown Vancouver. The ferry journey was an easy 1½ hour crossing and we were soon in Vancouver. This is a city that is often touted as one of the best places to live in the world. So, the weather was bad but I really could not see why. OK, you have sea and mountains within easy reach but downtown itself I found quite dull and characterless. Things looked better around the wharf area and Gastown with some cool looking bars and cafes and Stanley Park would be a beautiful place to stroll in the sunshine but otherwise it was just another of those non-descript towns with the same shiny office blocks and the same global brands touting their wares. I did like the idea of Dog parks though, like kids playgrounds but for dogs, who really seemed to appreciate it!
Just an hour or so along the Sea-to-Sky highway lies the world famous ski resort of Whistler, home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The residents did not actually want the Olympics there as they claimed they already had a beautiful and opulent ski town with all the required amenities, which I think is true. They received a lot of snow on the mountains around Whistler this year so some of the hiking trails were still closed due to snow and avalanche dangers in July but we did undertake two beautiful treks. The first trek was up to Rainbow Lake which required quite a lot of traversing through the snowpack and a few crossings of snowmelt streams. The second trek was half an hour’s drive north of Whistler, the trail involved clamouring over some rocks on the way up to the Joffre Lakes, three lakes that sit right underneath glaciers. Finally the weather had cleared up for these two treks which made the views well worth the effort.
One of the first observations I made of Canada and Canadians was just how bad they are at driving, especially when compared with the standard of driving in the U.S. Every day we witness acts of driving that are dangerous, disrespectful to other drivers and just plain negligent. It is like being in a country where every third driver is an 18 year old lad from Norwich in a souped-up Nova SRi. The worst experience we had was the guy who decided to pass us on a single lane road, but as the opposite lane was full of oncoming traffic he veered onto the gravel ‘soft’ shoulder and passed us on the wrong side, spitting up stones and dust and barely giving us an inch of leeway as he returned to the road. It was such a shame that the police car that passed us about 500 yards down the road hadn’t seen it. Otherwise the drivers display a scant regard for speed limits or other traffic restrictions and are constantly tail-gating or beeping at cars that are obeying the law. It is true that we have only seen a couple of patrol cars on the highway and there are no signs warning of speed cameras so perhaps this is the reason?
Another disappointment whilst on the road is the total lack of any decent service stations or truck stops. Those you do find sell coffee and snacks at vastly inflated prices and in small piddly portions. If there is one thing the US can teach the world it is that if you charge a reasonable price for coffee, soft drinks and hot dogs and offer them with a variety of condiments and toppings at your petrol station then people will come and spend money on other things, like petrol. If I had known that I would no longer be able to get a 64oz lemonade, a bottomless coffee and a cheese and chilli dog for less than $4 (including tax) all in then I would have made an effort to visit an AM-PM gas station one last time.
Also, I didn’t mention hitch-hikers in any of my emails from America and I meant to as it is amazing to see the hitch-hikers here. We know a lot of people that travel to work or school every day by hitch-hiking even though they have a car at home, doing their bit for the environment. We would normally pick almost anyone up, we have experienced standing on the road watching people smile and wave at you as they pile past in their giant, empty people carriers and it does not feel good. Only if the hitcher really looks like a homeless drunk or a mass-murderer would we probably drive past and even then feel a bit guilty. On this trip, over about 9,000 miles we have only picked up two hitchers because all the rest looked a bit crazy and dangerous. It is as if they don’t realise how bad they look. Often the hitchers are not even standing up but rather lounging by the side of the road in filthy strands of clothes, rolling a cigarette whilst attempting a half-arsed wave of the thumb. They also don’t seem to consider the location where they are trying to be picked up, we have seen hitchers on the approach ramp to highways or on narrow bridges with no obvious place to pull over. Hitch-hiking is a dying practice across Europe already, both the hitchers and potential rides becoming more and more suspicious, which is a real shame. Now I feel like I have seen the future of hitch-hiking, and it does not look good!
