The Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. The spray from the fountain carried almost all the way to the path at the edge:


Dawn and Earl in front of Grouse Mountain, which they climbed last week. It took them two hours and they were so tired that Dawn couldn’t get out of bed the next day to meet me from the train. They wanted to take me today but I politely declined. I don’t want to die, thanks.


The ‘Girl in Wetsuit’ statue symbolizes Vancouver’s dependence on the sea:


There are totem poles in Stanley Park (Earl did his ‘warrior face’):

English chocolate in a slightly seedy comic book store:

So yes, anyway, I came across Crescent Dragonwagon’s vegetable bonanza in a bookshop in Jasper, whose eclectic catalog also included an entire shelf of ‘Native Ghost Stories’, and a rotating rack of Canadian-written books about dogs that had done heroic deeds and people who had done a lot of hiking. I did actually buy an American book in there, but only after I had amused myself sufficiently flicking incredulously through the Canadian schmultz whilst trying not to laugh out loud. The book I bought is about outlaws of the Wild West. Butch Cassidy’s in it, as are Jesse James and Billy the Kid (not the same as the Milkybar Kid – I checked) with stories of their daring and unlawful escapades.

I sorely wanted to buy the vegetarian cookbook too, not for the recipes but because I didn’t think anyone would believe it really existed, but there was no space in my pack for it. And I’m not carrying a giant cookbook all the way home (this thing was huge). However, if when I get home I discover it on Amazon (at a discount and with free shipping, natch) I will one-click order it without a second thought. And introduce the world to the wonders contained within its leafy green pages.
Only a woman willing to balance a basket of veg on her head for a covershot could have written this strange and wonderful book.

For the past five days, I have been in Jasper. Surprisingly for such an attractive location, and despite the town’s best efforts in setting up souvenir shops down the entire length of the main street, there are very few tourists here. Or at least, you don’t see many. The trails are always completely empty and peaceful, save the odd hardcore cyclist passing by silently. There are dozens of RVs everywhere though – rumbling down the highways, parked in all their monstrous masculinity along the sides of the main street of the town close to the innumerable camping grounds and ‘lodges’. That’s a vehicle that a guy buys to say ‘Look how I provide for my family. They want go camping, I drive to middle of nowhere in big house-truck and we sleep and go toilet on-board. Maybe we eat bear that I kill. Or maybe drive-thru. UGGGGG!’

I find them very tedious. Apart from the way they don’t stop for pedestrians at crossings (‘Man truck no stop for puny people, rolls past puny people like molten thunder ugggg’) they actually obscure the light if you walk on the wrong side of the road, and they make the most tremendous noise that can be heard from the lower trails. This was incentive enough for me to go on a long hike on the first day. I took the furthest trail route from the town up to Pyramid Lake, a vast, glassy blue valley floor bordered alternately by walls of enormous grey mountains and forests of pine trees that creep right up to the water’s edge and bend forward to peer into it, as if staring perpetually at their own reflection. For twenty minutes everything was beautiful and warm, and I sat and wondered how they take the cheery pictures that go on postcards when in reality the view is so blindingly sunlit that everything looks dark through a camera lens, then gradually the sun faded and there came muffled booms! of thunder resounding ominously in the next valley, and I looked up to see rolls of thick white cloud galloping over the mountain ridges towards me. The mountainside grew hazy with rain. I knew it was time to go.

When I finally got back to the hostel I was exhausted. The hike was 14km in total, and the walk each way between the townsite and the hostel was 6km – a day’s total of 26km. I had tried to save the money from the $5 bus fare and hadn’t realised how damned far it would be. The next day promised more rain, so I thanked the skies and feeble sun and instead of forcing myself on another hike I went to the cinema and saw Ice Age 3. It was brilliant.

The hostel itself seems to accommodate a huge number of people, but maybe that’s because there are only two dorms of 30 and 40 beds each, and its remoteness from the town means everyone gets here at about 7pm and stays here for the evening – no popping into town for dinner. Also, it seems to have a very high guest turnover with people staying only one night to break their journey, and lots of groups rather than lone travellers (because what kind of fool would decide to go hiking alone in the Rockies? I ask you…) and therefore a lot of noise. The noise peaks in the dorm, naturally, just when tired hikers are trying to go to sleep, (like today when a gang of excitable German girls arrived and giggled madly as they tried to make their beds up) and again in the morning around 7 o’clock (when the school group from Korea set their alarms and began their interminable rustling of plastic bags, packing and repacking individual items).

I leave for Vancouver tomorrow afternoon and arrive Saturday morning. I have a feeling I will get more sleep on the train than I have in the past four nights combined.

THE HOLY FRIGGIN’ CN TOWER THAT’S WHERE!!

Yeah. Hell yeah. At 351m off the ground (and 5728km from London!) the restaurant at the top of the tower looks out over the city and Lake Ontario. It doesn’t matter whereabouts you sit, because the WHOLE RESTAURANT REVOLVES. Really slowly though, so people don’t choke on their food. And the food was amazing.

I went with a girl I met at the hostel called Rochelle, who’s from Australia. A crazy Japanese waiter called David took this picture of us:

Main streets of the city centre – Yonge street is the one that carries on into the horizon where you can see another group of buidlings below the clouds.


Our hostel is on the upper side of the square with loads of dark trees on it, (to the bottom left):


That’s the airport. Planes were taking off and landing over the Lake. The airstrip really isn’t that long either – luckily they were all little planes but we did notice a couple of passenger jets parked up. They must have got there somehow. That’s a skilled pilot can land a plane that size on a 1km strip surrounded by water.


We went down to the observation level after – you can see Yonge more clearly here:


This was amazing. Simply called the ‘glass floor’, some genius had the idea of fitting glass panels on the floor instead of regular tiles, so kids can lie on them while their parents take photos and secretly wish the glass would break.
And so fools like me could stand on them and take pictures of their own feet:

Not to mention the longest street in the world (Yonge street runs 1900km from Toronto harbourfront to Rainy River, Ontario):


…and a pretty sleek City Hall:


Toronto also comes way in at the lead of my ‘city green spaces’ league table, just ahead of Halifax with its Victorian Public Gardens and miles ahead of Montreal with its riverside ‘terraces’. I followed the city’s ‘Discovery Trail’, designed for both tourists and Torontonians who don’t know their city’s heritage too well, which leads from one park to another and passes by old buildings such as the old City Hall (which sits sulking beside the swish new one). That said, these parks were seemingly more attractive to tramps than to anyone else since there were a disproportionate number sleeping on the benches and on the grass compared to the number of city businesspeople and families, whom the city council had obviously envisaged as the main beneficiaries of the scheme. Luckily I managed to avoid said tramps when taking these pleasant photos: