 
The Best Laid Plans: Journeying Around Western Canada

By Chris Jones

Copyright 2011 Chris Jones

Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Chapter 2: The Perfect Storm

Chapter 3: O Canada

Chapter 4: Victoria-bound – the Long Way

Chapter 5: Vancouver Revisited and the Open Road

Chapter 6: The Kootenays – Bear Country?

Chapter 7: The Rockies – Bring on the Wildlife

Chapter 8: Wild, Wild Life

Chapter 9: Gobsmacked – the Icefields Parkway and Beyond

Chapter 10: Jasper – Well Worth Maligning

Chapter 11: Rail, Friends and Exciting New Reasons to Tear Your Hair Out

Chapter 12: Down the Inside Passage

Chapter 13: There's Bears in Them Thar Hills

Chapter 14: First Nations and a Meal not to be Missed

Chapter 15: Friendly Faces

Chapter 16: The West Coast – Even More Surprises (and a Couple of Great Meals)

Chapter 17: Vancouver Yet Again

Chapter 18: ....and Back Again

Chapter 19: Notes

Chapter 20: Glossary of Endangered Words

Chapter 21: 71 Movies I'd Go in to Bat for

Chapter 22: My Top 5 Border Crossing Experiences

Chapter 23: Transcript from Quiz Question on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader

Chapter 24: Transcript from Miss Teen USA 2007

Chapter 25: Spotter's Guide to Rednecks

Chapter 26: 40 Country and Western Song Titles to Bring Tears to Your Eyes

Chapter 27: Unusual Collective Nouns

The road, [he] felt, had to go somewhere.

This geographic fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don't necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Travel is horrible. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either dishonest, suffers from severe memory loss or is a travel agent. Travel is full of such joys as bags heading to Prague whilst you're on your way to Washington, children lost on the streets of strange cities, boat trips delayed by a disgruntled truck driver who dumps his load of rocks on the wharf, violent digestive problems that make death seem a lot more dignified and airport officials that went to the Basil Fawlty School of Customer Service – and failed.

So why do we keep on doing it? And why especially are we drawn to self-managed holidays which just raise the Disaster bar even higher? Because, like so many travellers, we suffer from cock-eyed optimism and are totally addicted to the excitement of discovering something for ourselves.

I recall many years ago going whale-watching in Hervey Bay, Queensland. Whilst the experience was worthwhile and satisfying it didn't compare to the thrill our family had driving home several days later when we spotted a pod of whales out to sea. The pod was much farther away and certainly not an intimate experience as far as proximity went. In another sense though, it was far more intimate. This was our pod of whales. We had spotted it and for that moment in time it was totally our discovery.(1)

This is the motivation behind planning your own holidays – the peaks of personal joy, but it comes with provisos. If you don't want the stress of making your own decisions, often with ludicrously limited local knowledge, then go with a packaged tour. Many people also enjoy the company of new people that is found on packaged tours. And then there are those places. The ones where only people who think sticking a live ferret down your trousers sounds like a bit of fun would go independently. These are all excellent reasons for going with organised tours and it is quite possible that on some future holiday to a place of dubious safety we will do exactly that.

Now, anyone with half a brain (2) can see that planning your own holiday needs a fair bit of preparation unless you've got so much time on your hands that you can wander about learning everything as you go. Our planning began with trying to decide where we actually wanted to go to. Both my wife, Kate, and I have reached at interesting stage of life. We are steadily approaching a point when our children, Tim and Michael, are becoming independent individuals, more or less, and this gives us our own independence. And it's a different independence from the one we knew before the children were born. Back then we may have been free of children but we had the weight of our future expectations. Now we've reached a point where we are both satisfied with our professional achievements (at the moment, at least) so the burden of our career development has been considerably reduced. The other reality of our stage of life is that we aren't getting any younger. Whilst this hackneyed phrase applies to all of us, it's certainly true that there comes a moment when you realise that age can work against, rather than for, the body. We've decided that though we could always try to aim at an early retirement and then travel there's the risk that life will trip you up along the way, and how frustrating would it be to achieve the goal of retirement and then find oneself unable, for a wide range of reasons, to be able to travel.

Another decision that I had made, with plenty of encouragement from Kate, was to keep a written record of the trip. She had even suggested I buy an electronic notebook/PC for the journey. In the end I decided against this, largely because of money, though it would have been exceptionally useful at times, not only to record things but to access the Internet. Wireless access would prove to be available everywhere we turned. I think, though, it would have been a mixed blessing. I would have written much more on the trip rather than taking limited notes and keeping all sorts of paraphernalia, but on the down side there would always have been the risk that I would start obsessing over recording things and that this would have shackled my ability to really enjoy the places we went to.

I must say that the writing of this journal has been a wonderfully enjoyable experience and I intend to do it in future. I have a habit of walking into a room with a very specific purpose I've established only moments before and then stand there wondering what on earth I was looking for. The writing has played a particularly powerful part in capturing the memory of the trip.

One last word, if you pardon the upcoming pun, on writing. I am a logophile, which sounds considerably more unpleasant or disturbing than it is. I love words – curious, rare, easily frightened words. Quoting from my favourite author Terry Pratchett:

Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea."

On the last full day of our trip I purchased a copy of Foyle's Philavery. I have, therefore, decided to retrospectively integrate words from that book into this journal, and provide a glossary at the back (Words). Anybody who bothers to compare the glossary with the text will almost certainly note that a number of the words in the glossary are not actually used in the book. They are there simply because they are strange enough to deserve a place. I do not know if I will use the word batterfang, but by crikey I'm proud to have it in the glossary. Similarly, turdiform made it in just because it takes you by surprise. It's interesting to note the words that my spell-checker recognises. Most don't get a look-in. Interestingly, callipygian, referring to well-shaped or formed buttocks, is acceptable, but dasypygal – having hairy buttocks, is not acceptable. Little did I know that the spell-checker could also reflect social preferences.

Some may say that this whole process creates a time paradox – how can a book purchased later in time influence a recording earlier in time? To these people I say, 'get a life'. Besides, if the apes from _Planet of the Apes_ all had as their ancestors two of the apes from the future that had fled our exploding world (3), then anything is possible. The words that I have scattered throughout this book are but a snippet of what's in the original and I've left out a swag of wonderfully eccentric words (4), so if you're tempted to find more, see if you can track the philavery down.

Back to the travelling. So, our intention was, and still is, that, whenever we can manage it, we will travel and if this means we have to work longer then so be it. The upshot of this is that we've put together quite a shopping list of countries. Ridiculously long, no doubt, but there's no harm in dreaming. This is our current hit-list, in no particular order:

United Kingdom and Ireland

Spain and Portugal

West Canada

South America

Africa

Egypt

Eastern Europe

Italy

Turkey

Mexico

Antarctica

South-East Asia

India

China

I make no apologies for countries that aren't on the list. Such a catalogue will always be of its time. Were I to do another one tomorrow it would, in all likelihood, be different thanks to the wonderful tales people tell of new destinations. I should point out, though, two noteworthy omissions. New Zealand is a magnificent country and should be on anybody's travel agenda. It will be on ours again, but having been there in 2000 we feel that there are other more pressing destinations. The same can be said for France which we visited in 2004. If we do get back to France one day it will be with the intention of staying in one location, probably rural, for the body of the trip.

At this point some might wonder why there's such an emphasis on overseas travel. What about seeing our own country first? Isn't this un-Australian? First of all, we have seen many amazing parts of Australia – most recently Western Australia – and are sure to throw more into the mix down the track (we haven't seen the Great Barrier Reef yet or been to the Centre). Second, the years of retirement, which will hopefully be many, seem an ideal time for these local travel projects. And last, there is nothing un-Australian about visiting other countries. In fact, seeing other places has built a profound love of our own and the more I travel the deeper is my attachment to this country and its people (even if I could strangle some of them on occasions).

I know that some of the entries on the list are so broad as to be almost meaningless, like Africa and South America, but we did have in mind some boundaries. A trip to Africa would entail something along the line of animal safaris and amazing sites like Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria. Similarly, South America would focus on specific areas and features, such as Machu Pichu.

I must confess to having a deep desire to travel to Chile. It stemmed from discovering several years ago that our frequent flyer points had a special deal to go there. I started investigating the country and developed a fascination for it. Unfortunately, the frequent flyer deal was short-lived and we missed our chance, but the interest in the place has remained strong to this day. It is a country I truly want to see before I die.

Drawing up the list was straight forward – whittling it down was always going to be more challenging. Like a child in a lolly shop it's easy to point out the treats you want, a darn sight harder to choose the exact items that 20c can purchase. We have all stood behind such children as they agonise over their selections. I have always admired the patience of corner store owners at this time. It's the hardest 20c they're ever likely to earn.

Nonetheless we had to make a start. First to go was Egypt, largely because we'd had a bit of a saga trying to organise such a trip the previous year. We knew Egypt was not a place for the faint-hearted and that a tour would be the way to go. In the early stages of our planning I'd been given the name of a tour operator, ex-pat English woman, who did personalised tours for very small numbers – just the two of us would be fine.

This suited us down to the ground – the comfort of a tour but a greater sense of independence. I got in contact with the lady via email and so began a steady stream of emails as I tried to refine what program we'd undertake. The woman offered a range of one and multi-day tours so it was quite a lot of fun researching and constructing our itinerary.

But the wheels fell off – and I blame the Internet and word-of-mouth. There's a wonderful experiment that demonstrates how a nuclear reaction works. You put an incredible number of ping pong balls on mousetraps in a confined area and then get one trap to spring. The ball flies up in the air and sets of another ball and in turn is flicked on to another ball, releasing it sets off other ping pong balls, and so on. There's a brief moment at the beginning when you can actually follow things and then all Hell breaks loose and the world is a blur of ping pong balls. Word-of-mouth combined with the Internet can achieve a similar effect. During the time we were in email correspondence the lady had established a website and was "discovered" by the rest of the world. It must come as quite a shock when your quiet little business goes nuclear. Her emailed replies to me became less frequent and carried a harassed tone – and then one day they simply stopped all together.

We went to North-western Australia instead, and had an amazing time. It is quite strange to visit a place in your own country that feels foreign and then to realise that the foreignness stems not so much from the countryside, which is so essentially Australian, but from your own sheltered lifestyle. I have never felt so strongly the timelessness or grandeur of our country as during those three weeks between Broome and Kununurra.

So – Egypt was off the list simply because I couldn't be bothered going through all that rigmarole (5) again.

The next to go, in one fell swoop (6), was the entirety of Europe (including the continent-straddling Turkey). The logic behind this was that our son, Timothy, may have been heading over that way in the next couple of years and so we could combine seeing him with a European vacation.

Antarctica dropped of the shrinking list next. I'm not quite sure why but I think it just didn't feel like the sort of holiday that would afford the break we were looking for.

The South Pole was followed by the equator. Mexico quietly slipped off the radar. It certainly still remains a country to see, and the preliminary research revealed it to be a far richer destination than I had realised. Again, not quite the experience we were looking for and perhaps not quite different enough at this point in time. We already live in a country that offers warmth, beer, sun and sea. Another time.

South America and Africa went at pretty much the same time, for pretty much the same reasons. They are both such massive areas, they'd require some seriously good planning and we'd almost certainly have to spend most ,if not all of the trip, in a package tour. This just didn't fit what we were looking for.

And the last three to drop off the list were South East Asia, India and China. This part of the world certainly offers some fascinating experiences and is definitely affordable and convenient to Australia. The region is increasingly accessible to tourism, and there are countries I would love to see. It's got a lot going for it but it just didn't feel right. I think neither Kate nor I could build sufficient enthusiasm for the destination. Both of us had been working hard. Though Asia would offer a rich and challenging experience, I had imagined, rightly or wrongly, that we could come back feeling wrung out. We'll definitely keep this part of the world on the list, possibly travelling with the company of others.

And then there was ONE! Western Canada had come through the scourging to remain our place of choice. It has a landscape quite different from ours (though we would find intriguing parallels between Canada and Australia), it is a country we both felt we could tackle outside of a package tour, we both spoke the language, we could go in September/October when the climate was great but the tourists minimal, we'd heard good things about it and there are seriously cool animals we could see (I have an abiding desire to see as many animals as I can in my life).

Once we'd chosen Western Canada we began to create a framework for the holiday. Though the intention was to allow the trip to have flexibility, you still need to have an idea of what you want to see and to make sure that you can fit it all into the time you've got. One thing I deal very badly with is losing precious time on a holiday because, quoting from Bugs Bunny, we "should have made a left turn in Albuquerque"(7).

Before I go any further down the planning route it's probably a good idea to give a bit more of a background on our travel styles as this informed the decisions we made. People cut from a different cloth may well make other choices.

As you've already read, we prefer self-planned holidays. The proviso to this is that there are times in any holiday where a bit of planned/booked content is necessary. We fully understand this and, as you'll see, our trip certainly had elements of those.

We're also not major-league bed and breakfast people. We did end up staying at one B&B but we prefer motels. So, if you're looking for B&B advice this book won't provide it. Having said this, there seem to be plenty of B&B options in Canada and a bit of web surfing should trawl up some great options.

Speaking of using the web, this played a key role in our planning. I used a mixture of brochures from travel agencies, a travel guide we purchased in Australia and good-old google to formulate what seemed a reasonable plan. One website I would heartily recommend is trip advisor. Plenty of great advice from people who have seen the places first hand. You can also expect frank commentary.

In regards to travel guides, I think it's up to your personal preference. We went with the Lonely Planet for a few reasons. One, it is reputable. Two, it's easy to get a hold of. Three, it had a guide just for the region we wanted. Four, I was reasonably familiar with it through my work place. I must confess that I found the Lonely Planet guide, at times, a little hard to find my way around but overall I was happy with it.

Of course, you pick up heaps of travel brochures as you journey and they can help refine the trip on the fly. I really enjoyed doing this, probably to excessive levels. At times I suspect we were carrying, pound for pound, more brochures than clothing.

Another feature to our planning was that we had flexibility with the budget. By this I mean that we weren't forced to go the cheapest route, though we certainly weren't looking to throw money away. In general, our planning revolved around reasonable expenditure. 3 star accommodation, fuel-economic vehicles, a mixture of self-made and purchased meals. There were times we did pay extra but this was done with due consideration. For example, we knew the grizzly watching would cost us. Yes we paid for an inside cabin on a ferry. But, wherever we could reasonably save money without having a detrimental impact on the holiday we did. One thing though, that we didn't do, was count every penny. I've done that before and I personally believe you can lose the focus of why you're on a holiday. Of course, if you're travelling on a tight budget then you do whatever you can to get the most out of the trip.

Anyway, the more I dug the more I realised how much there was to see in this region of the world. This put some boundaries in place. We would focus only on British Columbia. This turned out to be my first geographic gaff. The travel guide to BC I was using featured great stuff on the Canadian Rockies so I just presumed they were part of this province. Wrong. The vast bulk of the Canadian Rockies actually lie in Alberta – a fact we only discovered on the road.

Actual geographic correctness aside, we decided that we could do BC and the Rockies in one big loop. Factoring in that we had an interest in both wildlife and First Nations culture we came up with a reasonable shopping list of places to go to. Things to see and do included Victoria and Vancouver cities, Vancouver Island (featuring orcas and grizzly bears), the Rockies via the Canadian inland (e.g. the Kootenays or Okanagan valley rather than up through Whistler), a train trip from Jasper to the coast, a visit to Haida Gwaa (previously known as Queen Charlotte Island) and a boating trip down the painfully named Inside Passage.

At this stage things started to get a bit complicated and so we hooked up with our friend and long-term travel agent, Craig. So began a convoluted series of emails, a face-to-face meeting (Craig lives in Armidale and we are in Forster – 3 hours apart), interspersed with a volcanic eruption in Iceland that knocked all flights out of the air and made the lives of travellers and travel agents chaotic for weeks. Who'd have thought the underground movements of Europe's westernmost country, with a landmass slightly less than the state of Kentucky, could have such a profound effect on the world (8). Of course, we were also thrown into a spin as Craig virtually disappeared off the planet, striving to get people home or wherever they naively thought they were going.

It's a funny thing that people tend to magnify their personal troubles. We're all guilty of it. Who hasn't sat in a car, queued up from an accident and lamented on lost time, giving limited consideration to the poor souls who've had the accident other than to hope vaguely that nobody has been seriously injured? Sure we might miss that appointment but what about the folks who've just lost their car and possibly their lives. This was us with the Icelandic volcano of unpronounceable name. Eyjafjallajökull - trying saying that with some schnapps inside you. Actually, it's probably the only way you can. As an interesting aside, did you know that courtesy of prohibition, beer was banned in Iceland until 1 March 1989? Ironically, March 1 is now a day celebrated locally by consuming great quantities of beer.

We knew people were in strife all over the world and we did feel sorry for them, but I must confess to having an inordinately strong focus on our forthcoming travels to Canada.

In all our planning the biggest hurdle was combining ferry travel and train travel. Quite naturally, the trains only travel on certain days, as do the ferries. To make life additionally complicated, the schedules for the ferries we were looking to use changed on 1 October, falling right in the middle of our trip. It was fortunate we picked this up or all our planning would have gone for naught. In the end we came up with the following itinerary:

2010

Sat 11 Sep Sydney to Vancouver via L.A.

Sun 12 Sep Ferry to Victoria

Mon 13 Sep In Victoria

Tues 14 Sep Back to Vancouver by ferry

Wed 15 Sep Possibly Osooyoos, in the Okanagan

Thur 16 Sep Nelson, in the Kootenays

Fri 17 Sep Nelson again

Sat 18 Sep Lake Louise

Sun 19 Sep Lake Louise

Mon 20 Sep Lake Louise

Tues 21 Sep Jasper

Wed 22 Sep Jasper

Thur 23 Sep Jasper

Fri 24 Sep Prince George (arriving via the skeena, a BC train)

Sat 25 Sep Prince Rupert (again arriving by the skeena)

Sun 26 Sep On board the ferry to Haida Gwaa

Mon 27 Sep Haida Gwaa

Tues 28 Sep Prince Rupert again, arriving by ferry

Wed 29 Sep Prince Rupert

Thur 30 Sep Port Hardy, Vancouver Island via the Inside Passage

Fri 1 Oct Tofino

Sat 2 Oct Tofino

Sun 3 Oct Tofino, going on a whale watching tour

Mon 4 Oct Campbell River

Tues 5 Oct Campbell River, going on a grizzly tour

Wed 6 Oct Victoria

Thur 7 Oct Vancouver to Sydney, via LA

Sat 9 Oct Arrive Sydney

Anybody who takes the effort to analysis this itinerary with an atlas in hand will quickly note some really strange options, especially towards the end of the trip. There are certainly some long-haul drives on Vancouver Island. In defence of this, we were truly hampered by ferry timetables and the availability of a grizzly tour. Our first preference for the grizzlies was Saturday 2 October but the grizzly tour was booked out. Apparently, a bunch of lawyers had got in before us. Is there no end to the grief lawyers can cause?

Under Craig's advice we did book a number of stages of the trip. Specifically, we booked our first night in Vancouver and the two nights in Victoria. Then the nights in Lake Louise were paid upfront because it's often hard to find accommodation around there. We also had to nail down much of the transport - the two-day train journey from Jasper to Prince Rupert, the ferry out to Haida Gwaa, the ferry back down the Inside Passage to Port Hardy and the car hire. Last of all we booked the grizzly tour and a whale watching tour.

For the times when we were winging it, it was usually a combination of the Lonely Planet Guide, which gave us a couple of real winners, and dropping in to tourist information centres (which also delivered some positive outcomes). Then there were the times when we drove around until we found a place. I'm not a huge fan of doing this because I get worried we'll end up in a dump or overpaying. In all honesty though, whenever we really did do the door-to-door accommodation seeking we ended up with almost universally fine outcomes.

Also a word or two about transport. We are not 'car people'. By this I mean that we're quite happy with whatever vehicle can effectively get us from point A to point B with the minimum amount of fuss. I sometimes think that maybe we miss out on something. 'Car people', or at least my romanticised vision of them, get an additional pleasure out of the vehicle they drive and possibly are in a position to fix one if it breaks down, using little more than rubber bands, a pair of pantyhose and some chewing gum. We got none of that but we didn't lose any sleep. For the record, we opted for something economical, new, mid-sized. Craig booked us Ford Focus's all the way through and we were very happy with them.

The other element of driving that bears a mention is navigation. For some traveller's the electronic navigator, e.g. Navman, Tom Tom, is a must. I do quite like these devices (I now have one for driving around Australia and probably use it excessively), but I never really factored in using one in Canada. As far as I can recall, it really wouldn't have made any significant difference to us. I bought a book of road maps in Vancouver the morning after we picked up the car. As I write this it seems like we were recklessly laissez faire about this aspect of the journey but, honestly, it just wasn't an issue. In a country where the language was different and if we were doing more city driving perhaps it would have been wiser to be heavily armed on the navigation front – but hey, we weren't and we lived to tell the tale.

Once last word on trip planning. Many people will tell you that half the fun of travelling is planning the trip. They are indeed lucky. I am not one of these people. Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy planning, up to a point. I love finding new places to visit, I enjoy putting together an itinerary, I hate missing out on anything, I love fitting as much as possible into a trip - but I do hit the wall. I also like there to be flexibility and worry that if things are tied down too tightly we might plan ourselves into a corner. So, for us, the planning phase gave us a structure, gave us something to look forward to, built in some certainty and enabled some budgeting. For the record, I'd say planning is around 10% of the fun of travel, but I don't think that phrase will catch on.

In the end there was probably more rigidity to our flexible trip than we had hoped. Little did we know that it would be the fixed stages of the holiday that would cause us the most grief.

Chapter 2: The Perfect Storm

Sometimes the most obvious things get missed – like the parents of a previous Minister for Gaming in NSW who named their son Richard Face. It was proving elusive to find a flight at the time we wanted to go but then we hit on a flight path to Vancouver via Los Angeles leaving on Saturday September 11. Plenty of seats on a plane flying into the US on 9/11. We simply did not register the significance of the date until the first time we actually told somebody when we were leaving – and it hit us like a steam train. To compound the discomfort, we were crossing the International date line and got to fly to the US on 9/11 for two days in a row! Needless to say the flight went as smoothly as an international flight can but the thought of travelling on such an infamous date did sit a little at the back of the mind.

There was certainly good financial incentive to fly this way. Our travel agent Craig had trawled through the airline offers and found a real steal. By going on Delta Airlines via Los Angeles it cost just $2,700 for both of us, return. Now that may seem a considerable sum of money but it was bargain – saving around $1,000 compared to flying direct to Vancouver.

Prices for airflights can cop a bit of bagging, largely because of the total cost of the flight but things need to be put in context. The total distance from Sydney to Vancouver via LA is 13,800 km. For us to both travel this, return, equals 55,200 km or 5c/km. Compare that to a typical local bus trip from Forster to Broadmeadow railway station in Newcastle. The ticket price, one-way is only $25, making it seem a bargain. But when you convert that to cost per kilometre it equates to 15c. If it were possible to travel by bus from Sydney to Vancouver via LA this would cost $8,280, return, for the both of us. Airline travel is positively frugal, and they throw in meals and pretty good movie viewing.

So, Vancouver via LA on Delta airlines, leaving Sydney on 9/11 it was. We packed very carefully to comply with both airline bag size limits and weights, though this would prove to have been rather pointless as we encountered huge numbers of passengers who had clearly been told that carry-on luggage the size of a Shetland pony was quite acceptable. As for what we forgot to pack - and there is always something designed to wrench the guts when it's too late to do anything about it - only extra T-shirts (more on that later) and a printed copy of my ESTA form. ESTA, or the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation, is your online visa application form for entry into the US. Even though we were just passing through the US we needed this form and we'd heard stories of people who hadn't thought about this and had to be accompanied by airport security the entire time they were in the airport. We had filled these out but we'd also taken printed copies just in case. It was the copy of my ESTA that we left behind. There is a fundamental law of travel that says "The piece of paper you threw out yesterday will prove to contain the vital details you need to avoid finding yourself in a Turkish prison today." A panic ensued, resulting in mad phone calls to my son Michael, to email us the details, followed by further efforts to find an Internet PC in Sydney airport to print the documentation. As it turned out the online submission paid off, but we didn't regret our panic – no matter how slim the likelihood, it's always wise to steer clear of Turkish prisons.

We stayed with friends, Keith and Michelle, on Friday night and our son drove us to the airport on Saturday morning early. Here we began the joy of queuing. It was a pleasure we would experience again and again. Whilst booking in to the Delta flight I asked the woman behind the counter if she wanted to take our declaration slip, which we had filled out whilst in our first queue. She looked at me and said:

"Do I look unhappy to see you?"

I shook my head in surprise.

"Well then you know you don't give that form to me. It's Customs you give that to."

This was our first indication of the additional joy that international Customs would provide. To be truthful, we really didn't have a problem with Customs anywhere but in the US – and they made up for the rest, in spades. By the time we'd cleared US soil I had got the skill of dentiloquy down to an artform.

We cleared Australian Customs much relieved to have avoided any full body cavity searches, grabbed a more substantial breakfast, and were soon on board. We had scored an aisle seat and an adjacent one in the middle section of the plane. On the surface it seemed a bit of a disappointment not to have a window seat, but as experience would show in later flights the window seats didn't deliver much at all – initially sea and then endless clouds for sixteen hours. The upside of having the aisle seat was that it was easy to get to the toilet without having to clamber over somebody and the other person in our three-seat bank could get out into the aisle on the other side, meaning he never had to clamber over us. This may sound a little thing, but on long-haul flights the little things grow in importance with every passing kilometre.

Taking off and landing have never generated much joy with Kate, though she got better with each one over our holiday and by the end the fingernail marks in my arm would fade so quickly that you'd almost think they hadn't been there.

Once airborne, we settled down to our sixteen hour flight. There is a point in any journey when time seems to be suspended and everything is surreal. It's not an unpleasant state to be in. And then this too passes and true tedium sets in. Anyone foolish enough to subscribe to the theory that time is linear and one-directional has clearly never travelled on a long international flight.

Many travellers, especially those precious few in business elite, which we shall never speak of again, can find escape in sleep. All Kate and I could ever find was a sore neck and snatches of sleep so small that I don't think they have a word to describe them effectively.

Fortunately, we did have some options. My local library, which I manage, had recently polled the community for their Ten Greatest Books of All Time (9). As I was on the panel I had to acquaint, or reacquaint, myself with some interesting titles. For the record, our top 10, in descending order, was:

10. The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society (Mary Ann Shaffer)

9. Cloudstreet (Tim Winton)

8. Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

7. Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

6. People of the Book (Geraldine Brooks)

5. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

4. Book Thief (Marcus Zusak)

3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

2. Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

1. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

It was an interesting list and reflected a mix of what was current, some classics, some that probably wouldn't be there if we did it again down the track, some Australian and a couple of intriguing dark horses. And it was our community's list – so that was that. I started by reading the ones that for, one reason or another, I had never had the pleasure to enjoy. By the end of our flight I had made serious inroads into People of the Book. Kate, who had bought her Kindle e-book reader along, read Grapes of Wrath.

In addition to reading, each seat on the plane offered free access to a wide variety of movies and TV shows. Now I admit that I can be a little over-driven at times i.e. obsessive and once I sink my teeth into something, fairly stubborn at seeing it through. Some time ago I'd purchased for Kate a copy of "1001 Movies to See Before I Die". I'm not sure how much value Kate got from it, but it certainly changed my life. This became a project, and because of my obsessive streak I did also consult the book "501 Must-See Movies", combined these with the 1001 and came up with a list of 1192 movies to see before I die. Some of you may be starting to think this is a tad pathetic but hey, other people's obsessions never sound as interesting to the independent listener – just ask anybody who has ever researched family history if you doubt me.

Now, the hidden trap with the 1001 Movies list is that the publishers keep updating it year by year. They also remove titles from the list but as I'm in for penny I might as well be in for a pound. If a movie was good enough to get on the list its good enough to watch (though I do have to wonder how some movies got there – if you doubt me watch Andy Warhol's Vinyl). I'd started in March 2007 (with 331 already under my belt from the previous 45 years of television and movie watching) with 861 more to view. By the time I sat down in the plane the list had climbed to 1254 to watch, of which I'd knocked off 893. I knew another update was about to come out and had some idea of the titles on the list. To my joy I was able to tick off The Wrestler (a bit too cheesy for my tastes), Hurt Locker (a powerful movie, though it didn't work for me as much as I'd hoped) and the Godfather, Part II (truly worthy of inclusion). Just for the heck of it I've included a list of seventy one movies I reckon are worth the viewing at the back of the book (movies). Of course, this is totally subjective, even for me, and could change from day to day. Also, as I haven't actually seen all the movies I should before I die (I'll have to keep one or two up my sleeve so I can live forever) there's obviously ones that aren't there because I haven't seen them yet.

I should note that the quality and quantity of the airline food was fine and belied the bad rap that it seems to have earned. Of course, in such confined spaces it's always wise to avoid anything that can have those kind of digestive implications that's it's unpleasant to share with others. I recall a plane trip I took earlier this year with a work colleague where one ventose passenger clearly forget this consideration. We'd be sitting in our seats talking when suddenly we'd be hit by the sort of lethal smell that the military would pay good money for. Again and again we'd suffer the barrage and you could see similar looks of horror on the faces of others nearby. It's a testament to the asphyxiating powers of the odour that not one person leapt to their feet and tried to open the plane windows. Was the culprit sitting quietly, thinking to himself, I wonder if I got away with that one, much as Basil Fawlty thought he might have got away with mentioning the war to his German guests (10)?

*****

Buried in one list or another, we flew across the Pacific, eating occasionally, making pathetic attempts at sleep and, thanks to the wonder of people trying to live on a sphere and making sense of time on a global scale, we arrive in LA three hours before we had left. If only such a phenomenon could be applied to the functioning of some of the committees I have had the joy to be part of.

And then the perfect storm of queues was unleashed upon us. If New Zealand is the Land of the Long White Cloud – LAX (an ironic acronym for LA airport) could certainly claim to be the Land of the Long Wait Queue.

Our first queue was on the plane waiting to get off. Normal enough. The next queue was at Customs. This was a cracker of a wait and when we finally got processed they took a fingerprint and retina scan. This was then followed by another queue, whose purpose I totally fail to recollect. I don't recall a cheerful face during this whole time and I can guarantee that by this stage our dispositions were rapidly heading south. But the joy just wouldn't stop. Next we queued to pick up our baggage. We then had to wheel this about 100 metres and join another queue to hand our bags on to somebody else. Then we had to catch a bus around to another terminal where we had to check-in. For a brief moment it looked like we might be able to do an electronic check-in without a queue BUT Kate's check-in didn't work, so we had to join another queue to do a manual check-in. Tired of queues yet? Not us. After a lengthy period of time on this queue we then wandered upstairs to join a particularly long queue for security checking to get into the section of the airport our Vancouver-bound plane was waiting. Not only was it a long queue the people working it were largely unpleasant and totally lacking the bongre we'd invariably encounter across western Canada. I'm fairly confident that the facial muscles required to smile had long since atrophied through lack of use on all of the customs officials in this area. This time we had to take off our belts and shoes. Again, we totally failed to prove to be any kind of threat at all. By this stage, our bladders were on the full side and we needed to find a toilet. Just for a change Kate had to join a queue to get a cubicle. We wound up with one last queue to get onto our Canadian flight. All up we experienced nine queues and it took us the better part of two hours to do so. I have never felt more relieved to get out of an airport than LAX(11).

After we'd got back from our trip it's amazing the number of people who said "Oh My God, you flew into L.A.?" in much the same way that people would say "Oh My God, you drove in Athens?", or more accurately, "Oh My God, you've got smallpox?" This retrospective and, therefore, totally useless advice is all part of travel. It happens to everybody and is the one thing you can draw from your own horrendous experience. One day you'll meet somebody and after hearing their tales of woe you'll be able to say "Oh My God, you seriously didn't fly into LAX?"

Whilst LAX was a nightmare other border crossings have provided some interesting experiences. My Top 5, to date, are included at the end of the book (crossings).

Of course, even if we'd been told about LAX there's a very good chance that we'd have run straight into another of the fundamental rules of travel – The That-Won't-Happen-To-Us rule. One optimistic account of dubious origin will wipe out a mountain of verifiable evidence to the contrary. It's always better to have a realistic appreciation of what you're up against than travelling in La-La Cuckooland. If a place has an annual rainfall measured in metres then the chances are you will get wet. Afghanistan probably isn't a safe place to travel at the moment. And never fall for "My best friend's mother's boyfriend's sister knew somebody who'd driven in Rome and he used to leave the keys in the car with the engine running and the windows down and he never had a problem (12)." Never believe in ludicrously optimistic stories involving travellers that patently do not exist. Nor is there some magical guardian angel of travellers – or if there is he/she can be a right royal bastard.

Chapter 3: O Canada

Arriving at Vancouver Airport was like a breath of fresh air. The whole process of getting out of the airport was smooth and comparatively quick. A taxi-ride later we arrived at our Hotel in downtown Vancouver. This was to be our first encounter with tipping. I'd read in the guide book that it's advisable to tip restaurant staff, people who provide service (including cleaning staff) and taxi drivers. Armed with my knowledge of tipping I looked in my wallet and watched the taxi meter ticking over. I knew around 10% of the fare, maybe 15%, was about right. We'd just hit $35 when we pulled up. Now, my wallet only contained some freshly minted $50 notes and some very small coinage, courtesy of exchanging some Australian dollars at the airport. I thought $40 seemed about right so I pulled out a $50 note after we'd unloaded the luggage and handed it to the driver. He looked at me and I looked at him. I was about to say, make it $40, when he smiled at me, nodded an appreciative thanks, and disappeared with my $50 note. I sighed and decided not to mention this to Kate.

The motel we were booked into was pleasant enough though rather soulless, with polished decor and overly attentive staff. We were enthusiastically helped with our luggage to our rooms and it was at this point I made my second tipping faux pas. Having just been stung by the taxi driver I was loath to tip with a note and I only had very small change in my pocket –so I offered him thanks. Well, you can't buy a lot with that. He looked disappointed and disappeared without a word of reply – no doubt frustrated yet again by newly arrived tourists who simply didn't understand the system. I sighed again. Clearly there was more to learn about tipping, and the first rule was to have plenty of change in the pocket. This would lead me to spend much of my time carting extra kilos of coinage, staggering from one sight to another and scaring off the wildlife with my jingling approach.

At this point I should say that I have nothing against the expectation of tipping in Canada. It turns out that their minimum wage, at the time, was a pitiful $8/hour (Australia's minimum hourly rate is $15 by contrast) – a fact that was causing some stir in the media. One side of politics had actually dared to speak about the possibility of raising this figure and boy had they copped a shellacking. Whilst I fully appreciate the need to encourage and support small business the ultracrepidarian people that were protesting the outrage of increasing this pittance looked liked they lived so far from the planet where the pay rate was $8/hour that they'd need a spaceship and a fully functioning cryogenic chamber to get there.

One further observation on Canadian money. The one dollar coin has a picture of a loon on it. As a result it became known as a loonie. When Canada then produced a two dollar coin this acquired the nickname twonie, at least in some quarters. A woman explained all this to me at great length at one point in the trip. I decided that anybody with such a fascination with currency and the naming thereof could legitimately be called a loonie-twonie.

By this time we were starting to feel the disorienting effects of the plane travel. We both found that for a number of days we would get dizzy spells and I think fluorescent lights, particularly older ones, would trigger them. Nevertheless, there was still plenty of light left in the day and we decided to check out downtown Vancouver, which was just a few blocks from our hotel.

The day was overcast, but there was no fear of rain so we wandered down to the wharf area, to be greeted by the toweringly impressive sight of one of those massive ocean liners that presumably would be heading up the coast to Alaska. The sheer size of these people movers is truly something to behold and one had to wonder at the practicalities of catering for so many mouths and the attendant digestive systems. The sheer scale of feeding such a moving city was hammered home whilst reading a book at the house of some wonderful friends we made in Canada. The following, according to the informative and attractively pictured Along the Inside Passage, is a list of food stuff consumed in one week on one cruise liner in May 2001 (probably easily surpassed by now, given that the next generation of super liners has been launched, being 25% bigger and better):

Eggs 110,820

Vegetables 25,736 pounds/11,674 kg

Beef 24,236 pounds/10,993 kg

Chicken 20,311 pounds/9,213 kg

Fish 13,851 pounds/6,282 kg

Beer 10,100 bottles

Wine 3,400 bottles

Milk 3,260 gallons

Coffee 2,458 pounds/1,115 kg

Lobster 2,100 pounds/953 kg

Ice cream 600 gallons/12,323 litres

Champagne 200 bottles

At that rate, and only accounting for those foodstuffs listed above, the ship would eat a blue whale, bones and all, every three weeks. I do find such profound consumption more than a little disturbing. One shudders to think how much toilet paper was used on board. An army may travel on its stomach but I think other parts of the human anatomy should be overlooked at your own peril.

We strolled around the dock for a while, along with quite a number of other people. This being a Saturday it was clearly one of the places locals went for a weekend stroll. On the pavement of this promenade they have laid the place names of Canadian towns and cities, grouped by Province and colour-coded. This was an entertaining reminder of the English, French and First Nations presence in this sprawling country.

Obambulating in a largely aimless fashion and now pretty strongly in the grip of that semi-surreal jet-lag state we came across a group of three large totem poles - the first of many we would encounter. These towering constructions are housed in the Vancouver Convention Centre, and are surrounded by a marvellous piece of mosaic work entitled "Moon Journey" by a First Nation artist from the Coast Salich, people, Susan Point.

One of the first things you begin to appreciate early on is the magnitude of how things are done here. Ocean liners sit waiting to swallow up thousands of people, totem poles defy the photographer to capture them all in one shot – and this was on the first day and before we'd got into the great outdoors. We would be reminded of this again and again – not just in the jaw-dropping grand scenery but in the size of their animals, the scale of their cars and RVs and even the meals that are served up.

The Vancouver Convention Centre is a pretty interesting building in its own right. Comprising two separate buildings this world-class facility was the media centre for the 2010 Winter Games and the Paralympics. It was designed with a leading-edge environmental philosophy. It has a 24,000 square metre "living roof" that contained over 400,000 native plants and 60,000 bees in four colonies that supply honey to the public plaza restaurant. If that's not cool enough the building recycles 180,000 kilograms of materials (close to half of what is used), donates leftover food to charities, uses the deep water from the harbour to control its heating and cooling and even has a fish habitat built into the foundations of the Western Building. Now that's impressive.

Our meandering led us to a roadside diner serving Asian noodles. It was that time of the day when you've missed the lunchtime slot but dinner is still too far away. Will this, one day, be called dunch or linner? The noodle bar seemed a pretty popular eating spot with the locals so we grabbed a bite, sat down to eat on the top of a low wall by the footpath, as everybody else seemed to be doing, and enjoyed our first full meal in Canada. The food was good.

The guide books had indicated that Gastown was worth a visit and this was just down the road so we finished our noodles and continued with our stroll. Gastown was named after Jack Deighton who established the first bar there in 1887. He was known as Gassy Jack for his long-winded yarns. This is a term that simply isn't used in Australia. You call someone Gassy it means they need to think about their diet.

Gastown is pretty cool, but be warned it is 'Tourist Shop Central'. It's actually the ideal place to visit at the end of the trip so that you don't have to cart around the countryside the sort of junk that all tourists inevitably take home. It's also a good last minute place to find a brimborion for those frustrating relatives and friends we all have that we simply cannot figure out what to get. Go to Gastown and the next thing you know Aunt Mabel's scored an amusing animal-shaped head warmer that she never knew she needed. We did the walk up and down the main drag in Gastown, admired the Steamclock and the architecture of the buildings, checked out a pretty impressive First Nation art gallery and were impressed by the huge range of amusing references to animals doing strange things in the woods that you could fit on to tee-shirts.

By this stage we were beginning to fade fast and dunch was but a distant memory. We found ourselves at the top-end of Gastown and nipped into the pub on the corner for a bite to eat. I'd acquired some coinage so I tipped with comfort and then we caught a taxi back to our Hotel.

Back at the room you realise that it's often the everyday things that most make you feel like the foreigner. Producing a cup of tea would regularly prove to be a major chore in Canada. Often there were no tea bags to be found and even when there were you'd have to track down a kettle. Worst of all was the ever-present coffee whitener in lieu of milk. I only ever tried the whitener once and quickly added it to the list of foodstuffs (if it even qualifies for being food) to avoid like the plague. We had no milk, no tea bags and we'd thought we'd just make some cereal for breakfast. So, back downtown I jogged to a shopping centre. Wandering the aisles of the shop was a further powerful reminder of the alien nature of the little things. I struggled to find simple items like tea bags and as for cereal types – lordie. Just because it once grew on a farm doesn't give a producer the right to infuse it with seven colours of sugar and call it breakfast cereal. Finally I'd approximated what I was looking for and jogged back to the hotel.

I must stress that at no stage during this period of dislocation did I feel that the issue lay with the Canadians. I was the interloper and it was up to me to find the rhythm that would make me fit. After all, one day earlier we 'd been on the other side of the world, hanging upside down, heading into summer and driving on the left side of the road. The past really is another country.

Before we turned in for the night we shared our concerns about the length of time it took to get through LAX. Just prior to leaving Australia Delta Airlines had informed us of a modification to our flight out of Vancouver, heading back to Sydney. We would now only have just an hour between our arrival in LAX and our departure from there to Sydney. Though we'd discussed this with our agent before we left Australia he'd told us that since we were booked through from Vancouver to Sydney Delta recommended a minimum of 40 minutes. Whilst this might have seemed OK back in Australia it seemed a ludicrously short time to navigate through one of the circles of Hell (13). We just couldn't see that this would work. We figured we'd probably stress out on the rest of our trip just dreading LAX and running the real risk of missing our flight. We decided the best thing was to contact our agent back in Australia as quickly as possible to see if there was anything we could do. So out I went one last time, looking for a phone card. At the nearby 7/11 they had a whole range of cards, with the store owner recommending a particular one for contacting Australia. They only came in $5 cards, which I couldn't believe would last long so I purchased 3 or them. Once again I'd get this dead wrong. One card would have got us all around BC. We contacted Craig back in Australia, had a good chat with him and explained our deep concern regarding the return flights. He reiterated that the minimum was 40 minutes, but he'd look into it further with Delta.

The night ended early with us in the bed, trawling though an impressive array of TV channels – none of which managed to interest us in the slightest.

Chapter 4: Victoria-bound – the Long Way

The next day dawned grey and led us to wonder what the weather would do. Fortunately, there's a TV channel dedicated to answering this very question. That's right, weather 24/7. Now you may wonder how you can fill up every moment of time with something about the weather without it all getting a little ho-hum. Clearly, the weather channel people had the same thought. As a consequence, not only can you find out, pretty darn regularly, what the weather in your area is going to be like, you can also see great weather moments of the past. Then there's the viewer segment where people send in great weather moments from their backyard. I have a vague memory of there even being a pet segment. Anyway, it was all a brave attempt and we were definitely always appreciative of knowing what the weather was up to. Fortunately, Canadian meteorologists seem to have the same accuracy challenges as their counterparts around the world. For much of the time we were in Canada the weather exceeded predictions.

So, Day 2 – grey skies with the chance of rain. The rain was likely to linger for a while. Oh well – that was travel and BC certainly is a wet province. If we'd come here expecting sunny days from go to woah we'd have been "a few sandwiches short of a picnic".

Our cunning plan was to now head over to Victoria, via BC Ferries. Though we thought we'd figured this out back home, the intention to travel from Vancouver to Victoria for a couple of nights and then back to Vancouver for one night would prove to be one of the dumber calls we made. Let me explain our logic and why it went wrong. We knew that Vancouver was about a 90 minute boat trip to Victoria so really it shouldn't take much out of the day. Of course, any Vancouverite worth his or her salt will point out that you have to get to the ferry in the first place and then get from the ferry to Victoria – all using public transport.

The first inkling I had that perhaps we had underestimated the time occurred as we travelling down in the hotel lift with the porter who I'd failed to tip yesterday.

"Where are going today, Sir?" he asked.

"Victoria," I replied, wondering if it would be appropriate to somehow tip him for this discussion.

"That will be a long day then," he continued.

"Oh, it's only about a 90 minute boat trip."

He raised his eyebrows. "More like three to four hours, Sir," he answered as he hopped out of the lift. I'd again failed to find the "tipping point" with him, but as the day wore on and his wisdom sunk home, I felt he'd probably got his value out of us in other ways.

Canadians are invariably polite and wonderful people. They are always obliging and willing to offer assistance – unfortunately obliging doesn't always mean helpful, as we were about to discover. On booking out of the hotel I asked the lady at reception where the ferry terminal to Victoria was and the best way to get there. After a bit of thoughtful frowning and some investigation on her PC, she informed us that we need to catch the Horseshoe Bay bus to the ferry terminal.

So, off we headed, dragging our bags behind us, looking for the 257 Express to Horseshoe Bay. After a fair bit of typical disoriented tourist behaviour we tracked down the bus stop and shortly we'd hopped on board – heading to Victoria via Horseshoe Bay.

Anybody who has every caught a ferry to Victoria will, by now, have questioned what planet we were on. You see, there are two ferry terminals out of Vancouver- one out of Tsawwassen in the south and another out of Horseshoe Bay to the north. The subtle difference here is that you'd have to have more than one screw loose to consider heading to Victoria via Horseshoe Bay. The ferry, which is less frequent from there, lands you in Nanaimo, which is hours up the coast from Victoria. The route we had taken would be something like flying from London to Paris via New York.

So here we were blithely heading in exactly the wrong direction, still naively hopeful of a quick trip to Victoria. As the bus took us through northern Vancouver city we undertook a further consultation of the guide book and slowly the realisation dawned on us that the advice the receptionist had given us was based on the same sound logic that Custer had used at Little Bighorn. The added joy of getting stressed on a bus is that, unless you're prepared to disembark god-only-knows-where, you're stuck heading further and further away from your destination.

The better part of an hour later we scrambled off the bus at Horseshoe Bay only to confirm our worst fears at the ferry terminal. The next boat to Nanaimo was hours away and then we'd still have to somehow or other get to our accommodation in Victoria that night.

At this stage a kind of gentle calming horror sets in and you realise that since everything is going to Hell in a hand basket you might as well go along for the ride. Kate and I looked at each other, turned promptly around and boarded the bus straight back to Vancouver city. As Kate pointed out with a dedicated Pollyanna style that was the only sane plan. At least we'd got to see Horseshoe Bay and the bus ride really was quite pleasant. Damn, but you've got to admire such determination, especially as we were doing the trip twice and the rain had started to come down heavily.

Around about an hour and a half after we'd left Vancouver we returned, though not with the same sense of triumph that MacArthur exhibited on returning to the Philippines. We'd got precisely not one step closer to Victoria and still were uncertain as to how to get there, though at least we now knew to head to Tsawwassen. We figured that we'd have to catch the Canada Line to Bridgeport and then a bus from there to Tsawwassen but local ignorance tricked us again. Because everything was so bus-focussed we didn't realise that the Canada Line was actually a train line. Eventually, with some help from locals (one of whom was able to stop us from, once again, heading in totally the wrong direction) we found ourselves somewhat in control of our travel plans again.

I might point out that during this entire saga we were carting two backpacks and two large suitcases. There's nothing guaranteed to make travel dilemmas more enjoyable than the pleasure of carting an extra twenty or thirty kilos of luggage around. It gets you in the kind of mood where lines like "Do you feel lucky punk?" rise naturally to the surface. The only cure to this that doesn't feature divorce or incarceration is to move into the "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn" stage as quickly as possible. Fortunately we had reached this point by a comfortable margin when we found ourselves sitting in a subway tunnel perched on our suitcases.

It was lunch time and we were truly feeling peckish. Having spent plenty of the day already in a state of lost bewilderment we popped into the nearest food outlet we could find. This turned out to be Tim Horton's – a fast food chain that appeared to specialise in chicken rolls and donuts. The menu indicated you could get a meal, involving a chicken roll, donut and coffee. This was good enough so I ordered two chicken roll meals. The rolls arrived promptly and then we stood around waiting for the coffee. After a few minutes, lack of patience got the better of me and I asked the staff member where the rest of our meal was.

"I'm sorry, sir," she replied, "what did you order?"

"Two chicken burger meals, thanks."

"That's what we've given you, sir".

"But I ordered the meal."

"And that's what we've given you, sir," she continued patiently.

"I was wondering about the coffee and donut," I persisted.

"So, you wanted the combo then, sir?"

Ahhh, a meal in Australia is not the same as a meal in Canada. A meal here is a combo. My education in all things Canadian was to continue throughout the trip, and I was about to get the next lesson.

"Yes please – two combos."

"How would you like your coffees, sir."

"Both white please."

"Sorry?"

"White please," I repeated.

"I'm sorry, sir, I don't follow you."

"White – oh, with milk please."

"Milk, sir?"

I nodded.

The lady frowned. "Do you mean cream, sir?"

No, actually, I didn't mean cream – cream back home is thick and rich and not what I'd normally have in coffee, but I knew when I was licked. I nodded mutely and was promptly served with my two coffees and cream. It turns out, of course, that cream means a mixture of cream and milk anyway.

After hurriedly consuming lunch, in the company of our increasingly cumbersome bags we headed off on the Canada Line, from which we would hook up with a bus down to Tsawwassen. All this flowed smoothly and provided some unexpected entertainment. Our bus driver from Bridgeport Station down to Tsawwassen had clearly decided the trip needed a bit of humour, and that he was the man to give it to us. As it turned out, he really did add something to the journey. He described himself as being goofy, a term that you'd hardly ever hear in Australia. Along the way he revealed that he was now a grandfather and informed us that we could only get off the bus if we correctly answered the question "Who is the grandfather of the most beautiful baby in Canada?" Much as this all sounds cornball, the driver had a natural charm to him that made an otherwise humdrum trip memorable.

Now we were back on track and all was right with the world. We caught the ferry and the journey proved to be quite picturesque. We saw our first harbour seal along the way – a moment of excitement - though they would prove to be a common sighting in Canadian waters.

The other thing you notice about this area of Canada are the birds, or the absence of them. Australia, largely, abounds with birds. Not necessarily stunning birds but there's enough of them to catch the eye. British Columbia is reputed to be a bird-watcher's paradise, with up to 490 species of birds to spot but we really didn't see much evidence of this inland (though the squirrels made up for them at times). Of course, bird migration probably had something to do with this, and visitors to Canada in the summer months probably report finding them so abundant that they have to shake out their shoes before putting them on.

There is one place, however, that Canadian birds simply spank Australia from here to Timbuktu – on the water. They were often like a thick blanket and it's an impressive sight to see a massive flock of scoters peeling off the surface of the water. At one point a classically V-shaped formation of birds flew up beside the ferry. They were ripping along and travelling near the surface of the water (they get this close so that they can get support and propulsion from the water surface by touching it with their wing tips). As I was admiring the formation three birds, clearly of a different species, came flying up behind the flock, making a beeline for it. I had no idea what this was all about but it looked like it could turn ugly. I'd never seen a flock of ducks have a collision with another flock but this was going to be the day – surely the height of duck embarrassment, especially for the squadron commander. You'd have to lose your stripes over that one. As I was pondering this the three darker birds caught up with the flock. There followed a rather bizarre sight with the V-formation rapidly going through every letter of the alphabet and then, just as I wondered if this was some kind of clan war or predatory move, the flock settled back into its V-formation, now all the larger and more motley looking, and flew on. The dark ducks had just been hitchhikers and the original flock was happy to tolerate them as long as they occasionally took turns in the driving seat.

For the record, the word motley means variegated colour and come from motleys – the colourful clothing worn by court jesters. Interesting? Possibly.

One thing I didn't know about Canadian birds, though it makes complete sense when you think about it, is that lead poisoning claims thousands of birds' lives every year. Why? Largely because of duck-shooting. Canadian hunters shoot about 2000 tonnes of lead into the environment on an annual basis. Couple this with lead sinkers left behind by fishermen and you've got a toxic mix. This is a staggering amount of lead. The birds most at risk are the bottom-feeders who may accidentally ingest the lead or mistake the pellets for snails. It never ceases to amaze me how humanity is able to find new and rich ways to bugger up the environment.

Back on board the ferry we were able to book on to a Pacific Coach, which made the trip from Schwartz Bay to Victoria all the easier and stress-free. Some six hours after we had left our hotel in Vancouver we arrived at our accommodation in Victoria. Hardly the most efficient use of our time, especially as we'd be heading back to Vancouver two days later.

*****

The hotel we were staying at, the Royal Scot, which was well-positioned close to downtown Victoria, had upgraded our room and we now had a one-bedroom apartment. Good fortune like this has an amazing effect on the mood and our interminable introduction to the entire transport system of Vancouver seemed but a distant memory. The rain had cleared and the approaching evening cast the city in a most attractive light. After depositing our luggage we went for a wander that took us past Parliament house and down to the waterfront. We'd asked at reception about a place to eat in the area and, other than recommending their own restaurant (a highly appropriate thing to do), the staff suggested trying Barb's Fish and Chips down at Fisherman's Wharf. This proved to be excellent advice. We strolled to the wharf area along the harbour's edge as the day shifted gently towards twilight.

Fisherman's Wharf is made up of a range of float houses many, or all, of which contain businesses. A float house is exactly what you'd imagine it to be – a house, or building, designed to float on the water. There were a range of eateries, including those for the sweet tooth and plenty of options to stroll around. We made a beeline for Barb's which already had quite a queue. While we were waiting to be served a harbour seal made an appearance and, judging by his casual nature, he was a regular to the area and comfortable around people. So comfortable, in fact, that he was quite happy to be fed fish and had no concerns about us all being within touching distance.

Barb's fish and chips were delicious and thanks to wise advice on the portion sizes we were able to finish the meal and sneak a small dessert. This would prove to be a rare experience in Canada.

We headed back to our motel through some charming backstreets and then I went down to the bottle shop to grab a local wine. I do like a nice wine and am partial to reds, though I have no prejudices against white wine either. I must confess that though we were going into the BC's wine country later in the trip (the Okanagan Region) I'd not researched any Canadian wines and so had no idea what I should buy. Our wild ramblings on Vancouver public transport had totally stripped back any inhibitions on seeking help so I asked the two ladies at the bottle shop what was a good BC wine. On finding out that I was interested in a red wine this apparently made recommendations harder. The wine industry in Canada is still quite young, though the Okanagan valley is starting to develop its reds. In the end I purchased a merlot, not my usual preference, which proved to be a satisfactory choice though pricey and a bit light on character. It's hard to sample red wines from other countries when you've been bought up on the strength of flavour in Australian reds. The more we travelled through BC the more we found ourselves buying Australian reds, which were common across the country. Though this may seem parochial the truth was that I really wanted to drink more of the Canadian wines, and did so on a number of occasions. We just happen to prefer the structure and depth of the wines we'd been raised on.

*****

The next day was our one full day in Victoria and naturally, like hundreds of thousands of tourists before us, we decided to spend it at the Butchart Gardens (pronounced Butch-Art). The day was overcast and as we travelled by bus up to the gardens a drizzly rain set in. This didn't bode well, though we were quite thrilled to see some black-tailed deer grazing in a nearby field. To be honest, from the distance that we saw them they could have been Hawaiian Tree-Dwelling Pineapple Deer that had floated here on a coconut palm but they were definitely deer so we went with the bus driver's opinion (14).

In case this hasn't been made clear I should come clean at this stage. I love seeing new animals and so does Kate. This was one of the underlying reasons we chose Canada – there just seemed plenty of opportunities to see something new, and possibly quite impressive.

We arrived at the Gardens mid-morning, with no real idea of how long we would spend at this world-famous site. We grabbed a quick cup of coffee (again discovering that the size I had ordered was clearly for someone with the sort of coffee addiction that made the Brazilian coffee barons rub their hands together with glee) and began what would turned out to be a magical three-hour stroll through the 55 acres of horticultural creativeness.

The Gardens were established by Jennie Butchart, wife of cement manufacturer, Robert Pim Butchart, back at the turn of the twentieth century. The centrepiece of the gardens is the Sunken Garden, which owes its existence to the fact that if you're in the cement game you dig some seriously deep holes. Jennie Butchart decided to turn this ugly quarry into something amazing and the idea of the Sunken Garden was born (apparently she even had to hang from a winch arrangement to plant ivy in the walls of the quarry).

Now I should point out that we are not noted gardeners. We like to purchase plants that are described as "hardy" or "resilient". It's not that we're guilty of neglect, far from it – I've nurtured too many plants to a brown death to be accused of that. We just don't seem to hit it off with the plant kingdom. For example, last year we noted a small grub on our New Zealand Christmas Bush, which overnight exploded into a leaf-devouring horde. I spend days spraying – to no avail, followed by a six-month campaign of plucking the little buggers off. At first we were lulled into a false sense of success but it turned out they had quietly moved camp to the sort of spiky bushes that you couldn't imagine would provide any sustenance at all. There they stealthily built their numbers up only to swarm out on the garden again. On visiting the nursery in despair – carrying some prime samples in my hand – the lady there was suitably impressed and informed me that she'd only ever heard of one other case like this before. Though it's nice to be some sort of benchmark, it's generally better to be the one people aspire to rather than the one they run away from screaming. We're currently trying a new approach thanks to some fresh advice from the nursery people, but I don't hold a lot of hope.

I mention this in case you were thinking "I'm not really the garden type so why would I bother with the Butchart Gardens." Sorry, but you've just got to do it. Even people with brown thumbs like us can get plenty of joy out of a visit.

The property consists of a series of themed gardens with the recommended route starting with the Sunken Garden. The weather had remained drizzly, though not the sort of rainfall that really causes anything other than some interesting light for photographs. We clambered up to a hillock in the middle of the Garden and admired the colourful array of both flowers and raincoats that were on display. From there we strolled past a fountain with an impressive array of water jets. In fact, the jets created such an interesting radiating effect that we took plenty of photos. Little did we know that the last effect we would discover was that when captured in an image they would look awesomely phallic.

Strolling on further we saw our first and only woodpecker, and then found ourselves at the Rose Garden. This is a stunning display of 250 varieties of rose, whose naming must have run dry every popular member of royalty, every state of sunlight and every superlative created. I'm not sure if there is a "Princess Diana Outrageous Sunset" rose yet, but there will be one day.

Next we made our way into the Japanese Gardens, the beautiful structure of which truly captured that nation's sense of form and shape. Here we saw our first squirrel – a strangely dislocated location to see such a creature, though Japan does have its own squirrel species, so perhaps it's quite a natural sight.

It was at this point that the obvious consequence of having consumed an excessive amount of coffee began to kick in. There were a number of issues associated with this increasingly insistent problem. First, we were at the most distant point of the park – and this meant distant from the facilities. Now, a garden should provide some discrete solutions to this dilemma, but not one that you're sharing with quite a lot of garden-loving sightseers. Sightseers that were doing exactly what they paid to do – look at, and behind, every single piece of greenery that could provide relief. Not that a Japanese garden tends to have the sort of sized trees that one can hide behind – this is one of the serious downsides of miniaturisation. I also had another bone to pick with Japanese horticulturalists at that particular moment – why, oh why, did they have to create so many trickling water features.

I gritted my teeth and looked at the map – still the Star Pond to negotiate and then the Italian Gardens before we reached the toilets. I resolved not to create an international incident and hoped that the next features were more compact and less fluid-based (though I doubted something called the Star Pond would provide much relief on the latter front).

Fortunately, things did move along quite quickly. The Star Pond was an interesting feature but not demanding the same time as the previous gardens. The Italian Garden, originally a tennis court, did feature a range of low-growing plants but they didn't grab our attention as much as the more spectacular varieties in other gardens. Call us horticulturally shallow if you like, but my bladder was glad that we suffered this flaw.

After a joyful, exsqueamious trip to the local facilities we spent some entertaining time in the gift shop before hopping on a bus back into town. We had spent a wonderful three hours in the Gardens and I'm sure many others could spend a whole day there.

*****

We got back into Victoria around 2 p.m. and were in that sort of uncertain state that regularly plagues travellers. We hadn't been sure how long we'd stay at the Gardens and so found ourselves back in Victoria a bit earlier than we had thought, with nothing really in mind to do. We did wander into The Empress Hotel, which has some real style, but we didn't feel like a high tea, so we headed back out again. Kate was flagging a bit and I was losing some drive so we headed over to the Tourist Information Centre. Here we discovered that there was an Orca Cruise heading out at 3 p.m. Why not? We bought tickets and then realised that we hadn't allowed for lunch. There was a hurried dash around whilst I looked for some fast food – settling upon a couple of hot dogs. Then came an anxious ten minutes when it turned out that, despite a name that would indicate it was already there, a hot dog needed to be warmed to a certain temperature. It's funny that in circumstances like this OH & S always takes the back step and I was happy to risk salmonella, or whatever dreadful disease an undercooked hotdog may carry, just so that I didn't miss the whale tour. I scampered back with my regulation-temperature hot dogs which we quickly scoffed before boarding within the required time.

Just as a trip to the Butchart Gardens is a must, so is an orca tour. By now the weather had cleared and we were out on the open waters at a spectacular time of the day. Nor were we to be disappointed. After a relatively short period of time we came across a pod of orcas which we followed for some time. The skipper explained that there are three types of orcas – transients, residents and offshore. The types are distinguished by behaviour. Residents are not strictly resident to one area but they do frequent certain areas. They travel in larger groups and their favourite food is salmon. Transients, as their name suggests, are more nomadic. They travel in small groups (rather than pods) and they love to dine on harbour seals. It's quite possible that it was the aggressive hunting nature of the transients that earned them the name of killer whales. The offshore orcas, not surprisingly, live well offshore, and little is known of their behaviour.

In Argentina orcas have developed a technique where they beach themselves to catch a seal. I'm not certain what type of killers these are but the footage is quite amazing, though not recommended viewing if you're a seal or a fan of seals.

Orcas really are impressive and no photograph does them justice. Actually, photographing sea life often seems to feature the splash that shows where the creature was just moments before. Despite this photographic challenge we were blown away by the orcas.

Over the course of the afternoon we were to see several more pods, but the animal experience wasn't about to end there. We were fortunate enough to see a humpback whale (15) and then our guides took us out to an island abounding with sea lions.

The difference between seeing a seal colony on TV and in the wild is quite profound. It's all to do with the senses – the sheer bloody-minded and argumentative noise of the colony is only surpassed by the wonderful aroma that a solid diet of fish can produce. Despite, or probably because of, the full-on nature of the encounter we had scored another marvellous animal moment. The scene was enhanced by the fading light and the curl of mist on the water. This time we got the sort of photos we wanted. For the record there were two types of sea lions – the larger and golden coloured Steller sea lions and the smaller and darker Californian sea lions. They seemed to co-exist comfortably enough (though there was always a disagreement happening somewhere) and were happy to cram themselves onto the wharf servicing a nearby lighthouse at Race Rock. The lighthouse is automated, fortunately, though I'd imagine that servicing the light would have its own pinipedal challenges and a sea lion poking stick would be an occupational must-have.

The journey was to hold one more delight. As we were returning to the harbour a pod of orcas was spotted at the mouth of the inlet. We followed these again as they cruised so close to the shore that you could see people out walking stop in amazement. Not for the last time, we would be reminded that the more diligently you look for creatures deep in the Canadian wilderness, the more likely they are to appear at your back door.

That night we had simple enough fare at a local pub before wandering home past Parliament House, whose outline was impressively lit with strings of lights. At that moment all things came together and as the crescent moon dipped low in the sky I was able to take a picture of the illuminated Parliament House with the moon perched on its spire. On reviewing this photo later I realised that simply by good timing the building had shifted from classic western architecture to something eastern and Islamic. Best not to tell the authorities. Perhaps they'd put Parliament house, or possibly even the moon, under surveillance for potential terrorist activities.

That night we clambered into bed to sleep the deep sleep of the exhausted but satisfied interloper.

Chapter 5: Vancouver Revisited and the Open Road

The fine weather continued into the next day as we reacquainted ourselves with the BC public transport system. This time, though, Horseshoe Bay was firmly off the itinerary. The ferry trip back to Tawassen, which was all the more pleasant for the good weather, was notable for two things. First, we saw another pod of orcas. Yep, you really could just about get away with not going on any animal tours and see what the day throws your way (though we were more than glad to support the local animal tourism industry and, as we would find at a later stage, a tour was essential to us seeing one of the animals we desperately hoped to catch a glimpse of). Second, was the stark realisation that I hadn't actually booked us any accommodation in Vancouver for that night. I know in the earlier trip planning it had been intended, but somewhere in various iterations of the journey it had simply slipped off the radar whilst my sad old brain stayed stuck at Version 1.

This turned out to be a cunning stroke of good luck. We hastily consulted our Lonely Planet guide and noted that their pick was the Sylvia Hotel in West Vancouver. Not exactly close to the centre of town but we'd been there and the Sylvia was right near Stanley Park, which we had hoped to see.

At this stage we couldn't do anything about booking a room as we had to get out to the airport as quickly as possible to pick up our car. After even more time on Canadian public transport (I must add that we always had positive experiences on the transport, even when we were heading in the wrong direction) we got the airport and there we joined the dreaded hire-car queue. Why is it that, so often, you find yourself in a queue behind so many people that have some particular problem that requires special attention and takes up inordinate amounts of time? You cease to care whether or not the people in front of you have the kind of insurance that covers moose-related impacts or whether they get an extra discount for being a left-handed grandmother with sore bunions.

Once we'd finally claimed our car we made a hasty phone call and scored a room at the Sylvia. The booking experience highlighted another vocabulary difference between Australia and Canada. The lady on the phone asked me if I wanted to book a single or a double – I promptly answered 'a double'. There were two of us after all and a single in Australia means just one person. It turns out that a double in Canada means two double (or queen) sized beds. We were to be spoilt for choice on the bedding arrangements.

Then began the drive – travelling on the right-hand side of the road in a foreign city. What joys awaited us? Well, it was all rather anticlimactic. We got lost once but got found again, didn't have one single accident or even hairy moment and made it safely to our accommodation.

The Sylvia Hotel was just the sort of place we were looking for. It had old-world charm and though the room we were in was dated it was plenty large enough and we were stoked to be spending the night here. Our first motel in Vancouver had been fine enough but it didn't have a lot of character – the Sylvia had character to burn.

The day had largely been dedicated to travel so we were more than happy to get out and do some tourist stuff. Stanley Park was just around the corner, we had a set of wheels and the day was now all blue skies and sunshine – the decision was already made.

Stanley Park is an impressive place and deserves more time than we gave it, though we got plenty out of it while we were there. This afternoon would reward us on the animal-spotting front. We saw dozens and dozens of squirrels – some grey and others a real chocolate brown. They were all busy catering to their nucivorous habits, gathering acorns for the coming winter and we were able to get close to plenty of them. The Park is very large, so after we'd sated our squirrel-watching needs we went for a lengthy drive around its road network. Lo and behold, on the side of the road was a family of racoons. Now North Americans have probably seen plenty of racoons and get blasé about them, much as we do about kangaroos and wallabies, but for us this was such a cool moment. We stopped and took photos of them as they came right up beside the car, looking as clichéd as racoons could possibly look.

Now well and truly satisfied with our day we headed back to the Hotel and decided we'd walk up to where the restaurants were. The sun was setting on English Bay, just across the road from the hotel, and the locals had gathered to watch. Out on the water the shapes of huge cargo ships cut impressive silhouettes and added a sort of grandeur to the occasion.

The Westend has a really great eating strip – a bit like King Street in Sydney. We strolled up and down Denman Street before settling on a Greek place that served us some delicious, authentically and very affordable fare.

The day had proved to be another winner, if a little bit by chance. Back at the Hotel we decided to afford ourselves the luxury of sleeping in separate queen-sized beds. After all – we had paid for it. That evening I finished the first of my books, People of the Book. It's a bipolar novel, with one story tracing the history of a book and the people involved with it, and the other set in the modern day and centred on the person investigating the book. I'd loved the historical story but found the modern aspect less than satisfying. This would turn out to be a common comment made by other readers of the novel. I greatly preferred Geraldine Brook's earlier novel, The Year of Wonders, set in England during the plague.

*****

The next day was our fifth day in Canada and the first in which we'd left ourselves the freedom to stay where we wanted. We had a general goal of getting to Osoyoos by nightfall but that was open to negotiation. It is true that we had chosen to go a different route from Vancouver to the Rockies. The most obvious, and no-doubt well-worn, trail was to go up through Whistler – a very popular tourist destination (particularly for Australians. I was told that during winter it's known as Little Australia, especially for those who enjoy skiing). I have tried skiing though my style turns out to be described, more accurately, as falling (16). Besides, we felt that we would see plenty of impressive mountains up in the Rockies so we opted to touch on the Okanagan Valley and take in the Kootenays. Trips are a compromise and there will always be somebody back home happy to point out what you missed by not taking Route 77B whilst driving naked by moonlight.

We drove out on Route 1 and though the guidebooks say that Fort Langley and Abbotsford have picturesque areas they're certainly not anywhere near the highway – which is probably a good thing as it is far from a charming stretch of road. There was plenty of traffic and plenty of road works and we were glad to see the back of that region.

I should take a brief pause from describing our trip to mention the great value of talking books. Because of my desire, or intention, to read the Ten Greatest Books of All Time before we'd be holding our "big reveal" at my library back home, I was not only travelling with a swag of books (always recommended on a trip) we also had them in a variety of formats. Grapes of Wrath was on Kate's kindle and we secured a copy of Pride and Prejudice as a talking book on CD. Whether or not Pride and Prejudice is your cup of tea is beside the point – the fact is that talking books really do make a trip easier, especially on the long hauls. I recall one particular holiday our whole family had shared back in 2000, driving around New Zealand. Our two boys were then ten and thirteen years of age and we did have some concerns that there would be the sort of fights or disagreements that invariable go hand in hand with putting two siblings in close proximity for a lengthy period of time. We looked for anything that might help us out and before we left I'd grabbed a selection of talking books from the library. This was a real winner. Harry Potter was all the rage and I'd managed to grab a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. One of the better Harry Potter novels. and good and lengthy to boot. We all got into listening to it and in the end, rather than having problems with boys fighting we had challenges getting them out of the car at times. More than once we'd have to sit in the car, with wonderful scenery all around us, waiting until the end of a chapter. This is a genuine travel tip – take some good talking books with you and with the range of formats available to you there should be one for just about every mode of transport (with the possible exception of a camel – if you're travelling by dromedary you'll have more pressing things on your mind and probably your body. Besides, I don't think a camel will ever come with a USB – or if it does, I'd be very cautious about using it).

It's a shame we couldn't have got one more of the titles in talking book format. A quick plug to for Jane Austen's novel – it really works well in the spoken word. The book is rich with witty dialogue that's all the better for listening to rather than reading.

Back to the driving. We headed through Hope and down the Crowsnest Highway to Osoyoos. We finally felt we were out in the Canadian countryside and there were plenty of conifers to show for it. We stopped at Manning Park to have our padkos for lunch, went for a stroll on one of the many accessible walks you find right across BC, saw some more squirrels and a chipmunk, and then motored on towards Osoyoos.

At one point in the drive we had our first close-up experience of a deer. Kate had been looking casually out the side window when a head popped up at the side of the road. Desperate for me to share in the sighting we had to drive on for what seemed an outrageous distance before we could turn around. Fortune had favoured us and the herd of deer were still near the roadside. They turned out to be mule deer – a species we would see in many locations across mainland BC. Nonetheless we were totally thrilled to watch the herd as it disappeared, quite casually, into the forest.

We had now reached the wine belt of BC and signs to wineries were popping up all over the place. We were also in the fruit growing region and roadside stalls, some quite impressive in size, were also featuring on the drive. We succumbed to their temptation and pulled into one such larger stall at Keremeos. There we admired the range of produce (I took a photo of the darndest assortment of pumpkin varieties I've ever seen in a confined space) and purchased both local honey and some truly delicious blackberries. Over the next few days of travel blackberries would feature strongly in the diet.

Having fallen victim to the appeal of the roadside stall our resolve was weakened as a few minutes later we found ourselves dropping into the Crowsnest Winery to sample the local tipple. We spent a very pleasant half an hour there chatting to the vigneron – the only thing I could possibly fault her for was her advice on accommodation. What we should have done was stay the night there but instead we opted to head to Oliver, through Osoyoos. Today would not end as well as yesterday and the good fortune that previously favoured us in our search for accommodation would abandon us to its ugly twin sister, Stinkerella.

If you do this drive keep an eye out for the Spotted Lake. As hard as it is to imagine how a lake could actually be spotted the description is accurate. The Lake evaporates over summer and leaves behind mineral deposits that give the Lake its spotted appearance. Well worth a photo and it's just off the side of the road.

We got to Osoyoos in time to visit the Tourist Office, but only if we'd come a week earlier. We had hit this region on the tail end of the tourist season and everything was gearing down. The tourist office had closed an hour earlier, despite the opening hours the guide books had indicated. Now the trick with Osoyoos is that the accommodation you'd probably want to stay at is right through the town a bit. Unfortunately, that was exactly where we didn't go. I'd still thought to see the Desert Centre at Osoyoos but that was also already closed. The town just didn't seem to want us so we decided to follow the advice from earlier and head to Oliver.

Maybe Oliver just needed to be seen in a better light, and certainly we were feeling done-in so what I'm about to describe maybe more a reflection of our day rather than of the town itself but Oliver just didn't do it for us. Again there were roadworks. We would encounter them all over Canada. I suspect there's plenty of occasions in the year when you can't do this kind of work in Canada thanks to challenging weather conditions so, in one respect, we were lucky enough to see them in all their glory. We got to be roadwork connoisseurs. There are more enjoyable things in life to develop an expertise in.

It was sunset before we reached Oliver. We couldn't find anything much in the way of accommodation and ended up settling for a modest motel on the main road. The room was cheap, but well enough kept so we'd certainly got what we'd paid for. The manager was also a pleasant enough fellow. I must say it was interestingly decorated, right down to the blanket on the bed, featuring an orca with the sort of mutated flippers and fin that would ensure that it lived a very short and sad life going around in ever-decreasing circles.

To cap the evening off we made some pretty poor meal choices also. In the end we headed to a supermarket and found ourselves back in the room with a shop-bought pizza that tasted like very thick cheese-and-tomato-flavoured cardboard. We'd have been better off eating the box.

We climbed into the bed, which was only a double with a sag in the middle, and spent the night rolling into each other. There are times when this could be quite romantic – this was not one of those.

*****

So, the evening before had been ordinary – that's travel for you. Build a bridge and get over it. Besides, every trip needs "experiences" to talk about and to make the good things seem all the better. Day six also offered up good weather. Things were looking up – even Oliver seemed a bit more appealing – though not enough to want to hang around. The memories of yesterday were still too strong.

We headed back to Osoyoos, picking up more blackberries along the way, drove past the desert centre, which wasn't open yet, calmly noted the number of lakeside motels in Osoyoos we could have stayed in last night and pointed ourselves towards Nelson in the Kootenays.

Though last night had been an "experience" we were still glad we'd chosen to come this way. The countryside was beautiful and the fruit was certainly abundant and delicious. It may seem strange that we didn't stop at the Desert Centre in Osoyoos as this was the central reason for going there. Perhaps we did miss out on something special but we felt that the whole countryside was giving us the Canadian equivalent of a desert experience. Much of the Canadian landscape that we would see was densely covered with firs of beeches – but around the Okanagan the lapidose hills often only had a Spartan covering of vegetation, allowing the rocks to speak for themselves. It was never going to be as spectacular as some of the majestic scenery in the Rockies but it had its own special grandeur and beauty. This would prove to be the region that felt most like Australia.

Not long after we'd left Osoyoos we found ourselves at the village of Greenwood. Now Greenwood is pretty much a one-street town but what caught our eye was a bakery. This sounded great, and even though we'd yet to have a good coffee in Canada we thought we'd see what they had on offer.

The food looked good but ordering once again proved to be challenge. This time my Australian accent, which most Australians would probably think isn't dreadfully strong, confused the lady and the request for a "regular coffee please" somehow ended up as an order for a 16 oz coffee (17) (around half a litre). This was huge and I've have happily settled for smaller but the lady behind the counter didn't seem to be type of person that would back down from anything. When she came over to ask how things were I did mention that the cup was too big. She informed me that the problem lay with what I had ordered – that it was, essentially, my fault. At least I wouldn't be falling asleep at the wheel, or possibly at all later that night.

The lady was actually quite pleasant, just definite in her world view. I took this on board and let the matter rest. She responded to this quite positively and shortly we were deep in conversation.

It turned out she collected coins. People with this hobby are often referred to as numismatics, but this isn't quite accurate. Strictly speaking a numismatist is a currency collector, so they may or may not actually be a coin collector. It's a rather unusual name for a passion (quite mystical really – you can just about picture a stage magician with the name Artemis the Numismatic), though certainly better that the one for stamp collecting – philately – which sounds like something that is either illegal or a painful medical condition.

We ended up happily giving her some Australian coinage and she even gave us a coffee card just in case we were going through again. I will leave this card for the children to fight over when we are gone (or possibly give to other Australians who may be travelling that way). The coffee was fine and the food even better.

One special feature about Greenwood, and you'll find that no matter where you go each place always has something unique about it even if it's just that it won the Award for Being Totally Un-Unique twelve years running, is that it's the smallest official city in Canada. Driving through it you simply couldn't argue with the claim and you've got to admire the brazenness involved in even aiming for city-status. It's a bit like the fellow who tried to get in the Guinness Book of Records for the World's Lowest Jump or the World's Tallest Little Person. We liked the place – it was definitely a positive on the "experience" front without the horrifying consequences usually associated with the term.

The rest of the morning was spent travelling through the scenic Kootenays region until we reached Nelson around lunchtime – our destination for the night.

*****

Nelson had caught our attention in the guide books. The Lonely Planet described it as "alluring, intriguing, amusing, confounding." Quite a combination of adjectives and they drew us in. Of course, you do have to be careful with adjectives – I've known people who you could describe in a similar fashion and after a few minutes with them you would also add the words "mad as a meataxe". Still, it sounded promising, and here we were.

Apparently, there are even bumper stickers that say "Keep Nelson Weird" and once when a law was passed to exclude dogs from the central business district people got in the habit of putting posters on their canine friends indicating that they were pigs. Keepin' it weird.

By the time you get to Nelson the countryside has started to take on a classic BC feel. The hills have got back their greenery and water was evident again, in abundance. So much of our journey was spent near or on some body of water. This is definitely not something you'd say was typical of inland Australia.

Nelson certainly lived up to its reputation. It's a really quaint and charming city – abounding with intriguing architecture, galleries selling cool artworks, attractive streetscapes and plenty of interesting people to watch out of the corner of your eye. Wrap this all up in, put it next to a lake surrounded by impressive hillsides and you can see why the guidebooks make it sound so appealing. Presumably it's also the reason that the movie, Roxanne, starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, was shot in Nelson.

Originally built on the discovery of gold and silver the town did have sufficient wealth to attract the attention of architect, Francis Rattenbury, who designed many of the grand granite buildings that are an essential part of the attraction of Nelson. By the start of the twentieth century Nelson had matured into an important centre, boasting a range of businesses and hotels.

It's hard to imagine that Nelson wasn't always a bit offbeat but apparently it took the Vietnam War to really up the ante. The township attracted draft dodgers and these younger, often more liberally minded and artistic, people helped to shape Nelson as a cultural destination.

Mind you, it's not always been smooth sailing for Nelson. In the 1980's the region suffered an economic downturn, but thanks to the efforts of locals, particularly designer Bob Inwood, the town was able to save itself from decline by rebuilding its architectural heritage.

Driving down the main street of Nelson we were taken in by it – hook, line and sinker. The weather had held fair and the streets were alive with people wandering in and out of interesting looking shops. The tourist office in town gave us heaps of advice on sights to see in and around Nelson and also options to stay and eat. We found ourselves shortly afterwards in a small but totally serviceable and clean motel right in the heart of Nelson.

The afternoon was long, sunny and warm and we took the opportunity to wander the town streets. Though we didn't actually buy anything of note we certainly spent a very relaxing time strolling past impressive architecture and admiring the artistic skills of the locals. For those who are inclined there is a walking tour of the local buildings. I'm sure this would be interesting but we just felt like window-shopping.

After we'd had our share of downtown Nelson the surrounding lake and parks drew our attention. We hopped in the car and headed for the park at the top of the hill. Thanks to a particularly challenging arrangement of streets and a map that seemed, at least to us, to often bear no resemblance to the layout of the town, we got to see many interesting backstreets of Nelson, sometimes more than once. Nonetheless we did manage to see everything we wanted, though not necessarily in the order we intended. One upside of this meandering was that we saw our first Steller's Jay. This jay is the official provincial bird of BC and you can see why. It's a stunning mixture of blues and blacks. We would see many more jays over time but we never got bored of them.

Nelson nestles on the far west arm of Kootenay Lake and a visit to the lakeside park is well worth including on your perambulations. You may even like to catch a local tourist train around the area though we were happy enough to walk through the park, carefully avoiding the abundant droppings of the impressive flock of Canadian geese that also share the area.

Whilst down at the park I was surprised to notice a group of youths being trained in a football code that looked nothing like the ubiquitous gridiron. On closer inspection I realised that they were training for Rugby Union. This simply was not a sport I expected to encounter in Canada, and certainly not way out here in Nelson. It turns out that the local Rugby team is called the Nelson Grizzlies and that they train several times a week once the snow has cleared. Australia plays its fair share of rugby union, though usually we don't have to wait until the snow clears to do so.

From the lakefront we hopped back in the car and worked our circuitous way up to Gyro Park which overlooked the town. It's a charming little piece of greenery and worth going for the view alone. There are benches in the park with plaques on them in memory of various people, presumably locals. One caught my eye in particular. It said, and I hope I recall the name correctly, "To Betty Drewe who so loved life." It was the word "so" that stopped me in my tracks. If Betty Drewe had simply "loved life" I probably wouldn't even have noticed the plaque – but to "so love life" – now that's something to aspire to. I think I would have liked to meet Betty Drewe. When I shuffle off this mortal coil I could do worse than to have the words "He so loved life" on my gravestone, presuming that I haven't become part of the Soylent Green (18) program.