The longest drive of this part of the trip was from Whistler to the Rocky Mountains. We drove via Kamloops, a tar strip of motels, petrol stations and shopping centres. Not particularly pretty or interesting for tourists but conveniently located between Whistler and Jasper and full of all the essentials we needed. I quite enjoyed our day in Kamloops, perhaps because it had no pretentions to be something it was not, which I found refreshing.
Closer to the Alberta border we stopped overnight at the base of Mt. Robson. This is the highest point in the Canadian Rockies and the peak dominates the skyline as you approach the mountain. We did hike up a short part of the trail that leads up to the Mt Robson pass, although we only reached the first lake on the trail we joined many hikers who had made the three or four day trek up to the pass and back. Unfortunately down at the trailhead we found ourselves helping a girl who had tripped on her shoelace having reached the bottom and knocked herself unconscious. I suppose her only consolation is at least it happened at the bottom and not half-way up where the situation would be ten times worse. Close to Mt. Robson is Mt. Terry Fox, named after the courageous guy that attempted to run across Canada on a prosthetic leg. He lost his leg to cancer and as soon as he had recovered he set off on his run, dipping his leg in the sea in Newfoundland to signal the start. Unfortunately he never made it as the cancer re-appeared in his lungs somewhere around Thunder Bay forcing him to give up. He is now regarded as Canada’s biggest national hero and had a mountain in the Rockies named after him.
By this time we had realised just how expensive Canada is, the cost of living is much higher than the U.S. and we have been trying to work out if it is as expensive as Australia? I can’t work out why it should be so expensive, I guess the average per capita income must be pretty high. Everything is more expensive here than south of the border. OK, so we are in high season so it is understandable that car rental is more expensive but food, clothes, provincial campgrounds, national park annual permits? Don’t even mention beer or wine. Apparently British Columbia has some great local breweries producing some excellent craft beers and ales. It is possible but I can’t be sure because I am not prepared to pay four times more for a beer here than a similar bottle in the U.S. I heard that Phillips Brewery in B.C. in particular has some noteworthy drops; if I save up enough to find out I will let you know. I wonder if the cost of beer and wine is an attempt to reduce alcoholism or binge drinking? I have heard the idea bandied about by politicians in the UK, if it is true then I hope we never adopt it at home. Why should normal, honest drinkers be penalised for the misdemeanours of others. Luckily I am moving to Prague soon where all my beer dreams can be realised. Of course the relative cost of travelling in a country would never be one of the main aspects that I would judge a country on. I would love to go to Japan, a country not exactly renowned for offering good value. We are also quite used to experiencing massive differences in the price of goods as we cross borders – Singapore to Malaysia springs to mind – just when added to the other negative aspects we have experienced it seems to become more significant.
We crossed from British Columbia to Alberta and headed for the town of Jasper. It is a surprisingly small town with no suburbs or high-rises or big superstores, like driving into the old days. Probably the nicest of the towns we visited in the Rockies and surrounded by classic mountain scenery – snowy peaks, glaciers, icy-blue lakes and alpine forest. We made a couple of treks, the first around the Valley of Five Lakes and the second up through the Bald Hills overlooking Maligne Lake. Along the road to Maligne Canyon and Maligne Lake we also spotted a bear, some giant elk and a couple of bighorn rams. All-in-all it couldn’t have been more of a complete Rockies experience unless a Mountie had popped by on his horse. A less welcome form of wildlife that we encountered in Canada were mosquitoes, millions of the little buggers. We had met a few swarms in Washington and Oregon but nothing to prepare us for this. The mosquitoes of the Rocky Mountains are the most impolite and aggressive mosquitoes I have ever met. If the mozzies in Africa and Asia were as rude as this then whole countries would have been wiped out by malaria years ago. They bite through layers of clothes here and wriggle through your hair to get to your scalp, they squeeze into your ears, up your nose and between your eyelids. Half the problem is the sheer number, huge black clouds greet you at campgrounds and don’t offer any respite, not even after dark, nor are they deterred by smoke from a fire. At one point I counted 83 on my legs alone. In all honesty I would rather meet a bear in the wild, at least you know what you are up against and can see him to put up a fight, with these you kill half-a-dozen and they are replaced by fifty more!
