One of the great things about travelling, is the people from all walks of life that you meet along the way. A few months ago I was travelling around India on an organised tour with Dragoman and met a couple from Vancouver who were also on part of the tour with me. We got along very well and knowing I was going to visit Canada in the not too distant future, we stayed in touch. I wasn’t sure of the exact dates when I would be in Vancouver but once I knew, I sent Andrew and Jennifer an email to see if they would be around when I would be. Thankfully they were and we met up for a reminiscent Indian meal in a really nice Indian Restaurant downtown. What’s nice with good friends is that you can carry on conversations from some time ago as if it were yesterday, especially about glass coffins and the remains to be seen… 🙂
I explained my dilemma about how I was going to travel across Canada. Whether to travel by plane, train or automobile? The weather forecast for the next couple of weeks didn’t look like there would be much new snow where I would be going, but it would be down to -30 with added windchill. On top off the cold weather, I have the issue of driving an automatic in proper winter conditions without snow tyres and having to park outside overnight without keeping the car heated until I got to Calgary. Also a major distraction and attraction would be the beautiful Canadian Rockies and wanting to stop every 10 minutes to take a picture. It became pretty obvious that driving is not really the safest option at this time of year. Andrew and Jennifer concurred and being locals I heeded their advice. In summer, absolutely no issue driving, but in these real extreme winter conditions, that’s another story.
Bus tours weren’t available until April and were quite expensive too and so was accommodation in Vancouver. So that really left me with two options. Catch the train to Edmonton followed by a local bus to Calgary, or fly direct to Calgary. There was hardly any difference in the price, about £400 each. The train takes 2 days but with all the scenery and meals included or a flight for about 3 hours, squeezed into an economy seat. The preferred solution was pretty obvious, catch the train. So that night I logged on to the VIA Rail website searched for discounts and booked my passage. Exciting stuff. It’s something I have always wanted to do so it would have been a shame to miss it this time around. The train didn’t leave until Tuesday and this was Saturday so I had a couple of days to kill.
Knowing the temperature was going to be cold, I went shopping for some arctic gear and bought a Northface down jacket and some thermals for quite reasonable prices. I’ve got all these back home but I simply did not have room to bring them with me. Especially that since July I have not really been below 30 degrees centigrade. At least I’ll have spares…
A big tourist attraction in Vancouver is the Capilano Park with its suspension bridge. There’s a free shuttle from the downtown area which runs every 30mins, so I hopped on that and enjoyed the short ride over to North Vancouver. It was just under $50CAD to go in which includes access to all of the attractions and they did not disappoint. The bridge is 140m and 70m high but very wobbly. Apparently it can take the weight of 1000 people at a time but even so, when people were walking across it caused the bridge to undulate quite badly.
The views from the bridge down the gorge are amazing.
Once over the other side, there is a treetop walk which reminded me of the Ewok village on Endor in Return of the Jedi. Perhaps this is where the inspiration came from. It was quite high up and narrow, so a one way system is in force. Apparently they were very careful when putting this walkway up not to damage or to fix anything direct to the trees themselves. If and when the time comes to remove the treetop path, there would be no sign that it was ever there.
There was also a Raptor house which have birds of prey displays in summer, but being February this part was closed.
I had to cross the suspension bridge again to get to the other side to do the clifftop walk. Once again crossing the bridge was a great wobbly experience with wonderful views. At the other side, there was an old lady with a walking stick. She was about 8 feet onto the bridge and already holding on for grim life. She wasn’t going to be able to go across, so I asked if she was ok and managed to help her back on to solid ground.
The clifftop walk was really nice. More solid that either the suspension bridge or the treetop walk, but it was narrower and in places the floor was a grate so your could see the forest floor 70m below. It could be a bit nerve racking if you have a fear of heights, but it felt solid enough so I was ok.
After that, I caught the free shuttle buss back to downtown and found somewhere for dinner and went back to the hotel. A nice as the hotel was, I had perhaps the worst night sleep I’ve had in a long time, maybe I am still adjusting to Canadian time but that pretty much wrote off the next day.