That night we had a very pleasant dinner at a local restaurant and sampled some more of the Okanagan wines before meandering back to the motel. A much more enjoyable end to the day than the previous one.

Chapter 6: The Kootenays – Bear Country?

Painful as this may sound the next day we had decided to head up the Kootenays. We had originally thought we might spend a couple of nights in Nelson, but we had found the driving pleasant enough and though I'm sure more time in Nelson would have had its own rewards we were happy to keep on motoring, especially with the weather being so fair. Our goal was Revelstoke – a convenient day's drive at the northern end of the Kootenays.

Before we left town we visited the local shopping complex because, apparently, I can snore a bit. Now I've seen limited evidence of me being such an expergefactor, but based on the certainty stamped on Kate's sleep-deprived face, I was willing to concede the possibility. It was amusing to note as we entered the shops that a range of activities was banned from the complex including "No solicitors". Another wonderful example of the different uses of vocabulary. I couldn't wait to tell my solicitor friend back home about this ban, and, pondering it further, I could think of the occasional solicitor I'd encountered of the years that would have benefitted from a darn good banning. We purchased some special nose strips designed to both make the wearer look a total knob and reduce snoring. They were totally successful at achieving the former goal and spectacularly unsuccessful at the latter. At least Kate had purchased some tablets to help her with her agryphnia.

We also filled up with petrol on the way out of town. Here's a tip for prospective driver s in BC – you have to pay for petrol in advance. You can do this by credit card or cash. In smaller petrol stations that don't have credit card facilities at the bowsers you must leave your card inside. I give you this tip to avoid you looking like a complete goose the first time you try to fill up. One further word of advice – once you get out of BC – you don't need to do this. This additional tip is so you can avoid looking even more like some aquatic domestic fowl when you purchase petrol in the Rockies.

The rest of the day would prove to be an excellent reminder that there really is a lot of water in BC. We travelled up the western arm of Kootenay Lakes until we reached Kokanee Creek Park – the location of a salmon hatchery and also possibly some interesting wildlife.

The walk around Kokanee Creek was the first really good leg-stretch we had in the Canadian countryside. There are quite a range of paths to choose from, though we did make a beeline for the one along the river where the salmon should be.

We were not disappointed. The creek was full of juvenile Kokanee salmon – the only landlocked salmon in Canada. Now this sounds an eminently sensible option to me. Their name may imply that these salmon have a screw loose but I reckon they've got it all figured out. I like to think that at some point two Kokanee salmon got together and had the following sort of conversation:

"Hey Sam _(Sam is the most popular baby name among salmon_ _)_ tell me exactly why we have to fight our way out to sea, disappear off the radar for a while doing god-only-knows-what and then fight our way past ludicrous obstacles to get to some creek that is pretty much the same as any other creek?"

"Well Sam _(see)_ , it's because we've always done it this way."

"I tell you what Sam, just this one time let's hang around and see if anybody notices."

And they did. Basically, kokanee salmon, unlike their anadromous cousins, are sockeye salmon that stayed at home.

Along with the world's laziest salmon, Kokanee Creek provided us with a good example of how close the wildlife is to the people. Around the park signs had been put up indicating there was a grizzly in the area, presumably feeding on the salmon. The possibility of seeing a grizzly thrilled me and unnerved Kate (i.e. thrilled but in a more cautious fashion). This encouraged me to tramp all around the area looking for the bear, with Kate increasingly concerned that we might actually encounter it.

To be honest, we really didn't have much to fear. Canadians have a wonderfully comfortable relationship with their native animals and while we were there a school group was also visiting the Park. Nobody seemed too perturbed by the presence of bears – just a bit cautious. Looking at the 8 and 9 years olds I comforted myself with the knowledge that surely I could outrun them if need be. You don't have to be faster than the critter chasing you – just faster than the slowest member of the group. When I informed Kate of this she indicated that this was not the most honourable of philosophies. Once again she was right and I'm glad that I didn't have to put my morals to the test.

From Kokanee Creek Park we headed up the Lake to the pretty little township of Kaslo, where we stopped for a cup of coffee. The local cafe owner was happy to chat to us, and to anybody in the vicinity for that matter. On finding out we were from Australia, he indicated that he had seen more than a few people from our country over the years – though it had gone a bit quieter since the Global Financial Crisis. This was something we rapidly had come to terms with. I'd thought that Australians would be viewed as an exotic species but it turned out that we were as common as muck over there. A bit like New Zealanders in Australia. In the end the only real consequence of being Australian was that sometimes people had no idea what we were saying.

To get to Revelstoke we had to catch a free ferry across Arrow Lake from Galena Bay to Shelter Bay. The ferry was only running at certain times of the day in the direction we were heading so from Kaslo we'd set ourselves a goal to reach Galena Bay without having an inordinate wait to cross. Things were going to plan until we got stuck behind a log truck. The road we were on was truly scenic as it wove its way along the side of the lake, but the downside of winding roads is that it turns out to be impossible to overtake log trucks on them. After a while we simply gave up and steeled ourselves for a lengthy wait.

We arrived at Galena Bay a good fifteen minutes after the scheduled ferry departure, only to discover that, miraculously, the ferry was still there. We drove on board virtually as the gate was shutting and the engines firing up. I really don't know if the ferry was running late or if the captain knew a truck was coming and waited. Either way we were grateful as we took the attractive and fairly short ferry ride across Arrow Lake.

Shelter Bay is less than an hour's drive to Revelstoke and we got there mid-afternoon. For a place that we had not ever intended to stay at Revelstoke turned out to be something of a find. We drove straight to the Tourist Information Centre and had the following conversation with a talkative and friendly lady.

"So, are there any bears in the area?"

"Oh sure. They're all over the place at this time of the year. Why not go over the bridge to this park here on the map first. If you come in from this way and do the walk you'll see them along the river."

"Fantastic."

"Once you've finished there take this other longer walk. Now this one is raised so you'll be above the bears."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Not at all. If you're at all worried just hop into somebody's back yard. I've had to do that once before."

"Wow."

This was clearly grizzly central.

We booked into a cheap but pleasant enough hotel, dumped our gear and then went in search of grizzlies. The lady had mentioned two places that sounded like they would be simply crawling with bears. First of all we headed across the river to a walk alongside another feeder river. As we got there we noticed some people walking a dog. Again this amazed us. Back in Australia the last thing you do is go swimming in the sea with your dog. They can and do attract sharks. Surely the same principle applied with bears? Again and again we would see this in Canada – people walking dogs in areas where bears were supposed to be. Yet another sign of the degree of familiarity humans have with the animals and vice versa.

We asked the people if they'd seen any bears, which they hadn't however they did point out a pretty impressive and quite explosive scat (i.e. poo). At this time of the year there's an abundance of autumn berries and they form a key part of the bear's diet. This bear had consumed an impressive number of red berries and they clearly had not agreed with him. Suitably impressed by the size and colour of the scat we headed off hopeful of seeing our first grizzly bear.

We were to be sadly disappointed. About the only living thing we saw was a young person tearing around on a quad bike. After a while he got on my nerves and I started to hope that a grizzly would appear out of the bushes and chase him off camera. Two grizzlies would be even better. Now that would be a video worth watching, not that I wanted the bear(s) to catch him – well, I'm pretty sure I didn't.

Kate did find a really impressive and quite clichéd red toadstool with white spots whilst we were walking. Over the course of our holiday Kate would become quite a dedicated spotter of fungi. Once I had observed that she was a fun-gal with her fungi. Fortunately both of us quickly realised that jokes such as these should never see the light of day and we never mentioned it again. So, Kate became our resident, or nomadic, fungologist (Strictly speaking the term is mycologist, but fungologist beats that hands down).

Next, we headed back across the lake and tried the other recommended spot that must surely be where all the bears were that weren't at the first spot. After all, the woman at the tourist office had been so confident and positive. Again the experience would prove to be ursine-free. The walk itself was a good reminder of the relationship the Canadians have with the landscape. If you looked one way there was a lake, forests and snow-capped mountains – the other way a big, unappealing sawmill. We diligently looked towards the mountains and discussed the possibility that the lady at the tourist office was either a scam-artist or off her rocker. Quietly in my mind I put the tourist lady on the quad bike and threw in a few extra grizziles.

Though we'd actually had two very pleasant strolls and were quite taken by Revelstoke the dashing of our grizzly-spotting hopes kept us hungry to see more. The people at our hotel suggested we try Mt Revelstoke National Park – just up the road. Back in the car we hopped and headed up there. We arrived at the park gates around 6 p.m. and the park ranger informed us they would be closing the gates in just an hour. She was very friendly and suggested that rather than entering the park for such a short period of time, we should try the road up to Mica Creek. Apparently we had a chance of seeing moose along the way and there hadn't been any reports of major animal activity in Mount Revelstoke Park anyway.

That was good enough for me (it takes depressingly little to get me heading off on a wild goose chase to see wild geese) and Kate was enjoying the ride so we found the road, which ran along the serpentine Lake Revelstoke, and off we headed. And headed. And headed. Driven by a desire to see something special, riding on the back of such promise earlier in the day, I knew I was pushing the boundaries (19). As the ludicrously long Lake Revelstoke kept pace beside us and the moose-depleted daylight disappeared even I began to think that this was not to be our day – at least as far as animals went. As far as countryside went though, it had been a real cracker so it was hard to be too disappointed. We never got to Micah Creek – lord only knows what it would have been like – probably had moose wandering the streets riding on the backs of grizzlies. On the way back we did see an arctic hare, which was kind of cool, though it took a lot of Pollyannering to compare this to a moose.

When it comes to animal spotting size does matter. Sure, it's great to see rare animals, and I know some people can get a well-earned thrill out of seeing Thompson's lesser brown wren, but that's for the connoisseur of lesser brown wrens. Big is better. BC is full of tours to see whales and bears – I don't recall a single one to see field mice or insects.

Back at Revelstoke the advice was that a great place for dinner was the Indian Restaurant, Paramjit's Kitchen. The local's knew what they were talking about. The menu brought together Indian and German dishes – truly an unusual combination. The decor was nothing amazing but the atmosphere, the pleasantness of the staff, the happiness, the affordability and, above all, the flavour of the food was just wonderful. Visit Revelstoke – eat at Paramjit's Kitchen.

After our dinner, where we got to chat with two very nice Australians, the night presented us with one last challenge. There is one thing that seemed to be common to just about all the accommodation we stayed in – the rooms were way too hot. Everything seems to be centrally heated and we hadn't actually packed for this. I regularly ran out of tee-shirts whilst my warm night gear remained untouched in the suitcase. Ludicrous as it may sound, you need to pack light clothing in Canada, even, or especially, in the colder seasons. The room at Revelstoke turned out to be the hottest of all. After a few minutes uselessly twirling a dial that I suspect was just hanging on a nail in the wall we staggered out of our room, heat-struck and dazed, to the helpful young lady at reception. She came back to our room where the air was now thick enough with heat that you could cut it with a knife, wrap it up and save if for a cold day. There followed a brave but futile attempt at twirling the dial on the nail again and then we settled down to an Arabian night. In the end, and as mad and environmentally criminal as this sounds, we turned on the air-conditioning to counter the central heating. Finally, on the seventh day, we rested.

Chapter 7: The Rockies – Bring on the Wildlife

Today would be our first day in the Rockies. We arose, turned off the air conditioning, and headed out to the complimentary breakfast. As we would find out so often on the trip this would be far too large (there was nothing petit about this dejeuner). A useful conversion table for sizes in Canada is:

Regular = Large

Medium = Extra Large

Large = Coronary

Another little trick is that entree doesn't mean entree - it means main. Entrees are called appetisers. It must really disappoint Canadians when they come to visit Australia and order an entree. Kate and I never seemed to learn that you could probably get by on an appetiser each.

Of course, we would still try to consume the whole – or at least I would. The twin forces of "already in the bill" and "it's on your plate" drove me to eat more than I should have – and also a sense of respect for what had been given to us. Surely, we should do justice to the effort to grow the food, and especially to the animals which were now so clearly part of the food chain. As a result of all of this by the end of the trip I put on three extra kilograms. I guess it's hardly surprising that the latest OECD report shows that 6 of the 7 most obese nations are English speaking. In order they are:

Country % Adult Pop. Obese

U.S.A. 34

Mexico 30

New Zealand 27

Australia 25

U.K. 25

Canada 24

Ireland 23

What is it about English-speaking cultures? It's not just the wealth, there are plenty of other European countries who could get an honourable mention on that front. It must be a combination of access to a wide range of food and choosing poorly and excessively. We are the labrador dogs of humanity.

For the record the cost of meals was comparable to Australia and certainly cheaper than in many parts of Europe (though the exchange rate can obviously be a factor there). For those planning a trip the food budget can be well-managed, especially if you opt to use the supermarket and make your own meals. In fact, if you're canny about what you order you could quite conceivable get away with ordering less (remember the mammoth sizes) and sharing.

A special mention must be made of breakfasts. These were regularly they best value meals around. The hot breakfasts were always cheap and usually so substantial that you could get away with only something very light for lunch.

Anyway, after our Elvis-sized meal (20) we hopped in the car – our destination for the night Lake Louise – and we had all day to get there.

As we were climbing out of Revelstoke there was a roadworks site. Now this was nothing unusual in itself, we saw plenty of them in BC. I suspect that autumn is the season for falling leaves and roadworks. What absolutely caught our eye was a flock of bighorned sheep, quite casually moving around the dusty side of the road, seemingly oblivious to the traffic, the stop/go people and anybody else. This was yet another example of how often the people and the wildlife share the same space.

I was thrilled that Kate had spotted them. "If we can see the sheep on a roadside work site, imagine how many more we're going to see on the trip!" I observed. We never saw another one.

We started to see signs indicating roadside walks and one caught our attention - the Skunk Cabbage Trail. An unusual enough name that we felt compelled to stop and check it out. There followed a pleasant enough stroll on a boardwalk in a swampy sort of area. We certainly got to see skunk cabbage – though not one skunk was in the vicinity. It turns out the skunk part refers to a smell it produced if you tear the leaves. This we did not do. What's special about the walk is the unusual ecology in this area – don't expect a spectacular walk but if different environments are your fascination then you'll be quite satisfied. The board walk was well constructed too.

We motored on through Mount Revelstoke National Park and up into Glacier National Park, admiring the scenery as we went. At Roger's Pass we pulled into the Glacier Park Lodge for a pit-stop. The building had a large room set up quite well for providing information on the surrounding national parks so we checked it out and purchased a pass for the parks. There were a number of impressive stuffed animals around the room – many, if not all, of which have been the victims of road vehicles. Very sad to see, especially such fine creatures as the cougars. I can only imagine the horror of hitting one of these –bad for the environment, karma, car, cougar and all.

It's a darn shame that the term cougar is now more commonly associated with older women (usually 35-50 years) who "hunt, stalk, lust after and impose their attentions upon some innocent, inexperienced young male". Not that I have anything particularly against that practice, just that I think it doesn't do the actual cougar's image much good. I believe there's some subtle new age category coming in, like panthers, to describe women over 50 with younger men. Lordie, where will it end? I wonder if all men who have reached the expiry date for cougars go on similar rants. On the plus side apparently there's a category for older man with younger woman – Panther Daddy, better known as dirty, old man.

As the Lodge is really the only place around and we didn't have adequate food in the car we had a bistro meal. This was not an eating highlight. The food was definitely over-priced and uninspiring. Later reading reviews it seems people have had quite mixed experiences with the Lodge and their meals. Some rave about the place, others implore you not to stay or stop there. I was amused by one traveller who claimed to have amazingly low standards when it came to their caffeine fix but that even they were stopped in their tracks by the Lodge coffee.

It's your call as to whether or not you sample their fare. If you're just travelling through maybe a packed lunch is the better option.

The road took us into a new time zone (Mountain Time – an hour later) and on through to Yoho National Park. I should note that there are plenty of options in this area for energetic people. There are some seriously impressive sounding walks, which we simply didn't have the time, or probably the inclination, to do.

The Lonely Planet guide book and the assorted tourist pamphlets we'd picked up along the way indicated that Emerald Lake was worth seeing so we peeled off the main road and drove the 11 kilometres to what would prove to be a picturesque and totally justified detour. Having checked out the Lake, and being in full agreement with both its name and the superlatives used to describe it, we launched out on a walk towards some nearby falls.

I was pretty much hoping that along the way that we might spot something significant, like a bear. Kate pretty much wasn't. She, along with heaps of other people, quite rightly reckon the best way to see a bear is from a car, but I just couldn't help hoping. The walk turned out to be a bit longer than we thought and totally bear-free, though charming enough. About the only thing we heard was what we thought must be birds chattering. It turned out that our "birds" were actually squirrels going off their nut (which is much worse for squirrels, for obvious reasons) about us being near their tree. Later in the trip one irritated squirrel would sit on a branch and give me a fair slice of his acorn-sized mind.

Back on the highway and further up the road we took another detour to see the Takakkaw Falls. Actually the whole drive up there was something rather impressive. Along the way you get to see Spiral Tunnels. These really are a feat of engineering to the layperson – to the railway enthusiast it must be like spending a night with Claudia Schiffer. I have jumped to the conclusion that all railway enthusiasts are male – for those female railway enthusiasts, who must surely have the pick of the male enthusiasts, I give you a night with Johnny Depp.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway was being constructed this particular area was the proud owner of the most difficult stretch of the railway line along the route. Initially they constructed a line with 4.5% grade. This may not sound much but it was twice the normal grade and even though trains slowed to around six kilometres an hour accidents happened with depressing frequency. The solution – spiral tunnels. A great big corkscrew of a railway line. Worth stopping to check it out.

Takakkaw means magnificent in the Cree language and the falls certainly were that. Some falls specialise in great torrents of water, others reside in idyllic settings. The Takakkaw just fell from a wicked height past a stark cliff face, plunging into the rocks below without a care for what anybody else thought. It was an unfettered expression of water in motion and no photograph could do it justice, which is, perversely, why we took quite a few.

By now the day was getting on, Lake Louise was calling and we responded, crossing into the Province of Alberta and arriving in the township close on sunset. Lake Louise is a major tourist destination and it does have a fair bit of a touristy feel – part of which is that it isn't cheap to stay there. The accommodation ($240 per night) would prove to be the most expensive of our entire trip and the rooms were nothing special (though certainly clean and functional). Still, we were in a great area and that's what it was all about.

That night we decided to have dinner at the restaurant in our motel. The pizza was quite tasty but nowhere near as cheesy as the service. I would have to say that we were pretty much always impressed by the quality and sincerity of the service in Canada – but not this night. The waiters were certainly attentive and the level of service couldn't be faulted but, help me please, I don't need to see grins that are painted on nor hear lines that have been properly rehearsed and regurgitated more times than John McEnroe disagreed with an umpire. Heading back to our room we had to wonder if this kind of sincere insincerity actually works for anybody.

*****

The next day was wet. Seriously wet. The kind of wet that really does affect your holidays. The kind of wet that not only soaks the skin it soaks the mood as well. Sure, we'd seen a bit of rainfall over our time in Canada but none of it did much to harm the trip and some of it may have actually enhanced it.

This was also the day that my mania for doing things really kicked in. Back when we were on the whale-watching cruise out from Victoria the Australian fellow passengers had shown us plenty of photos of cool wildlife they'd seen on Canmore Road, and there was nothing that was going to stop me going there – not even godawful weather. It was always going to be a tough gig for Kate.

As we damply hopped into the car Kate spotted a chipmunk. Perhaps this was a good omen for the trip. To get to Canmore Road we first had to find our way to Banff. There were two options – the main road – quick but rather dull, or the Bow Valley Highway – slower but supposedly rich with wildlife. So, it was wet and miserable but some wildlife would surely cheer us up. Elk were apparently thick on the ground around here.

Off down the Bow Valley Highway we went, driving slowly (it does have a lower speed limit) and keeping any eye out for some cool critters. We reached Moose Flats without having seen a damn thing – at least the name sounded promising. We pulled over, I wandered around in the rain and saw precisely zero moose. The collective noun for moose is a herd – I'm guessing no moose is simply unherd of. A friend of mine once convinced his sister-in-law that the collective noun for a moose was muesli. I've tasted some muesli that would support that claim. And that's about all we need to say about absentee moose.

Frustrated but mostly undaunted we headed further down the road. We'd heard Johnston Canyon was worth a visit but when we pulled in there seemed to be an orgy of RV vehicles in the car park so we drove on.

Anybody who visits British Columbia has to be prepared for a close encounter of the RV kind. RV stands for recreational vehicle, though it might as well be called half-a-house. Australia does have something akin to these vehicles, in the same way that some pygmies probably play basketball. RVs are not just large, they are everywhere – and British Columbia has done a good job of catering for them. There are RV parks all over the place and when they are full it's like a small city is in operation. To be honest, they seem like an interesting way to get around and it might be something we'd consider if we did it again – though you'd have a bundle of fun trying to manoeuvre one in a small space. It's not an uncommon sight to see some poor sod trying to park an RV on a town street. This looked pretty much like the exact opposite of having fun.

All along the Bow Valley Highway we looked for animals and all along the way we saw nothing. Perhaps the chipmunk we'd seen to start the day had actually been an albatross in disguise. Not the golfing kind (three under par for a hole), which would have been good news, but the feathered kind that sailors used to believe (and maybe some still do) were the souls of dead sailors and that it was bad luck to shoot one.

We reached Banff, with the damp weather still persisting. We stopped for lunch and had a preliminary wander around the town. Though the layout and facilities were definitely designed with a strong tourism focus we enjoyed our stroll and we began to think that perhaps we shouldn't have booked three nights in Lake Louise – a night in Banff was well worth considering.

As the day was so wet, driving did seem to have some sense to it, especially as I still had the urge to see more wildlife and we were as close to Canmore Road as we were likely to get. Back in the car we went and headed down Highway No. 1 to Canmore. We had decided that we'd do a big loop, taking the Spray Lakes Rd south out of Canmore until it hit the Forestry Trunk Rd which we'd follow back north to Canmore again.

The town itself seemed quite pleasant and if we'd had more time in BC it might well have been worth spending a day or two here, but we didn't, so we didn't. The Spray Lakes Rd is listed as a dirt/gravel road. We were expecting it to be a step down from the good roads we'd been travelling. It turned out to be a whole set of stairs down, though still quite drivable – just not something you'd fly along, especially in the wet weather. Having said this we had driven the road between Broome and Cape Leveque the previous year and that had set such a wonderfully new low in driving conditions that it made every road that we'd driven since seem so much the better.

The road has a steep climb out of Canmore, providing quite impressive views- or at least it would have if it weren't for the rain and clouds. We pulled over at a picnic area for lunch, surrounded by signs indicating we were in bear country. That was an upside, though neither us particularly wanted to meet one while we were eating or visiting the pit toilets. Whilst it's true that once you're dead a whole lot of things become less important it's hard not to want to avoid being found in an embarrassing position. There's something about pit toilets, particularly in bear country, that brings these unwanted thoughts to mind.

The rain settled in around us. It had moved well and truly through mizzle and then well beyond the sort of drizzle you could pretend was accentuating the scenery. I've often thought mizzle should come after drizzle – mizzle being miserable drizzle – but it means a mist-like rain so it comes first. We'd hit that really persistent rain that has absolutely nothing going for it. This was the weather we would share the rest of the day with.

Driving down what could well have been a really attractive stretch of road beside a lake all we got to see was wet, which we had in abundance. Then passed a genuinely frustrating couple of hours. Not only was the weather as miserable as a miser, we literally did not see one single creature, despite going once more along the Bow Valley Highway and dawdling around Moose Meadow. The fact only being drilled home by the multitude of signs warning of the animals that you were likely to encounter on the road. Basically, the day stunk. Eventually, and rather the worse for wear, we got back to Lake Louise. I had a headache from staring fruitlessly into the roadside forest and I don't think Kate was much the better.

That night we decided to contact a friend of Kate's family who lived in Calgary to let her know we were nearby and would like to catch up with her. We'd given her a head's-up before we left Australia that we'd be in BC. Having only got her answering machine a few days earlier this time we did catch up with Kari. When we explained where we were she seemed disappointed. It turned out that Kari had moved from Calgary to Vancouver a while ago. In a classic example of miscommunication we had been in Vancouver, just up the road from Kari for a couple of days and now we had put a whole province between us. At least we were heading back that way I told her. Ah, well there's another problem. Kari had had trouble finding work and was heading back to Calgary – almost at exactly the same time we'd be getting back into Vancouver. Auuuggghhh. Well, we'd just have to try and hope.

Could the day get any more frustrating? Yep. One of the challenges of being in a foreign country is getting to understand how food products work. Earlier in our trip I had purchased some packet soup and this was what we decided to have for dinner. It turned out that rather than just needing hot water the whole mix had to be boiled for a while. We had precisely zero kitchen items to achieve this. Curse that tricky, deceptively familiar packaging. We did make ourselves the soup in our mugs and ate it, but it was genuinely nasty. The noodles were still hard and crunchy, but not in a good way.

So our Day Horribilus came to an end, surrounded by damp clothes, nearly a thousand kilometres from our friend, in a less than wonderful room, our stomached bloated with something that only masqueraded as edible. As for wildlife, we'd seen one measly chipmunk to show for all our travels and that had been in the car park before we left. Whilst our evening in Oliver had definitely been an experience we could laugh about, today had really just been knobby on every single front. They say tomorrow never comes but we definitely needed it to.

Chapter 8: Wild, Wild Life

We had decided overnight that we really didn't want to stay another evening in Lake Louise. A couple of days earlier I'd managed to speak to our Australian travel agent, Craig, and he'd told us that the Delta Airlines representative agreed the timeframe was on the tight side. Unfortunately, this meant we'd have to take an earlier flight, and as we'd now left our run quite late we couldn't fly direct from Vancouver to L.A. – we were going to have to go via Salt Lake City. Heavens to Murgatroyd (21) – what were we getting ourselves into? The implication was obvious – and no it had nothing to do with me coming back to Australia with extra wives or leaving Kate behind to form some megafamliy (SLC being a major Mormon centre). We would have to leave on a much earlier flight on our final day.

Though this was a bit disappointing it wouldn't turn out to be so bad. On the final day of a holiday it's never easy to cram in too much last-minute sight-seeing and as this trip was a month long we ended up being quite happy enough to spend the last day dealing with the trip home.

We did use the earlier departure time to our advantage though. It proved to be an excellent excuse for getting out of our pre-paid three-night booking at Lake Louise. It's true that this was a deception as the earlier flight really had no impact on this end of our travels (the train was still booked out of Jasper on the same day) but every traveller should reserve the right to some fairly harmless duplicity – it's not like Canada had done badly out of us. For some this may seem morally reprehensible and something you'd never consider. Good for you. I guess the one thing that would annoy me about it in a major way would be if I got to the pearly gates only to have this one read out on my offense sheet. Having said this, I really can't believe that I wouldn't have been shot down well before then. For Kate, a bellibone from top to toe, and a much more descent human being than I'll ever be, it would have to be a pretty harsh call.

Now that we were leaving Lake Louise it was probably a good idea to actually visit the Lake. The weather was not exactly clear blue skies but the rain had disappeared and the mountains were taking on that wrapped in cloud feel that didn't do them much harm at all. You can understand why Lake Louise has got such an international reputation. It really was a magnificent piece of scenery, with the snow-capped, cloud-shrouded mountains forming a striking and rugged backdrop to the blue lake. We spent some time on the foreshore and pondered how much it would cost to stay at the Chateau right on the Lake (it turns out you'd need to think about around $500 CAD per night).

Back in Victoria I'd had a conversation with a receptionist about Lake Louise and he'd told me that he preferred another lake nearby – Lake Moraine. It was fortunate that he'd told me this as otherwise we may well have driven past it. Whilst Lake Moraine doesn't have the picture-card beauty of its more famous neighbour it has a sombre atmosphere that found us agreeing with the receptionist. The mountains surrounding Lake Moraine were scoured and scarred by rock falls and the barren trunks of fir trees littered a rocky foreshore. The mountains hung heavy over the water, made all the more ominous by the clouds that hid their peaks and gave them an endless height.

We took a longer walk along the side of this lake. After a while the path forked, with one arm heading up into the hills. At the junction a lady with a clipboard was waiting patiently. There's always something impressive about a clipboard – it conveys an authority far in excess of what is observed. In reality this person was only demonstrating, at that point, the skill of holding a clipboard. The clipboard is the loaded gun of the organisational world – it demands either attention or creates a desire to be as far away from it as possible.

The reason the clipboard-carrying lady was there was that a grizzly with cubs had been seen around the path heading up into the hills. Now Canadians are pretty sensible about grizzlies. The two fundamental rules are a) never surprise a bear b) never come between a mother and her cub. It's gormless tourists like myself that end up having an unpleasant bear encounter. We tend to try and tiptoe through the woods so as not to scare off any animals. Whereas the correct approach is to make plenty of noise. To this end the lady was stopping people until a large enough group could assemble. The minimum number for a party to continue up the path was four. Presumably this would make for a big enough crowd to keep the bears from attacking.

Now there are products out there to help protect you from bears. There's bear repellent which is considered the most effective method. There are also the amusingly named bear bangers. There are three potential definitions of a bear banger 1) Somebody with an unholy and presumably terminal sexual attraction to bears 2) a sausage product make from bears – (surely there are easier ways to make a meal) 3) a device that emits a loud sound designed to frighten off bears. The last definition is the correct one, or at least I hope so. The bear banger is quite a potent device that can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Suffice to say that it certainly did seem like the explosive projectile emitted by a bear banger would frighten off a grizzly. For those who don't have a spray or don't like the bangers there are bear bells. We did come across a hiker wearing a set and, to be frank, they didn't sound like anything much at all, other than possibly a dinner bell. I reckon if I was a lazy enough grizzly I might just wait until I heard their gentle tinkle and see what had popped round for a bite. The loose change in my pocket seemed to make as much noise as the bells.

We were exactly two people shy of the required number and as there was no real attraction to the upper track other than, paradoxically, the very bear that was preventing us from going up there, we continued along the impressive lakeside path. Eventually, having surfeited on the tenebrific atmosphere of Lake Moraine we headed back to the car, being roundly chastised by a squirrel along the way. Never have I seen a squirrel more animated or human in its behaviour. I honestly felt like I'd had a darn good squeaking-to – the impact slightly weakened by the fact the squirrel was smaller than the bear scat we'd seen at Revelstoke.

Onwards now to Banff. The first time I ever heard of Banff was on the old TV show F Troop. There was a character on this show, Corporal Agarn (played by Larry Storch), who would occasionally be visited by some distant relative from a foreign country. In one episode his cousin Lucky Pierre appears, being chased by a singing Canadian mountie, who turns out to be the "Burglar of Ban-f-f". Learning geography by watching F Troop – the only way to travel.

We decided to give the Bow Valley highway one last chance. This would be our third run along it and so far we'd seen precisely diddly-squat. Slowly we wound our way along the road. Again we scoured Moose Meadow, only to come up empty-handed once more. It was only later in our travels that we read the following comment in one of our National Park brochures: Muse on why moose are so rarely seen in Moose Meadow.

For crying out loud....what did they think they were doing calling it Moose Meadow then? Was it a meadow that belonged to a fellow nicknamed Moose? Were we on some candid camera show (look at the stupid tourists trying to find the non-existent moose)? Why on earth don't they just slap up a dirty great big sign with a moose and red cross through it and put us all out of our misery? Or change the name to something more accurate – like Mooseless Meadow? The only positive side to this is that we weren't the only ones sucked in – the roadside was littered with cars of tourists gazing hopefully and pointlessly into the mooseless greenery. Misery, being the tool that it is, certainly does enjoy company.

Again the Johnston Canyon car park was full to the gunnels with RVs so we turned around and left. No doubt the canyon was spectacular but the world wasn't going to end if we didn't see it and by the close of the holiday we had seen so much wonderful scenery that there was simply no regret associated with this decision.

The Bow Valley Highway had persistently failed to provide any animal sightings and we were getting over the familiarity of each turn when suddenly it was there. Lolloping out of the forest and across the road in front of our car was a pine marten. The pine marten belongs to the mustelid family, which contains such creatures as the mink, otter, badger, wolverine and weasel. This was a fine specimen – in fact of such considerable size that it may well have been a fisher, the larger relative of the pine marten. The fact that it was happily running across the forest floor – a mode of transport preferred by the fisher, added some weight to this, but let's calls it a pine marten to be on the safe side. Ironically, if we hadn't spent so long at Moose Meadows we would have never seen the pine marten/fisher.

But wait the Eeyores of the world cry! There is always another, gloomier way of looking at this. Lord only knows what wonderful animals we might have missed because of Moose Meadow. Therein lies madness.

The day wasn't faring too badly. The weather was passable, the scenery impressive and we'd even seen a pretty cool animal – certainly not one we'd expected to add to our lists (especially if it was the rarer fisher). We reached Banff in an upbeat mood and dringled for an hour or so in the shops. We then went to the local tourism office to get some advice on things to do and places to stay. We teed up some affordable accommodation in a fine Bed and Breakfast and were given some very friendly and helpful advice about possible wildlife opportunities. We dumped our luggage at the B&B and headed off again to take in the sights and, hopefully, see some more wildlife. We'd now been told so regularly about the elk in the area and seen so many signs warning us to be careful of them that we were beginning to wonder if we'd be the only tourists ever to visit the Rockies and not see one.

First of all we took a drive around the scenic Vermillion Lake, just on the edge of town. Well worth doing even though it was animal-free. Then we headed over to do the full loop of the unfortunately named Lake Minnewanka. The Lake has an interesting legend attached to it. The Stoney people of the area called it Cannibal Lake because it was believed that mer-men lived in the lake and would eat people boating or fishing there. There are still rumours that a giant trout lives in the lake. The Lake was renamed Minnewanka (meaning "lake of the water spirit") because, for some reason, the locals thought Cannibal Lake might just dent its tourist appeal. Hard to imagine why. The most we saw on the lake was one lonely sea gull. It didn't look that threatening but then you never know.

The Lake was charming and we pulled over at its edge for a while, simply admiring the view. The day was getting on so we headed back to Banff, still without seeing any wildlife. We were almost back in the township when we came around a corner and there grazing beside the road, with a few cars pulled up nearby, was an impressive buck elk. He seemed totally oblivious to us, and judging by the number of people photographing him I guess a deer would have to get that way or go mad. Like everybody else we took piles of photos, each one looking pretty much the same as the last. We were ecstatic. Though we'd seen some deer earlier in the trip this was easily the biggest and nearest one we'd experienced. To make it all the more impressive the buck looked like the picture-perfect cliché of an elk.

So, now we had seen our first elk, and it was like the flood gates had opened. Further down the road we saw a herd of elk. Over the coming days we would see many more of them but this has done nothing to diminish the memory of that first elk.

There remained one last stretch of road to see. This was the loop road that ran through the local golf course. It sounded a little urban for animals but we decided to give it a punt. As we wound between the fairways and then off into the forest behind the golf course we chatted animatedly, well-satisfied with the day. Swinging back towards Banff I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Crivens! It was a coyote – no, it was a family pack of coyotes. We stopped the car, talking now in excited whispers as though the distant animals could hear us through the car windows. Humming with excitement we watched as the coyotes chased each other around in what was clearly a playful mood. To our amazement first one, and then another, coyote padded slowly our way and crossed the road just metres away – totally oblivious to us, eyes focused on a bird they were stalking.

What a day. We saw another herd of elk on the golf course (females around one of the greens – solitary male hiding watchfully in the trees ready to frighten a meal or two out of an unsuspecting tourist) but they'd been well and truly gazumped by the day's earlier sightings.

Though the day was gone the night was before us. It was starting to drizzle again but we wanted to go out for dinner. We'd seen a few interesting restaurants on our earlier wanderings but one in particular had caught our attention - the "Grizzly House". It was mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide and it sounded quite offbeat. Walking through the front door we knew that it was going to be a different dining experience. With old musical instruments and stuffed animals on the walls, plenty of timber and a dark smoky atmosphere the décor was something else. So was the menu. The Grizzly House specialises in fondues, and offers a wide range of exotic meats such as rattlesnake, ostrich and alligator. After much deliberation we opted not to order the original fondue dinner for two in case it was too much food and settled on a French Onion Soup each and the cheese fondue for two. As these were both just appetisers we felt we'd finally figured out the right amount to order. Wrong. The soup alone was quite filling – the fondue nearly killed me. I cannot imagine how one could eat their original fondue dinner, featuring a soup or salad, a fondue like we'd just had, a meat fondue and a chocolate fondue, without exploding. We dragged our bulging stomaches outside only to discover that the rain had turned to snow. What a difference a few degrees makes – rain was miserable, snow was awesome.

We took plenty of photos, stopped to buy some delicious fudge at a store staffed by a friendly Australian (lordie but we're thick on the ground over here) and then weaved our way back through the snow-filling streets to our cosy B&B. The snow fell all night.

*****

The next morning we awoke to a classic winterscape. The clouds had rolled away, clinging like cotton wool to the tops of the surrounding peaks. The sky was polished blue and everywhere, simply everywhere, was covered with snow. Grinning like happy children we headed downstairs for breakfast.

Already at the table were a couple from Calgary whom we shared some pleasantries with while we ate. A short while later we were joined by a lady from Miami who chatted away with a wonderfully stereotypical New York accent. Part way through our bavardage the lady who was making our hot breakfast came out to give us an update on the roads. Courtesy of all the snow some of the roads had been blocked and there had even been an accident on Highway 1. At this point another couple joined us for breakfast.

There followed one of the more entertaining conversations we'd had on our trip. The Breakfast Lady was cheerful and certainly didn't mind chatting and had no reservations about providing an opinion on just about everything.

The first and most vital topic was driving on the roads. We all told her what we were up to for the day. When she heard we were looking at going to Jasper she asked:

"What kind of tyres do you have on your car?"

I quickly shelved the tempting response "round ones", which just didn't seem to be the kind of reply she'd warm to. I looked at Kate. We really hadn't considered this, but I did have a memory of seeing something in the rental car paperwork.

"Winter, all-season, summer?" the lady offered.

"All-season," I replied with confidence.

"Hmmm," she looked thoughtful. "At least they're not summer ones, but you really can't drive up to Jasper today on those."

This rocked us somewhat. Though we did have flexibility at this end of the trip we were certainly ready to head up the Icefields Parkway.

"Besides, there are so many more dangerous drivers on the road in these conditions. Spend the day around Banff, there's so much to see. Check out the Museum, the Hot Springs Hotel" she instructed.

Now, both of those suggestions were fine enough but the concept of spending the entire day here just wasn't what we were looking for. Much as we appreciated any advice we got on the trip I had a funny feeling that the lady was happy enough to be a quasi-travel agent, booking in our itinerary. Kate and I looked at each other, the eyes conveying the message that we'd discuss this later.

Around us the conversation had drifted on to wildlife and the Breakfast Lady was cheerfully informing us of all the wildlife you could encounter in the area. She was particularly keen on the grizzly bears, which she had seen many times on the road to Jasper, from the safety of the car.

I then piped up to say we'd seen some impressive elk last night. The lady nodded.

"I've always said that there'd have to be something wrong with visitors if they hadn't seen elk around here," she observed.

At least we'd passed that test. Two days ago we'd have failed miserably. I wonder what the treatment is for people who go to the Rockies and don't see elk. Something involving electrodes - or possibly a stock and rotten tomatoes.

I then mentioned that we'd been fortunate enough to see coyote at the golf course, thinking this might be interesting information for the others at the table.

The lady laughed. "There's plenty of those around. They're a bit like a pest to the locals."

Oh come on, give us a break. It wasn't that she was being mean in the slightest, but despite her cheery nature I was beginning to feel the Breakfast Lady could do with a basic course in Tourists 101. A little white lie or two couldn't have hurt. What about a simple "Wow"? Essentially, according to her, we'd seen one animal you'd be pathetic not to and another that was a pest.

One of the other guests said, cautiously, "We did see a wolf."

And that stopped the lady in her tracks. "Well .... that's something I haven't seen."

Woo hoo. Score one for the tourists.

Then the conversation took a twist and we found ourselves listening to the travel plans of the Breakfast Lady. It turns out that she was heading to New York with a niece.

"Of course, I'm the lucky one in my family because I don't have children or anything to tie me down. Everybody else is jealous on me," she exclaimed with such conviction that you had to wonder. I was definitely beginning to think that, like the salmon, we'd swim against her advice.

"The best thing about the trip is that we'll be going to a great convention - Comic Con – like for people who get into comic books and graphic art and dressing in costume."

Yep, we were definitely taking that drive.

After breakfast we headed out into the snow-filled streetscape. The trees by the front gate drooped white and the road was a patchwork of black and white, with the tracks of cars cut through the snow. We had to scrape the mounds of snow off our car before we were able to head off.

Though we had decided not to take the Breakfast Lady's quisquous advice about the drive to Jasper a visit to the Banff Springs Hotel didn't sound a bad idea at all. Parking at the Hotel we took a detour and wandered across a snow-covered field to admire some pretty large snow-people – a clear demonstration of how much snow had actually fallen overnight. We even tried taking artistic photos but they really just looked like red berries on snow.

The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is well worth seeing. It is unashamedly luxurious. We wandered the wide corridors and admired artwork and jewellery so far out of our league that we didn't even know what league it was that we didn't belong in. We purchased two small wooden Christmas tree decorations. Very nice too, they were. We left the life-preserver-sized crystallised ammonite, priced for the discerning buyer who already owns their own private jet, island and possibly small country, for another time.

On the way out I was waiting in the hallway for Kate when three other tourists walked past. There was a middle-aged couple and a much older gentleman, Jewish, by the sound of it. Doing his darndest to reinforce stereotypes the older gentleman was bemoaning everything about the place. Standing in this amazing and indulgent setting where he had clearly stayed the night, he found fault with everything from the basins in the toilet to the bedside lamps. It wasn't the fact that he was complaining that really got to me, it was that it was so self-centredly trivial. I felt sorry for his fellow travellers.

A few minutes later we'd left the carnaptious old man behind. The lady from Miami who had shared breakfast with us earlier had told us we _had_ to visit the Marble Canyon, just out of town and on the way to Jasper. It was such a wonderful day that most suggestions seemed like great ideas (except the not-going-anywhere proposal, of course) so we happily took the detour.

On the road to Marble Canyon we saw something that we hadn't seen before – blackened trees that had been through a bushfire. Back in 2003 the Kootenay National Park experienced a bushfire that burnt over 12% of the park and the evidence was still on display. It made me wonder how long it took an Australian forest to recover – seven years seemed inordinately long to still look fire-affected. This got me to thinking about Australian bushfires in general. What was even more amazing was that bushfires in Canada seemed so rare. Seven years, and no subsequent fire. Apparently some areas of the park hadn't received such a major burn in 300-500 years. You just couldn't imagine this happening in Australia. From Aborigines (using fire for a range of survival purposes) to firebugs and throw in lightning strikes and scorching temperatures and we have a country that has a history of major bushfires. From 2000 to 2005, just five years, there were 20 Australian bushfires that damaged or destroyed close to 3,000 houses. Every year there are several hundred bushfires in Australia.

Marble Canyon proved to be worth the tree-blackened detour. The Canyon is a deep gorge cut through the limestone by the milky blue waters of Tokuum Creek. The walk along the top of the gorge is an easy one and the views quite magnificent. Strolling back to the car park we thought we'd use the facilities but there was a big sign up indicating they were broken. This wasn't the end of the world for us but it may have been for the people who pulled in just as we were leaving. The woman walked straight over to the toilets and tried to break in. I accept that there are times when you might need to do this but people should think twice before using a broken toilet – especially when it's a pit toilet. The consequences of one of those toilets failing don't bear scrutiny.

The morning was slipping away so we headed back up Highway 93 towards Jasper. The Breakfast Lady had got the driving advice totally wrong and soon we would be travelling safely along one of the most stunning stretches of roadway anywhere in the world.

Chapter 9: Gobsmacked – The Icefields Parkway and Beyond

"Let's see – there are 230 km of Unesco-designated world heritage scenery that spans two famous parks, _and_ roadside critters such as mountain goats abound _and_ there are lots of glaciers... Where do I sign up" _Lonely Planet Guide to British Columbia and the Yukon._

"It is one of the most stunning drives I have ever done. I think I must have said the word 'wow' at least a hundred times, followed closely by 'amazing' and 'stunning'!"

"This drive had some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever been lucky enough to see..."

"Crazy wonderful views all up and down the Parkway..."

"Unbelievably beautiful country." (quotes from <http://www.tripadvisor.com/>)

All the quotes above refer to the Icefields Parkway. I've put them in just to soften you up so then when I start describing it you'll understand where I'm coming from and also why words simply don't do the Parkway justice.

Last night's snowfall had done amazing things to the countryside. As we headed up the highway, past the township of Lake Louise, and on to the Icefields Parkway everywhere was now dusted, often quite heavily, with snow. Whilst the mountains looked like they already had an impressive crest of snow on them the slopes and down into the valley were clearly wearing new-fallen snow. In this part of Canada the fir was king and great swathes of fir forest clambered up the mountainsides. This would have looked pretty amazing under normal conditions but with every tree outlined in white it had been transformed into something else altogether. We may have had a wet and miserable time several days earlier but we wouldn't have had the snowfall without it and it seemed a more than fair trade-off.

At the start of the Parkway the clouds were still wrapped around mountain peaks that would occasionally emerge to tower over us – giving the day a lowering atmosphere. By the time we reached Bow Lake, about half an hour or so of drive time, there was little left of the clouds and the mountains were showing off their full glory. The new snow on the trees gave them a depth of structure, as though an artist had wanted to create a sense of muscular strength. The mountains loomed around us like great silver-backed beasts. They had that air of timelessness you find in the presence of such raw geography - leaving you in no doubt that they would, and should, be here long after humanity has gone.

We pulled in at Bow Lake to visit the facilities and check out the melodically named Num Ti-Jah Lodge. Num-ti-jah is the Stony Indian name for the pine marten. The lodge, and its name, were the brainchild of legendary Rockies guide, Jimmy Simpson who moved to Canada in 1896. Jimmy himself had been given a particularly impressive Indian name because of his ability to move rapidly in snowshoes – Nashan-esen – which meant "wolverine-go-quick". The Indians certainly have a knack for great names.

There was a store at the lodge that was well worth wandering through. Whilst the shops back at Gastown in Vancouver may have been twice the size of this one they had an artificial touristy feel. The store at Bow Lake had none of this. Sure, it was laid out with plenty of trinketry to capture the magpie-eye of the traveller but it had a much more down-to-earth style. You didn't feel like you were just one in a long line of people destined to buy chocolates made to look like moose droppings. I purchased a tie with wolves on it (I mean, why wouldn't you?) and Kate picked up a set of salad tongs made from recycled plastic and complete with Indian designs. We struck up a friendly chat with the lady behind the counter as we were purchasing our goods and she even offered us some chocolate. One of those small, unassuming episodes that are the bedrock of a great holiday.

It would be a criminal injustice not to talk about the lakes along the Icefields Parkway. Though the mountains are undeniably the most dramatic feature of the drive they take nothing away from the spectacular nature of the lakes. In fact, the mountains would be the poorer for their absence. The lakes, which the Parkway tracks along side, not only have their own beauty they do a remarkable job of capturing the beauty around them. It's magnificent to see mountains wrapped in snow and blue skies, but it's quite something else to see them reflected again in the water.

Shortly after leaving the picturesque and friendly Bow Lake we followed all the guide books advice and turned off to check out Bow Summit and Peyto Lake. The Lake was named after Ebenezer William "Wild Bill" Peyto – another legendary mountain guide. Legendary guides may have been thick on the ground but Wild Bill certainly sounded rather special. He liked his solitude and is noted for walking into a pub in Banff with a live lynx strapped to his back. An impressive feat in itself and apparently a remarkably effective way of clearing a bit of space at the bar.

The snow was still thick on the ground when we pulled into the car park and started out on the short walk to the Peyto Lake lookout. The path was icy and presented some amusing uphill and even more amusing downhill moments but we negotiated it safely enough. We saw plenty of animal tracks in the snow but never the creatures that made them. They must have been incredibly stealthy because sometimes tracks would appear if you blinked for too long. The squirrels were clearly playing games with us – and winning.

The lookout over Peyto Lake is stunning and has to be a must for any travellers on the Parkway. When we arrived at the lookout there was a misty cloud hanging over the area which threatened to steal the view but patience was all we needed. The mist burnt away leaving behind a stunning, numinous vista of the milky-blue lake. Another of those many moments on the Icefields Parkway when neither words nor pictures do the experience justice. Apparently it's worth going an extra couple of kilometres up to the Bow Summit if you really want an awesome view and the solitude to appreciate it in. It's probably good advice but we were happy with the lower lookout. Sure there were plenty of people there but there was plenty of view to share.

Suitably impressed we slip-slid our way back to the car. The clouds had now totally gone and it was a classic autumn day. We couldn't have asked for better weather. Kilometre after kilometre we drove through the most stunning of countryside. Soon words like "magnificent", "magic", "amazing" and even the simple "wow" were worn thin from overuse and we lapsed into appreciative silence.

We also saw our first mountain goat. Kate let out a yelp as we were driving beside a precipitous cliff face and we did the long-drive-looking-for-a-turning-point-on-the-winding-road trick. Eventually we found our way back and the sighting was confirmed. Looking like a goat on steroids and wearing white MC Hammer parachute pants the goat was nonchalantly perched on what looked like a five cent piece. It was the sort of ludicrous image that you'd only expect to see on a Looney Tunes cartoon.

"Woo, hoo. Our first mountain goat".

We excitedly pondered on how many more we'd see as we repeated the long-drive-looking-for-a-turning-point-on-the-winding-road trick heading in the other direction. For the record, it was precisely none. Still, one is infinitely more impressive than zero.

It really is impossible to adequately describe the drive up the Parkway but perhaps a photographic moment will help in conveying the message. At one point we had climbed up a mountainside and pulled over at a lookout. The view was so grand we just had to take a photograph, but that was impossible. In the end I had to take five separate photos to capture the view. And this was just one viewpoint.

Eventually, with eyes sore from being stretched wide open, we reached the Columbian Icefield and the Athabasca Glacier. Our boys were just lucky that we hadn't visited the Canadian Rockies before they were born, otherwise one of them would have been sporting the name Athabasca Jones. With that sort of name you'd have to consider finding lost temples as a career choice (presuming you'd survived having seven kinds of snot beaten out of you at school – kids can be such knobs).

This is another major tourist destination and there were plenty of people taking the walk to the Glacier. The car park looked like a family Christmas gathering of RVs. Again, you're in a pretty amazing part of the world so you've got to expect to be sharing it with a few people. To be honest, the whole drive in the car is such a personal experience that it really doesn't matter that you occasionally come across people at key tourist points.

The glacier is a short, though fairly steep walk from the car park. As we were heading up there I noticed that buses were driving on a road up beside the Glacier. As we came over the crest the Athabasca Glacier stretched out before us. Another stunning view, but this time with a twist. Crawling across the glacier in the middle distance was a bus! These vehicles have been specially designed to cope with traversing the glacier and up some impressively steep paths.

The buses reminded me of one of the most infamous car trips our family had ever taken. We were travelling around the South Island of New Zealand and were staying the night at the town of Twizel. We intended to see Mount Cook but at the time of year we were there it was inaccessible. We were deeply disappointed and wandered into the local tourist office to find out what else we could do. Now you need to understand a bit about the history of Twizel to understand the people at the tourist office. Twizel was originally built as part of establishing a hydroelectric scheme and was intended to be dismantled when the project reached completion. The residents of Twizel so loved their town that they fought, successfully, to keep it alive.

The people at the tourist office were the pure distillation of this passion. They simply hummed with a Twizel-loving energy and it was impressive to behold.

"Don't worry," said a bright-eyed Twizelian youth, "you can go and see the snowfields at Mount Ohau."

"Are they easy to get to?" we asked.

"Sure, it's a good road."

Other passionate Twizelian tourist office staff nodded in agreement.

We listened carefully to the instructions and headed off towards Mount Ohau. The road was fine, and then we turned off it. This next stretch of road was OK. It was windy and narrow but still quite adequate. We were now driving between some pretty impressive mountains and were starting to wonder where on earth the road actually went to. Our questions were soon answered. The road changed to dirt and took another turn. Without fully realising what was happening we found ourselves climbing up a ridiculously steep and narrow dirt road with the only view the open heavens in front of us or the deadly drop beside us. Add to this picture the fact that two people in the car simply hated heights – Kate and Tim. Twist the knife deeper and put these two people on the side of the car that looks straight down the mountainside to the rocks below. Not enough yet? Let's add the sound track. This featured Tim crying out "We're going to die, we're going to die" while Michael, not concerned about heights, is calling out excitedly "Let me see" whilst trying to clamber over his mortified brother. The final straw – the road was so narrow that we simply couldn't turn around.

We crawled our way, in this bedlamic state, to the mountain top with the knowledge that we'd just have to repeat the experience on the way back. Amusingly, as we got high up in the drive there was even snow on the road just to add a bit more of a thrill. And this was a good road. Heaven help us if we'd ended up on a bad road. On the drive back we entertained ourselves with thoughts of what wonderful medieval retributive tortures we could rain down on the Twizel Tourist Office staff. Something involving spikes and hot metal sounded appropriate. Perhaps the most amazing part of this horror drive was to discover that there were buses up at the Ohau snowfield. Buses, for god's sake! That would have been one hell of a trip.

Back to the present. At the Athabasca Glacier we were reading signs about the dangers of hidden crevasses. Apparently, every so often the glacier claims the life of an incautious tourist. We stood our ground, took even more photos and then clambered down the stony track back to the car park. The road out to the highway has got signs marking the full reach of the glacier over recent years. It's sobering to realise that the glacier has receded 1.5 kilometres in the past 125 years – a reminder that the Greenhouse Effect is in full swing.

The impact of global warming is dire on so many fronts. A rapidly melting glacier may seem to some like nothing worse than a diminished tourist sight but it has profound implications for hundreds of thousands, or probably millions, of North Americans. The Athabasca Glacier, along with five other glaciers in the Columbian Icefields, forms the centre of water distribution in North America. Their melt water flows into three different oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic. The problem that arises with global warming is that these glaciers are releasing water at an unsustainable level and when they "dry up" this will have a critical impact on the people and ecosystems of Western Canada and other parts of North America. When, oh when, will people get their act together on global warming? (22) To give the Canadians their due information boards around the glacier and at other tourist sites where we stopped were strongly arguing the case of man-made global warming and why we needed to change our behaviour.

By the time we left the glacier the day was getting on and we had just about reached the overwhelm factor. We saved the sights on the northern end of the Parkway for the next day and finished the drive simply admiring the scenery from the car.

The road north of the Columbian Icefields is quite different from the southern sections of the Icefields Parkway. Here the glacial valley widens out and the road travels closely beside the river. The riverbed itself is quite rocky and bare but spectacular nonetheless and really suited our more casual car-based mood.

I should point out that there are any number of impressive walks people can take off the Icefields Parkway, which is pretty much typical of all the Rockies. We didn't take any of the longer walks. This was our choice. There is so much to do in BC and the Albertan Rockies that our time was none the poorer for it. Having said this, if you're a hiker I'd imagine that you'd be in seventh heaven in this part of the world. Just don't forget your bear bangers.

As an aside, did you know that the phrase, seventh heaven, common enough in the western world, comes from the Muslim and cabalist tradition? The seventh heaven is the most distant one, and is where God and the angels reside. Best not let Inland Security know about this, or everybody that uses the phrase would have to be listed as a potential terrorist.

We had kept our accommodation options for Jasper open but the lady from Miami back at the Banff B&B had said we really should stay out of town in a resort at Pyramid Lake.

"We stayed in town the first night but there were all these young people there making so much noise," she'd told us in her wonderful rich accent. "So we moved out to a resort at Pyramid Lakes. It was so much quieter and we got great rates."

The advice was appreciated and we certainly did wander out to check out Pyramid Lake. While the lady was telling us where to stay I had to smile to myself. So, not only were we clearly no longer young things (which is indisputable, so no skin off the nose there) we were at the stage of life where the term young people seemed to be often surgically attached to the word noisy. It probably had more to do with us being in a B&B than at a certain age, to be fair, but it did make me smile that we'd be brought into this loop, in a well-intentioned fashion.

I must confess that raising two young boys into young men there's been plenty of times when we've had our share of them being noisy, though I suspect a lot more noise came out of the Jones household when we weren't there and had no idea what was going on. I can fully appreciate the need to respect neighbours and there are times things have had to be reined in, but to give the boys and all their friends their due they never intended to disturb people and also quietened down (or did their level best to) when asked. I do think the younger generation get the rough end of the pineapple at times (though surely every emerging generation feels that way at some point). I could bang on and on about generational differences but you're in luck, there's just one thing I'll note, and this comes from a workshop on managing difficult people that I attended. The presenter, a Baby Boomer, informed us that our generation (i.e. the Baby Boomers) and older, simply do not understand Generation Y and are often distrustful of them. We have a very bad habit of wrongly labelling Gen Y and wishing they'd change, rather than having a good look at all our own hang-ups. Pretty sound advice.

I do have one story to tell regarding an event that occurred quite recently and is a great example of when the description "noisy young people" is just classically inadequate. It all started out harmlessly enough. Our neighbours across the road were holding a party for their teenage daughter. They warned the neighbourhood that there could be some noise because there would probably be a bit of drinking but they'd keep it all in hand and make sure that the noise was toned down by 11.30. They even had adults on hand to make certain nothing got too out of control. All noble sentiments and it sounded like they did have it sorted out.

By around 6.30 the young guests started to arrive – some dressed entertainingly in Halloween gear. We decided (Kate, Tim and myself) that we might just wander down to the local golf club for dinner and let some of the partying wash over an empty house. By the time we got back, around 8 p.m., there were probably 30-40 youths at the party and it had spilled down the driveway and onto the road (the neighbour's house not being that large). Again all harmless enough and young people really deserve the opportunity to have a party as much as anybody.

We headed inside and settled down to our own entertainment. As I was writing up an earlier entry in this book I thought I could hear a noise. I wandered out to the kitchen, which faces onto the road, and met Tim who had also heard something. It was a deep, surging sound. We drew back the curtains, and lo, the sight we beheld. Our quiet side-street was filled with a seething mass of bodies. It was a rock concert crowd, surging and swelling and breaking like a massive school of fish. Tim and I looked on in amazement, Kate joining us moments later.

You see, in all the planning there was one thing the teenage daughter had failed to mention to her parents – she'd advertised the party on Facebook and like all good parables the chickens had come home to roost. It was at that moment the police arrived. Whether they'd been called or were just naturally drawn to the area like bears to spawning salmon we'll never know. The parents certainly didn't make the phone call but were grateful somebody did.

At the time the police arrived you'd have to say the youths were all pretty well-behaved but you just knew that in another hour's drinking it would have got ugly. The police tactic was simple but effective. They turned up in numbers and simply moved the youths on down the road. There followed an amusing period where quite a few of the crowd, using beer-logic, went down the hill around the block and intended to sneak back to the party from uphill. The police, who'd experienced such cunning plans every weekend simply waited at the house and as a group would come down the road they move them on again in a grand circular dance.

In the steady waltz between the police and the party-goers there was an amusing vignette. Two young couples found themselves, momentarily, alone on the street near a police car. Quick as a flash the two girls draped themselves over the bonnet in classic model poses and the young lads took photos with their mobile phones. It was a wonderfully cheeky but harmless moment.

Back to the holiday. Pyramid Lake was a pretty location just a few kilometres out of Jasper. We probably would have enjoyed staying there but we weren't to be as lucky as the American lady. I'm not sure how many rooms they had left but the only option they gave us was a very expensive one. We politely declined and spent the next little while checking out accommodation at Jasper. Along the way we saw a huge elk on the side of the road in the traditional monarch-of-the-glen-recumbent pose. We had been keeping a track of animals but by this stage certain creatures, such as squirrels and chipmunks, were becoming so common we started writing in our diary OBAMA, which stood for 'Other Birds And Mammals Again. The elk was becoming such a regular sighting that it had now qualified as OBAMA.

In the end we opted for some accommodation on the southern edge of town where we booked a small stand-alone chalet. It was just what we felt like, giving us a sense of independence. That night we had a fine dinner on site and settled into our cosy accommodation, satisfied that we'd just had one of the most remarkable tourist days of our lives.

Chapter 10: Jasper – Well Worth Maligning

Though we'd gone to bed glowing with the warmth of a great day's adventure we'd also opted for turning on the heater in the chalet. This was a decision that we would have reversed if we hadn't been so groggy with sleep. Whilst the chalet was a beauty, the heater was definitely the beast. It was noisy, which was bad enough, but it made its racket intermittently which just compounded the problem. You'd nod off, only to be stirred by the growl of the beast starting up and the blast of its hot breath. The next morning we decided that the heater would be used more judiciously.

Despite intermittent sleep the day that dawned was so stunning that we couldn't help but be energised. We had three nights in Jasper, which meant we could take a more relaxed approach to seeing the sights. The first morning we decided to take the tramway to the top of Whistlers Mountain. Now, don't be deceived by the name. In Australian tramways are firmly fixed to the ground – the Jasper Tramway floats firmly (or at least you'd hope so) some distance above the ground. Tramway = cable car.

The tramway is just a short drive out of town and definitely an outing to include in any trip to Jasper. It was only around 10 a.m. when we got there but already there was a goodly-sized crowd queuing up. To build on the aerial theme the tramway takes "flights" up to the peak, an amusing little quirk that did nothing for those afraid of heights. Whilst waiting to get on board you can take the time to read the profiles of the staff at the Tramway. With growing amusement we noted that just about everybody employed there was Australian, with a New Zealander or two thrown in. We had now heard so many Australians, both amongst staff and fellow travellers that we had stopped bothering to comment or identify ourselves. The subdued responses from people who realised where we originated from would confirm that in the interesting nationality stakes Australians could be comfortably added to OBAMA as well.

A short time later we were squeezed aboard our flight and were airborne. Kate had opted to take an inside position so that the impressive and fatal drop could be hidden from view – in much the same way as blankets can keep the monster in the cupboard at bay. Both Kate and our eldest son, Tim, have a strong dislike for heights. I recall a certain trip up to the top of Mount Blanc where Tim clutched onto the central pole of the cable car and slid to the floor – adding a wonderfully tense air to the journey for all the other travellers. In an amusing conclusion to this trip our friends in Sallanches, who we'd been visiting on the holiday, contacted us some weeks later to say how lucky we'd been to get up to Mount Blanc because the cable car had recently broken down. Funnily enough neither Kate nor Tim thought that the cable-car breaking was necessarily good news.

The summit, or as near as the tramway took you, provided a stunning view of the surrounding valleys. The recent snowfall had given the mountain an even richer snow-coating and the air was crisp and clean. Visitors to the top have the option of taking a rather steep but awesome walk to the real peak of the mountain. Along with just about everybody else we decided we'd go up as far as we felt inclined to, if you'll pardon the pun.

The downside of the new snow was that it did make the track up rather challenging and progress was pretty slow as you tried to find an established foothold when heading up the steeper section. After a while Kate opted to sit and admire the view whilst I snow-ploughed ahead – both of us absorbed by the beauty of this remarkable vista.

There were plenty of rocks on the mountainside and these were covered with little (and sometimes not so little) stacks of rocks. You can see these rock stacks all over the countryside. They are called Inuksuit (the plural) or Inukshuk (singular). An Inukshuk may serve a range of purposes – it can provide directions to travellers, mark an area as a place or respect, warn of possible dangers or even indicate where good caribou-hunting can be found. They have now become something else again – a way of telling the world that you were here and having a pretty good time. A much better option than graffiti. Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of an Inukshuk, which may explain why there are so many of them around. Great Slave Lake, Canada's deepest lake, is the eighth deepest in the world dropping down over 600 metres below the surface. When they fully explore it they're sure to find at least one Inukshuk on the lake bottom.

There was chance that we would even see some wildlife up here (though I was fairly confident that the abundant Inuksuit were not indicating a high presence of caribou). The Hoary Marmot, North America's largest ground squirrel, is a common enough inhabitant of the Rockies. They get their somewhat unfortunate name not from having loose and morally questionable habits but rather from the silvery-grey fur on the back and shoulders. They are also called whistlers because of the warning call they make. Whistlers Mountain gets its name from these creatures so I kept an eye and an ear out. Nary a whistle or a scampering critter did I see but this didn't dampen the spirits. If there was a more magnificent setting in which not to see a marmot then I'd like to know about it.

Having eventually surfeited on stunning views we headed back down to the cafeteria and had lunch whilst watching two incredibly long trains snake past each other in the valley below. We would be travelling that rail route soon enough and fervently hoped we wouldn't have to give way to one of those serpentine trains. Whilst at the cafeteria I unwisely bought some hot chocolate – not a drink I regularly consume. My first mouthful indicated that at last they'd come up with a way to create brown liquid sugar. The drink tasted so saccharine that I could imagine that not only would a spoon stand up in it, eventually it would climb out and go for a run. This was to be yet another example of cultural differences. No doubt many Canadians go over to Australia and find hot chocolate there unpleasantly bitter (though you can always add sugar – it's a bit more difficult to extract it).

After lunch we headed into Jasper and did some standard tourist shopping. I managed to track down the local library and got on to my emails. Though I'm fairly subjective on the topic, public libraries are a great place to hook up with the Internet. The atmosphere is welcoming and if there's a charge you know that it's going right back into the public library system. After shopping and surfing the web we slipped back to our chalet to relax.

*****

We were really hoping to see some wildlife around Jasper. It's true that we'd already seen a variety of whales and seals, plenty of squirrels, chipmunks and deer, bighorned sheep, a mountain goat and even some animals we hadn't expected to see, such as the raccoon, pine marten and the coyote, but there were still some flagship creatures we were still very keen to encounter. Animals in Canada were like famous European monuments. We still really, really wanted to see some bears and a moose or two. If we left Canada without seeing them it would be like going to Paris and skipping the Eiffel Tower, or visiting Venice and not really doing the canal thing.

At least we were in the right part of the world to see bears and moose. Having done a bit of research and asked around, the best tip was to head out to Maligne Lake later in the afternoon – all of the creatures we wanted to see being crepuscular in nature. Impatiently I waited until it felt like about the right time and then we hopped in our car and headed off.

The drive out to Maligne Lake is worth taking with or without wildlife. In many parts the road limit is just 50 kilometres per hour but that's OK because you, and every other tourist on the road who took the same wildlife-viewing advice, are driving slowly enough to spot anything in the woods. As an added incentive there are signs up indicating that there caribou cross the road. Caribou are very much a species at risk and the herd numbers in this area can be counted on two hands. To hit one of these would be like accidentally running into a panda. You couldn't live with yourself.

Despite our best efforts we'd reached Medicine Lake, situated about halfway along the road to Maligne Lake, and still hadn't seen any animals of note. Medicine Lake is yet another of those majestic locations in the Rockies. The lake itself is a pretty strange geographic feature. For starters, it's not actually a lake. The Maligne River reaches this point and then backs up before going underground. It is this backup that creates the effect known as Medicine Lake. Because the "Lake" is dependent on water flows it changes dramatically with the seasons. During the summer months the additional melt water causes the "lake" to swell as the influx exceeds the drainage. At other times the "lake" can simply disappear. Medicine Lake gets its name from the local First Nation people, who considered that spirits were to blame for the lake's ability to disappear. Medicine Lake really means Bad Medicine Lake.

At the time of year we were there the lake was really more of a wide shallow river. We stopped at the viewpoint and soaked up the stunning scenery. As we were pulling out of the car park a few minutes later Kate commented that she thought she could see something in the lake. Her observation was immediately confirmed as we came around the next corner. A number of cars had pulled up on the side of the road so we immediately stopped to see what all the fuss was about. Sure enough, right in the middle of the lake was a moose!

Once again the Canadian wildlife had made fools of us. You can spend hours and hours peering into the trees only to find that the moose is in the middle of the lake. There's nothing discrete, nothing surreptitious about standing in the middle of the lake. No moose has ever blended into a lake. None of the guide books say "By the way, if you want to see a moose check out the middle of the lake." Again and again we'd fall for this sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an Animal Conspiracy going on just so they can have a good laugh at the expense of foreigners.

Like us you might wonder why a moose would be wandering around a shallow lake. It turns out that the moose was eating the lichen that was growing on the increasingly exposed rocks. Having taken stacks of photos of the aquatic moose we continued our journey towards Maligne Lake – thrilled to have seen one of the flagship animals.

We hadn't gone more than a kilometre when something caught the corner of my eye. There, just off the side of the road, was a dog-like creature, quite nonchalantly grazing on whatever tickled its fancy. We had just seen our first, and only, hoary marmot. We watched it for a few minutes and the marmot did what Canadian mammals seem to do best – it totally ignored us.

In a very short distance we had seen two new animals – the drive had certainly proved a winner, but it wasn't over yet. We'd been dawdling along for some distance when we came around a corner to see another fleet of cars pulled over on the roadside. We joined them and leapt out to see what was on offer. And there is was. Down an incline, working its way through some berry-laden bushes was a black bear. We'd been thrilled to see a moose but nothing compared to seeing our first bear. I still get a bit of a rush remembering that moment.

The bear was pretty much unconcerned by our presence and we stayed watching it until it disappeared into the bushes further up the hill. You might think that pulling over on the side of a narrow road could make for some unfortunate accidents but everybody is moving so slowly and also looking out for people animal-spotting that nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to happen.

In a state of animal-watching bliss we continued on to Maligne Lake. Unlike Medicine Lake the Maligne is a genuine lake, and another crackingly beautiful one. The name Maligne comes from the French word for wicked and probably relates to the dangerous turbulent water that flows in the lake. And just in case you didn't get the message there's also a Maligne River, Maligne Mountain and Maligne Pass. A tad harsh for such an attractive area.

We wandered around the lakeshore for a while, strolling near a herd of gracile mule deer as we went, and then, with the setting sun dropping subtle hints, we headed back to Jasper. The return journey was to provide one more surprise. Spotting some cars on the roadside we quickly joined them and peered into the forest. Down the slope we could see a deer, somewhat different to any we'd seen before. And there around its neck was a tracking collar. It was a caribou, and though perhaps not as awesome as the black bear this was the rarest creature we would see on our travels. To top it off there was a caribou foal lying down nearby. This was a totally unexpected and seriously cool buzz. Two young male travellers in another car were so excited when they realised what they'd seen that they high-fived.

We arrived back at Jasper in full twilight, having to give way to a big buck elk just out of town. Feeling quite drained from such a long and exciting day we went straight into town for dinner. We prowled up and down the main streets and finally settled on Andy's Bistro, an interesting looking wine bar with an appealing menu. We had a very pleasant dinner there, I particularly like the Soup of Yesterday (cunningly branded as tasting better the next day – and I'm guessing it did).

That night we slept well – the heater now carefully managed so as not to growl us awake. From snow-covered mountain top, to moose-filled lakes there was nothing more we could have asked of the day (23).

*****

Our second full day in Jasper was blessed with the same fantastic weather as the first. Kate had noticed that a petrol station in town had some good looking breakfast options so we thought we'd give it a rattle. It was a classic diner experience. The food was abundant and well cooked and your coffee cup was never allowed to get empty. If a coffee-Geiger counter were invented then the people who regularly had breakfasts here would sure make that little sucker sing.

Happily wide-eyed we headed off to explore more of the amazing countryside. Our destination was Mount Edith Cavell where we would, apparently, "Enter a world of hanging glaciers and alpine meadows." The same Mountain Parks guide book also suggested that if you wanted a quieter time to come before 10 a.m. or after 3 p.m. We opted for the former and headed out there straight after breakfast.

Mount Edith Cavell is a great place to visit if you want to get up close with snow and ice in awesome settings. We took the Glacier Trail up the riverbed and then returned by the hillside track. This was definitely the best way to take the loop and if we'd had more time and energy I think the climb up to the alpine meadows would have been an awesome experience. Having said this, for people who want to take an accessible walk amongst some stunning scenery then the Glacier Trail will definitely deliver. Above everything sits the Angel Glacier – one of the most aptly name geographical features you could possibly imagine. Hanging above the valley floor with massive white wings, if it wasn't called the Angel Glacier you'd have to have a screw or two loose to name it anything else.

Below the Angel Glacier is a frozen lake, complete with what looks like mini-icebergs. Canada's natural formosity continued to find new ways to enthrall. The valley floor is also a fascinating window into the impact of glaciers on the environment. Essentially, a glacier to the countryside is like an industrial sander is to a tree. At Mount Edith Cavell you can see both how harsh a glacier is on the environment and the signs of the environment's recovery as it recedes (not that this is a plug for global warming).

Even the name of Edith Cavell is pretty awesome. Edith Cavell was a British nurse who was executed by the Germans in World War I for helping prisoners escape. There are plenty of geographic features named after uninspiring politicians, wealthy patrons whose main fame is being wealthy, and lessons in the bleeding obvious (e.g Australian abounds with water courses exotically named Sandy Creek). It's good to see something named after somebody who deserves it.

Mount Edith Cavell provided one last amusing moment. In the car park we spotted a chipmunk – and a chipmunkier chipmunk you'd never seen. A bit like those pink sunsets that when somebody paints them accurately they just look outrageously tacky and unrealistic. This chipmunk looked like something you'd see in a Disney movie – and it behaved like one too. It scampered around the car park and then came straight over to me in a series of staged and rapid hops. It literally got so close as to touch my shoes and then proceeded to do the same with Kate. Having ascertained that neither of us carried food nor were edible he skipped off to investigate other more potentially fruitful (or nutful) travellers.

As we were now on Route 93A we figured we might as well follow it through to the Athabasca Falls. These falls are not actually all that high – only 23 metres. Hardly worthy of the name falls really –except that the sheer volume of water dropping the measly 23 metres makes up for their diminutive nature. Bucketloads of water. In fact, being a grade 5 waterfall, probably over 1,000 buckets per second to be accurate. There are ten grades of waterfall, based on a logarithmic scale of water volume. Sitting at Grade 10 are the Niagara Falls – lord only knows what Grade 1 is. If the scale really is logarithmic then it's going to be pretty small. Knocking a glass of water over probably qualifies.

Reading about this amazing waterfall later on the web I found a description of it. Under the kayakability of the falls it said, quite simply, No. No better, or more bleedingly obvious advice, has ever been offered. The Falls, like so much of the water in this part of the world, are a marvellous milky blue and you can wander around various walking tracks to see them from a variety of different angles.

The falls are dangerous – you simply couldn't doubt it – and the signs warning you to stay on the path should surely only reinforce common sense. And yet people die here. There was a powerful plaque on a bench near the head of the falls. It told of a 21 year old man who had died here. The plaque concluded:

" _... he made a bad judgement call on that day._

His decision has changed the lives of family and friends forever."

Now there's a message that packs a punch. So many tragedies could have been avoided if people thought about the impact of their actions on the people they care about. Suitably sobered we walked to the car and headed back to Jasper (spotting a coyote trotting along beside the road as we went).

*****

Another trip to the library to send a couple more emails, some more wandering around the shops and then, possibly demonstrating a mild manic tendency, we drove once more out on the Maligne Lake road. The previous day had been so rewarding I simply couldn't not drive it again.

To cut a long story short – yep there were more critters. We saw another black bear, more mule deer, a grouse and a much closer encounter with two moose – truly one of nature's most orming creatures. This was all great, especially seeing moose up close, but it felt strangely flat compared to the previous day. It turns out that, just like the truism of never crossing the same river twice, you can't recapture that unique sensation of spotting an animal for the first time. I guess that's why it was unique.

That night we decided we'd have some Chinese for dinner. It's a strange way of phrasing it really. People say "Let's have Chinese for dinner" all the time, without really considering the more grizzly implications of the statement. Fortunately, everybody knows it means the cuisine, with the possible exception of some interesting and remote places in the US you get to by taking an inadvisable shortcut and where the favourite hobbies are banjo-playing, inbreeding and eating lost travellers.

Anyway, Chinese really is a common dinner option in Australia, and often quite a cheap meal. The reason for this is likely to be thanks to the long history the Chinese have with Australia. When gold was first discovered many Chinese came to Australia to seek their wealth and stayed. The funny thing is that you kind of think that everywhere in the world will have a Chinese restaurant and that it will always be a cheap and easy dinner.

It turns out that this is not so much the case, which is surprising considering the Chinese are the second largest visible minority in Canada. Visible minority is a quirky term used by the government body that monitored demographics - Statistics Canada. Specifically, the word "visible" is used because in Canada political divisions were often based on language or religion and these were considered "invisible" traits. Seriously bizarre and entrenches the even stranger phrase "invisible minority".

What we did see so many more of were Japanese restaurants or sushi bars. This led me to do a little digging around on the Japanese in Canada. It turns out that most of them live in BC, Alberta and Ontario.

Dig a bit deeper and you find some pretty strange history there. Sure, I knew that there was some significant anti-Japanese sentiment in that part of the world post World War II, thanks to the movie _Snow Falling on Cedars_ , but I didn't realise what had actually happened to the Japanese in Canada prior to and during World War II. For almost half of the twentieth century Canadian Japanese didn't even have a vote, courtesy of blatant racism and discrimination, most strongly championed by the Anti-Asiatic League. The League comprised of many wealthy white businessmen who were quite happy to limit the number of Japanese passports and, therefore, Japanese workers. At that time the Japanese owned around half the fisheries in British Columbia and there was good business advantage for members of the AA League in making life difficult for the Japanese. This legislation was overturned in 1925 and the Japanese finally got the vote in 1948.

The Second World War would provide another opportunity for rough treatment of the Japanese. Through the powers legislated in the War Measures Act of 1942 people of Japanese origin could be interned. There was even a 100-mile exclusion zone along the Pacific coast that Japanese men between the ages of 18 and 45 could be relocated from. The logic behind this was that the Canadian Japanese could be charting the West Coast for an invasion force. Around 22,000 Japanese were interned, 18,000 of which were actually Canadian-born. These people became cheap labour and lived in squalid conditions in the camps.

It gets even worse. The Japanese originally had their property confiscated, on the grounds that the government would hold it in trust until they were resettled somewhere else in Canada. No such luck. Under the "Custodian of aliens" powers all possessions held by enemy aliens was auctioned off. Of course, many white fisherman did well out of this. Not only could they purchase impounded fishing vessels at good prices, their fishing opposition had been removed. After the war many of these Japanese were deported to Japan – a country they had never seen and which had been devastated by war.

It wasn't until 1988 that the Canadian Government formally recognised what had been done to the Japanese Canadians and did provide payments to survivors ($21,000 each), reinstated Canadian citizenship to those that had been deported to Japan and made several other significant contributions to organisations that supported racial harmony.

I can't say what this actually has to do with us finding so many sushi bars and so few Chinese restaurants – it was just something that turned up when my curiosity was piqued. As luck would have it we did find a Chinese restaurant in Jasper and had a fine enough Chinese meal at reasonable prices.

Our last night in Jasper was coming to a close and what an awesome time we had had there. We had great weather and limited crowds in Jasper and we found it brilliant. Funnily enough other travellers had actually warned us about Jasper. That it was too crowded and unpleasant. The trick was that they had been there on a weekend at the end of the summer holidays and, of course, it was a different and less enjoyable experience for them. We did see the sad, vacant spaces, just about the size of Luxembourg, that were the now largely empty RV parks. If these had been full it could well have been a different experience. Timing is everything.

Chapter 11: Rail, Friends and Exciting New Reasons to Tear Your Hair Out

Little did we know the curve balls we would face today when we got out of bed. Things began innocently enough – we were leaving on the midday train heading to Prince George and then on to Prince Rupert. We decided to kick around town for a little while, having once again had our diner-breakfast experience, filling up on bacon, real hash browns (not the McDonalds type but proper pieces of potato) and caffeine.

I decided to check my emails again and wandered up to the local library. There was an email waiting for me from our travel agent, which I opened with interest – an interest that rapidly shifted to horror, much like the sensation you have when you wonder what is in the ice cream container at the back of the fridge and unwisely open the lid.

Because of high seas our ferry trip from Prince Rupert to Haida Gwaa had been cancelled. Our whole holiday itinerary had been built around the critical timing associated with the train to Prince Rupert, the ferry out and back to Haida Gwaa and then the ferry down from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island. Taking the Haida Gwaa ferry out of the loop was like pulling out the wrong pick-up stick – everything simply fell apart. Looking back on this journey we would realise that the pre-planned elements were the ones that went belly-up. Not that the planning was pointless, it gave us a good idea of how to structure the holiday – it's just that once we'd got the framework sorted we could have thrown out the model and let the world take us along for the ride.

At times like this it's easy to haver about but we simply didn't have the time. Nothing for it but to 'suck it up'. Besides, there was a small part of me that was a bit relieved. It had been good to spend a few days in one spot and the forthcoming flurry of transport transformations had looked a tad daunting. To add to this, the Haida Gwaa leg had a really unformed feel to it and I simply wasn't that sure how it was going to pan out.

I thought about some options and when Kate came to the library I ran through them with her. Like me, she didn't feel too heartbroken by the sudden news, though both of us would have loved to have got out to the island. In the end we came up with the following:

* Still catch the train across to Prince Rupert (a no-brainer really)

* Try and move our booking for the Prince Rupert to Port Hardy ferry forward four days

* Move forward our accommodation in Port Hardy four days

* Cancel our extra nights at Prince Rupert

* Bring our car booking forward four days

Add to the mix that if we were on Vancouver Island four days earlier then we would have to reconstruct the last part of our holiday intinerary and you'll see how much we were riding our luck.

Our quiet hour or so of moodling time in Jasper had suddenly turned into a frenetic race to change travel arrangements that had so many interlinking elements that the odds of it working were slightly less than Buckley's (24). 'One step at time' – a stupid phrase really. What next followed was actually a hellofalot of hurried steps to the nearest phone booth. We managed to get a hold of somebody at BC Ferries and, with a fair bit of wrangling, got ourselves booked on to the earlier Port Hardy Ferry – we were over the first hurdle. Another phone call to our Port Hardy motel cleared the next challenge – accommodation moved forward. Tick that box – we were on a roll.

Now for the hat trick – moving the car booking. Sadly, life isn't meant to be that straightforward. We did speak to the person handling the car bookings at Port Hardy, but it all got complicated. The only way we could get a car was if somebody was driving one up to Port Hardy from somewhere else – there simply wasn't a car pool to draw on. To make matters worse, wet weather was playing merry havoc with car movements on the Island, and apparently, hordes of tourists had been hitting the region from Europe because of great travel deals that ran out at the end of September – right at the time we were arriving at Port Hardy. To top it all off, the lady who was dealing with our bookings sounded like she didn't cope with stress too well.

Still, at least we'd sorted out some of our problems – we'd just have to see what unfolded.

*****

We were booked in to travel on VIA Rail from Jasper to Prince Rupert, spending a night in Prince George along the way. The train is officially called the remarkably bland, boiled-rice-with-nothing-added name of the Jasper-Prince Rupert Train. A name that carries the same descriptive accuracy and excitement of the word "shovel" (25). It is comfortably beaten hands down by its original name, the skeena, derived from the skeena region the train traverses. Skeena in turn comes from the mellisonantly named Tsimshian people's word, Kshian, which means "Water of the clouds". We could have driven this route instead of travelling by train but there were three good reasons we didn't. First, it was a really long way – 1,100 kms and probably two full days driving. Second, the train trip sounded really different and relaxing. Third, and certainly not to discounted, the highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert has been a source of a wide number of unsolved murders. Some speculate that up to 30 women have been murdered along the highway in the last 35 years. This sad stretch of road has such a bad reputation that it is known locally as the Highway of Tears. A darn fine motivation not to drive.

The sad story continues to unfold and has so many tragic elements. The women who hitchhike are largely First Nations people who come from impoverished families and can't afford cars. The murders/disappearances still seem to be cropping up and no-one knows if it's a serial killer or a range of people involved, despite an ongoing investigation costing around $6 million per annum. If you want to know more about this chilling story try the website http://www.highwayoftears.ca

At the time of year we were travelling the skeena (we prefer the original name) was only two carriages long. We'd stocked up on food because we'd heard there was not much to eat on the train (actually they did have a fair range of passable train fare on offer), dragged our suitcases to the train, did the mad dash for the best windows seats (always a fine balance between politeness and persistence) and settled down for the two-day train adventure.

The weather was still fine, though there were hints of a change coming through – the change that had whipped the seas to a frenzy over in the west. Now one of the really cool features of the skeena is a skydome on the top of the train. Normally this skydome is only for first-class passengers but with the peak tourist season over it was opened up to the hoi polloi (From the Greek meaning many – now come to mean the common folk. Interestingly, there's also term for the opposite – i.e. the few – hoi oligoi. I suspect that anybody who was in the habit of using the term hoi oligoi could find themselves having their vocabulary rearranged by certain elements of the hoi polloi, possibly with some justification.)

Our steward/conductor on the trip requested that people spend only an hour or so in the skydome to give everybody a chance to use it. This seemed fair enough so we thought we'd wait and sit out the rush to have a look. We need hardly have bothered. Half an hour or so into the trip my chronic restlessness fired up and I decided to wander up to the viewing area and see what all the fuss was about. The glass-domed carriage did offer a really spectacular view of the countryside and well worthy of the fuss – but perhaps the most surprising thing about it was that it was almost empty. If there had been a rush on it, it had been embarrassingly short. I nipped back down to the main part of the train and encouraged Kate to come up. We spent a goodly time there, soaking up the amazing Canadian scenery as it slipped by.

I must say that I did hear afterwards from another Australian who had travelled the skydome train and he assured me that he'd found it very hard to grab seat. Apparently, regular travellers on the train nip up there and grab seats for the entire journey. Clearly, our timing was fortunate and probably had something to do with the time of the year.

There is something rhythmic and relaxing about train travel and you can understand why people like to do the great train journeys around the world, though you should tread this path with care. At some point, if you're not careful, you may find yourself joining the trainspotting fraternity (and I'm betting it is considerably more of a fraternity than a sorority) – therein lies madness. The journey provided us with all of the elements you needed to have one of those good-for-the-soul experiences. We'd see great scenery, a few more interesting animals, read a good book, meet kind and entertaining people – all without having to put any effort in.

*****

This part of our holiday would take us through quite different countryside from what we had experienced so far i.e. forests of mountains and mountains of fir forests. The mountains were still there, but at times they would disappear for hours and the fir forests gave way to open stretches of beeches. By this time of the season the beeches had started to turn and the countryside was often yellow in great swathes. Without meaning to sound like a firophobe, it was a refreshing change.

In the early stages of the journey the mountains were ever-present, including what we were told was the highest mountain in Canada – Mount Robson. The train slowed down for us to take a look at this giant, the top of which was wrapped in clouds (in a less than surprising twist it's also known colloquially as Cloud Cap Mountain). The conductor informed us that you only got to see the peak around a dozen days of the year. The Texqakallt, a Secwepemc people (Shuswap), called the mountain Yuh-hai-has-kun - The Mountain of the Spiral Road. Not only did all the First Nation peoples we come across have awesome names for themselves they really knew how to give geographic features the right description too. How can something as bland as Mount Robson hope to stack up against something like Mountain of the Spiral Road.

The Mountain of the Spiral Road reaches an impressive 3,954 metres in height, but don't believe everything you read in the papers – it's not the tallest in Canada. That distinction belongs to Mount Fairweather, though it's a somewhat sneaky winner. Most of the mountain actually lies in Alaska, but the peak, an awesome 4,671 metres above sea level, lies in British Columbia. As far as names go Mount Fairweather can boast an impressive tally. The current name owes itself to Captain Cook (lordie that man got around) who apparently saw it on a pleasant day. Rather ironic really, as it generally experiences horrible weather – around 2.5 metres of precipitation a year and can get down to temperatures of around -50 degrees centigrade (which also, coincidentally is around -50 Fahrenheit). It's had many other titles too. La Perouse named it Mounte Beautemps (another one who presumably saw it on a good day), Mounte Buentiempo by the Spanish cartographer and explorer Galiano (who either lacked imagination or was also remarkably cheery at the time, possibly thanks to the liqueur of the same name), Gor[a]-Khoroshy-pogody by the Russians (I have no idea what this translates into and don't want to run the risk of insulting someone's mother in the process – I do know Gora means mountain and that's about it), G[ora] Fayerveder by another Russian explorer, and Schonwetterberg by yet another Russian (this one I can translate and curiously it's the German word for fine weather – what a mess of nationalities and languages they must have had up there).

Of course, for the best name for Mount Fairweather you have to turn to the First Nations again. The Tlingit call is Tsalxhaan. The mountain was originally close to Yaas'éit'aa Shaa (Mount St Elias) but they had an argument and separated. The mountains in between the two peaks are called Tsalxhaan Yatx'i (Children of Tsalxaan).

In between admiring the scenery both from the skydome and our seats below we were happily reading our books. At the time I was well into Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible – and what a fine piece of writing it is. Set in the Congo it follows the lives of a missionary family as they find themselves all, in ways good and bad, shaped by the very country they came to convert.

The conductor on the train was a genuine bonus on the trip. A real character, he was both polite and had a laconic sense of humour. He was quite happy to chat to people and took a shine to a French couple who he talked to regularly, polishing his language skills along the way. VIA Rail were on a winner there.

We were to have even more luck on the people-front. Sitting in the sky car I got to talking to a few of our fellow travellers. I do have a habit of being able to talk under wet cement, and can happily deblaterate if the company and mood suits. I spent a goodly amount of time chatting with a charming lady by the name of Gillian who came from the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island. Our conversation wandered amiably, and sometimes passionately, about the political woes of the world, the rise of redneck conservatism, the pros and cons of Alberta's oil sands mining, good books to read, the importance of public libraries and countless other topics. Along the way I also got chatting with another friendly couple, Kay and Alan, who lived on Vancouver Island. Gillian was catching a connecting flight out of Prince George and Kay and Alan were heading right through to Prince Rupert, with the intention of doing some bear-spotting.

By the way, if you're not sure what constitutes a redneck there are some tips at the back of this book (rednecks). There's also a list of country and western song titles that cropped up when I was looking for the definition of a redneck (c&w). This is a bit of a harsh call as listening to country music doesn't mean you're a redneck (though the reverse may be true) – I just couldn't resist putting this list together (and don't think there ain't other amazing C & W titles out there – the list is heavily edited).

The further we got from Jasper the more open and flat the country had become and we started to see a stream of what appeared to be abandoned properties. It's easy enough to make a joke of the rural lifestyle but the truth is that people were doing it tough out here. Northern BC rides the resources rollercoaster and whilst some centres seem to be doing fine (e.g. Prince George) there was plenty of evidence that smaller and isolated communities were getting the rough end of the deal. You have to admire the tenacity of people who can keep going in this environment. It's no easy gig living out here and you did see a few stretches of road you wouldn't want to break down on.

If there's three things Hollywood has taught me it's never take the wrong turn, never paddle down the wrong river and never take a shortcut through the badlands. For further supporting documentation on this advice feel free to watch _Deliverance_ (an example of how well this can be done) or the classic schlock horrors _Wrong Turn_ (and, amazingly, they made a sequel) and _The Hills Have Eyes_ (featuring one of the most bizarre and disturbing plots for a horror movie I've ever seen). The latter movies may be a bit light on acting skills but they offset this shortfall with bucketloads of fake blood.

The train trip had been quite a stop-start affair and we'd find ourselves sitting idle on the track for great periods of time. The closer we got to the end of the trip the more concerned Gillian had become as it looked like she'd miss her connecting flight. The conductor was very supportive and kept giving her updates on where the train was at and possible arrival times. Gillian asked him why we were stopping so often.

"It's because of the other trains on the line" he answered. "There are places where one train has to give way to another."

"But surely all these trains run on a schedule," Gillian countered.

"Oh yes, but that's only the trains we know about," the conductor continued patiently.

"You mean there are trains you don't know about?"

"Sure. They know they're supposed to check the rail timetables but they never do."

How gobsmacking is that! There are trains out there, not small ones either, that people simply don't know where they'll turn up. Statements like this should be accompanied by the soundtrack from Jaws.

"But I've thought the Canada rail system was always efficient and ran to time," said Gillian with genuine surprise.

The conductor smiled, both with humour and a dollop of pity. "Do you know what VIA stands for?" he asked, pointing to the VIA Rail logo on his jacket.

Gillian shook her head.

"Very Irregular Arrivals,' he whispered.

In the end we didn't arrive too late into Prince George because we'd had a mystery-train-free run in and Gillian caught her connecting flight, leaving us her contact details as she went. We'd even had a cool animal encounter not far out of Prince George. Kate and I were chatting away to Gillian when the young French woman who was part of the couple our conductor had been yarning with, called out "Bear, Bear."

Sure enough, heading away from the train at a great clip was a black bear – running like a cartoon character. We spotted another black bear in the distance, also giving the train a wide berth and I even saw one scrambling up a tree – again in comic book style. If you've ever seen partygoers scatter when the police arrive, you'll have a fair idea of how the black bears were moving. It makes you wonder what the heck they were up to.

Apparently, it's not uncommon to see bears on the railway tracks. Not only are the rail lines an easy way for the bears to get around, they can provide accessible food, courtesy of spillage from the trains carting grain. Sadly, some bears do get hit by trains and it's even worse with moose. Nor is it just in Canada that this happens. Estimates are that from the years 2000 to 2008 around 13,000 moose died in collisions with trains in Norway. Really sad stuff.

There's one place where they're trying to take something positive out of this. On the track between Wasilla and Talkeetna, in Alaska, moose get killed regularly. The rail clean-up crews take the meat to the Mackenzie Point Correctional farm, where they are turned into burger meat for the local Food Bank. Apparently, moose road-kill can also be an important source of protein in Alaskan communities – which is probably about the best thing to make out of the situation. Of course, there really are very few winners in the accident – not only is the moose in a lot of trouble, it's not uncommon for people to die in a collision with a moose. I could imagine that a moose through the front windscreen would be a lethal weapon, though probably not the kind to feature in a Mel Gibson/Danny Glover movie.

When we arrived at Prince George the twilight had pretty much gone and you could feel the darkness falling fast around you. We had been reliably informed by the station people at Jasper and also by the conductor on the train that we could leave our heavy bags at the station, so we'd repacked our backpacks to take some overnight gear. Once again, helpful advice and reality would turn out to be on different planets. Whilst I was furiously trying to check my emails in the tourist information centre, hoping for a response from the car rental people in Port Hardy, Kate was getting a rude shock about the luggage. She had asked a station attendant where we could leave the baggage and she was told outright and with not even a hint of concern (quite uncharacteristically Canadian) that there was nowhere to leave it in the station and that we'd just have to deal with it ourselves. I looked up from an unsuccessful visit to my email account, feeling more than a little frustrated, to see Kate totally trumping me in the looking-hassled stakes, dragging two large suitcases behind her and two backpacks over her shoulders.

Having ascertained in a few remarkably short and emotional seconds what had happened I turned to the friendly people behind the Tourism desk.

"Hi, I was just wondering about getting to the Ramada Hotel."

The man looked out to the road. "You could catch a taxi but you might have to wait." (Other savvy train passengers had snaffled what was on offer).

"How about walking?"

"Oh, it's not far, you might just meet some of the downtown nightlife."

I raised my eyebrows – nightlife? Did this mean a bear, or possibly someone who wrestles one?

The man smiled. "They're harmless enough," he said and went on to give us directions.

Then began one of the most joyless treks we'd made in Canada. The only upside was that it was blessedly short. Dragging our two suitcases and lugging the now pointlessly crammed backpacks we headed out into the night. A good strong headwind had blown in bringing with it a stinging rain, just in case there was any vestige of spirit left in us.

As we were walking down the main road we came across another couple heading the opposite way, also dragging suitcases – more victims of the leave-your-baggage-at-the-station myth. We exchanged windblown words as to the motel they were heading to and then they disappeared into the night. I wonder how many other train travellers were wandering the streets of Prince George that night, dragging their worldly goods behind them with a change of clothing naively stuffed into smaller, now cumbersome, bags. I hope they all made it.

Within a block we came to what presumably was downtown Prince George. Downtown can mean a charming older quarter of the town, such as in Victoria, or the vibrant part of the city, such as in Vancouver. Prince George had opted for a different definition. As we approached a hotel a patron, using the door to keep himself upright, swung out on to the street and glared at us. Moving quickly around him we started up a side street which seemed to lead into an even less charming area – darker and more menacing.

With the wind somehow or other still blowing rain into our faces (how does the wind always manage this when you most want it to be at your back or just bugger off all together?), the street lamps seeming to draw further apart we pushed on. For one of the few times on our travel we really felt the enfundying effect of the weather. It's at times like these that you start to notice people. On a bright sunny day the person heading down the street towards is just a person – but at night they become something else all together. Moving with the exaggerated quietness of people keeping a low profile we worked our way through the backstreets until we could see the hotel name shining like a beacon in the night – Rama. The last two letters had gone out on the sign bizarrely changing the meaning from an open or semi-closed shelter roofed with brush (this being a ramada) to one of Vishnu's heroic incarnations (this being Rama). On a night like tonight I was happy to accept the new definition and we limped into the waiting arms of Rama.

*****

Whilst our first experience of Prince George hardly charmed us, I must say the Ramada Hotel was wonderful. The rooms were spacious and the staff helpful. Dinner was served in the bar next door and the waitress there was one of the friendliest and most genuine people we were to come across in all our travels. The food was great too.

Sitting in the bar drinking a few quiet beers was actually a great way to unwind and to put things in context. The next day we would find that Prince George seemed a fine enough town and that perhaps it wasn't quite as bad as it felt in the wild, wet and windy darkness.

One thing I did notice – in this part of the world the moustache is still going strong. Back in Australia it's now quite unusual to see moustaches (other than in November, rebadged as Movember, when people are encouraged to grow a mo to raise money for research into combating prostate cancer) and they probably don't have such a great reputation. Think moustache and you think pornstar, used car salesman or cricketer from the seventies. Looking around the bar, I was fairly sure that if I said this to some of my fellow drinkers the night could rapidly turn south. I should point out that I'm pretty certain not all types of pogonotrophy would survive in Canada. Anything thin and weedy or curly would simply be asking for trouble. A moustache here has got to look like you've ripped it off the hide of a bear – possibly whilst it's still alive and very much pissed off.

*****

The next morning was overcast but our spirits felt higher and we wandered down for a good breakfast before boarding a taxi driven by a talkative cab driver who managed to fit more dialogue into the short car trip than you'd have thought possible. We caught our train and shortly we were on our way out of Prince George.

Now I have to say a few words in defence of Prince George, which I may have painted a fairly unpleasant picture of the previous night. For starters, we'd survived, been treated well by its people and probably seen it in the worst possible light and mood. Second, we'd never listed it as a prime tourist destination and nor had the travel guides (though it does look like being a great launching place for wilderness adventures). The town does have some tourist features and you could probably spend a couple of very interesting days there but the truth is that British Columbia has got so many awesome tourist destinations that it's darn tough on Prince George. Besides, why does everywhere have to be a tourist Mecca? Can't a place just play an important role in the economy, provide a good sense of community and get on with its life without needing to have international appeal?

Day two of the train trip followed much the same pattern as the first – plenty of reading, more chats with Kay and Alan who gave us their details and encouraged us to contact them, and plenty of relaxation. The countryside also started to turn things on again as we reached the Skeena River area. Cool bridges gave views of hillsides plunging down to the river below and plenty of time could be spent just doing the gawping tourist impression.

As the day drifted towards night we came down from the mountains and the train ran along the valley floor, providing further stunning scenery. Arriving at Prince Rupert we wished Kay and Alan all the best and headed out to find a taxi.

Though we were only spending a night here Prince Rupert seemed to hit all the right chords. We got a taxi, the taxi driver was very friendly and proud of Prince Rupert, our accommodation, the Crest Hotel, was a great choice (both according to our talkative cab driver and from our experience) and the restaurant at the Hotel served up some really delicious food.

The dinner was one of our indulgences and an eating highlight of the trip. For starters/appetisers we shared a salmon sampler, which featured salmon, obviously, prepared in a variety of ways, including a sweet Indian candy style. This was followed by two awesome seafood mains, one featuring halibut (26) and the other black cod. Accompanying all this with some good white wines made sure that when we slipped into bed we were fully satisfied with the day.

Chapter 12: Down the Inside Passage

The next morning we rose early, with the sun, and headed down to the harbour at Prince Rupert to catch the BC ferry to Port Hardy. My efforts to confirm a car from Port Hardy were still unsuccessful and we were facing the prospect of getting to Port Hardy and having no effective means of getting out of there. The joys of travel.

What we saw of Prince Rupert would indicate that it is a pretty enough town and if our travels had gone to plan we probably would have enjoyed a couple of very interesting days in the area. Still, no regrets. Our time at Prince Rupert could be converted to time on Vancouver Island, presuming we could find that car.

You might have noticed that royalty features a lot in Canadian place names. They even have a royal province – Alberta was named after Prince Louise Caroline Alberta, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria. A truly fascinating royal, who often swam against the stream. She believed in women's rights and was keen to be seen as an ordinary person. So much so that when she travelled overseas she would sometimes use the alias Mrs Campbell.

There's actually a bit of controversy about the naming of Prince George, which was originally called Fort George. It does seem that the local business community wanted to distinguish itself from another Fort Georges in the area, and maybe add style to the name too, but it's a bit unclear which Prince George it was named after. The most recent explanation is that it was after Prince George, the younger brother of King George VI. Prince George had the rare distinction of dying during World War II whilst serving as a Wing Commander in the RAF.

There's absolutely no confusion over the naming of Prince Rupert – and what a character he was. Even his full name and title are impressive - _Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, 1st Duke of Cumberland, 1st Earl of Holderness_ (27) _._ Born in 1619 and living for 63 years he was a noted soldier, admiral, scientist, sportsman, colonial governor and amateur artist. Starting his soldiering career at the age of 14 he fought for the Dutch against the Spanish during the Eighty Year War, against the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Year War and was a commander in the Royalist Cavalry during the English Civil War.

Thanks to his involvement in the Civil War he gained an amazing reputation, largely discredited in modern times, for being ruthless. He was even accused of witchcraft, either directly, or through his pet – a large white hunting poodle named Boye. A hunting poodle already sounds unusual though apparently not uncommon at that time. The poodle gets its name from the German and means to splash in water – a reference to the fact that they were an excellent water retriever.

Now Boye wasn't a typical hunting poodle. He was reputed to have magical powers. He was credited with being a witch's familiar, the Devil in disguise and a Lapland Lady transformed into a dog. Boye could find hidden treasure, was invulnerable, could prophesy and catch bullets with his teeth. There's a dog you'd pay good money for.

As a result of his siding with the Royalists Prince Rupert was banished from England, only to serve with the French at the end of the Eighty Years War. Not content with this he participated in the Second English Civil War on the royalist side. As part of a tactic to create finances for the cause he became a royal privateer, preying on English shipping. A problematic individual he fell out of favour with the royalists courtesy of being implicated in a failed assassination attempt on Cromwell and left for Germany to stay with his brother Charles Louis at Heidelberg.

And still his amazing life continued. In Germany he was involved in an unsuccessful plan to raise an army against the Papal States. There followed a fall-out with his brother in bizarre circumstances. Prince Rupert had fallen in love with Louise Von Dengenfeld, the maid of honour of Charles Louis's wife, Charlotte. He wrote Louise love notes which accidentally fell into the hands of Charlotte, who deeply fancied Rupert and thought they were for her. Charlotte was seriously put out when the truth emerged. It turned out Rupert's advances would have fallen on barren ground as Louise had no interest in him as she was having an affair with Charles Louis. Not surprisingly, when all this came out and the dust settled Rupert had moved on to Hungary.

You'd think this would be enough for one lifetime, but not Prince Rupert's life. Following the Restoration, he returned to England where he became an elder statesman and also resumed his naval career, this time fighting against the Dutch. During this period he had an affair with Frances Bard, who claimed he'd secretly married her (why not - his life was strange enough already) but no evidence has been found to confirm this.

At the end of his naval career Rupert moved into the field of colonial administration and spent time in North America. Thanks to his time here Prince Rupert in BC, Prince Rupert in Edmonton and the Rupert River in Quebec all acquired their names.

Along the way he found time to become heavily involved in the sciences, having been credited with a range of inventions and was the third founding member of the Royal Academy. If that's not enough he played a major role in introducing the mezzotint print-making process to England and produced some critically acclaimed artworks.

Even in his later years things were fascinating enough. He fell in love with an actress, Peg Hughes, and had a long term relationship with her that produced a daughter whom they named, rather tastelessly, Ruperta. It appears that Rupert quite enjoyed the family life up until his death in 1682, due to pleurisy. Peg Hughes was an inveterate gambler and loved jewelry and certainly had a generally negative impact on Rupert's wealth during his lifetime. After his death she appears to have continued her spending spree and had to divest herself of much of the property and possessions she inherited from Rupert.

What a man, and what a story. Well worthy of having a city named after you. Having said this, Rupert must not have been easy company, which may go a long way to explaining his exotic and varied lifestyle. He seemed to make enemies more easily than friends. The following quote from Count Grammont clearly showed his dual nature:

" _... brave and courageous even to rashness, but cross-grained and incorrigibly obstinate... he was polite, even to excess, unseasonably; but haughty, and even brutal, when he ought to have been gentle and courteous... his manners were ungracious: he had a dry hard-favoured visage, and a stern look, even when he wished to please; but, when he was out of humour, he was the true picture of reproof."_

Totally unaware at the time of the grand history of the city's namesake we sailed out of Prince Rupert just after dawn, heading down the Inside Passage.

*****

Having had a stunning train trip we were now embarking on an even more impressive water journey. The Inside Passage - butt of many jokes (no double entendre intended) - has a reputation for amazing scenery and it comfortably lived up to it, despite some overcast weather and even a bit of rain.

We had chosen to travel with BC Ferries rather than do a cruise around this region. This was done for several reasons. First, it was considerably cheaper. Second, it required less of a time commitment and got us exactly to where we wanted to be. Third, it really was a great trip. The same logic had applied to our choice of train travel. There were other sky trains that went from Vancouver and they had received big wraps but we felt that, at least for us, the skeena and BC Ferries gave us so much value for money that we couldn't go wrong. No criticism of alternatives, just that we were very happy with our decision.

To make the trip a bit easier, which was to last for around fifteen hours, we booked an inside cabin. Sure, it added to the cost but being able to lie down properly at different times was just awesome. This was probably as close to flying first class for us as we were ever likely to get.

Travelling down the Passage from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy was a bit like travelling the Rockies. No amount of photographs can possibly do it justice and it would be easy to overdo the picture-taking and bore the socks of friends and relatives on returning home. The scenery was constantly awesome for so long you ran the risk of taking it for granted. Fir-covered mountains came down to the sea, often shrouded in cloud and the number of waterfalls we saw made you wonder if BC was pretty much made up of water with a thin veneer of fir trees.

We saw Dall porpoises, often tearing through the water at a great rate of knots (they're the fastest of the cetaceans, reaching speeds of up to 55 kph). The order of Cetaceans includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Tempting as it sounds the name does not describe an alien intergalactic aquatic species, unless of course you're a fundamental believer of the works of Douglas Adams (which bizarrely some people seem to be if you trust what you read on the Web).

There was also a whale that we were confident was a minke. Add to this plenty of harbour seals on offer and the occasional sea lion and you've got a fair amount of wildlife to thrown in with the amazing scenery. Apparently you can sometimes see otters and even Kermode bears if the tides and time of year are right.

The Kermode bears are a subspecies of the black bear with a remarkable twist – a number of them (maybe around 10%) have white or creamy-coloured fur. Not surprisingly they are also known as the Spirit Bear or Ghost Bear. Because of this unusual feature they're much sought after to photograph and they have a place in Indian mythology. They're quite rare, which may explain why we saw exactly zero of them.

Thanks to the length of the trip we found plenty of time to read. Having just finished _The Poisonwood Bible_ I moved on to the _Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society_ – a fictional work set, as the name would suggest, on Guernsey. It had a good sense of the place and the time but I have to confess this book didn't work for me, which is a bit like saying I like to kick the cat. It's a heart-warming story and I think that's a great thing in many ways and heaps of people have clearly enjoyed it – so what's wrong with me? It just lacked the substance and writing style that is my preference, but then I get remarkably cautious when people tell me something is a romantic comedy, so I probably have a twisted and shrivelled heart. I have enjoyed a number of romantically set comedies, which means it's not an aversion to the whole genre at all, just the style at times – mind you I have struggled to like anything that gets the description "rom com". Read it if you like, you'll probably love it. One huge upside of the book was that it was an easy read and I knocked it over on the boat trip (we travelled on the vessel The Northern Exposure if that's of interest to anybody).

According to the promotional material you can occasionally see moose and deer swimming across the Grenville Channel – the narrowest part of the voyage. I did look closely for aquatic moose, after all we had a good track record on that front, but didn't manage to see one of them. What I did see was plenty of moose-shaped logs and tree branches. The water was littered (and litter being the appropriate word) with either tree limbs or often the whole damn tree.

It's interesting to note that Vancouver Island is actually missing a number of the major critters that live on the mainland. No moose, porcupines, skunks, coyote, mountain goats or grizzlies are on the island – though in the case of the grizzlies this is definitely a man-made phenomenon. Every now and again a grizzly will swim across from the mainland and people track them down and ship them back again. No wonder grizzlies can be grumpy – I'd be heartily pissed off if I'd swam all that way only to find myself being carted back to the starting point. A sort of punishment of Grecian proportions.

The Greeks really knew about this kind of torture and it's reflected in their gods, who were right royal bastards when it came to meting out punishment. They understood that the best kind of pain is mental. Take for example Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. She was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo as a trade for a quick roll around the sack but when he turned up to claim his reward she spat in his mouth. Apollo couldn't retract the gift but added a proviso – that nobody would believe her. How's that for nasty – to always tell the truth but never be believed. It drove her mad. Then there's Sisyphus . Now Sis was a nasty piece of work, but the gods sorted him out, good and proper. His punishment was that he had to push a huge rock up a steep hill, only for it to roll back down again before he reached the top. He got to do this _forever_. Makes complaining about a long day at work seem a little over-dramatic (28). And the best of all – Prometheus. Poor sod. His crime was to steal fire from the gods and give it to the people. His punishment – he was chained on a rock and in the morning a vulture (or eagle) turned up and tore out his liver. Bad enough, but he got to do this forever, with his liver growing back each night. You see, the pain of the liver being torn out was shocking but the knowledge that it would happen again and again for eternity was the real punishment.

Other than the amazing scenery and moose-like timber you do get to see some interesting little communities. First up, there's the abandoned township of Butedale, sitting right next to an awesome set of falls, not surprisingly named Butedale Falls. Butedale was established in 1918 as a mining, fishing and logging camp, with the salmon canning operation keeping the place running until the 1950s. It's impressive to see this town, slowly falling apart. Curiously, you can buy Butedale if you like. As I'm writing this Luxury Real Estate has it advertised at the cut-throat price of $595,000 – down $900,000 from the original asking price. What a steal. Presumably there simply isn't much of a buyer's market in old abandoned and collapsing ghost towns in isolated locations. The website offers the usual sort of real estate spiel, as well as the following, quite cryptic statement – _"It is also important to understand that deals come from opportunities which arise as a result of circumstances."_ Meaning exactly what? You can take advantage of this seller maybe. Very strange.

Further along the trip we sailed past a living town. Bella Bella, also known by the Indian name Waglisla (meaning "river on the beach"), has a population of around 1,400, featuring a strong Indian presence. It looks like this is another pretty darn isolated community but it seems to be kicking along okay. Bella Bella is the home of the Heiltsuk people and you can even see an impressive totem pole in the village as you sail past.

By the time we got to Port Hardy it was darker than the inside of a cat. The weather was off-and-on wet making the dragging-the-suitcases-around-the-car-park-of-the-ferry-terminal-in-the-dark experience all the richer. We clambered on board a school bus which was moonlighting as a tourist bus and dragged ourselves into our accommodation 15 minutes later. Though it wasn't the best of ways to wrap up a day we found that the motel had upgraded our room so we gratefully crawled into a very cosy and large bed in our spacious room. Now all we had to hope was that we had a car tomorrow.

*****

The next day started wet, but it did have a clearing look about it. Kate stayed in bed (I suspect that my "theoretical" snoring may have been a factor in this) and I wandered down for another really delicious pub breakfast. After jumping over puddles all the way back to our accommodation I tried contacting the car rental people again. The lady who answered was the same one I'd spoken to earlier. She sounded a tad stressed, but the good news was that she'd lined up a car. Now this opened up a raft of new options since we were on Vancouver Island earlier than expected. I quickly rang up our Grizzly tour people and after a bit of negotiation I was able to bring our booking forward to the following day. Things were actually falling in to place. We phoned for a taxi and were soon on our way out to pick up the vehicle.

The taxi driver, like the one we'd had in Prince George, and Prince Rupert for that matter, was happy to chat and offer advice. On the train Gillian had said we really should head out to the west coast from Port Hardy. Even though the road was a bit rough it was worth the trip and there was an amazing garden to see along the way. The garden was originally set up by a trapper named Brent Ronning way back in 1910. He lived there until the 60's, but after he died the forest started to reclaim the land until locals got in and re-established it. This sounded fantastic, but there was one hitch. The taxi driver informed us that the road had been totally washed out and those isolated communities really were isolated now. A shame, though at every turn where some element of our journey was cut out we'd find this freed up time to see something else. Fortunately, even though the weather had impacted on our journey it rarely rained cats and dogs on us.

Have you ever stopped to wonder where this phrase come from? There are a few theories – cats are reputed in mythology to influence the weather and dogs are a sign of the wind. Some effort has been put into suggesting the term derives from the French word catadoupe, meaning waterfall, though this is a bit of a long stretch. The most plausible is the most mundane and certainly least romantic. English streets back in the 17th and 18th century were plain dirty. After a good solid rain you could find dead cats and dogs floating down the street – and there you have it – raining cats and dogs. Makes you think twice about using the phrase.

We probably shouldn't have been surprised by the roads being cut as many British Columbians we'd met along the way had indicated that the natural state of their roads was wet. They even have an interesting name for those long stretches of water that wind along the road in front of you, causing bladder-loosening moments of tractionless driving, water snakes. Now there's a wet country – it has a species of animal that is purely metrological.

Getting the car was an experience in itself. Some people are naturally obliging no matter what the circumstances – others are not. The lady we were picking the car up from looked like she verged on the second category. Fortunately, both Kate and I have worked in challenging staff environments over the years and have learnt some pretty good techniques along the way. Here was a woman under pressure who clearly didn't enjoy the experience. Easy stuff if you've survived working in local and state government, places abundant with stressed out people. All it took was to be nice to her and listen to her troubles. Not such a big ask really.

What we wanted to do was pick up our car four days early, return it a day earlier, but at Nanaimo rather than Victoria. It's funny how something that seems straightforward enough, in the right hands, can turn into something far larger and potentially catastrophic. We realised fairly early on that the best way to travel was often to be accommodating, up to the point where you got what you wanted without having a barney with anybody.

It's tempting to think that the word barney originates from cockney rhyming slang. Drawing from the old TV series The Flintstones, a Barney Rubble would translate to trouble. Wrong. Barney is short for Barnabas, a common name amongst Irish settlers back in the 19th century and, apparently, there's nothing an Irish settler likes more than have a good old argument. If you doubt this just watch the classic movie The Quiet Man. Hollywood is in no doubt about the pugilistic, alcoholic, charmingly argumentative and melodic nature of the average Irish person.

As we all grappled with a solution to our problem the phone rang. The lady tensed and picked it up. We never heard the other side of the conversation but we really didn't need to.

"Hello .... [extended silence whilst the lady listened] .... I'm sorry sir I'm very busy now .... I said I'm busy sir ... you'll just have to ring back later."

She slapped the phone back down and looked at us in that long-suffering way people get when having just dealt with a troublesome person. We nodded sympathetically, silently grateful that that wasn't us on the phone.

Eventually, after some interesting scream of consciousness discussion (stream of consciousness when it's not in a good place), we came up with a rather strange solution. Because we had pre-paid the car in Australia it was, apparently, really complicated to change the length of the booking. So what we ended up doing was keep the car for the same length of time, just with a different starting date (four days earlier), a different finishing date (four days earlier again) and a different drop-off point (Nanaimo). We would then need to pick up another car from Nanaimo for the last few days of the trip. To be honest this didn't prove to be much of an issue but it was hard to fathom why we couldn't just book the car for an extended period. This would be the same question the car rental office at Nanaimo would ask when we went to "swap" the car. Not surprisingly the swap would involve the following conversation:

"Are you happy with this car?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to keep it?"

Yes."

Towards the end of the paperwork the phone rang again. We all looked in horror at it, Kate and I guessing pretty accurately how the conversation would go.

"Hello .... I'm sorry sir I'm still with the customers .... you'll just have to ring back later."

Another shared long-suffering look, another moment's quite appreciation that we were here and not on the other end of the dead phone, and we went on to finalise the deal. Minutes later we were heading out into the damp but clearing weather of northern Vancouver Island.

Chapter 13: There's Bears in Them Thar Hills

We had booked the grizzly watching trip for the next day, so we were able to cruise down the road to Campbell River. It's a pretty stretch of road and classically BC – loads of firs and, mountains and lakes. We'd been told by Gillian, our fellow skeena-traveller, that as we were missing out on Haida Gwaa, Alert Bay would be a good option to grab a quality First Nation experience. We detoured on a trip down to Campbell River to check this out. We hadn't actually intended to do Alert Bay today – we just thought we'd find out a bit more about the area.

Alert Bay is a First Nation community, with an awesome cultural centre, located on an island off the east coast. The best way to get there is by ferry from Port McNeill. This morning we thought we'd check out Port McNeill, then motor down to Campbell River (about 2 hours drive), do our grizzlies the next day, then wander back up to Alert Bay the day after that. The logic to this backwards and forwarding was that we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time in Alert Bay. In retrospect we probably could have fitted Alert Bay into that first day, but it would have been a tight squeeze.

Port McNeill – I can't say that it's a charming little coastal village but nor does it deserve to be bad-mouthed. There's some interesting shops and the people are certainly friendly. We wandered into the tourist office for advice and had a good chat with the lady there. When we explained that we were going to head to Campbell River later on, but would make a day trip back to Port McNeill and Alert Bay, the lady smiled at us.

"That's what I like about you ozzies, you appreciate distance."

I raised my eyebrows.

"European travellers often don't understand that you've got to spend a bit of time driving to get to places."

It's true – the sheer size of our country gets you used to travelling fair distances. A two-hour drive to a "nearby" city to do a bit of shopping and then heading home on the same day is nothing. You'd be considered a poor specimen of humanity if you complained about it. This seemed to surprise European visitors we've had over the years. It would amuse us when they'd talk about planning to visit Uluru (previously known as Ayer's Rock) one day and the Great Barrier Reef the next – after all they're both in the same country. Yes, but our country is a continent as well. The flip-side of this is that you realise how compact Europe is. I recall one memorable day many, many years ago when our family was staying in the north of France. For a day trip we headed up through Belgium, checking out Bruges along the way, got to the Netherlands, went on a canal boat trip and then came home again. A long day, sure, but three countries and sightseeing along the way. Our European friends thought we were quite mad and probably still continue to do so.

I can't resist another little aside here. There's a show on ABC television in Australia called the _Chaser_. They spoof a lot of things and for a while they were running street-side tourist campaigns in US cities. Their goal was to see how many international sites they could con US citizens into believing were in Australia. I was impressed when they convinced a person that the Eiffel Tower was there but this was well and truly topped when a passing citizen who was quite willing to believe that the Great Wall of China could be found in Australia. What part of the name Great Wall of China didn't sink in? It's a salient reminder that perhaps Australians think we're better known in the world than we are (and perhaps that some of the US citizenry don't have a clue about the rest of the world). For an excellent example of this see the transcripts from a) a question to a celebrity on the game show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" and b) the response by Ms. South Carolina in Teen USA 2007.

The tourism lady also suggested that the pies up at the local coffee shop were worth sampling. This sounded a good idea so we settled in for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie each - again we had failed to learn the lesson of meal portions. The slices came out looking like slabs and though they were tasty they were hugely sweet and rich and by the time we had finished with them you could feel the dissolved sugar coursing around the body. You'd think sugar-overload would lead to hyperactivity but delivered in this form it had the reverse effect. Dragging our bloated carcasses out to the car we headed on down the road – next stop Telegraph Cove.

We'd read good things about the drive out to Telegraph Cove so we took the detour. The road is an attractive drive and Telegraph Cove a quaint location. Just out of the village you can see a logging farm in action. The timber is dragged into the river where it's gathered together to float down stream. These logs create an amazing and impressively large floating island and whether you're into logging or not you've got to respect the efficiency of using the river to do most of your work.

There is a major downside to this – the waterways are littered with parts of trees – often whole trunks. This makes boating in the waters often quite hazardous. We did ask what happens if you collected some of the timber. It turns out that the timber is still "owned" by the logging companies so you're supposed to keep only 10% of the value of the timber and give 90% to the loggers. But, if you should actually damage your boat on the timber then it's your bad luck. What a stitch-up by the logging companies. If you generate some value out of the timber they own it, but if it causes any grief then they don't know about it.

After our leisurely drive out to Telegraph Cove we headed to Campbell River, arriving there mid afternoon and happy just to cruise around. We had lined up two nights in the float house above the Campbell River Whale Watching office so we got to the harbour before the office closed. I had been dealing with Jack, who seemed a pleasant enough fellow but as we approached the office I noticed a sign indicating that we were in the territory of Hurricane Jack. The name didn't thrill me. I had an image of a large gent with a moustache the size of small bear and a handshake that could throttle a raccoon. I wasn't sure how much fun we'd be having on HJ's tour. As it turned out Jack was the pleasant, polite and friendly fellow he'd sounded on the emails. The name came from the fact that he had owned a model of boat called a hurricane and not that he was a natural disaster in human form.

The float house was great and we'd highly recommend staying there. It was right in the middle of the harbour and provided cool views in the evening and morning. That night we wandered up to the nearby supermarket to buy some food for dinner. The reason this is even worth mentioning is that we did our shopping in one of their superstores – and it was simply huge. You had dozens of brands in every variety of food, often in the sort of bulk containers that could support a small town for weeks. They also seemed to have one of everything. I'm sure if we dug around enough we could have found one of the lost tribes of the Amazon or a board game that caused magical catastrophes as you moved from square to square.

We ate well and slept even better. Tomorrow promised grizzlies and we couldn't wait.

*****

The next morning the day shaped up to be a cracker. Outside our window a great blue heron had made his night-time roost on a nearby post. Demonstrating an aversion to the matutinal lifestyle, the heron remained with his beak buried deep inside his wings until well after the early bird had caught the worm, walked the dog and had a hearty breakfast.

Today was the big day. We headed downstairs and met the other passengers. Once again our fellow tourists turned out to be Australians, from Newcastle, just a couple of hours drive south of our home. We sure are common as muck over here. The people, a family of four with two teenage boys, were friendly and good company on the trip. Coming along with us was Jack's son, Jason. Jason had plenty of tour guide experience and was a likable lad, so we considered ourselves fortunate to have him on board. The boat we were travelling in was a Zodiac – very comfortable with indoor seating and a deck out the back.