The road south from Jasper to Banff is known as the Icefields Parkway, the reason-being that the road passes an impressive number of glaciers and snowy peaks along the way. We stopped to view the Athabasca Falls before reaching the glaciers themselves. It is a very scenic drive and just a twenty minute walk to the foot of the Athabasca glacier. Many people were taking a tour up on to the ice but we preferred to hike up to Wilcox Pass, on the other side of the road, which offered views of many glaciers together as well as a view straight down this part of the Rockies range. Also along this stretch of the road are some amazing lakes that glow in a creamy turquoise colour, something to do with mineral deposits being ground out by the glaciers perhaps? Two of the prettiest were Peyto Lake and Bow Lake. We decided that Bow Lake was so nice we should take a dip in it, a very short dip.
We arrived in Canada at the start of the Canada Day holiday weekend, a celebration of the creation of the country back in 1867. Unfortunately the weather here has the same attitude to bank holidays as in the UK so one sunny day in Victoria was followed by three days of rain, fog and miserable weather on Vancouver Island. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, a fact that surprised me, and resembles something like a quaint, pretty Scottish town. There is very much a British influence, from the colonial architecture of the government buildings to the botanical gardens (the most famous of which, the Beaufort Gardens, we didn’t visit due to the astronomical entrance fee) and also a cricket theme pub, The Sticky Wicket. I found Victoria a little bit too prim and proper though, I wouldn’t like to live there, I would be in constant fear of scuffing the pavement with my shoes or something.
Half way up Vancouver Island on the Pacific coast lies the old surf village of Tofino. In years gone by this has grown from a small leftfield community of surfers and hippies to a developed tourist town with a booming whale watching industry. The weather of course put paid to most people plans of surfing or spotting a pod of Orcas swimming by. We visited the region to go hiking in the Pacific Rim National Park though so our plans were only slightly impacted. We made a few short hikes through the forest trails, some emerging on to beaches being patrolled by bald eagles, others to streams that at certain times of the year are visited by salmon who make those death defying journeys up river to spawn. The only disappointment for us in Pacific Rim was not finding the Bombers Trail, a trek that leads to an old World War II bomber plane that crashed in the forest. The lady who quashed my parking ticket recommended it but the guys at the Visitor Centre would not tell us where it was as they discourage people from walking on that trail. Which was a shame.
On the way back to Victoria we made a detour to Lake Cowichan and the Cowichan River Trail. This is the final section of the Trans Canadian Trail, a trek that crosses from Nova Scotia all the way across Canada to Vancouver Island. This part of the trail was very scenic, running along the river but high up on either side giving great views over the whole river canyon. We did not actually see the lake itself as it was hidden behind a variety of private residential areas and industrial parks.
Back in Victoria we were given four options to cross over to Vancouver. The first was to charter a sea-plane (yes, the Visitor Centre actually recommended that!) and the second was some sort of hoverjet. Predictably we went for the fourth option, a local bus from Victoria to the port at Swartz Bay, across on the BC Ferry, then a bus and metro combo from Tsawwassen port to downtown Vancouver. The ferry journey was an easy 1½ hour crossing and we were soon in Vancouver. This is a city that is often touted as one of the best places to live in the world. So, the weather was bad but I really could not see why. OK, you have sea and mountains within easy reach but downtown itself I found quite dull and characterless. Things looked better around the wharf area and Gastown with some cool looking bars and cafes and Stanley Park would be a beautiful place to stroll in the sunshine but otherwise it was just another of those non-descript towns with the same shiny office blocks and the same global brands touting their wares. I did like the idea of Dog parks though, like kids playgrounds but for dogs, who really seemed to appreciate it!
