Northwest Passage - Seattle & British Columbia

Last couple of weeks in July, 2006

So after six months travelling in Asia, I flew from Hong Kong to Vancouver. I was looking forward to visiting friends in Canada and the US, but also to having a little time in an English-speaking country with a familiar culture, and temperatures less than 30 degrees Celsius!

Vancouver is an attractive, manageable city with some nice tourist attractions, such as the markets on Granville Island which I visited very early in the morning the day after I arrived, (courtesy of an attack of insomnia). It was great to just get some freshly-baked sourdough bread and sit by the moored boats, watching the bay slowly come to life. The market also enabled me to indulge a craving that I had tried to ignore for the previous six months - my need for good European-style cheeses! Before I left, I never would have thought that something as mundane as fromage would leave such as big hole in my life by its absence but, (with the exception of that served up in sandwiches in Vientiane's wonderful Scandinavian Bakery), anything and everything that had rejoiced in the name of cheese throughout Asia had been, well, a bit "different". For example, any mention of cheese in Vietnam almost always meant a triangle of "La Vache Qui Rit" processed gunk. So a good block of provolone piquante it was, to go nicely with the sourdough loaf! Yum...

Later that day a Greyhound bus took me down across the border to see my friend Pete in Seattle. I have known Pete since my teen years growing up in Northampton, but he has lived in Seattle for about the last ten years or so. This was my first time visiting him there, (although my second time in the city as I had been there in the summer of 1990).

Much of my time in Seattle was spent just relaxing, and indulging in those pleasures that American culture always delivers on..... shopping and over-eating! I was taking advantage of the former to replace a lot of stuff that had become worn out on the first half of my trip, particularly clothes. So after some time spent wandering around the various retail outlets of the city, (including, of course, Urban Outfitters for their excellent t-shirts!), a big bag of tired old traveller clothes went to the Goodwill store. The above-mentioned over-eating went some way towards offsetting the 8 kg that I had lost travelling in Asia, and did start to make me concerned that my newly-acquired t-shirts might be a bit too snug by the time I left...

Pete and I did a couple of very cool touristy things. One was to go to the top of the Bank of America building, the tallest construction in Seattle, standing at 285m. The observation floor we visited isn't actually open to the public, but it houses the studios of a syndicated radio travel news service. The idea is that instead of going to the expense of using a helicopter, they can just look out of the window too see what the traffic is like! Pete does some work for them so we were able to hang out up there, taking in the views of the bay, the city and the mountains behind. It was a hot and sunny day, and the visibility was excellent.

The other touristy thing was that we went to the Experience Music Project Museum, which is next to the Seattle Space Needle. The museum, brainchild of Seattle-based Microsoft's Paul Allen, is a huge, highly-impressive, interactive complex focusing on modern music. It contains an amazing range of music-related paraphernalia, including a history of the guitar with a display of some remarkable old models and historically important instruments. The museum also has several little rehearsal studios that you could just walk into, pick up instruments and jam, so the place had more than enough to keep a couple of music musos amused for several hours! It also has a permanent exhibit highlighting the musical history the Northwest, and is rightly proud of local heritage figures such as Hendrix, The Wipers, The Kingsmen and, (of course), Nirvana et al. The fact that they also managed to portray in a positive light the region having spawned the likes of Heart and Queensrÿche, is a credit to the curators' enthusiasm...

After a few days in Seattle, another Greyhound then took me back across the border, up into Canada's beautiful British Columbia to the town of Whistler. There I stayed with Stacey, who I had travelled with in Thailand and Laos, and had since returned home.

Whistler earns its keep as one of Canada's premier ski resorts, but is still lively out-of-season as the mountains are beautiful whether or not they are covered in snow. The town itself is very pretty, and was constructed from scratch a couple of decades ago purely as a tourist destination. There is is something about that fact which gives the place a slightly surreal "Santa's Groto" feel; in fact, some residents refer to Whistler as "The Bubble", a hint that living there isn't quite like living in a "normal" town!

Whistler is very definitely a lovely place to spend some time. I took ski lifts to the top of Whistler Mountain, where there were still patches of snow, and walked a trail or two. The views of the valley and the surrounding mountains were just beautiful. Other days we spent time cycling around the area, borrowing Stacey's friends' dogs Misha and Ruby for long walks in the woods and to the Narin and Checkamous River waterfalls. There are lots of bears in that part of the world, and it was very important to me to see one during my visit. Much looking during the daytime brought no results, but one night we just happened across one. He was sat on his big fat bear ass, sorting through some trash near the bins he had retrieved it from, like an over-sized child ripping open presents on Christmas morning! I was delighted, but the locals are much more circumspect about meeting bears in the woods. When out for a walk once we met a family coming the other way who told us that they had just seen a bear cub, and Stacey almost had to drag me back the other way! Where there is a baby bear, a very protective mama bear is not far behind...

So after a wonderful few days in Whistler, I returned to Vancouver in order to catch a flight to Cancun and on to Cuba. A got in a bit of last-minute North American shopping to equip myself for Cuba, and left the comfort of Canada for the heat of Mexico.