Our goal for today was Butte Inlet, on the mainland. It may seem strange that there are a number of grizzly tours based on Vancouver Island, which has a notable and well-maintained absence of grizzlies. The reason for this is that a number of the good grizzly populations on the mainland are up mountain valleys only really accessible by water. The Vancouver Island tours head across the channel and up into these remote mainland locations.

It was also a great time of year to see bears. The salmon were running, the berries were on the trees and hibernation was just around the corner. The bears were on the prowl and very active. To prepare for hibernation, grizzlies become the ultimate gormandisers, packing on up to 180 kg extra prior to hibernation. Most people would be aware of this however they may not realise that in order to survive hibernation the bears need to limit heat loss and defecation. Bears produce a tappen – a plug of indigestible material that lodges in the anus and prevents defecation. Aren't you glad we don't have to hibernate?

It took us some time to get to our destination (the overall trip ran for around 7 hours) so we had plenty of opportunity to chat to the talkative Jack and Jason and to admire the scenery. We scored a very enthusiast pod of dolphins on the way over and Jack motored around for a few minutes to give them the chance to wave-ride behind the boat, which they did most obligingly. We took scads of photos, all of which, thanks to the speed of the dolphins, pretty much showed the splash were a dolphin had just been. There was one photo that even included Kate's arm pointing at a recently vacated and dolphin-free location.

The bear-watching trip is only possible with the permission and involvement of the First Nation people who have ownership of that particular section of the coastline. In the case of Butte Inlet this was the Homalco people. We arrived at their reception area mid-morning, in glorious sunlight. Jack gave us the routine talk about nobody having been attacked on one of their tours but that we still needed to be extremely vigilant as these were wild animals that could easily duntle us into new and unhealthy shapes with their dinner-plate sized paws. The next leg of the trip was a slow one by twenty-seater bus across some fairly rugged dirt tracks. Not that anybody wanted to rush this part as we were now in prime bear-viewing country.

On the bus, as well as Jack, Jason and the six of us tourists, we had a Homalco driver and an additional tour guide/local expert. Buzzing with excitement, we headed off into the wilderness. There's always a chance of seeing a bear on or near the road which leads to a spit of land between two rivers. To increase the odds of seeing one, the Homalco have put in place a number of viewing towers. As it turned out, the heavy rains that had modified our travel schedule had an impact on this trip, despite the wonderful weather we were now experiencing. The rivers were swollen and a milky brown colour and they had also played merry havoc with one of the viewing platforms. Jack wasn't sure how good that particular tower would be for bear watching at all.

The first leg of the drive, whilst scenic, was a bear-free experience – though the locals did warn that a bear could be lurking only a few metres away at any given time so there were certainly plenty of eyes on the forest. Another consequence of the heavy water flow was that we reached a stage where there wasn't much point in driving the bus any further so we got out and walked – our guides quietly accompanying us and keeping a vigilant eye on the surroundings. Their experienced watchfulness was definitely a comfort. Jack told us to stay tightly together as a bear can isolate a person. He recounted one story of a woman who had strayed in one of his groups and two bears had coming lumbering out of the forest, one chasing the other, coming between the lady and the rest of the group. Things ended on a happy enough note with the woman avoiding anything grizzly and gristly but the story had the desired effect and a tight little unit we were from that point on.

We reached the final viewing platform located right out on the spit of land between the rivers. This was hardly a comforting sight. The platform had been spun around and was resting on the ground at quite a tilt. This meant that the stairs now faced out to where the bear would be likely to come from and was so close to the ground at the other end that a bear could easily reach in and grab you. If it was meant to provide comfort it didn't do such a grand job. It looked to me like it was offering any bear an easy way to get at a human size snack, nicely caged in, from either direction. Jack, Jason and the guides though seemed relaxed enough so we shelved our concerns.

It was time to settle down to some patient surveillance. The countryside was simply stunning and almost shamelessly picture-postcard perfect but our eyes were on ursine patrol. Time ticked by – no bears. Jack very calmly told us that we'd just have to wait and the bears would turn up. We waited – no bears. Jack reaffirmed the fact that the bears were out there – a fact that didn't seem to tally with reality. I was wondering if we'd go down in the Grizzly-Bear-Spotting Hall of Infamy as the only tourists in the history of the world to not see a grizzly on one of these trips. Would our names be mentioned in hushed tones or raucous laughs around the campfire every time grizzly tour guides gathered to share their experiences? I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in thinking this, though possibly the whole campfire thing was a tad over melodramatic.

It's a funny thing that people have a habit of thinking that certain general observations don't actually apply to them. This is the basis for so many of those disturbing painful moments that _Funniest Home Videos_ rely on. All around Canada we'd been told that the bears could be very difficult to see and yet there were gasps of surprise when a log that we had been carefully watching for five to ten minutes suddenly sprouted an adult grizzly bear. As clear-cut an example as you could get of why people warned you about the ability of bears to spring out of a nowhere (and what a bowel-loosening surprise that would be). Not content enough with this, a few moments later a cub also emerged from behind the log. There followed some of the most wonderful animal-viewing time of our lives. The mother wandered up and down the shoreline looking for salmon whilst the baby gambolled along behind her. Bears are so nasute that they can actually smell an approaching salmon on the surface of the water.

Jack told us to keep an eye out for a second cub as the mother had been spotted with two cubs a few days earlier. There was actually some concern amongst the Homalco people that the second cub may have been washed down river in the floods – a sad thought at such a wonderful moment.

After the bears had put on an unrivalled show for five minutes or so, the mother looked over towards the spit of land we were on and made up her mind to see if the salmon-hunting was any better over our side. Quite nonchalantly, she waded into the water and began swimming. Quickly Jack and the guides got us to move into the viewing tower, which still felt uncomfortably like it had been redesigned as a bear self-servery. Inside a minute, the bear had got to our side and then wandered, quite unconcernedly, within a few metres of our tower.

The mother bear may have been in a relaxed state, but the same couldn't be said for the baby. He looked absolutely mortified that his mother had left him and started to howl up a storm – all to no avail. She simply continued on her way up the river and disappeared around the corner. So much for not coming between a mother and her cubs – it's not like we had a choice with this one. There followed a baby-howling-indifferent-mother standoff, and then the cub made up his mind. Mother clearly wasn't coming back so it was up to him. In the kind of nervous hurry one has when pulling off a bandaid the cub decided to get it over with and leapt into the river himself. This proved to be quite a tense moment for the cub and also for us watching. The river was flowing strongly. Whilst the bear was making progress across the river he was also very much in danger of being swept into the adjoining river. Then things could go very badly for him. We were all conscious of the possible plight of the other cub and you could hear people quietly urging him on.

In much the same way as the stop button gets hit 0.5 seconds before the atomic blast goes off in any good B-grade movie, the cub scrambled ashore on just about the very last piece of land his claws could grab hold off. As we all breathed a sigh of relief he bolted straight out of the water, now really howling at the top of his lungs. He ran so closely past us, totally oblivious to our presence, that we could have reached out and patted him.

After that thrilling close encounter we all scrambled back into the bus, pausing only for a few moments to admire a pair of bald eagles that were spiralling up the mountain. As we rolled slowly back down the track the bus stopped suddenly to allow a large male bear to amble across our path. Jack told us that the males are generally solitary creatures and are definitely to be avoided. But hang on, you've also got to avoid the females because of cubs. Soooo, basically there's not much point in trying to do gender identification - just steer clear. Besides, if you're not sure about their sex you probably don't want to get close enough to find out. Nor, I imagine, would the bear be all that accommodating in having its gender assessed.

We also spotted a bear disappearing around the corner of the river so we pottered along to the next look-out and waited for him to emerge. This produced one of the more amusing wildlife moments I have ever witnessed. The bear, a big male, had just come into view and was working his way upstream when he slipped, executed a shocking tumble (the sort that destroys the careers of professional springboard divers) and disappeared back downstream in a wet flurry. The bear must have been praying that no other bear had seen it – otherwise he'd be the perfect target for some ursine rough music (29). "Hey Bruno, did I tell you about the time I saw Yogi belly flop down the river with his legs in the air \- haw, haw, haw." Brown bear – red face.

Our bear-watching wasn't over yet though. Jack and the guides took us back towards a salmon run area located up one arm of the river and sure enough we struck pay dirt – three times over. There on the bank was a mother and two cubs. This was a double woo hoo. Not only was it an awesome sight, it also meant that there had been no washed-away cub. There were two mothers in the area, one with two cubs, the other with one – and we'd seen them both. Jack told us that though you can see more bears on a trip, we'd had a quality rather than quantity experience. No disagreements there.

Now well and truly satisfied we headed back to the main base for lunch and the boat ride home. I cannot speak highly enough of this experience, and it's worth taking such a trip despite the hefty price-tag. It cost CDN $329 each (which is not to be sneezed at) and was, by far, the most expensive single event on the trip – BUT – you have to realise that a fair whack of this fee is tendered directly to the First Nation people whose land we were travelling on. Around about 50% of the cost went straight to this. If you then think that the rest of the day, and it was a really full day – hours of boating, food and expert advice cost around $150 per person, it becomes a lot more reasonable. We felt that we were repaid in full, and then some.

The boat trip back was also entertaining, though far more laid back and besides, anything that followed the bear watching was always going to seem a little more low-key. We went via a pod of sea lions (or a spring of sea lions, or even possibly a plum of sea lions, for some more unusual collective terms included click here). We then motored up through the timber-littered and scoter-covered water to the some seriously impressive and expensive homes built on secluded islands. We sailed past Michelle Pfeiffer's waterfront mansion and there was even one place where a wealthy chap had decided that the one thing a wonderful tree-covered stretch of land needed was to be flattened to make way for a private golf course. By the time we slid back into the harbour we were well and truly satisfied and worn out. It had to be one of the best days of our travelling life, and certainly the highlight, amongst so many highlights, of our trip (though the Icefields Parkway drive ran it a very close second).

Chapter 14: First Nations and a Meal not to be Missed

Having slept the deep and satisfied sleep of the accomplished grizzly spotter we woke refreshed and keen to check out Alert Bay and the First Nations Cultural Centre there. The weather now looked set up to be beautiful for days to come, so the drive was even more enjoyable and scenic than before. Around mid-morning we pulled up at Port McNeill and took the ferry to Alert Bay. It's not a long trip, nor particularly stunning, though pleasant enough (it would always be a tough gig to highly rate any other ferry trip in BC after having experienced the Inside Passage). We got to Alert Bay on lunch time and ate some sandwiches we'd prepared.

Alert Bay would prove something of a disappointment, simply because most things were closed, even though the shops all had signs indicating there were open or that the owners would be back in 5 minutes (we waited, off and on, for half an hour for one owner, who had just been leaving as we arrived and swore she'd be back in just a couple of minutes. We gave up).

Another visitor turned up at the shop at one point and asked how long we'd spent waiting for it to re-open. When we told him he smiled, nodded and said "They're running on island time." This translates into "When they get around to it." I had a similar challenge many years ago trying to contact the tourist office of the Cook Islands for a school project. I was told that they'd chase the information up but was warned that everything ran on Pacific Time. I thought this meant different time zones but, as with island time in Canada, it turned out to be whenever it happened. It never did.

The Bay is pretty enough though and the Umista Cultural Centre really is worth the visit if you're interested in First Nations history.

The Cultural Centre captures the wonder of the First Nations traditions and artforms and also the destructive way that they were treated by the European settlers. The Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw people call the north western coast of Vancouver Island and a large area of land opposite on the mainland their own. They have a rich cultural tradition, central to which is the potlatch. Potlatch features singing and dancing, with various important religious characters represented by Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw people wearing impressive masks. Potlatch serves many purposes; it is a celebration, it allows for the exchange of goods, it is a bringing together of people, it is a spiritual event and it enables a redistribution of wealth.

You can understand how important it was to the First Nation people and so perhaps it's not surprising that it was banned in Canada and the United States in 1885. The government saw it as potentially dangerous and the Church saw it as the main impediment to introducing Christianity to the region Honestly, do you think Christ would be proud of some of things done in his name? Not satisfied with banning the potlatch, the authorities confiscated the potlatch masks in 1921. This was a cruel blow to the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw. It ripped into their social, economic and spiritual fabric. It was not until 1951 that the ban was repealed, and it was only in 1975, with the construction of the Umista Cultural Centre, that portions of the collection were returned. Even now there are attempts to repatriate items missing from the collection.

It is well worth taking the time to watch the movie about the establishment of the Centre and the history of potlatch. It's wonderful to see the items returned, and taking time in the hall of masks is a rewarding experience, but it's important to remember what was done to the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw people and to recognise that simply returning the items does not, in isolation, make amends. The following quote, taken from the website of the Umista Cultural Centre is a solid reminder of this:

_What they did to us because of the potlatch was terrible. Now, they are telling us to do it, when it was in the past they made us suffer so much, which is why we had forgotten our ways, because all of our tribes had been afraid. Now, they are strongly urging us to show how things were done in early times -- they, the white people. (_ Agnes Alfred, at Alert Bay, June 20 1975)

Much as I support reconciliation and the empowerment of First Nations people there are times when this conflicts with what, to me, are important environmental considerations. For example, there was a segment on the video where First Nation fisherman were appealing against catch limits on fishing and stating that it restricted their First Nation rights. The problem I have with this is that whilst fishing is obviously a traditional activity of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw people, having highly efficient fishing technology is not traditional. The quota on fishing is there to make the industry sustainable and this, in my opinion, has to take precedence over any people's customs.

Having spent good time in the Cultural Centre and been unable to get into any shops of note we decided to head back to the mainland on the next ferry. The trip back was rather entertaining thanks to the unaffected energies of a Canadian child. I had wandered up to the viewing deck and was reading my book, Grapes of Wrath, when a child, maybe six years old, came over and sat beside me and asked me what I was doing. I happened to be reading the book on a kindle and the technology had caught his eye.

"Just reading," I answered.

"I read books too," he said in a broad Canadian accent.

"What sort of books," I asked, charmed by his total lack of fear.

"I can run really quickly too," he continued, totally comfortable swapping from topic to topic in a heartbeat, demonstrating a six-year-old's normal attention span (marginally less than that of a toothpick).

"Really?"

"Yeah – do you want to see?"

"Ok."

"I'll run around the deck in five seconds", he said, confidentially. I looked around at the unsuspecting passengers and the considerable distance this would involve.

"How about we say thirty seconds?" I suggested.

The young sprinter pondered this and then nodded his head.

"Alright, are you ready? Good. Let's count it down. Three ... two ... one. Go."

My newfound friend shot around the deck, taking a few fellow travellers by surprise, but other than that, he skidded back to me, with a stop, inside the timeframe allowed.

"How did I go?" he asked as he gulped down fresh air.

"Twenty five seconds," I said.

"I'm going to try again."

"OK. Ready? Three ... Two ... One ... Take-Off."

Twenty-three seconds later he was back again. You'd think this might go on for hours but remember the attention span thing. My new travelling companion looked up and saw the ship's conductor.

"That's my uncle," he said. "I need to scare him."

"Of course you do," I replied, but by the time I'd said it he was gone. The world held just too much fascination and I was already yesterday's news. A few moments later a growl and a yelp of surprise told me that mission had been accomplished. There went a child that would never lack companionship, if for no other reason than people would want to find out what happens next. The joy of some teachers, the death of others.

Back on solid land we started heading south, not really sure where we'd stop and not too bothered either.

*****

The afternoon wore on and the first thing we knew we were back in Campbell River again (with apologies to Cold Chisel). This seemed as good a place as any to stay, so we motored around a bit until we decided on one of the major chain motels. The price was good, as rates would prove to be from here on in. We were now out of the summer season and too early for the winter skiing so everybody was keen to fill their rooms. There was also a pub and restaurant nearby and that suited our desire to stretch out and relax.

Mostly I haven't bothered to bore you with mundane stories about our meals. We do have friends that, when they travel, manage to fit in one or two really top-notch restaurants (all planned before they even leave the country). We do enjoy fine food but there's a point where my unrefined taste buds lose the battle against the price. I guess it's also about saying you've eaten in a special place, just as I like to be able to say I've seen a grizzly. Good on anybody who enjoys great meals in the world's finest restaurants –it's just not our major priority. Having said all this, every now and again a meal comes along that, in its own special way, is truly memorable. Our dinner in Campbell River would prove to be one of them.

We walked to the pub and had a beer as the sunny afternoon drifted towards twilight. We considered having a pub meal but on impulse went for something a little more upmarket and headed into the adjacent restaurant. There was only one other couple in the rather large room but it was early, so we figured it would probably fill up later. Not another soul entered the restaurant the entire time we were there. The couple who were in there left almost as soon as we arrived, so we found ourselves the only customers in the place.

A few minutes later a waitress appeared and handed us the menus. She was pleasant about it, had a brief chat with us and then went back out to the kitchen for a bit so we could make up our minds. Looking at the menu we realised that it wasn't that much different from the pub food. If there were others in the place we may well have snuck off but when you represent 100% of the customers leaving does look pretty obvious.

We each settled on stuffed mushrooms for an appetiser and a chicken schnitzel for the main. The lady came out and took our order and then disappeared again. As we were waiting for the meals to arrive Kate and I had slipped into the casual chat you have on holidays when you recount the events of the day. It's at this stage that the waitress became part of our life. First of all I started watching her floor-walking movements. At one point she came straight towards us and I was just acknowledging her approach with a nod and a quizzical raise of the eyebrows, wondering what she wanted to ask us, when she did the most amazing 90 degree turn to straighten some knives and forks on a table nearby. It honestly looked liked a movement that Basil Fawlty would have been proud of. This would go on for some time. Not another person in the place and yet she'd floor walk to ensure everything was in order. Was she checking to make sure nobody else had snuck in, or was this all part of her routine, regardless of whether anybody was actually in the place?

A little while later our appetisers arrived and boy did they make their presence felt. Now when something is described as "stuffed" you've got to expect it to be stuffed with something, and it was, just not what we were expecting. They must have had some kind of special device that enabled them to get more cream cheese per square inch into those poor, unsuspecting mushrooms than anywhere else on God's earth. It was the richest, most labour-intensive mushroom eating experience I've ever had. Not that they actually tasted bad, just that there was so much of them you could feel your bodily extremities shutting down to enable digestion to take place. And, of course, we'd ordered one each. And we'd forgotten the fundamental rule once again – we'd ordered main meals as well.

It was as we were digesting our way through the mushrooms that the waitress came over to chat with us. You could tell she was trying her darndest to perform her duties and that chatting with the patrons was an important part of this. Of course, the timing could have been better. There was the real risk of some sort of disgrace whilst talking with stuffed mushrooms somewhere in the consumption stage.

First we discussed the quality of the appetiser, a topic that presented some challenges, but as the taste was alright (though now starting to wear us down simply through mass) we could focus on that. Then we got on to the topic of where we'd come from and the waitress said all the right things about how wonderful Australia was, and you could see she meant it. But then things started to take a more interesting turn and somehow or other we found ourselves listening to stories from her own life. This would go on all evening, like an unfolding melodrama.

The total absence of anybody else in the place made sure that the main rapidly followed the appetiser, doing no favours to our already full stomaches. Of all things to be fitting in, a decent-sized chicken schnitzel was definitely not it. Neither of us came within a bull's roar of finishing, though we both felt by the end of the evening that we'd eaten at least one horse each.

Again, during and after the meal, we got talking to the waitress. I fully understand that friendly conversation should be part of good wait-service, but I'm pretty sure you're not generally expected to learn about family situations, including divorce details and who had made a pass at you whilst on holidays.

But the strangest thing about the evening was that despite, or possibly because of, all the elements that didn't seem to work, in the end it really was a memorable evening. The waitress, despite taking us on a journey we had not expected, seemed like a genuine person and we both wanted things to go well for her. We tipped her quite outrageously (the meal wasn't expensive so we had plenty of scope to work with) and she was over the moon. She came back to give us a sincere thanks – another reason to hope life gives her some decent breaks. A special evening and one we'd happily repeat, in around ten years time.

Chapter 15: Friendly Faces

We had rung Gillian and Kay and Alan, (our skeena friends) whilst we were in Campbell River. Unfortunately we missed catching up with Gillian but Kay and Alan were around and had very generously invited us to stay at their house in Bowser. We arose early to continue our trek south along the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. We would be passing through the Comox Valley and everybody, including the guidebooks, had heartily recommended taking in the sights. We had allowed ourselves a few hours in the area, which enabled us to visit the townships of Comox and Courtenay.

Comox is a lovely coastal town, with impressive water views backed by distant mountains and plenty of cool looking houses. It really is a stylish place in which to wander and though we didn't spend a long time there it certainly charmed us. Only a short drive up the road we came to Courtenay, which definitely took our fancy. Like Nelson, it's a quirky place (though a bit more mainstream). We found an excellent chocolate shop and wandered in and out of some interesting stores. We also scored one of the best coffees we'd had in our travels – at the Grotto, a funky pub/cafe.

It would have been good to have had a bit more time in the area as the guide books indicated that Cumberland was well worth a visit, but it wasn't to be. The drive down the coastal road taking Route 19A (a slower but far more scenic option than the main highway) was a relaxing and enjoyable one and we even got to see some more sea lions. They were in a pod on a barge right near the shore, grunting up a storm and a bit on the nose.

We arrived at Kay and Alan's in the early afternoon and were greeted warmly by them. It really is a remarkable gesture to open your house to people you met travelling on a train. As a further example of their generous natures Kay sells her craftwork at fairs and then donates money to the local hospital, St Joseph's (30) in the Comox Valley. The hospital was set up way back in 1913 by four nuns who had answered a call by the local bishop to build a hospital for loggers. Now there's something for your CV, especially when you see your hospital grow from 10 beds to a modern 234 bed hospital. For the record the sister's were named Majella, Claudia, Praxedes and St Edmund – they just don't make names like those any more.

But what's in a name? Saint Gerard Majella lived in poverty, was abused by an uncle, loved to suffer as Christ did, was wrongly accused of causing a woman to be pregnant, was cleared of the charge but somehow along the way this connected him to the patron saint of children. He was also said to have the powers of being in two places at once and being able to read consciences.

Saint Claudia was the mother of the second Pope, Linus - qualification to sainthood being easier in those days (unless you were a martyr of course). Praxedes (a cool name if ever there was one) was cut from a different cloth to Claudia. Legend has it that she lived in the second century in Rome and that she worked tirelessly to help Christians who were being persecuted by the Emperor, Marcus Antonius. Eventually the horror of it all was too much for Praxedes and she asked God that if it was OK for her die could she be taken so that she wouldn't see such suffering. God duly obliged. An interesting twist really. Suicide is not condoned by the Church (though they've softened their stance there, thank heavens) but clearly asking God to end it all is perfectly fine conduct.

If that's not an impressive enough story Saint Edmund takes the cake. Edmund was crowned king of East Anglia in 855 A.D., whilst still a boy. He reigned as a model king (gaining a reputation down the ages for it) but his basis for sainthood came at the end of his life (as it did for so many martyrs, which is probably not so surprising when you consider the meaning of the word). Edmund was defeated in a battle against the Danes in 869 A.D. and, on refusing to recant Christ, legend has it that he was shot full of arrows until he "bristled like a hedgehog" and was then decapitated, the most extreme act of silencing somebody. Then things start getting really weird. His head was thrown into the forest and his followers searched for days to find it – all the while calling out "Where are you", and the head answering "Here". When the followers eventually found the head ("here" not necessarily being the most descriptive of terms, so it's no wonder it took a while) it was being guarded by a grey wolf that was protecting it from the other animals of the forest. The grey wolf then accompanied the people and the head back to the town, whereupon the wolf disappeared. To make the saintly nature of the man complete, some years later when his body was exhumed for a more fitting burial it was found that the arrow wounds had gone, the head had been reattached (leaving only a faint line) and the skin was soft to touch. You'd have to be pretty miserable to argue against Edmund scoring sainthood after all that.

Disappointingly, there is a more mundane explanation of this. When they went to exhume Edmund from his hasty grave in the forest they dug up the wrong body. And if it happened to be a bog body from a sacred king who had been ritually strangled then it would fit all the signs. Your choice – bog body or miraculous preservation.

Back to Kay and Alan. They hailed from the UK and retired to Bowser some years ago, having seen the area courtesy of one of their children moving to the area. A stone's throw from the water, a secluded setting in a lovely part of the world - they love where they are and you can understand why.

It's impossible to talk about them without dwelling for a few moments on their garden, which is really something to behold. Maintaining it has to be almost a full-time job for both of them, with it being Alan's particular love and joy, but the pay-off for their efforts is truly impressive. The garden was filled with a huge and beautiful array of plants on offer – and this wasn't even the best time of year to see it. My limited knowledge simply cannot do the garden the justice it deserves but suffice to say that I spend a wonderful half an hour at twilight wandering through it with Alan providing descriptions.

One of the more amusing moments of the tour was to see the apple trees that had recently been carrying some impressive fruit until a black bear wandered in and stripped them clean. Now that's not a problem we have to put up with in Australia. It's one thing to complain about aphids, quite another about a creature that could rip you arm off. Apparently, bears are quite common around there and, other than the occasional garden raid, they'd caused no harm whatsoever.

That afternoon we went for a drive down to their local beach. This beach was probably the catalyst for us being with Kay and Alan in the first place. They had spoken on the train of a tree that bald eagles frequented and they had even seen an otter one time when walking there with friends. We had asked if they could describe it to us so we could visit it and one thing led to another until we found ourselves staying at their house.

The walk along the beach was a further affirmation that BC is a magnificent part of the world. As far as bald eagles, we saw not one, and the same count for the otters. I think Alan might have been a bit horrified that the bald eagles didn't carry out their part of the deal but he needn't have worried. Sure we love seeing animals but the real treat for us was the generosity of these people. We spent a wonderful afternoon in their company, had dinner with them, they gave us a copy of an excellent book on Canada, we had a bed for the night – life should be full of more people like Kay and Alan.

*****

The next day we had breakfast with Kay and Alan, then said our farewells, with promises of staying in touch (which we have – we exchange emails and I hope one day we'll get the chance to return the favour). We headed off towards Tofino. Alan, typical of their generosity, led us down the road a fair bit in his own car to show us the quickest way south.

Our first objective was Nanaimo where we had to swap our car. We never spent much time in this city, though the guide books indicate it has a fine older quarter. Alan had strongly recommended we visit Chemainus instead. So all we really saw of Nanaimo was the car rental depot. Swapping _our_ car for, wait for it, _our_ car, we headed south to Chemainus – only half an hour to the south and nestled on the coast.

Chemainus comes from the name of a First Nation's shaman, Tsa-meeun-is, and means Broken Chest. Tsa-meeun-is was reputed to have survived a massive chest wound to go on and become an important chief. Though the name is impressive enough that's not the reason Chemainus has become a tourist destination. Chemainus had originally been a logging town but a downturn in the industry threatened its existence. Chemainites went for something a bit different to turn things around – they began painting murals on the side of buildings. Starting back in 1982, the town has continued with its mural theme and there are now 36 of them.

The artwork really is quite impressive and though they may not be Van Gogh's they stand up well and make for a great walk around the town. They also give a window into the local history and I was again struck by the role of the Japanese in this part of the world. Two of the murals were painted by Japanese Canadians and one was dedicated to the First Japanese Lone Scout. I've got to say that this was simply not something I'd expected to see when I was planning the trip back in Australia – Japanese scouts painted in a huge mural on the side of a building.

Chemainus is more than the murals. There are some great antique shops and the streetscape has many attractive heritage buildings. We also found a courtyard restaurant that served delicious food. Chemainus offered one more highlight, though it came at a price. In the courtyard area was a sweet shop and Kate was drawn to it like a bee to honey. We scored some very tasty sweets but there was one we wish we hadn't. The lady in the shop recommended chocolate-coated jubes – apparently the second highest seller in the shop. Whether she was mendaciloquent or misguided we'll never know. Honest-to-God, I wish these things had never been invented. I can dig jubes and I can dig chocolate but the two simply shouldn't ever go together (31). A taste sensation – undoubtedly, but not all sensations are worth experiencing. Luckily the other lollies were delicious.

As far as food goes, here's a summary of what, in my opinion, are handy eating tips when travelling through this part of Canada:

* Stuffed mushrooms – beware what lurks beneath

* Remember, small means large, regular means extra large and you need good health insurance if you order a large

* Chocolate coated jubes just shouldn't be (even if the person selling them to you says they're popular go there with your eyes wide open – buy something else in the shop)

* Avoid hot chocolate (drink only if you like your sugar in liquid form)

* Poutaine – why take the risk - (French fries, topped with cheese curds and gravy - actually I never tried them at all - the description was enough)

* Stick with the great seafood they have to offer and you can't go wrong

* Read the guide books and listen to the locals and you'll find some fantastic eating experiences

* Have the breakfasts – they're almost always awesome and filling

The day was wearing on and I had hoped to make it to Tofino that night – a rather optimistic goal and one Kate wasn't as keen on at all. I think I had largely controlled my mania so far on this trip but here it was bubbling up to the surface again. What the upshot of this would be was still unclear.

Kay and Alan had highly recommended that we stop at Cathedral Grove – an old growth forest between Parksville and Port Alberni. It's a popular destination and for good reason. The trees are huge, the pathways idyllic and the walks easy. But big trees lead to big branches and big branches can lead to some big injuries so there are signs up warning people to be careful. Coming around the bend of one path we arrived at a bridge that was cordoned off. Why was it impassable? – because a massive tree had flattened it. Words on signs are one thing but there's nothing more impressive than a potentially terminal practical demonstration.

It was now quite late in the day and driving to Tofino would have been crazy, which is probably why I was still entertaining the thought. Fortunately, Kate spoke enough sense that I relented, and we opted to stay in Port Alberni, but damned if I was going to enjoy it.

Port Alberni is probably a fine place to visit but I never really gave it a chance and, to be honest, it didn't go out of its way to impress us. I had a scunner for the place and I'd never even been there. The motel we stayed in, the best in town, was situated near the paper mill (great), there was a fireman's conference happening that night and just about every fireman on Vancouver Island was at our motel (even greater). Several of the firemen thought wrestling each other in the lifts was the height of amusement (just awesome).

So what did Port Alberni have to offer to the grumpy traveller? The only thing that sounded passable was to head to the riverside where we might just see a black bear coming down to the waterfront.

At last I had something to focus my mania on – the only thing that could make this evening worthwhile was to see a black bear so down to the waterfront we went. Port Alberni has a reputation for delivering bear sightings and we weren't the only ones there. First we sat in our car and waited and then we got out and started to pace up and down the boardwalk. No bear sighted for the first twenty minutes so Kate sought refuge in the car again. I continued to pace as the wind picked up and the cool of the evening settled around me. Still I waited, probably becoming as much of a spectacle to the bear-watchers as anything happening at that moment. And then it happened. Briefly, oh so briefly, a black bear emerged from the long grass headed along the bank and disappeared again. I ran back to Kate and pointed it out. We both peered into the grass. Pointing into the countryside is always a good way to grab attention and a number of other people were shortly staring in the same direction we were. The bear never reappeared. Even though I knew with every fibre in my body that the bear had been there I could feel the growing suspicion of my fellow spotters. OK, so maybe I was a knob for getting them excited but at least I was a knob that had seen a black bear.

By now it was quite dark so we went back to our motel for dinner – ordering, once again, too much food and regretting it heartily. The room was fine enough and we hit the sack on the early side. Come Hell or high water we would be getting on the road to Tofino as soon as we could manage it.

Chapter 16: The West Coast – Even More Surprises (and a Couple of Great Meals)

Our run of good weather continued and in the morning light I was prepared to be a lot more forgiving of Port Alberni. To be fair on the fireman I don't recall any midnight ladder demonstrations.

Now suitably resipiscent I vowed to be less churlish. Over breakfast the TV was on and a story was running about a woman who had shot her husband. Her defence was one you're not ever likely to hear in Australia – she mistook him for a bear. This may sound pretty farfetched but not apparently to the jury. She was acquitted.

Australia has no true bears at all, BUT we do have a rather bizarre cryptid that appears to have sprung up in the last twenty years or so - the drop bear. Drop bears are reputedly vicious, carnivorous koalas that drop from the trees onto traveller's heads. Equipped with very tough buttocks their impact can be fatal and if this doesn't kill you their bite will, as you lie stunned on the ground. Despite featuring in television ads and novels, having its own guild in the World of Warcraft, a band named after them and even getting an entry on the Australian Museum website there has never been a fatal drop bear attack verified. A final word on drop bears – whereas most cryptids e.g. bigfoot, are based on some level of sighting the drop bear seems to owe its existence to the Australian desire to take the piss out of foreigners.

On the road again, we could do little but marvel at how kind the metrological conditions were to us. Sure, we had one wet day around Lake Louise and had a trip to Haida Gwaa cancelled, but on the upside we'd had snow in the Rockies and now we would see Tofino in full sun – for days in a row. Apparently, this is a rare occurrence in this procellous part of the world. We knew of Canadian people who had holidayed in the area, year after year, who had always seen it wet. The locals, whilst we were there, regularly made ironic comments about this being typical Tofino weather. Tofino is now even a tourist destination for wild stormy weather. All we saw was blue sky and sunshine.

It's an attractive drive down to the coast, though having driven the Icefields Parkway, every other drive we did in this part of the world suffered in comparison. If we'd done this stretch first I think we'd be waxing quite lyrical. There are still plenty of mountains, lakes and impressively steep hillsides and views to satisfy any traveller. In fact, it has been rated as the third most attractive drive in Canada, so you can imagine that it does provide the traveller with plenty of amazing scenery to absorb.

We got down to the coast road by mid morning and were presented with the choice of heading south to the tongue-twistingly name Ucluelet or north to Tofino (32). We'd heard mixed advice from Canadians as to the best place to stay. Some had suggested that you simply had to pick Tofino, others had sworn that you'd save some money by staying in Ucluelet and it was just as pretty down there. Totally unencumbered by pre-booked accommodation we chose, largely because it was closer, to head south and check out Ucluelet. There was a beachside walk with the impressive sounding name of the Wild Pacific Trail in the area so we thought we'd tackle it.

The Wild Pacific Trail offers three options – the Lighthouse Loop (2.5 km), Big Beach Section (4.5-5.5 km) and Brown's Beach (5.5 to 8.4 km). The Brown's Beach beckoned to the energetic walker, which is why we opted for the Lighthouse Loop. The Wild Pacific Trail is touted to provide _"spectacular shoreline panoramas and seaward vistas through ancient cedar and spruce-framed viewing platforms"_ where hikers " _get an up-close-and-personal look at the ocean's fury_ ". Perhaps the touting was a tad melodramatic but the walk is definitely tout-worthy. It's a good track and largely easy walking, with some up and down stretches – just the kind of walk we felt in the mood for. The coastline is impressive and I'm sure in wild weather would be quite overwhelming. In bright sunlight and blue skies it was stunning. The path weaves along cliff tops overlooking rugged coastline, taking in a lighthouse along the way. The water is strewn with seaweed that looks exactly like a sea otter. Now some might suggest that this is an example of the otter evolving to take advantage of its surroundings. The alternative theory, that I felt more inclined to at the time, was that nature likes to annoy the bejesus out of tourists. For the record our wildlife spotting for the walk was:

Seaweed = 23 billion; otters = nil.

The walk was quite popular and a one point provided a perfect opportunity to remember one of the vital tips of hiking – you never know who's watching, especially on a winding path. As we were climbing up the headland the track swept around in a big curve, almost looping back on itself. It was at this narrow point that we heard some noise in the bushes. With excitement we peered into the undergrowth wondering what new thing we might see. It was at exactly this time that a fellow hiker, on the other side of the loop had decided to discretely answer a call of nature. So, yes, we did see something that we hadn't seen on our travels before, but, no, it wasn't something we could add to our spotting list and certainly not something we wanted to see again.

There was one really amusing sign on the walk. It made it abundantly clear we were in wildlife country and gave some tips on how to avoid conflict (a polite way of saying nasty, nasty injuries). It also showed us pictures of the kinds of animal we could encounter – these were wolf, bear and cougar. Now there's a serious line-up. No easy options. In Australia we'd warn you seriously about being swooped by a magpie – seems kind of pathetic in comparison (33).

By the time we got back to the car hunger had set in and we dropped into Ucluelet to grab some lunch. We found ourselves wandering into the supermarket, which gave us an unexpected option for lunch. You could select from a range of off-the-shelf, or from behind the delicatessen counter, foods that the staff would heat up and you could then eat there at one of the tables provided in the supermarket. They even had warm soup on offer. It was a surprisingly enjoyable way to eat – an opinion clearly shared by the goodly number of people who were having lunch there too.

After lunch it was onwards and upwards to Tofino. We kept Ucluelet as an option for accommodation should Tofino prove to be disappointing, for whatever reason.

So why is this area of the coast such a magnet for holidaymakers, especially as it is reputed to have such wet weather? Why not just stay home and have a good warm shower? Fortunately, plenty of reasons. If you're a hiker, there are some great and often quite extensive tracks – the 77 km West Coast Trail is reputed to be the best in BC, approximately 75 km too long for us. If you're a surfer, then you'll be drawn to the beaches here like flies to a cow pat (though you'll definitely need a wet suit). If you're a sightseer, the beaches and forest provide you with plenty of amazing photographic opportunities; and if you're into a bit of alternative/quirky culture then you'll get your share of that too.

Interestingly enough, I think Canadians may well get more out of Tofino than Australians do, though this not to say we didn't have a wonderful experience. It's just that whilst long impressive beaches may be quite rare in Canada – Australia has an abundance of them. Whilst we got the pleasure of seeing amazing beaches Canadians got the additional reward of seeing something quite unfamiliar.

Of course, not all unfamiliar places are good things to visit. It's a rare young person who hasn't woken up with a brain hosting a worksite full of jackhammers, in a darkened room with furnishings they've never seen before (but which may include bed sheets for curtains) with the nagging suspicion they're not alone. Unfamiliar, yes, good – not necessarily.

We had already identified from our reading of the various guidebooks that there were some tracks we definitely wanted to walk. There was also the Wickaninnish Interpretive Centre that got great reviews (Just as one of boys could have been named Athabascas if he'd been born after this trip, the other one ran the risk of bearing the name Wickaninnish). Unfortunately, the Interpretive Centre was not to be. It had closed for the season just the weekend before, at total odds with what the guide book said. This was a real bummer – it would seem that much of First Nation experience was to be denied us courtesy of high seas and closed doors. That's not to say we didn't get a good taste of it, just not to the full extent we'd hoped. C'est la vie.

As a result we skipped the Centre option on the way north but we did check out several of the short walks. First we tackled the Shorepine Bog Trail – not necessarily the most appealing name for a track but it offered an easy 0.8 km boardwalk around some quite different coastal habitat. Only the most naive of people would be surprised to discover that the trail winds through a bog. The reason it is entirely a boardwalk is because the bog environment is so delicate. It's said that a stroll off the path can destroy years of laborious plant growth in these extreme conditions.

Whilst the bog trail has less spectacular trees and beaches than other walks it has an otherworldly feel to it and certainly the most intriguing ecological history of any of the trails in the park. The bog is a war zone, set in an unforgiving country. The bog owes its existence to sphagnum moss which carpets the area. This moss originally appeared in the area four hundred or so years ago, the only thing that seemed suited to the acidic and nutrient poor area. Layer after layer of moss has created a bog metres deep, resulting in an ecosystem unlike any other you'll see in the region. Born in acid, the bog breeds acids and so only plants tolerant to this environmental extreme can survive. The result is biologically fascinating. Clawing their way out of the multi-coloured moss beds are the path's namesakes - the shorepines. Much like everything else on the trail, these are dwarf version of the outside world. They also look a lot like large clumps of broccoli.

It's tempting to say that these would be a sight to frighten young children, but this is just hopping on the clichéd band wagon of "kids hate broccoli". Maybe it is a challenging taste at a young age but lordie it packs a punch on the health stakes. It's a good source of antioxidants, folate, potassium, fibre, iron, Vitamin C (on par with an orange), calcium (same rate as with milk) and Vitamin K. On top of all of this there's a whole industry that depends on people eating the stuff. How kickass is that! Kids (and Adults) - Eat Your Broccoli.

Wherever life can grab a toehold in the moss it does. Hummocks barely inches above the surface thrive with tiny plants, including the carnivorous sundew. This makes for a myriad of colours and shapes, all in miniature. You can't rush the walk, nor expect to get the same roller coaster sensations that the towering pine forests offer, but if you take it a leisurely pace and let the world settle in on you then you're in for a treat.

Also take time to consider the battle that is going on all around you. Plant life, struggling to claw some space in the choking carpet of moss, emerges triumphantly for a while, but you know that it could be swallowed up again, ever-so slowly, by the moss. Nor is the battle confined to the heart of the bog. On the fringes the sphagnum moss is at constant war with the surrounding vegetation. The acidic environment it brings with it is slowly but surely impacting on this opposing ecosystem and the bog is winning. As we struggle with the rich variety of human-generated problems – nuclear weaponry, over population, pollution, greenhouse gases – the bog will be quietly gnawing away at the world. For such a dwarfed and self-contained patch of the world, it's surprising how much gentle awe it can generate.