Just an hour or so along the Sea-to-Sky highway lies the world famous ski resort of Whistler, home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The residents did not actually want the Olympics there as they claimed they already had a beautiful and opulent ski town with all the required amenities, which I think is true. They received a lot of snow on the mountains around Whistler this year so some of the hiking trails were still closed due to snow and avalanche dangers in July but we did undertake two beautiful treks. The first trek was up to Rainbow Lake which required quite a lot of traversing through the snowpack and a few crossings of snowmelt streams. The second trek was half an hour’s drive north of Whistler, the trail involved clamouring over some rocks on the way up to the Joffre Lakes, three lakes that sit right underneath glaciers. Finally the weather had cleared up for these two treks which made the views well worth the effort.
One of the first observations I made of Canada and Canadians was just how bad they are at driving, especially when compared with the standard of driving in the U.S. Every day we witness acts of driving that are dangerous, disrespectful to other drivers and just plain negligent. It is like being in a country where every third driver is an 18 year old lad from Norwich in a souped-up Nova SRi. The worst experience we had was the guy who decided to pass us on a single lane road, but as the opposite lane was full of oncoming traffic he veered onto the gravel ‘soft’ shoulder and passed us on the wrong side, spitting up stones and dust and barely giving us an inch of leeway as he returned to the road. It was such a shame that the police car that passed us about 500 yards down the road hadn’t seen it. Otherwise the drivers display a scant regard for speed limits or other traffic restrictions and are constantly tail-gating or beeping at cars that are obeying the law. It is true that we have only seen a couple of patrol cars on the highway and there are no signs warning of speed cameras so perhaps this is the reason?
Another disappointment whilst on the road is the total lack of any decent service stations or truck stops. Those you do find sell coffee and snacks at vastly inflated prices and in small piddly portions. If there is one thing the US can teach the world it is that if you charge a reasonable price for coffee, soft drinks and hot dogs and offer them with a variety of condiments and toppings at your petrol station then people will come and spend money on other things, like petrol. If I had known that I would no longer be able to get a 64oz lemonade, a bottomless coffee and a cheese and chilli dog for less than $4 (including tax) all in then I would have made an effort to visit an AM-PM gas station one last time.
Also, I didn’t mention hitch-hikers in any of my emails from America and I meant to as it is amazing to see the hitch-hikers here. We know a lot of people that travel to work or school every day by hitch-hiking even though they have a car at home, doing their bit for the environment. We would normally pick almost anyone up, we have experienced standing on the road watching people smile and wave at you as they pile past in their giant, empty people carriers and it does not feel good. Only if the hitcher really looks like a homeless drunk or a mass-murderer would we probably drive past and even then feel a bit guilty. On this trip, over about 9,000 miles we have only picked up two hitchers because all the rest looked a bit crazy and dangerous. It is as if they don’t realise how bad they look. Often the hitchers are not even standing up but rather lounging by the side of the road in filthy strands of clothes, rolling a cigarette whilst attempting a half-arsed wave of the thumb. They also don’t seem to consider the location where they are trying to be picked up, we have seen hitchers on the approach ramp to highways or on narrow bridges with no obvious place to pull over. Hitch-hiking is a dying practice across Europe already, both the hitchers and potential rides becoming more and more suspicious, which is a real shame. Now I feel like I have seen the future of hitch-hiking, and it does not look good!
The longest drive of this part of the trip was from Whistler to the Rocky Mountains. We drove via Kamloops, a tar strip of motels, petrol stations and shopping centres. Not particularly pretty or interesting for tourists but conveniently located between Whistler and Jasper and full of all the essentials we needed. I quite enjoyed our day in Kamloops, perhaps because it had no pretentions to be something it was not, which I found refreshing.