After the Shorepine Bog we decided to head into Florencia Bay to see what all the fuss was about the beaches around here. The walk is short and sweet and showed off some rather magnificent coastline. Perhaps the most impressive thing of all was the incredible amount of driftwood on the beaches. I'm talking serious amounts of timber, ranging from small branches to massive trees. You have to clamber over a really large pile to get down to the beach and people had even built quite solid tee pees out of the wood.

The day was drifting well into the afternoon so after our stroll around Florencia Beach we headed back towards Tofino. At this stage we were planning to spend two or three nights in the area and we had kept our options wide open. Before we left Australia we had considered doing a whale watching/Hot Spring cove boat tour but we'd spent plenty of time on boats and had already seen our share of whales, so we skipped that. No doubt others will tell you this was the best thing about the area and you'd be mad to miss it – they may well be right but I didn't lose a moment's sleep wondering about this as we were already fitting so much into this holiday.

Heading towards Tofino we dropped in at a road-side tourist centre. The lady there was very friendly and offered useful, patriotic advice. She gave us tips on where to eat the best Mexican in BC (Tacofino's) and the best Japanese (Inn at a Tough City). She also gave us an insider's tip on seeing black bears – in the area surrounding a salmon hatchery back down Ucluelet way.

Now fully armed and dangerous with this knowledge we hit Tofino. The Lonely Planet guide book recommended a few places, with the Inn at Tough City catching our eye. The food was obviously good, the decor sounded offbeat, and the name was even a bit unusual. Best of all, when we rang them the room rates had just dropped. The decision was made and it was to prove a great one.

The Inn at Tough City really is cool. The ceilings are covered with old editions of comics and magazines, aging advertisements and some pretty impressive model planes. The room we were in was really charming and had an awesome view out over the water. We would stay here again in a heartbeat.

Tofino itself deserves further description. I'd imagine that at peak tourist time it can get pretty overwhelming but I still reckon it would be a great experience. It's got an impressive history to it as well. Originally settled by the Nuu-chah-nulth people, it came under European scrutiny back in 1778 thanks to James Cook, who clearly had nothing better to do than sail all over the Pacific. In 1792 Spanish explorers named the inlet after Captain Vincente Tofino de San Miguel (truncated to Tofino, much to the relief of sign writers everywhere). There followed some pretty chequered history between the Nuu-chah-nulth people and the European settlers (34) but it remained largely an isolated outpost until World War II. Tofino and the region were connected to the world by a logging track in 1959 but the area largely remained the habitat of fishermen, loggers, seekers of solitude and hippies until the Pacific Rim National Park was declared in 1971. Since then it has steadily grown and now tourism is the main source of employment in the area. Despite it being such a tourist Mecca something of its history has rubbed off and Tofino does have a laid back surf/alternate culture to it. There seems to be a healthy blend to the relationship between the people and the countryside.

We decided to take the advice of the tourism lady and checked out Tacofino's for dinner. Honestly, this really should be a must for any traveller. Operating out of a reconditioned bus, and with friendly staff willing to have a chat, the experience was already going to be a good one, but the food took it to a whole different level. Simple enough in appearance the tacos were just totally delicious. Following the recommendation of the backwards-cap-wearing and cheerful cashier (if that's what you call somebody who sits in the driver's seat of a bus and takes your order) we went for a couple of different tacos, the outstanding highlight being the fish taco.

On recommending the fish taco, the fellow added the phrase – "I shit you not." If ever there was a saying that was so in keeping with the speaker, the accent and the surroundings this was it. I've been quietly using it myself since I've got back, but it just doesn't have the same sense of place.

If you're ever in this part of the world, just do it.

After dinner we wandered down to Mackenzie Beach. It was just the perfect time of the day with the sun setting over the sea. The beach had a wild feel about it and a number of other couples were walking along it appreciating the solitude. Again, photos simply didn't do the experience justice.

With the day almost done, I still had the itch to see more, hopeful that on sunset we might even see a cougar, wolf or bear. Kate was happy to go for a drive so we headed up nearby Radar Hill. By the time we got there it was just in time to watch the last of the sunlight disappear, wrapping the surrounding countryside and seascape in the purple blanket of twilight. We had the view to ourselves and quietly soaked it up until virtually all the light was gone. There followed a slightly unnerving walk back down the now darkened trail, with the knowledge in the back of our minds that we'd originally headed this way on the chance of seeing bears, wolves and cougars and that perhaps right now was not the best time for this to happen. Timing, it turns out, is critical when it comes to creatures that can cause a fair amount of embarrassment in the trouser department. We made it back in one piece, grateful not to have seen anything ursine, lupine or feline.

That night we went to bed grateful for having crammed so many wonderful things into the day. The weather forecast was good, and there were bears on offer, we hoped, in the morning. Life didn't feel like it could get much better.

*****

The weather forecasts were right on the money and the day was probably the best we'd had on our entire trip. I was as keen as mustard to get going and see if we could catch some bears. The tourism lady had indicated we should have breakfast at the resort down Ucluelet way after seeing the bears so we had a bit of a running schedule, though this would totally depend on the wildlife.

The road out to the hatchery is dirt and only in fair condition so without the lady's advice there's no way we'd have thought to head down it. We arrived a bit before ten. It was later than I'd hoped and I was afraid that we might have missed the bears. The hatchery sits right beside a stream, Thornton Creek, which leads up into a waterfall and back down to an inlet. It's definitely a scenic location to go bear spotting. You can walk up a wooden boardwalk that skirts the hatchery and reaches right to the base of the falls. The Creek is cram-packed with salmon and you could well imagine that the local bear population would look on this as just the best kind of take-away. There were some amusing signs up on the boardwalk – one indicating that if you find yourself sharing the boardwalk with a bear you might just like to give it right of way. Very, very comfortable with that advice. The other was a handwritten one that said to be careful about what you carry in your backpack as just yesterday some tourists had had their bag snatched by a bear because it contained fruit and nuts. I wasn't sure how Kate would feel about that one or whether or not this periclitating jaunt mightn't lead to our untimely demise so I managed to stand in front of it whenever Kate was coming past. Not that it worked to any great extent as Kate pointed it out to me a bit later in the morning, causing much feigned surprise.

So up the boardwalk we paced, and back down again – admiring the salmon and not saying too much about the lack of bears. Again we did the walk – again very impressive on the salmon front, less impressive on the bear front. Some other people arrived. The kids ran up the boardwalk far more hopeful than we now felt. More pacing, no more bears. More people arrived, more enthusiasm, no more bears. By now I'd basically given up as it was close to 11 a.m. and no self-respecting bear should be getting out of bed this late.

Fortunately the bears around here had no self-respect. Just minutes before we would have packed up and gone we spotted a bear high up in forest on the other side of the creek. We spent several minutes watching him devouring a salmon he'd snuck down and caught. Then things really started to get interesting. A few minutes later a smaller bear was spotted coming down the hill on the other side of the creek. He very calmly waded across the creek and made a beeline for the hatchery on the other side. Now the hatchery had impressive fences but the second black bear (BB2) had other plans. In order to keep fresh water running through the hatchery it was necessary for a sluice to dump the spent water back into the creek. BB2 had decided this was the weak point in the defences. He stuck his head in the sluice, water pouring all over him, and with the minimum of fuss clambered up into the drainage pipe. This pipe ran under the boardwalk and it was possible to literally stand directly above the bear with only the width of a board between you. I was there like a shot.

At this point an employee wandered down from the hatchery.

"What's going on," he asked.

"A bear's climbed up the sluice," we replied.

The man let out one of those not-again, long-suffering sighs.

"Just stand back, please," he said.

At this point he reached over for a large pole that was clearly there for this exact purpose. Bending over he shoved his bear-poking stick down the sluice channel. For a brief while the bear set up some staunch resistance but it was futile. With a loud scuffle the bear appeared rapidly out the back end of the sluice, landing with a loud splash in the water. The bear clambered out, refusing to make eye contact, presumably out of sheer embarrassment. He was so close to the path that you could have reached out and touched him. Tempting as this was there are limits of stupidity in regards to animals that even I won't cross. We followed the younger bear up the stream, amused by the fact that the creek that had been teeming with salmon now seemed totally fish-free.

The big bear up the hillside came back into the picture. It had been watching proceedings and had decided to come down and make its presence felt. There followed an entertaining stand-off with the smaller bear trying to nonchalantly appear like he just happened to move to where the bigger bear wasn't. After a while BB2 got tired of moving around dodging BB1 and wandered straight over to the wooden boardwalk a short distance from where we were standing. He climbed up it, not even acknowledging our presence, and then headed off up into the forest on our side of the creek – leaving us to ponder exactly where he might be.

The larger bear now had the run of the creek, but not for long. Another smaller bear (BB3) had appeared from the forest and was eyeing off BB1. The two seemed to settle on some sort of agreement as they then assiduously avoided each other for the rest of the time we were there.

We ended up watching the bears for probably half an hour or more. The casual way in which we slipped into the bear's environment was breathtaking. I simply cannot tell you how exciting it was for us, nor is superlative after superlative likely to be good reading, and I fear I've used too many of them in this book so far anyway. I will say though, that even writing about it now still brings on a feeling of joy. We really hadn't imagined that we would get so close to such impressive animals. We could have stayed longer, but even such wonder as this had to have an ending. We walked slowly back to our car (dropping some money in a donation tin to help support the hatchery – money well and truly deserved from an entertainment value alone), the time now around 11.30 a.m. and headed back into Ucluelet, alternating between excited chatter and appreciative silence.

The morning had run so late that by the time we'd arrived at the resort breakfast had finished. Not in the slightest bit worried we drove back into Ucluelet and found a really cool cafe that served awesome breakfasts. Stoked with this discovery, riding high on the memory of our time with the bears and with comfortably full stomaches we rolled back up the highway towards Tofino.

Our next stop was the Nuu-chah-nulth Trail (formerly called the Wickaninnish Trail). This track runs from Florencia Bay to Long Beach. The walk takes under an hour and weaves between impressive forests and open bog land. It sounded great – the only downside was that it wasn't a loop and so one of us would have to run back and get the car. I happily volunteered, still on a bear-high, and we spent the next 40 minutes walking through some spectacular forests. We hardly saw a soul which made the time all the more contemplative and personal. The stunning weather didn't hurt things either.

The run back to the car was easy enough and with the day continuing to be so clear and fine, we decided to take in the Rainforest Walk on the way back to our accommodation. This walk provides two loops on either side of the road, both relatively easy grades. Having already undertaken quite a few walks over the past twenty four hours we opted to take just one – the coastal walk side. This loop again shows the forest at its best and we were particularly impressed with one timber footbridge that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a very large tree with one slide planed flat. Plenty of timber to spare in BC.

Having now seen more than our share of trees, beaches and wildlife we were quite happy to go back to our hotel room and relax for a while. We'd only be there a short while when Kate commented that she'd left her book in the car. I nipped back to get it, not realising that there would be consequences to this act. By the time I'd got to the room Kate was standing on the balcony with a look that can best be described as thrilled horror.

"I've just seen some otters," she said.

I ran out onto the balcony.

"They were swimming around the breakwall, but I can't see them now," she continued, both excited and deeply mortified by the prospect that I'd missed them, especially as I had been out getting her book.

We both peered at the water for five to ten minutes but not an otter was to be seen.

"I think they were otters," Kate said after a while. "They weren't moving like a seal but ...."

The pause was really an act of kindness by Kate. She knew she'd seen otters, but she'd be willing to concede it was seals if it made my disappointment easier to bear.

What was needed was for somebody to stare at a piece of scenery for as long as it took for an animal to emerge. If ever there was a person designed to do this it was me. I bunkered down on the verandah and stared and stared. And then I stared some more. Nothing.

"I'm going to the breakwall," I declared and shot down there as quickly as possible. I sat right out at the tip and stared and stared. A seal popped his head up. Piss off, I thought quietly. He didn't. He kept bobbing up in that annoying, don't-I-look-like-an-otter way. No you don't – you really don't –piss off. The seal was clearly immune to my vitriolic thoughts and kept bobbing around happy as Larry (35).

I rose creakily from the rocks, glared at the otter-seal and stomped back to the room. But it wasn't over yet. I headed straight back out to the balcony and stared and stared. The water remained obstinately otter-free and after a few more minutes of water broken only by the annoying seal I was getting close to giving up when it happened. Straight from the end of the breakwall, directly under where I'd been sitting, a swarm of bodies cut the water like dolphins.

"Kate, Kate – oh my god, there they are," I cried.

Kate dashed over the window and we watched in wonder as this family of at least six otters (it could have been more but it was hard to keep count) slide, sea-serpent-like, over and under the water.

I turned to Kate, smiling like a badly made-up clown. "You always knew they were otters didn't you?"

Kate nodded. "But I didn't want you to have missed out on them."

Now that's love for you. We turned back to the otters whose sinuous motion between air and water was one of the most natural and mesmerising movements I had ever seen. Looking back, you might think it would be hard to say what the animal highlight on the trip was – the black bears, the grizzlies, the moose, the caribou, the orcas, the coyotes, or countless other animals but for me it was seeing those otters. I guess the reason was that it was totally unexpected, there was no planning – we just got incredibly lucky, and they were putting on a show for us. These were our otters. With every other creature we'd seen we'd been in places looking for them, usually in the company of other people. This was just a privilege and it still moves me today as I write this. I so hope everybody that comes to this part of the world gets their own special wildlife experience.

We watched them until they reached the jetty on the other side of the tiny bay, quite comfortable with the manmade nature of the place.

High as kites from this experience we simply had to do something so a short while later we wandered downstairs to have a drink at the Tough City bar. We chose an outside table and had a few cleansing ales as the sun worked its way down the sky. Though it was still only early autumn sitting out there was a good reminder that this was a cold part of the world. The locals are quite aware that tourists often need to be beeked and the wait-staff bought out blankets for the nithering people to wear. This is so not something you'd see happening in Australia (with a few notable exceptions in mid-winter at high altitude or latitude).

We stayed on for dinner (though we moved inside) and the restaurant certainly deserved its good reputation. The eating highlight was the tsunami roll, but there was plenty else on the menu to tempt. What an awesome day it had been. We went back to our rooms and had a bottle of wine before collapsing into bed, thoroughly pleased with ourselves.

Chapter 17: Vancouver Yet Again

We had decided that as much as we had loved Tofino we really would like to spend a bit more time in Vancouver. In addition to wanting to give the city more time we had a couple of compelling reasons to do so. First, with the way our flights were now panning out it would simply be less stressful if we had two nights in Vancouver. Second, we had finally been able to tee up a time to see our friend Kari back in Vancouver.

We bid farewell to the Inn at Tough City. It's a funny place and I guess it must either really appeal or really not work at all for different people. Just read the reviews online – starting with tripadvisor.com. For some the service was below par and I do recall having left a tip for the cleaning staff on the first morning only to discover later that afternoon that neither the room nor the tip had been touched. Maybe this just doesn't work for you, in which case I'd suggest something more mainstream. What I can say is that our experience with the staff was great. Sure, it is a quirky place, and if you like things to roll along as planned this may not be for you, but we just reckoned the offbeat welcoming character of the staff, the location (which is to die for), the stunning views, the great food and the weird-arse decor were why we'd come on holidays in the first place. Besides, they'd thrown in otters for free.

Whilst we had some up and down meals in Canada you simply cannot complain about the breakfasts on offer. We had another great meal in a local cafe, accompanied by good coffee, took in an impressive indigenous art gallery and some shops before heading on the road back east. Tofino had delivered everything we could have possible wanted and more than we had expected. The eating experiences were top-shelf, the scenery stunning, the accommodation charming, the wildlife incredibly personal and the weather outrageously good. One of those amazing four-leafed clover (36) periods that you always have to be careful not to judge the rest of the holiday by.

We really didn't have a set destination but Courtenay was in the back of our minds. We cruised up Highway 4, pausing only to admire scenic lakes and mountains. Our substantial breakfast carried us on through the day and we had our first real stop at Coombs, which had caught our attention because of a gimmicky tourist attraction. Coombs is noted for being the home of _goats on the roof_. Now in case you're wondering if this is something symbolic or artistic, forget it. What it says is what you get. There's a big supermarket with goats on the roof, complete with grass and goat sheds. Anybody who doubts they're goats only needs to open up their nostrils to confirm it. Goats really can pong, though apparently not all goats. The main culprits are uncastrated males who get noticeably ripe and rebarbative when coming into the mating season. The smell is so strong that the British Goat Society recommends that if you don't want to stink of goat until Kingdom Come leave handling them to the experienced breeders wearing special clothes. Now there's an image that's got to make you smile. Bet you never knew that goat breeding could be such a dangerous occupation.

Actually, the smell here wasn't really too bad at all. The story goes that the market building was constructed with a sod roof, based on the homes in Lillehammer where the owners came from. One particularly wet weekend (and there must be a few of those in that part of the world) the sod roof was getting so grassy that they popped a goat or two up there for a joke. This joke has now turned the store into a major tourist destination.

Now before you turn away in tourist-kitsch disgust wait a moment. So, goats on a roof isn't your bag – fair enough, but the market underneath is well worth a look. It's absolutely filled with amazing stuff. There's a great delicatessen area, you can buy food and eat it there and there's everything from outrageous bric-a-bracs to amazing toys and kitchenware. And there are some OK mainstream tourist shops nearby. I reckon it deserves a visit and it doesn't take a large slab out of your day to get there.

Having had our fill of roof-dwelling, aerial goats and candied salmon, we headed on to Comox and Courtenay, again experiencing the proctalgic pleasure of Canadian road works along the way. I must confess we didn't really hit it off with the accommodation this time. We ended up in some fairly mainstream and rather uninspiring accommodation in Courtenay. On the main road and equipped with an air conditioner that made you wonder if it was built in the days when nuclear power was considered suitable for household appliances. Fortunately, we had a very enjoyable evening in the area. With the sun setting we drove into Comox, taking in the charming autumn scenery.

The driving was a bit slow going because Canadians have these interesting four-way stop signs. Basically, the way they work is that the first person to get to the intersection get's right of way. This is a very civil way of doing things but it does make for some practical challenges. For example, and this was the case when we were driving through Comox, what happens when you get a queue at each intersection? It's actually rather hard to figure out who has got to the corner first when you've all be crawling your way forward. In the end what happens is that there's a lot of polite acknowledging the other driver, a fair few "After you" gestures and all rolls along, maybe a tad slowly, but it seems to work. It simply wouldn't in some parts of Australia and it would be a truly terrifying though blessedly short-lived experiment in Italy or Greece. Being the first to an intersection would be like a red rag to a bull and you could just imagine the mad life-threatening dash to be No.1 and gain a precious few seconds (well worth risking a life for).

Actually driving in Canada is quite an experience. I'd have to say Canadian drivers are polite and tolerant and that makes them an even better people. Just don't necessarily expect them to obey the strict letter of the law. Wherever we drove people did at least 10 kilometres over the speed limit. This meant that as we were only doing 5 kilometres over the limit we ran the risk of holding up the traffic - but this was never an issue as Canadians simply ignored double yellow lines. I began to wonder if they were there only to keep line-markers in a job. Here's a classic example. At one point on the north of Vancouver Island we were overtaken on double yellow lines and round a bit of corner. To our horror a car came around the bend heading right towards the overtaking car. We braked at the same time as the overtaking car did, effectively pinning him out there. As microseconds passed and the cars got closer together a combination of us accelerating, the overtaking fellow slowing down and the oncoming car hitting the brakes resulted in just a bowel-loosening near miss.

Now if this had happened in Australia there would have been, in all likelihood, horn blowing and one fingered salutes. But in Canada, there was not one expression of outrage. Now that's pretty cool, though I'm betting that this road-related near miss isn't such a rarity. As for the driver now behind us, he overtook us at the first available opportunity – over double yellow lines.

Though Comox had laid on the charm there wasn't anywhere that appealed for dinner that night – then we remembered the cafe/pub we'd had coffee in back at Courtenay. The Union Street Grill and Grotto. We thought it might have served dinner so we went back in to town. This was a great option as the meals were delicious – particularly the seafood. The service was excellent and the atmosphere was friendly as. It capped off a good day – all that was left was to crawl into bed, rocked to sleep by the vibrations set up in the walls by the nuclear-powered air conditioner.

*****

We were now well into the end-of-holiday leg. Most travel holidays are like being in a rubber band. At the start you're full of energy, heading left and right and everything expands to accommodate you. But then you get to a point where the holiday is at its maximum stretch and things start to slow down to a sort of halt. The next you thing you know every motion taken seems to draw you home at an ever increasing rate. Even the writing of this part of the journey has a rush-to-finish-line feel about it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's easy to spoil a good holiday through lamentation over its ending. This is sounding suspiciously cornball and pop-philosophic but the only way to really enjoy a holiday is to be able to appreciate when it's ending. Leaving Tofino had been the start of going home and we were comfortable with it. The only thing that stood in our way was flying into the US and, based on our previous experience, that really didn't appeal at all.

The eximious weather continued unabated as we headed out of Courtney and down to Nanaimo where we would travel to Horseshoe Bay, this time because it was a good idea.

Along the way we had to pass through Qualicum Beach so we planned to have morning tea there. It's a pretty town with a great community arts centre and a really awesome library. This was the best library, outside of Victoria that I'd seen. Really progressive in the way they did things and a modern feeling to the place. The community arts centre is also well worth a visit. Such a cool idea – stacks of rooms with artists practicing all forms of work, right down to jewellery making.

We got to Nanaimo a little early for the ferry so we took in one of those massive shopping centres where you need a cut lunch to get from one end to the other (fortunately there were plenty of food shops selling cut lunches) and different parts of the car park were in different time zones. Killing time was easy enough just by walking around and pretty soon we were dropping off the car and on to the ferry. Whilst we were waiting a fellow traveller struck up a conversation with us, seemed genuinely interested in Australia, had family over there which she told us about and wished us all the best for our journey. All this from a total stranger. Yep, Canadians are genuinely nice people.

Inside two hours we were disembarking in Horseshoe Bay. Having fond memories of our previous travel up this way, accompanied by baggage, Kate was keen that we travel back by taxi. Feeling a little tight-arse (I think the fashionable term now is frugal) and having a wonderfully selective memory that has a habit of pollyannering at times, I dragged us back on to the buses. As a consequence we found ourselves crammed in a bus with luggage all round. It was quite an entertaining trip, featuring regular grabs at suitcases that seemed quite happy to play 'corners' with anybody nearby.

We did arrive safe and sound at Westend Vancouver. The previous time at the Sylvia Hotel had been such good value that we had opted for it again. At this time of year accommodation bargains were really starting to emerge and we scored a fantastic one-bedroom apartment for a very reasonable price.

The next two evenings at the Sylvia would provide us with stunning views of English Bay. This is a very popular destination on sunset, with large cargo ships silhouetted against the colourful sky and framed by the surrounding coastline. Canadians, once again showing that they so often get things right, have put a series of large tree trunk benches on the beach so people can comfortably take this amazing sight in. The tourists appreciate it but clearly so do the locals and it's quite cool to watch somebody doing tai chi to this backdrop. It's a therapeutic view and well worth sitting down and enjoying. As this was right outside our Hotel we had plenty of opportunity to do so. You can even have a drink or two in the front bar while this is happening in front of you.

That evening we had arranged to meet our friend Kari at the Steamworks Brewing Company in Gastown. We agreed on a set time, with Kari having to make a discrete exit from a work function to be there.

This would prove to be another excellent example of why the world has the kind of sense of humour that is only funny to the person playing the joke. You know the kind of person – the one that thinks a brick to the testicles is seriously amusing when happening to somebody else. We arrived a little earlier and sat down in a booth. I did a quick circuit to see if Kari was there. Plenty of people but no Kari. It had been some time since we'd seen Kari (probably close to 20 years) but I had confidence in my memory. We sat and waited a bit longer. After all she was caught up at a work function. I got up and went for another reconnoitre. It was now half an hour after our agreed meeting time and I was getting concerned, especially as Kari was heading back to Calgary the next day and had wanted to grab an early dinner. The wait staff were also politely starting to wonder what the heck we were up to as we had taken up some prime seating space and had only ordered a couple of soft drinks. Still no sign of her. I checked upstairs and downstairs, both of which were quite crowded, making it an all the more amusing experience.

Back and waiting again. It was now well beyond a joke or normally tardiness. Then I remembered that there was a phone at the front of the bar. I headed up there and made a quick phone call. Kari picked up.

"Hi Kari, it's Chris Jones here. We were just wondering where you might be?"

"Hi Chris, I'm at the Steamworks, where are you?"

"Ahhh ... the Steamworks."

"I'm at the front bar."

"I'm at the phone."

"I'm in the blue jacket."

"See you in a minute."

It was less than that – I was around giving Kari a hug inside twenty seconds. Somehow or other I'd managed to walk past her a number of times without recognising her – bless my precision memory. For Kari's part I'm ready to concede that perhaps I had changed a little over the intervening years. A tad less hair, perhaps not the same svelte figure I once was. L.P. Hartley's great book _The Go-Between_ begins with one of the more famous lines in literature: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'. People look differently too. Some will try and hide the impact of time, and there's no denying that chemicals, surgery and money can do wonders for a while, but I still think the best way to look young is to laugh a lot and forget about your age all together.

Despite the slow start, everything else panned out well and we spent a wonderful evening with Kari. Kari is one of those restless souls and she confesses that she doesn't really have anywhere she calls home, though she does feel that she leaves a piece of herself in every place she's lived in. The part she left in Australia keeps calling to her and I think we might see her back down-under again sometime.

The balance of travel and home varies so dramatically from person to person. Some of us love travel, others only want to stay at home and some find a balance between the two. I always vote in favour of travel but I've learnt over the years that too much movement can lead to dislocation. I don't count Kari in this because she never lost herself; she just stretched herself thin across every place she'd visited. A colleague I worked with many years ago first revealed to me the dark side of travel. She worked at Parramatta Library for a while and during that time it became apparent that she'd lived in just about every country on god's earth. You'd think this would lead to happiness but it didn't take long to realise she was not a satisfied soul.

I asked her if she enjoyed her globetrotting lifestyle. She looked at me and said, quite simply, "If I died no one would miss me."

Now it's easy to say that's not true, we'd all miss you (and I did say that) but deep down you realise she's right. She had chosen to touch people superficially, for her own reasons, and the consequence was that she had no place to call home and no people to call friends. I suddenly realised I was looking at one of the loneliest people I had ever met. Not that she'd ever give you the chance to change this. Just as travel had expanded Kari, it seemed to have diluted my work colleague.

The evening with Kari ended all too soon and we said our farewell, wishing her the best with her new move back to old Calgary. We hopped in a taxi back to the Sylvia and went to bed with no firm plans for the following day other than a need to shop.

*****

I woke up the next morning at an ungodly hour, totally at a loss as to where I was. Actually, that's not quite accurate. I woke up thinking I was at home but utterly confused as to how the door had moved to the wrong side of the room (37). This should be a familiar sensation to most travellers, though you don't always have to go that far to experience it.

Shortly after we got back from Canada I went on my annual trip away with my Over 35 year's football team. It's a great couple of days and we don't cause any trouble in the small coastal community but a certain quantity of alcohol is consumed.

Over the years the number of people going on the weekend has steadily grown as we bring in new players but ex-players remain part of it all. This means beds are at a premium. On this particular weekend I found myself on a trundle bed, low to the ground, between two normal beds. The first night a number of quiet ales and a few bottles of wines were consumed before we weaved our way to bed.

I was fast asleep when a great weight fell on top off me. The room was pitch black, I had alcohol in the system and no earthly idea what was happening. To make matters worse the trundle was on wheels so the bed was sliding around the floor. After a few moments of real disorientation I began to make sense of things. Bruce in the bed next to me had woken up with a full bladder and decided a trip to the toilet was in order. Unfortunately, he was not in the best state to remember the layout of the room and had literary stepped out on to the trundle bed and promptly fallen over. Knowing what was going on was one thing, doing something about it was another thing altogether. Lying on a trundle bed in the middle of the night having had a few drinks with a bloke flopping around on top of you is disturbingly wrong on a number of fronts – it's also a bloody difficult situation to get yourself out of. Bruce also confused by alcohol, the dark and what the heck had just happened was trying his best to extract himself from the situation. Unfortunately, every move he made was countered by the trundle bed that simply slid the other way. For my part the only sensible thing I could think of doing was lie very still and not say a word.

This was one of the more surreal moments of any football trip I've been on. This went on for what felt like a number of minutes – the trundle bed sliding around the floor, Bruce collapsing back down every time it moved sharply and me lying dead still between the two protagonists. Eventually Bruce clambered off the trundle, staggered to the bathroom, farted loudly, and then spent the next five minutes patting the walls loudly looking for a light switch. There are discrete ways of getting up in the middle of the night. This had not been one of them.

Back at Vancouver, other than a moment or two of disorientation, I was able to get out of bed without a trundle-related incident and spend a couple of hours reading one of the Top Ten Greatest Read books. I was heavily into _Grapes of Wrath_ (reading it on Kate's Kindle) and it had got me in hook, line and sinker. For my money, it was the revelation on the list and I can't believe I hadn't read it earlier in life.

The morning unfolded slowly – the last morning of the last full day in Canada. Our goal was to take in a bit of Vancouver and buy a few presents along the way. Every holiday trip ends with this oniomania **.**

Our first destination was Gastown. The sun continued to shine, the skies were as blue as a china willow pattern plate and everything felt great. You need to be in this strong frame of mind to tackle the string of tourist/gift shops that abound in Gastown. There is a limit to how many tee-shirts with amusing logos about animals crapping in the woods you can look at. Despite the fact that at times you feel like you're in Crass Central the truth is we went there for a reason, the stores stock what they do for a reason, and we did end up with a range of good presents that didn't break the budget.

Heading east down the main street of Gastown we thought we'd take in Chinatown. The walk didn't look too far on the map and the day was made for it. Now we had seen our share of beggars and we'd heard sporadic stories of the homeless in Vancouver but the walk from Gastown to Chinatown really opened our eyes. And it did it so suddenly. One minute we're in a tourist area, the next thing we turned a corner and everything changed. There's an area a few blocks long by a few blocks wide that seems like something taken out of a dark futuristic movie when the world has broken down. Dislocated people were everywhere. Sitting in groups in parks, leaning on walls, standing in doorways, ambling up the street. There was a serious amount of incoherent yelling going on. This was the most out of place Kate and I felt on the entire trip. People crowded park seats, yelled loudly at each other, had a tendency towards rambling dialogue and generally looked to be marching to a very different drummer. It's fair to say that at no stage were we threatened by anyone but I don't think I'd make it a location for a late night stroll.

The area is known as Downtown Eastside and it is considered Canada's poorest postcode. I think a lot of people are striving to turn things around there but it would have to be a seriously tough gig. The sad thing is that it was once the centre of the city (as so many of these areas around the world have been) and it suffered urban decay as businesses relocated.

Having negotiated our way through this area we did find ourselves in Chinatown and in no time at all I'd somehow or other been convinced to buy a cool Chinese silk shirt at rock bottom prices (though not quite as rock bottom as the next store around the corner as it turned out). This is probably what happens to every tourist that has ever visited a Chinatown anywhere in the world. Cool shirt though.

Chinatown is a bipolar experience. There's a kind of grungy feel to the place and yet it's got really charming features, like dragon lampposts. The streets are a mad chaotic bustle of people and stores offering a gallimaufry of wares. This is countered by the tranquillity you can find in the Dr Sun Yat Sen Classical Garden. The Garden is quite modern. Constructed in 1985-86 it took fifty-two master craftsmen from Suzhou in China to complete it. The namesake of the Garden, Sun Yat Sen, probably doesn't have the recognition in the western world that he deserves.

Sun Yat Sen's support of the Boxer Rebellion against the Imperialist British wouldn't have done his popularity any good. The Boxers, a British name for the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists (such a great name in itself), were reputed to be invulnerable to knives, gunshot and cannon fire through possession by the spirits or even gods. Invulnerability to gunfire amongst the heroes of people that come into contact with it is not uncommon. The Australian Aboriginal warriors Jandamarra and Pemulwuy were reputedly immune to bullets, Andiciopec, a mythical Crow Indian hero, had similar powers and Geronimo's successes in battle lead to a belief that he also possessed such invulnerability.

It's rare to find the Republic of China and Taiwan agreeing on things but both consider Sun Yat Sen to be the father of modern China. Sun Yat Sen was instrumental in the toppling of the Qing Dynasty – the last imperial dynasty in China. His three Principles of the People – democracy, nationalism and welfare remain an important political legacy.

By now we were quite hungry so we headed back into Gastown and grabbed a bite to eat. Even this lunch was a reminder of how different food proportions were. We both ordered soup but then had to decide which complimentary sandwich we wanted with it. No such thing as a simple bowl of soup.

I wanted to check my emails and we'd heard good things about the Vancouver Public Library. It was only a few blocks away, which made for an easy walk. The building really is quite a remarkable architectural structure. The library is a large round, columnar building that has been constructed to fit within the concave wall of a neighbouring structure. As we neared the library we noticed a large crowd outside. On approaching closer we realised that some sort of movie was being shot, with two people being filmed riding bikes. With the invulnerability of my tourist status (i.e. I'm already considered a knob simply by this fact, so asking stupid questions is all part of the job description) I asked a gentleman in security clothing what was going on. He mumbled the name of some movie or TV show that was being filmed and then quite clearly said "You're on the set sir, can you please leave."

I nodded and backed away. Then Kate and I headed over to the library entrance. It was only as we got quite close to the building that we noticed that all the people around us were moving in a sort of staged-realistic way. We were still on set! Somewhere out there is a movie or a TV episode with two people riding bikes outside Vancouver Public Library and a couple of stray Australian tourists in the background.

In fact, it turns out that there are quite a number of movies or TV series that have scenes shot outside or in the Vancouver Public Library. The Library acts as the Headquarter in the TV Series "Fringe". The "Battle of Seattle" and "The Sixth Day" have scenes set at the Library and the impressive glass-walled mall scene in the "Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" is shot between the library and its concave partner.

The library is well worth a visit. If you do so, make sure to go to the gift shop. It's got heaps of interesting stuff and is run by the Library Friends. It's where I got the philavery.

By now we were starting to feel a little weary so we caught a bus back to the hotel and took a breather. Our last night in Canada – we were definitely going out for dinner. Fortunately, we were right near Denman Street again so we knew we had plenty of great restaurants to choose from. I still had a concupiscence for the Greek food we'd eaten earlier in the trip but Kate felt like something different so we went for The Banana Leaf – an award-winning Malaysian Restaurant (they had the awards on the wall to prove it). This was an excellent choice. The food was delicious, the service first-class and the place was lively. We were lucky to score a table as all through our meal people were queuing at the front door for a spare table. I heartily recommend the place. It was the perfect way to wrap up our last day – in a banana leaf.

Chapter 18: .... and Back Again

Our last day dawned overcast, a fitting confirmation that our holiday was coming to an end. As we were now on an earlier flight we decided not to cram in any more tourist stuff. For breakfast we polished off the last bits of food we'd picked up along the way. Every self-drive holiday features food like this and I'd swear that some of it had accompanied us around every kilometre we drove.

For the record, and these figures are only the direct drive distances (i.e. doesn't include all the side trips, often substantial ones, to places like Maligne Lake or Alert Bay) the trip from Vancouver to Jasper via localities like Nelson was over 1,400 kilometres. The skeena covered a further 1,160 kilometres and the ferry trip down to Port Hardy was 274 nautical miles (around 500 kilometres). Going from Port Hardy to Tofino and back to Courtney and Nanaimo was around 1,000 extra kilometres. So any food that had done the journey had covered around 4,000 kilometres for the basic circuit. Now that's some well-travelled muesli bars.

We got to the airport early, LAX having so got under our skin that we were planning for any contingencies. The curious thing with Vancouver airport is that you can deal with US customs at this end. It's possible because there is a section of Vancouver airport that is located on United States soil. Passing through customs this way was efficient, rapid and the people working there pleasant and courteous. If only all travel to America could be so simple. Just cut a chunk out of your own country, give it to the US and let the good times roll. I'm sure every Australian traveller who's been through LAX would reckon this was a darn good deal.

So our last moments on Canadian soil (or, strictly speaking, US soil inserted into Canada) were spent wandering around the inside of Vancouver airport. We'd thought we might grab a brunch-type meal and so we fell into the trap, one last time, despite all the warning signs being there. We opted for a place that sold iced buns, thinking this might be something like a traditional morning tea. It was only traditional if you were used to sugar levels so high you could feel the teeth cringing with the anticipation of future dental work. We laboured for a while through the sickly mess and then gave up, more disappointed than anything that we'd once again made a poor food choice.

Sugar is an addictive substance – some sources say that sugar is the most common and readily accepted addiction in American society. You think this is hyperbole – how's this for a fact – the average American consumes 32 teaspoons of sugar a day! I'm betting Canada isn't far behind and it's only a matter of time before Australia gets there too.

We settled down to kill a bit of time at YVR – this being the airport code for Vancouver Airport. We pondered how the acronym worked and presumed that it had a French influence, but it's much more mundane than that. The Canadian aviation authorities thought that it would be handy to have a uniform national aviation code and, at the time Y wasn't being used much – sad, lonely letter that it was. The second saddest and loneliest letter by my reckoning. It's a simple process of elimination. Once you take out all the popular mainstream letters you get J, K, Q, X, Y and Z left over. Now Z gets to be the last letter of the alphabet, features in the terms A to Z and even gets to be left behind by Zorro, so it's off the list. X is a really cool letter – gets to mark treasure on maps, is always a mysterious unknown and sounds like it starts heaps of word (e.g. excitement, expedition). This leaves J, K, Q and Y. J gets out of gaol because it's actually a very popular letter for surnames – Jones (common as muck), Johnson (in all its variations), Jackson, James – just to name a few. Q just about always gets to hang around with U so you can hardly call that lonely. This leaves Y and K. K loses out because it is less common than Y, and when it is being used it's either silent or sounds like C anyway and, last of all, because it features in the acronym KKK. Thus, Y is the second saddest and loneliest letter. I have a similar logic for why 23 is my favourite number.

Anyway, the code for all Canadian airports starts with a Y. This makes YVR quite a logical option, though lord only knows how Toronto airport scored YYZ. Definitely the last letters in the barrel, though they'd give you a healthy enough Scrabble score. Did you know that the original version of Scrabble was invented by an architect and that it went by the name of Criss-Crosswords? No? Do you really care?

Killing time was something we had to be comfortable with. The actual details of our flight times were:

* Vancouver to Salt Lake City – 2 hrs flight time (3 hours clock time)

* Kill three hours in Salt Lake City

* Salt Lake City to LA - 2 hours flight time (1 hour clock time)

* Kill an hour in LA (easy – just stand in a queue for a while – pick a queue any queue)

* LA to Sydney – 15 hrs flight time (32 hours clock time)

Reading, sleeping and movie watching would be high on the agenda, as would stress, frustration and a rich sense of the surreal.

*****

Describing the return trip home is never going to make for riveting writing or reading unless something extraordinary happens. It didn't and so I'm not going to dwell on the details of those 30 hours of our life. I did get to see a great movie, _Precious_ , I did start reading one of Australia's great novels, _Cloudstreet_ and I got buggerall sleep. Kate followed a similar pattern. Food was fine, flight attendants suitably attendant, time went pear-shape. All as it should be.

The most noteworthy thing about the whole trip was how starkly different it was to the outward bound leg. Because we were coming into LA as an internal flight from Salt Lake City there was no major delay in LAX and you could almost forgive the place for the earlier grief it put us through. Almost.

Our arrival in Sydney that morning was the most impressive example of getting quickly out of an International airport that we have ever experienced. Here's a tip for the seasoned traveller – if you've got something to declare – anything to declare - do it. We had some maple syrup which technically qualified and we'd also visited a wilderness area (after all most of BC seemed to be wilderness) so that was a double strike according to the declaration form. We dutifully ticked the boxes. This placed us in the anything-to-declare queue, which was considerably shorter than the honestly-I-don't-have-anything-suspicious-on-me queue.

Then came the kicker – a customs person was wandering up and down the queue. When he got to us he asked "What do you have to declare?"

"Maple syrup," Kate replied.

He nodded and continued, "Well you go through that door over there," he smiled.

Kate didn't even have time to mention the wilderness area as the fellow had moved on. Well, there's nothing good to be gained from defying instructions from customs officials at airports so we dragged our suitcases to the door in the side wall. There was hardly anybody there and we weren't really sure what we'd got ourselves into. Passing through the door, we came out into a corridor full of people heading towards another crowd of waving people. Kate and I looked at each in amazement. We were out into the terminal and our son, Tim, and Kate's sister, Bernadette, were there waving like crazy.

How long did all that take? The best answer to that can be found in the car parking ticket. Tim and Bernadette arrived at the car park on time. By the time they had met us, had the mandatory excited greetings, dragged the suitcases to the car and exited the car park, we were still inside the free fifteen minute timeframe. And we'd even stopped at the duty-free shop to buy some alcohol!