Closer to the Alberta border we stopped overnight at the base of Mt. Robson. This is the highest point in the Canadian Rockies and the peak dominates the skyline as you approach the mountain. We did hike up a short part of the trail that leads up to the Mt Robson pass, although we only reached the first lake on the trail we joined many hikers who had made the three or four day trek up to the pass and back. Unfortunately down at the trailhead we found ourselves helping a girl who had tripped on her shoelace having reached the bottom and knocked herself unconscious. I suppose her only consolation is at least it happened at the bottom and not half-way up where the situation would be ten times worse. Close to Mt. Robson is Mt. Terry Fox, named after the courageous guy that attempted to run across Canada on a prosthetic leg. He lost his leg to cancer and as soon as he had recovered he set off on his run, dipping his leg in the sea in Newfoundland to signal the start. Unfortunately he never made it as the cancer re-appeared in his lungs somewhere around Thunder Bay forcing him to give up. He is now regarded as Canada’s biggest national hero and had a mountain in the Rockies named after him.
By this time we had realised just how expensive Canada is, the cost of living is much higher than the U.S. and we have been trying to work out if it is as expensive as Australia? I can’t work out why it should be so expensive, I guess the average per capita income must be pretty high. Everything is more expensive here than south of the border. OK, so we are in high season so it is understandable that car rental is more expensive but food, clothes, provincial campgrounds, national park annual permits? Don’t even mention beer or wine. Apparently British Columbia has some great local breweries producing some excellent craft beers and ales. It is possible but I can’t be sure because I am not prepared to pay four times more for a beer here than a similar bottle in the U.S. I heard that Phillips Brewery in B.C. in particular has some noteworthy drops; if I save up enough to find out I will let you know. I wonder if the cost of beer and wine is an attempt to reduce alcoholism or binge drinking? I have heard the idea bandied about by politicians in the UK, if it is true then I hope we never adopt it at home. Why should normal, honest drinkers be penalised for the misdemeanours of others. Luckily I am moving to Prague soon where all my beer dreams can be realised. Of course the relative cost of travelling in a country would never be one of the main aspects that I would judge a country on. I would love to go to Japan, a country not exactly renowned for offering good value. We are also quite used to experiencing massive differences in the price of goods as we cross borders – Singapore to Malaysia springs to mind – just when added to the other negative aspects we have experienced it seems to become more significant.
We crossed from British Columbia to Alberta and headed for the town of Jasper. It is a surprisingly small town with no suburbs or high-rises or big superstores, like driving into the old days. Probably the nicest of the towns we visited in the Rockies and surrounded by classic mountain scenery – snowy peaks, glaciers, icy-blue lakes and alpine forest. We made a couple of treks, the first around the Valley of Five Lakes and the second up through the Bald Hills overlooking Maligne Lake. Along the road to Maligne Canyon and Maligne Lake we also spotted a bear, some giant elk and a couple of bighorn rams. All-in-all it couldn’t have been more of a complete Rockies experience unless a Mountie had popped by on his horse. A less welcome form of wildlife that we encountered in Canada were mosquitoes, millions of the little buggers. We had met a few swarms in Washington and Oregon but nothing to prepare us for this. The mosquitoes of the Rocky Mountains are the most impolite and aggressive mosquitoes I have ever met. If the mozzies in Africa and Asia were as rude as this then whole countries would have been wiped out by malaria years ago. They bite through layers of clothes here and wriggle through your hair to get to your scalp, they squeeze into your ears, up your nose and between your eyelids. Half the problem is the sheer number, huge black clouds greet you at campgrounds and don’t offer any respite, not even after dark, nor are they deterred by smoke from a fire. At one point I counted 83 on my legs alone. In all honesty I would rather meet a bear in the wild, at least you know what you are up against and can see him to put up a fight, with these you kill half-a-dozen and they are replaced by fifty more!