The rest of the day, like the flight over, was an out-of-body experience -also known as OBE or even OOBE – seriously. So when somebody says the Queen gave them an OBE this could be a potentially quite disturbing confession. For the record, the term to describe observing your body from outside of it is called autoscopy. Whilst some people may scoff at the veracity of OBEs I would suggest that everybody has experienced them many times over when visiting elderly relatives as a child and, of course, at committee meetings.

We had a wonderful breakfast with our son and Bernadette's family, excitedly recounting our adventures (big thanks to the Ogle family for looking after us) and then we drove back home to Forster, a coastal city four hours north of Sydney. All up in the past thirty hours we'd had an estimated one hour's sleep on the flight. The afternoon blurred away and at some stage we slept and slept and slept.

*****

I have now reached the hardest part of this book to write – the ending. At the beginning of this record it was all excitement and the book honestly took me for the ride, but ever since I reached that part of the journal when home had started to draw us in I've really felt the weight of its conclusion and I've been dreading it.

How do you write an ending to such a wonderful holiday? All the excitement's already happened and the book, like the trip, has a need for closure. It's tempting to end on something about how life is all about the journey and not the destination but I reckon that record is worn incredibly thin and is probably made of cheese. The idea of stealing somebody else words and wrapping them up with a famous quote also appeals but then I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde or Terry Pratchett weren't with us on the trip (or if they were they hid it well, especially Winston and Oscar, who haven't been seen this side of the pearly gates for some years).

There is room for a confession and an apology. First the confession – there were so many wonderful places in BC and the Rockies that we didn't get to see. I can hear people saying "Whistler? You never went to Whistler?" or "How sad that you missed out on Haida Gwaa" or "How could you go to Tofino and not do the Hot Springs Cove trip?" This is all true but it's the very nature of holidaying. This is not a travel guide. It has no obligation to cover everything. It's a story – our story – of what happened on our trip. We could have done so much differently and that would have been a different story but then there would have been things we'd have missed on this trip. Unless you've got limitless time, travel, especially self-planned travel, will always be unique, not comprehensive. Not much of a confession really.

As for the apology - this is to the wonderful people of British Columbia. In writing this account I wanted to capture the amusing moments we had – these are the rare gems in any holiday, though they may not seem so at the time. This, in no way, means that British Columbians are anything but welcoming. This they are, in spades, and I thank them unreservedly for their friendliness and generosity.

And now there are a no more excuses. Time for an ending – in my own words, but without them turning to cheese and attracting the mice. First of all, never let anybody convince you that it's not the destination it's the journey. If you've got an ordinary destination, and there are plenty of those the world over, then the odds are you'll have an ordinary time. Some places simply aren't made to be tourist destinations – they may serve other worthwhile purposes but don't confuse this with being interesting. British Columbia was anything but ordinary and should be high on the list of any traveller that enjoys amazing scenery, wonderful wildlife and friendly people.

Having said this, I do place great store in the value of journeying. I have so many things to be thankful to my parents for – not the least of these is the desire to travel. The joy of seeing new places, really seeing them, is one of the great feelings – even more so if you share it with a like-minded and tolerant soul. And if more people travelled and saw other countries and other people there'd be a hell of a lot less intolerance in the world. But the thing I enjoy most about travel is the way it makes everything else richer. How in a certain light, no matter where you are, you're suddenly transported back to that morning in Jasper. Travel not only shows you what an amazing place the world is, it brings out the best in what you have at home.

And that, complete with mousetraps and thrice-tapped ruby slippers, surely has to be an ending.

Chapter 19: Notes

(1) A word of warning when selecting whale-watching trips – just because the boat you've chosen offers a long trip, read the fine print. Our boat did provide the longest time on the water – but only because it was so interminably slow. We lumbered out to the whales, watching rival boats zip past, their luxuriating passengers no doubt sipping pina coladas, spent about the same time watching whales as the passengers on the other boats and then chugged slowly back to shore. Long after passengers had disembarked from those faster boats and were enjoying a beer in the sun we were still riding up and down the swell, getting most of the people on board colourfully seasick. Long is not always good.

(2) Half a brain is a phrase referring to levels of intelligence that probably should be reviewed in light of some amazing individuals. Norman Doige's tremendous book, _The Brain That Changes Itself_ , features a case study involving a woman who was born without the right hemisphere of her brain. Despite this incredible deficit the left hemisphere of her brain has stepped up to take on the duties done by the right side. It's not actually the amount of grey matter that counts, it's what you do with what you've got.

(3) According to the movie _Escape from the Planet of the Apes_. Another fine example of the movie industry failing to learn when enough is already enough and flogging sequels until the original title has been diluted to something rather unholy. Whatever you do, unless you're the kind of person who enjoys dentistry without pain control, never, ever see _Neverending Story III_.

(4) The philavery included the word diddy, which stands for a woman's breast or nipple. We have a dog called Sir Didymus – named after a muppet character in the movie Labyrinth – Diddy for short. Many are the times we've wandered the streets calling out "Diddy, Diddy", little realising that we were also crying out "Nipple, Nipple."

(5) Rigmarole is a word that I've regularly used to mean trouble or hassle, usually in large amounts. The word, which actually derives from the term ragman roll means a rambling discourse or a succession of incoherent statements. It seems I've been regularly guilty of creating rigmarole without knowing it.

(6) It's surprising how many people use the term "foul swoop", or possibly, thanks to the power of the spoken word, "fowl swoop", which conjures up intriguing images of kamikaze chickens. The world is rich with such malapropisms (a wonderful word in its own right - derived from Mrs Malaprop, a character from Richard Sheridan's play, The Rivals, who constantly used entertaining and confusing phrases). I've always enjoyed the mutation of the term "hard done by", describing unfair treatment, to "hardly done by", which seems to imply just the reverse. And one of the most charming malapropisms I've had the pleasure to hear was when a very friendly and helpful nurse told me that "we shouldn't upset the apple tart."

(7) There's an amusing story related to this cartoon reference. Apparently, according to the Internet which is never wrong and always of the most reputable content, Bugs's mistake is a reference to the fact that some of the Bugs cartoonists or their colleagues got lost around a confusing junction in Albuquerque whilst heading from Southeast US to Hollywood and ended up in the New Mexico boondocks. Now I'm not sure what this part of New Mexico offers to the travellers but apparently it was memorable enough to be immortalised, obliquely, in cartoon history.

(8) It would only be months later that one further impact of the Icelandic volcano would come to light. This volcanic eruption would be the first of its kind, ever, to actually reduce the greenhouse effect. How could this possibly occur when every eruption pours out huge amounts of carbon dioxide? You've got to think outside the box to answer this. Remember, the volcano grounded a staggering number of airline flights for days. Yes, that's right; the amount of carbon dioxide not poured out by the international flights that didn't happen exceeded the huge amount of carbon dioxide that the volcano had pumped out. A rather sobering fact when you think about it

(9) TGBOAT for short – next time we'll try and fit Universally into the title so we can have a proper acronym – TUGBOAT. The world is rich with organisations and concepts whose names have been tortured to create an acronym. You can search the web for hours and still find new ones to amaze. I do like SOFT – the Society for Forensic Toxicologists (what were they thinking) and for sheer bloody-minded commitment to the acronym, who can go past the Generation Of Little Descriptions For Improving and Sustaining Health (GOLDFISH).

(10) This reminds me of a joke I still enjoy: You're travelling on a bus when you find you have an urgent desire to break wind. The bus is quite crowded and you look around in desperation. Fortunately, you notice that the bus is playing some rather loud music and you hatch a cunning plan. You'll wait until the music reaches a particularly loud point and then fart. The plan works to a tee – the first fart is clearly a complete boomer but you time your run with a drum solo and are sure you got away with it. This fart is quickly followed by several more impressive ones before you arrive at your stop. It is only as you are hopping off the bus, bemused by the stares your fellow passengers are giving you, that you realise the music on the bus was coming from your own headphones.

(11) We were not alone in having a crapulent time at LAX. Have a read of the reviews on www.airlinequality.com. One poor person was stuck there for 7 hours. People getting searched for wearing "suspicious" trousers (a disturbing concept), getting caught in wheelchair jams, shuttles breaking down on tarmacs, people being yelled at by officials – rudeness, uncleanliness and horrendous waiting times all round (with an apology to the one or two very nice staff at LAX we did encounter – hang in there). Here are just a few phrases used to describe the place "All horror stories were true", "a disgrace", "most horrendous airport in the world", "unbelievable slow", "unbelievably dirty", "Long queues, rude staff and a lounge from hell", "dirty and extremely crowded", "How to count the ways I hate LAX", "If ever there is an airport that resembles hell on earth then it must be LAX " and "an embarrassment to the United States". You get the feeling that if Santa had to fly through LAX there'd be no Christmas, and he may never be heard of again.

(12) Once when my family was travelling in Italy we parked our car in front of a government building, complete with official, well-armed guards, and went off to find accommodation for the night. By the time we found a place (around 15-20 minutes) and my father returned to the car, the window had been smashed and a person was going through our possessions. All this blatantly in front of the armed guards. When we drove our damaged car back to the accommodation the hoteliers looked at us in gentle despair. Tourists! Imagine – parking your car on the street. Of course it will get broken into. Don't you know anything?

(13) The nine circles, according to Dante, are for 1) the un-baptised and pagan (referred to as Limbo) 2) Those who yield to lust (probably pretty full) 3) Gluttons (another one bulging at the seams if you'll pardon the pun) 4) the greedy and wastrels (hard to imagine this wouldn't be popular too) 5) the angry and the morose (tough gig really – get a tad annoyed and bam – you're in the fifth circle of Hell) 6) Heretics (a good traditional option) 7) Committers of violence – this has three layers – the outer being for those violent against property and other people, the middle for those committing violence to themselves and the inner – violence against God 8) Fraudsters (at last) 9) Traitors – there are four rounds – the outermost – traitors to family, next traitors to country and party, the penultimate circle – traitors to lords and benefactors and the final one is reserved for Satan alone – the ultimate traitor. Somewhere in that mix are the management and many of the staff at LAX – probably the fifth circle.

(14) Bill Oddie, from the British TV comedy show, The Goodies, makes a similar observation. Bill is actually a keen bird-watcher, or twitcher, as the avid ones are referred to in England. Twitchers love to observe new species and this may actually compromise the veracity of the actual sighting. Bill recalled that for many years he had ticked off from his list of birds the Greylag Goose – based on something grey and blurry with wings that he saw out of the back of a rapidly moving bus.

(15) Though we had seen humpbacks in the southern oceans these are a different population to the northern humpbacks. We had an interesting experience whilst watching the humpback. It turned out that an Australian family was on board and we got chatting to them. They had offered us some useful suggestions on where we could see wildlife in the Rockies, and the husband started to also show me pictures of the animals they'd seen on their trip and the fish he had caught back in Australia. It was at this point we came upon the humpback which I was more than happy enough to watch, despite having seen quite a few in Australia. The fellow though, was quite dismissive of it, and continued to show me, on the small screen of his camera, images of animals whilst one of the world's largest creatures was showing off in the background. Another of those surreal moments.

(16) I once spent an afternoon "falling" in the French Alps with my brother, whom I'd shared one complete ski suit with (he had the bottom, I had the top). Also with us was an energetic and diminutive 60 year old French lady (a family friend). Unfortunately, due to the extensive time we spent falling rather than skiing we missed the last bus and got stuck up the mountain with no transport down. We had to walk back and during this time the cold set in and my wet trousers began to freeze. Fortunately, our friend's daughter got concerned and drove up to find us – an action that may well have saved our lives, or at least ensured that I was equipped to carry on the family line.

(17) Hearing is so selective and conditioned. Your own name for example. How easy is to interrupt an innocent conversation that had nothing to do with you simply because you'd have sworn they mentioned your name? Just the other day I mistook a sneeze for somebody calling my name. A rather unpleasant thought but I reckon most names could be turned into a cough or sneeze. Mind you, if your name happened to be the longest one in the world – Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk (according to the Guinness Book of Records, belonging to a poor girl born in Texas back in 1984 who is destined to always run out of space on application forms) – then that's the sort of sneeze that could land you in intensive care.

(18) Soylent Green was a food product eaten by everybody in the futurist novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, which was later turned into the aptly named movie Soylent Green. It turned out that on our overcrowded planet Soylent Green was made from processing dead human bodies. Makes you appreciate your own dietary habits that little bit more.

(19) This was reminiscent of a car trip our family (Kate, me and our two sons, Tim and Michael) took in New Zealand back in 2000. We were in Queenstown around lunchtime and couldn't find anywhere that we all wanted to eat at. Then we noticed that there was a road to Glenorchy. Let's find out what we can eat there! So we headed off up the lake – for what seemed like forever. The road wound and weaved and as we approached each corner our hearts would rise, only to feel then dashed again as around the corner was another corner. The children got more and more restless and our voices, expressing hopeless optimism as to the proximity of Glenorchy, got shriller and shriller. Eventually, in what appeared to be about the same timeframe it took the Roman Empire to rise and fall, we reached the mythical township of Glenorchy. Having been fussy in Queenstown, we happily settled for some quite pricey food none of us really wanted, but desperately needed to eat, from the one place in town still open. Now, whenever a road (or any other tedious experience) seems to drag on and on we say we're heading to Glenorchy. As a final twist, Glenorchy really did reach mythical status when it became the location for the scene in which Boromir was slain in the movie version of Lord of the Rings (probably a tad more tragic than our long drive without food).

(20) By the time he died (or disappeared to take up a job in a dingy diner in the mid-West because that's obviously a great career choice for any mega-wealthy rock star) Elvis was eating enough to keep an average Asian elephant alive. Two typical dishes he was devouring were a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and a 30 centimetre (foot-long) baguette stuffed with peanut butter, bacon and strawberry jam. It shouldn't come as that much of a surprise to know that when the final curtain call came (or he was abducted by aliens who had all his albums) Elvis was found dead on the toilet weighing 159 kilograms.

(21) A phrase from childhood. This was the favourite catchcry of the cartoon character Snagglepuss, who featured on the Yogi Bear show. It actually dates back to the early 1940's, though Snagglepuss definitely put Heaven's to Murgatroyd on the map – at least for us old baby boomers. I always used to marvel when I was growing up at how my parents and other similarly old people would throw phrases around like they were dear old friends and be amazed that I'd never heard them before. Now I'm doing it myself. Everything old is new again.

(22) I know a case can be argued that though global warming is occurring it may not be from human impact but rather a natural cycle of the earth. Though this may be true, the problem is we can't afford to wait and see. Insurance companies use a risk matrix to determine responses to danger. The matrix has two axes – one relates to probability, the other consequences. Any insurer worth their salt would tell you that you don't just take into account the level of risk, you must consider the fall-out of the threat. If something is a big enough threat it can offset low risk. The thing with global warming is that even if you argue the risks are very low, the consequences (i.e. destroying the earth as we know it) are as high as it gets. Unless you're 100% sure, and I mean the full 100%, not 99.7% sure, we have to do something If you think global warming doesn't exist you should probably do more reading of reputable scientific research. The overwhelming evidence is that global warming is occurring and the vast majority of scientists agree that humans are a significant contributor to this. Sure there are some people who say otherwise, there always are. You can also still find people who will argue that the earth is flat. Honestly, you can. Check out the website <http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/>

(23) Back in Australia I was telling my brother and sister-in-law about the amazing animal-spotting day we'd had out of Jasper. Their young son Alex was listening and looking at the accompanying animals photos in a rather disinterested way when he asked "Did you see any dogs?" "Yes, Alex," I replied. "yaayy, dogs," he said excitedly, waving his hands in the air. It's all a matter of perspective.

(24) 'Buckleys and none' is an Australia phrase meaning no chance at all. This is one of those phrases that nobody is really prepared to make a firm call on its origin. The two most common candidates were William Buckley, a convict who escaped and lived with Aboriginals (the logic to this is that when he escaped he was reputed to have no chance at all) or a pun on a Melbourne business named Buckley and Nunn.

(25) The shovel must have some fundamental aura of dullness. Eric Olthwaite, a character in the Ripping Yarns TV series, is distinguished by being both able to bore people stiff and for his passion for shovel handles. A remarkably boring character features in one of the Stan Frieberg radio skits expressing an enthusiasm for shovel production. And in the seriously silly but vastly entertaining movie Mystery Men, a story based on superheroes with dull and apparently pointless abilities, one of the heroes is the Shoveller, noted for his amazing shovelling powers.

(26) If you'd asked me what size a halibut was before I went to Canada I'd have said about the size of a dinner plate. Well, it turns out that you'd need pretty large cupboards to house the dinner plate that would actually hold a halibut. Whilst the average size is impressive (around 12 kg or 26 pounds) the largest ever reported tipped the scales at 333 kg (734 pounds). The largest actually verified sat at 211 kg (470 pounds) and was 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) long – that's a dinner plate with a diameter wider than the height of the world's tallest basketball player.

(27) For every great name there is at least one shocker. How about the poor girl who was named "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii"? Surely this is justifiable grounds for parricide. A New Zealand court, showing profound clemency, actually made her a ward of the state so she could change it. And then there's the humble teenager who wanted to be unique so he changed his name to "Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined". Such a longer way to spell wanker. He certainly managed to stand out, in much the same way that a fart does at a funeral.

(28) To be honest, the Greek gods were pretty self-centred. Sisyphus really was a knob. He was avaricious, he lied without fail, he broke fundamental laws of hospitality by murdering his guests, he seduced his niece and took the throne off his brother. He even tricked his wife into throwing his naked body into the public square, supposedly as a sign of her love for him after he died. This was yet another deception as he used this to con Persephone into letting him go back to earth to scold his wife and then he did a spiritual runner. So which aspect of his nasty life got him his punishment? None of these. It was because he had the hide to think that he was cleverer than Zeus. The same thing with Prometheus really. It wasn't so much that he gave fire to humanity but that he tricked Zeus, who was perhaps not the brightest god in the pantheon when you look at his track record for having the wool pulled over his eyes.

(29) Rough music (also know as charivari or shivaree) was a nasty little tradition dating from the Middle Ages and practiced even up to the twentieth century, involved targeting a member of a community for a perceived wrong-doing or unacceptable behaviour, and descending on their home banging pots and pans and generally making a ruckus. It usually focused an marital relationships and if the target was a woman she could be forced to "ride the stang", which involved placing her facing backwards on a horse or mule and parading her publicly through town. We're much more civilised now, we use the media instead of pots and pans.

(30) There's an amusing real estate tradition associated with St Joseph that dates back, at least, to Carmelite nuns in the sixteenth century. Apparently, if you want to sell a house (or, as the nuns needed, acquire some land cheaply for a new convent) you bury a statue (or medal) of St Joseph upside down (so his feet point to heaven) in your front yard. Then after your saintly-aided sale goes through you need to clean him up and put him in pride of place in the new home. You can even buy a kit with instructions and suitable prayer. Seems to me that the real winners from this tradition are people in the business of selling statues of St Joseph.

(31) There are, of course, much worse things to combine. My mind immediately goes to Pierre Romain and Pilatre de Rozier. At the end of the eighteenth century a balloon-flying craze was sweeping France. The hot air balloon was being supplanted by the hydrogen balloon but Romain and de Rozier could see the strength in both, so they went for the hydrogen-hot air balloon. Now there's a combination that would have done with some deeper researching. Their impressively short flight established one record – the first people to die in a balloon flight, thought I guess it's possible they also briefly set new altitude records.

(32) According to the Guinness Book of Records (at one stage) the most difficult tongue-twister in the world was The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick. And for a party trick, try getting somebody to say: One smart fellow he felt smart. Two smart fellows they felt smart. Three smart fellows they felt smart. They all felt smart together. You're guaranteed to get some amusing results.

(33) Whilst magpie swooping is a common occurrence in Australia they're not the only critters to keep an eye out for. Fair mention should be made of the disproportionately healthy number of Australian snake and spider species that can deliver a poisonous bite. We've got 4 of the 5 most poisonous snakes in the world and the second deadliest spider. Even the charming looking platypus has a poisonous spur (at least the male does). And when it comes to water – we must go close to taking the cake. If sharks and crocodiles aren't enough we've got poisonous jellyfish, deadly molluscs, stonefish and even an octopus that can deliver a lethal bite. Mind you, the magpies really are annoying.

(34) Possibly the most notable of these being the fate of the ship the Tonquin. The Tonquin was involved with the fur trade and arrived in the area in 1811, hot on the tail of some unfortunate treatment of First Nation people (a captain of a vessel had recently left some Nuu-chah-nulth people on a Californian island to die). The captain of the Tonquin insulted the local Chief by throwing otter pelts at him. Later on the First Nation people returned, faking further trading negotiations and murdered most of the crew. One remaining survivor managed to light the gunpowder on the boat blowing himself, and a number of the locals who had returned to the boat, to Kingdom Come.

(35) 'Happy as Larry' is an Australian or New Zealand phrase that either comes from a truncation of the term larrikin (a hooligan who larks about) or Larry Foley, a boxer who never lost a fight which, presumably meant he was a pretty happy character. Hooligan appears to come from the Irish – possibly a fictitious Irish family described in song, an actually Irish family, a derivation of an Irish word or an Irish bouncer who was a bit of a yahoo. Yahoo comes from a race of brutes in Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels. And that's enough stream of consciousness definitions.

(36) We all know four-leafed clover represents good luck, but the origin is a bit cooler than you'd expect. You may have thought it was just about rarity, but it's well entrenched in Irish folklore. The first three leaves of a clover represent the holy trinity – the fourth good luck. Another interpretation is that the first leaf is for faith, the second hope, the third love and the fourth luck. There's even a myth that when Eve got thrown out of Eden she took a four-leafed clover with her and that's why it's good luck (being a bit of paradise). The four-leafed clover pre-dated Christianity though, with the druids being big-times fans of its magical powers. And, of course, there's always a dumb superstition or two go with them, on that most popular of topics, scoring a husband. Apparently the best bet when a maiden finds one is to eat it and the first unmarried man she encounters will be her husband. Talk about a lottery - and people complain about arranged marriages. Beware of strange women with green mouths that smell of clover.

(37) A resident of a nursing home my mother managed was schizophrenic and before she was moved to the home she used to tell people that every night the communists came to her house and dismantled it. Then early in the morning they would come back and build it again. The lady never saw them because she hid under the blankets but, in a wonderful example of circuitous logic, knew it must have happened because the house was there the next morning. Nobody paid too much attention to these clearly mad ravings but after a while somebody gave in and did check it out. The communists turned out to be a horde of possums living in her roof. On sunset they would go out to feed (making the racket of a house being dismantled) and in the early hours would noisily return (house reassembled). The racket was real – as was the madness.
Chapter 20: Glossary of Endangered Words

**Agryphnia:** Wakefulness, sleeplessness

**Anadromous:** Swimming up rivers from the sea in order to spawn in fresh water

**Batterfang:** To attack with the fists or nails

**Bavardage:** Idle chatter

**Beek:** To warm or make comfortable

**Bellibone:** A woman of exceptional beauty and goodness

**Bongre:** With good will

**Brimborion:** A thing of very little value, something trashy

**Callipygian:** Having beautifully proportioned buttocks

**Carnaptious:** Irritable, argumentative and cantankerous

**Concupiscence:** Strong desire

**Crepuscular:** Relating to twilight. Also animals that are active at dawn and dusk

**Crivens:** An expression of astonishment

**Cryptid:** A creature or plant whose existence cannot be scientifically verified and that is regarded as highly unlikely to exist.

**Dasypygal:** Having hairy buttocks

**Deblaterate:** To babble on

**Dentiloquy:** The act of speaking through clenched teeth

**Dringle:** To expend time lazily, to linger

**Duntle:** To dent with a blow

**Enfundying:** To be chilled or stiff from the cold

**Eximious:** Excellent

**Expergefactor:** Someone or something that awakens a sleeper

**Exsqueamious:** A pleasurable sensation with uncomfortable undertones*

**Formosity:** Beauty

**Gallimaufry:** A hodge-podge

**Gormandiser:** Someone who eats greedily or indulges in good eating

**Gracile:** Slender, willowy

**Haver:** To talk nonsense or waver over a decision

**Immorigerous:** Rude, boorish, obstinate, disobedient

**Lapidose:** Stony

**Logophile:** Lover of words

**Matutinal:** Occurring in the morning, early

**Mellisonant:** Sweet-sounding, dulcet

**Mendaciloquent:** Telling lies

**Moodle:** To pass time doing nothing, to wander around

**Nasute:** Having a keen sense of smell

**Nither:** To tremble with the cold

**Nucivorous:** Nut-eating

**Numinous:** Awe-inspiring

**Obambulate:** To wander aimlessly

**Oniomania:** A compulsion to purchase things

**Orming:** Ungainly, awkward

**Padkos:** Food to eat on a journey

**Periclitate:** To put at risk, expose to danger

**Philavery:** A collection of uncommon or pleasing words

**Podiacide:** The act of shooting oneself in the foot, metaphorically speaking

**Pogonotrophy:** The cultivation of facial hair

**Procellous:** Stormy

**Proctalgia:** Pain in the rectum or anus

**Quisquous:** Perplexing, debatable

**Rebarbative:** Repellent

**Resipiscent:** Recognising of mistakes and intending to do better in the future

**Scunner:** A strong dislike, an object of loathing or disgust

**Tenebrific:** Dark, gloomy

**Turdiform:** Resembling a thrush

**Ultracrepidarian:** Having opinions beyond ones knowledge, ignorant

**Ventose:** Flatulent

* I must confess to having made this word up
Chapter 21: 71 Movies I Consider Recommended Viewing

Ali Zoua, Prince of the Streets (2000)

All About Eve (1950)

All About My Mother (1999)

All That Jazz (1979)

Amarcord (1973)

American Beauty (1999)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Beat the Devil (1963)

Blade Runner (1982)

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Casablanca (1942)

Children of Paradise (1945)

Chungking Express (1994)

Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Closely Watched Trains (1967)

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Crash (2005)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Double Life of Veronique (1991)

Dr Strangelove (1964)

Gabbeh (1996)

Godfather Part II (1974)

Harold and Maude (1971)

Heat (1995)

Heiress (1949)

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Ice Storm (1997)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Ladyhawke (1985)

Life of Brian (1979)

Lives of Others (2006)

Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)

Magnificent Seven (1970)

Metropolis (1927)

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)

Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975)

O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Out of the Past (1947)

Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Oxbow Incident (1943)

Philadelphia Story (1940)

Piano (1993)

Princess Bride (1987)

Producers (1968)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Rashomon (1950)

Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Rules of the Game (1939)

Safety Last (1923)

Serenity (2005)

Shanghai Express (1932)

Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Sixth Sense (1999)

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Star Wars (1977)

Sting (1973)

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Strictly Ballroom (1992)

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Three Amigos (1986)

Three Kings (1999)

Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

Truman Show (1998)

Twelve Angry Men (1957)

Wages of Fear (1953)

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

The Year My Voice Broke (1983)

Why did I settle on 71 movies? Because that represents the number of movies I could think of that really impressed me, for one reason or another. I didn't want to stretch and strain my list to fit an artificial number. Besides, it's always going to be evolving. A list of its time.
Chapter 22: My Top 5 Border Crossing Experiences

Five

We were on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne with our boys, who were very young. Tim was at the age when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular and he owned a TMNT blue plastic suitcase. He also loved animals and had the suitcase stuffed with animal toys. This must have played merry havoc with the suitcase scanners and it caught the eye of one officious, immorigerous security person. He opened the case proceeded to hold up a wide variety of animals, including an impressive rubber snake. He finally settled on a stuffed bear that Tim had somehow fitted into the case. He took the "suspicious" bear to his supervisor. There was beautiful moment that will be burnt into my memory forever. The squat official standing there with a stuffed bear in his outstretched arm and his boss giving him the "you idiot" glare. If he could have slapped him over the head, Three Stooges style, he would have done. We got through.

Four

This one features my other son, Michael, on a return trip from New Zealand. The rest of us, Kate, Tim and I, had got through the passport checking unscathed but Michael wasn't so lucky. The guard looked at the name on the passport, looked up at his screen and frowned. There was a Michael Jones out there who was clearly of interest to the authorities. The security person decided this was a job for someone more senior and he called over his supervisor. They both looked at the name on the passport, then at the screen. The supervisor frowned as well, but then demonstrated the analytical skills that had got him into a senior position – he looked at Michael. Now I should point out that, back in 2000, Michael was ten years old. The supervisor looked, didn't see anybody and then leant forward to peer over the counter before he could actually see Mick. We watched as a long-suffering look passed over his face. Presumably the International threat they were looking for was somewhat larger than a ten-year old. We got through and even got to see the "you idiot" look again.

Three

We'd arrived in Sydney from Hong Kong and were going through customs when the security man looked at me and said "So, you've been to see the orang-utans have you sir?"

I nodded, impressed that he somehow or other knew we'd seen the orang-utans at Hong Kong Zoo.

This was not the best answer to give if I wanted to get through customs. Thanks to my podiacidal actions, within moments I'd had to take my shoes off and given them to him and my bag experienced the sort of search that would be considered a full body cavity if it had been a person. In fact, I was getting nervous that this was going to be my own fate.

It was only after I'd got through customers, my shoes still dripping from some sort of disinfectant spray and my bag feeling violated that realisation dawned on me. I was wearing a shirt my mother had sent to me some months before from her trip to Borneo. It had a picture of an orang-utan on it. I'd been through the third degree for wearing the wrong sort of shirt. I've never even been to Borneo.

Two

Many years ago I was travelling with my family in Europe. We had reached the border between Italy and Yugoslavia (yes, it was that long ago). At that point in time Yugoslavia was not a major tourist destination and the border security staff looked like prison guards, with the same cheerful disposition that implied, with very little subtlety, that if you annoyed them you could find yourself in a Turkish prison without your feet touching the ground. It's a curious fact that no matter what country you're in there's always the risk you could end up in a Turkish prison, probably with electrodes attached to the genitals. Search me – that's just the way it is.

This seriously serious and solid border guard, adorned with an impressive array of badges and regalia, accepted all of our passports and then, without a word, took them back to his office, closing the door behind him. My father, uncertain of Yugoslavia border etiquette waited a moment and then decided the best thing to do was to go into the office himself. He got to the door but had some problems turning the handle. The border guard looked up at him from inside the office, leapt to his feet and strode over to the door.

It was at this point that it became apparent that somehow or other my father had actually locked the door on the guard. I'm fairly confident that one of the things the guide books would have warned against was locking Yugoslavian border guards in their office. There followed a furious few moments when the guard rattled and shook the door, his face getting redder and redder. We quietly hugged our father and silently promised to visit him in his Turkish cell.

Eventually the guard reefed the door open and burst out onto the roadway. He marched towards my father, who had nervously held his ground, looked him up and down and then burst out laughing. It turns out that Yugoslavian border guards do have a sense of humour. We passed through unscathed.

One

Without a doubt, our number one border crossing experience occurred in Hong Kong back in 2004. We were heading to Sydney that morning and Michael had got a shocking temperature. You have to realise that this was right at the time when SARS hysteria was at its height and we had a funny feeling that we'd be barred from flying.

This didn't appeal in the slightest so we came up with a cunning plan. Tim and I would run back to a big shopping complex we'd been in the day before that had a free Internet terminal. We'd use it to check what the symptoms for SARS were and what the travel conditions were for people with temperatures flying with Singapore Airlines.

The good news was that Mick's symptoms didn't really align with SARS – the bad news - that it didn't matter. If his temperature was 38 degrees centigrade or higher we simply wouldn't get through to the flight.

While we were in the shops I needed to purchase one last thing so I sent Tim back to the motel room. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line Tim had added an extra ninety degree turn into the return route and was merrily, and then, less merrily, heading off into the crowded side-streets of Hong Kong. Meanwhile I had come out of the shops and sprinted after Tim, impressed with the fact that I couldn't catch up with him, ignorant of the fact that he was lost in Hong Kong. I reached our motel room and was puzzled to find Tim absent. This turned to horror when Kate informed me that he hadn't turned up at all.

Back I headed into the Hong Kong crowds, considering the prospect of one son lost on the streets the other likely to be quarantined. Fortunately, I found Tim who'd retraced his steps and managed to pick the right road. The next challenge was to deal with Mick's temperature. We all agreed the best thing would be to find some drug that would achieve this, so my next task was to track down a pharmacy. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds but one was located and I wandered inside looking suitably out of my depth. A staff member approached me and in reasonably good English asked me what I needed. After some interesting dialogue he disappeared into his back office. There followed a strange series of noises and he re-emerged with a zip-lock bag containing about a dozen orange tablets. In Australia medications come in boxes with plenty of instructions and I don't ever recall them being orange. Still, meds is meds. I scurried back to the unit. We grabbed the boys and headed for our flight.

Stage two of the plan kicked in when we got to the airport. We would medicate Michael, monitor his temperature and rip through security when it was below 38 degrees. All we needed was a thermometer (yes we should have bought it at the pharmacy earlier but in our defence it was perhaps not the best time for calm and analytical thinking). I prowled the various airport stores and eventually found some thermometers on a shelf.

Now it was pretty important that we kept a low profile as asking for thermometers could led to some very interesting questions. I snuck the thermometer up to the counter and presented it for purchase. The lady looked the item over and clearly couldn't find a price tag. Before I knew what was happening she was doing a price check on the in-store PA. Announcing to the world that we'd bought a thermometer!

We slipped out as suspiciously inconspicuous as it is possible to be. Mick was fed a couple of orange tablets and then we waited. After a suitable time we needed to take his temperature, but wanted to do it discretely.

I took him to the men's toilets and then, so as not attract further attention, sent him into a cubicle to take his own temperature. Minutes went by. Eventually frustration got the better of me and I went up to the toilet door and whispered, "Mick, how's it going?"

"Ah, Dad, there's been a problem .... I dropped the thermometer in the toilet bowl and it broke."

Auuugggghhhh. Right, back we went to the shop. This time I sent Mick in alone to avoid me being seen buying a second thermometer in minutes. I waited outside. Mick must have got a different shop assistant and shortly the sound of a price check on thermometers boomed across the shop's PA. Mick scurried out and we went through the whole saga again. In the end we managed to get him down below the target temperature and dragged him through the heat seeking monitors before our luck ran out. He was then able to be as ill as he liked, which he promptly was.

Chapter 23 Transcript from Quiz Question on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader

**Commentator:** The 3rd grade world geography question is: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

**Contestant:** This might be a stoopid question .....

**Commentator:** I'm guessin' it's gonna be.

**Contestant:** I thought Europe was a country. Let's see ..... Booda .... Boodapest .... I never even hearda that.

I know they speak French there ... Don't they? What I want to say is ... is France a country? I don't know what I'm doin'.

**Commentator:** Let's talk about your options. Cal ... focus.

**Contestant:** I am. Like, I'm listening to what you're sayin' but I only hear what I want to.

**Commentator:** That's just called bein' a woman.

**Contestant:** It's all about the charity .... I'm just goin' to "Copy".

**Commentator:** If you'd had to guess do you have a guess?

**Contestant:** I don't know if France is a country but ... I don't know, I'da just said France.

**Commentator:** France is a country – I will tell you that. If you'd said France you woulda gone home with nuthin. That is not the right answer. The right answer is Hungary.

**Contestant:** Is what!?

**Commentator:** Hungary.

**Contestant:** Hungry?

**Commentator:** Like I'm hungry.

**Contestant:** That's a country? I've heard of Turkey – but Hungary – never heard of it.

[Check it out on youtube – search under "dumb answer capital Budapest".]
Chapter 24: Transcript from Miss Teen USA 2007

**Audience Question:** Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can't locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?

**Miss South Carolina:** I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because... umm... some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education, like, such as in South Africa and Iraq .... everywhere like such as ... and I believe that they should ... ummm ...

Our education over here in the US should help the US ... or should help South Africa. It should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Say what?

[Again even better on youtube – search under "beauty queen maps".]
Chapter 25: Spotter's Guide to Rednecks*

You're banned from the Zoo because you disturb the monkeys.

You have a close relative named "Cletus".

You think a Volvo is part of a woman's anatomy.

The KKK kicked you out for being a bigot.

You've ever been involved in a custody fight over a hunting dog.

Someone in your family died right after saying, "Hey, y'all watch this!".

You've painted a car with house paint.

Ya can't get married to yer sweetheart 'cause there is a law against it.

The Halloween pumpkin on your front porch has more teeth than your wife.

You think the Mountain Men in Deliverance were just "misunderstood".

One of your kids was born on a pool table.

The third grade teacher says little Bubba could be a mathematical genius because he's got thirteen fingers.

You have a rag for a gas cap.

Your family tree has no forks.

You can get dog hair from out of your belly button.

Your grandfather died and left everything to his widow but she can't touch it until she's fourteen.

Your front porch collapses and four dogs git killed.

You've been married three times and still have the same in-laws.

You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels.

The following indicator of redneckosity is, apparently, taken straight for the local paper:

" _Debra Jackson said she liked shopping at the Dollar Palace because it is convenient and casual. "I don't have to get all dressed-up like I'm going to Wal-Mart or something..."_

For even more check out www.fortogden.com/foredneck.html
Chapter 26: 40 Country and Western Song Titles to Bring Tears to Your Eyes

C'mon Down off the Stove, Granny, You're too Old to Ride the Range

Dog Poop on the Pillow Where Your Sweet Head Used To Be

Dropkick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life

Gave Her My Heart and a Diamond and She Clubbed Me with a Spade

Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed

Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth 'Cause I'm Kissing You Goodbye

Her Teeth Were Stained, but Her Heart Was Pure

How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

I Ain't Gone To Bed with Any Ugly Women but I've Sure Woken up with a Few

I Been Roped and Thrown By Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral

I Fell in a Pile of You and Got Love All Over Me

I Just Bought a Car from a Guy That Stole My Girl, but the Car Don't Run So I Figure We're Even

I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well

I Still Miss You, Baby, but My Aim's Gettin' Better

I Wish I Were in Dixie Tonight, but She's Out of Town

I Would Have Wrote You a Letter, but I Couldn't Spell Yuck

I Wouldn't Take Her to A Dog Fight, Cause I'm Afraid She'd Win!

I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Like Having You Here

I've Got the Hungries For Your Love and I'm Waiting in Your Welfare Line

I've Got Tears in My Ears From Lyin' on My Back and Cryin' Over You

If I Can't Be Number One in Your Life, Then Number Two on You

If My Nose Were Full of Nickels, I'd Blow it All on You

If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know it's Me

If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?

Mama Get the Hammer (There's A Fly on Papa's Head)

My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don't Love You

My John Deere was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John was Breaking My Heart

My Wife Ran off with My Best Friend, and I Sure Do Miss Him

She's Actin' Single and I'm Drinkin' Doubles

She's Got Freckles on Her, But She's Pretty

She Got the Gold Mine and I Got the Shaft

She Got the Ring and I Got the Finger

She's Looking Better After Every Beer

Thank God and Greyhound She's Gone

There Ain't Enough Room in my Fruit of the Looms to Hold All My Lovin' for You

Velcro Arms, Teflon Heart

When You Leave Walk Out Backwards, So I'll Think You're Walking in

You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith too

You Were Only a Splinter in My Ass as I Slid Down the Bannister of Life

You're the Reason Our Kids are so Ugly
Chapter 27: Unusual Collective Nouns

An _ambush_ of widows

A _bask_ of crocodiles

A _bind_ of salmon

A _bite_ of midges

A _blast_ of strumpets

A _bloat_ of hippopotamuses

A _catalogue_ of librarians

A _charm_ of bees

A _clew_ of worms

A _clowder_ of cats

A _congress_ of baboons

A _crash_ of rhinoceroses

A _dopping_ of ducks

A _draught_ of fish

A _dray_ of squirrels

An _embarrassment_ of pandas

An _exaltation_ of larks

A _flink_ of cows

A _gam_ of whales

A _gaze_ of racoons

A _glaring_ of cats

A _gulp_ of swallows

A _labour_ of moles

A _mischief_ of mice

A _murmuration_ of starlings

A _mute_ of hounds

A _neverthriving_ of jugglers

An _obstinacy_ of buffaloes

An _ostentation_ of peacocks

A _pandemonium_ of parrots

A _pitying_ of doves

A _pomp_ of Pekinese

A _ponder_ of philosophers

A _prickle_ of hedgehogs

A _rout_ of wolves

A _sault_ of lions

A _scold_ of jays

A _shiver_ of sharks

A _shrewdness_ of apes

A _shuffle_ of bureaucrats

A _smack_ of jellyfish

A _taboon_ of horses

A _trembling_ of finches

A _troubling_ of goldfish

A _turmoil_ of porpoises

An _ugly_ of walruses

An _unkindness_ of ravens

A _waddle_ of penguins

Thanks

I owe many thanks to Michelle Mashman and Margie Wallis for encouraging me to publish this work.

The frank and detailed editing and proof-reading of Andrew Braybrook, though it sometimes drove me to distraction, was deeply appreciated and genuinely improved the publication.

And the last thanks must go to my wife, Kate. Travel companion, editor, graphic designer, supporter, believer – all done with profound patience. The book simply would not have been possible without her. It makes me appreciate how lucky I am.
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<http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/>

http://www.airlinequality.com

<http://www.fortogden.com/foredneck.html>

http://www.highwayoftears.ca

<http://www.tripadvisor.com/>