The road south from Jasper to Banff is known as the Icefields Parkway, the reason-being that the road passes an impressive number of glaciers and snowy peaks along the way. We stopped to view the Athabasca Falls before reaching the glaciers themselves. It is a very scenic drive and just a twenty minute walk to the foot of the Athabasca glacier. Many people were taking a tour up on to the ice but we preferred to hike up to Wilcox Pass, on the other side of the road, which offered views of many glaciers together as well as a view straight down this part of the Rockies range. Also along this stretch of the road are some amazing lakes that glow in a creamy turquoise colour, something to do with mineral deposits being ground out by the glaciers perhaps? Two of the prettiest were Peyto Lake and Bow Lake. We decided that Bow Lake was so nice we should take a dip in it, a very short dip.
The Jasper-Banff National parks stretch from just north of Jasper to just south of Banff and are probably the biggest tourist attraction in Canada, full of skiers in the winter and hikers, cyclists and canoeists in the summer with a lot of German families driving out-of-control RV’s and coach-loads of Japanese tourists clogging up every view-point also. With this in mind we made a short side-trip back into B.C. to visit Yoho national park, which, despite being just 20km away is far less visited. We were able to enjoy the Takakkaw Falls and Emerald Lake walks in a slightly less crowded manner. Also in Yoho national park are the spiral tunnels that have been blasted through mountains in order to allow trains to be able to cross the range. These tunnels reduce the gradient by twisting around with a slight incline, the net result being that you can often see the start of a freight train emerge from the tunnel at the top (or bottom) whilst the rear end is still chugging in at the other end.
Back in Alberta our next stop was at Lake Louise, the jewel of the Rockies. This claim is probably justified as it is beautiful, not just the lake but the glaciers and mountains behind and blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately if visiting in the middle of July during the first week of good weather in the summer then the experience will be shared with about sixty thousand other visitors all wandering along the lakeshore and taking photos. Sadly many of them are taking photos of the god-awful ugly monstrosity of a hotel that has been built on the shore of the lake rather than the pristine beauty of the landscape on the other side. Luckily all it takes is a short hike from the lake, past the packed tea-house at Lake Agnes and up to the Plain of Six Glaciers to get a bit of peace and quiet.
Slightly less visited but still heaving is Louise’s next door neighbour, Moraine Lake. The trails here go though some forest particularly popular with bears so trekkers must be in groups of at least four to hike up the Larch Valley for views of the Valley of Ten Peaks. We met a couple from Austin, Jameson and Taylor, who were on their honeymoon to hike up there with. Jameson had just had an accident with a chainsaw a couple of days before the wedding (how very Texan!) but we made it up and down in one piece. Valley of the Ten Peaks, Plain of the Six Glaciers, Valley of the Five Lakes?!? Surely someone could have been a bit more creative with the names, they all sound like Enid Blyton adventure stories.
Banff town itself is probably the most visited of all the Rockies sites. By now we were exhausted and getting a bit bored with treks through forests to lakes (in the same way that in New Zealand for instance the mention of a waterfall trek results in people running for cover) so we stuck to a short walk around Lake Minnewanka and the one trail that leads from the campground into the centre of town and back again. I am sure that Tunnel Mountain and Sulphur Mountain are both great treks but by now the rainclouds had also returned so we have a good excuse. We did plan to visit the Hot Springs at the top of Sulphur Mountain but in the end the hot showers in the campground were good enough for us after a few days of trekking so we went for dinner in the centre instead.
One disappointing aspect of the national parks in Canada has been the state of the campgrounds. Whilst they do have all of the requisite services it is always impossible to actually pitch a tent on the sites. This is due to rocks, gravel and other terrain that is not usually found in campgrounds. Surely before setting up a campground it would be common sense to make sure it is actually fit for purpose? I had to laugh at the two campsites we found that actually had perfect grass on the sites. At the first one the ranger came and told us to move our tent off of the grass and on to the gravel and at the second one a large sign forewarned us not to even bother trying the grass out. I have a good mind to invoice Parks Canada for 12 tent pegs, to replace the ones I have bent out of shape trying to drive them into the ground. The cost would be about £15 in the UK but I suspect here you might need a loan to be able to afford 12 tent pegs!
We had planned to bypass Canmore and Calgary and head to Drumheller, just east of Calgary. Famous for its pre-history involving a lot of dinosaurs the attraction for us was the hoodoo landscape close to the town. It turned out to be further from Calgary than we thought however so instead we spent a day in Canmore and found the centre all closed off for the Miners Day, a parade to mark the town’s history as a mining centre. For some reason they celebrate this by staging a series of cycle races. Although not quite Le Tour it was still great to see, although unfortunately two races did end with a serious pile-up just after the finish. They perhaps should have thought about that when they put the finish line that close to a 90° right-hander. Calgary is perhaps most famous for its annual rodeo, the Calgary Stampede. We arrived in the town on the final day of the Stampede and found the whole town covered in hay bales and all the bars and restaurants had temporary ‘saloon’ doors covering their entrances. The area around Kensington seemed a cool place to wander around but the downtown area was particularly lifeless. And we were there during Stampede, apparently the world’s greatest outdoor show and certainly the highlight of Calgary’s calendar. It did rain all day though so perhaps that’s why it was so dead. We camped just by the old Olympic park on the West of town, we had a view of the ski jump from our campsite.
One of the aspects of travel that we most look forward to is meeting new people and observing the different cultures. I suspect this is the main reason most people visit foreign countries. We were disappointed not to receive a warm welcome from most Canadians that we met. In general we have found them to be quite uptight and often abrupt and cold in their manners. This is in stark contrast to the easy going welcome we almost always received from Americans from Louisiana to Washington. For example, it is common etiquette when hiking to greet fellow hikers, perhaps to enquire about the trail or ask how they got on. Here our greetings were often responded to with blank stares or looks of suspicion. The times we have heard any Canadians enjoying themselves, during the Canada Day weekend for instance, it all seemed a little forced and unnatural. About the only thing they seem to be passionate about is their flag and how many places they can display it on their bodies, clothes, bags, cars or houses. I felt like shouting “OK WE GET IT, YOU ARE NOT AMERICANS”. Most telling was an interview on CBC radio with a Canadian author. She told a story how she seeked out a Canadian at Heathrow to mind her bag, she said once she saw the Maple Leaf flag on a suitcase she knew she could trust the owner. Later she mentioned how she had had her purse stolen “eight or nine times” in Canada. I am not surprised at this considering her apparent lack of critical thinking capability. Of course we have also met some really friendly Canadians, just not as many as in other countries and certainly not as many as we expected. You might have noticed that I have been slightly underwhelmed by our visit to Canada thus far. It is not that it has been a bad place to visit, just that compared to the U.S., Australia and New Zealand (similar countries that I have visited in the past year) it has many more negative aspects. To be honest this has really surprised me, if you had asked me last year to rank these four countries in order of how much I would enjoy travelling in them then I think Canada would have been number one and the U.S. number four. Experience has proved the opposite. Some of the reasons are from personal experience, others are due to general observations about the country. Unfortunately a further reason is probably due to my misapprehension of Canada in the first place. I must plead an ignorance of just how much of a tourist trail there is here in the Rockies in the summer. I was looking forward to a bit more wilderness and isolation. We didn’t expect to find it in the U.S. but we did, parts of Southern Utah being about as isolated as you can be in the middle of the most developed country in the world. However, I did expect to find it here but now I realise my error. I can’t see myself returning to Canada but if I did I guess I would head for the Yukon. On the other hand, if I was thinking about visiting the Yukon I would probably end up in Alaska or Kamchatka instead. It’s a shame, but it’s true.
Thankfully Canada has a week to redeem itself; tomorrow we have a flight to Toronto and spend a week making our way to Montreal.
Hey Allan! I'm really surprised by your impressions of Canada. We did the very similar route throught BC/AB, but in September and I have to tell you one thing: no mosquitoes, no crowds, same amount of bears and apparently friendlier people. We routinely had a hiker's chat with strangers on the trail and so on... That said, I have to second what you have written about Canadian driving habits. It also felt like at home while on the road! :)
ReplyDeletenot also, but almost!
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