View the photos of Vancouver here
Vancouver is a fantastic city. The mountains rise up to the north as you approach from the airport or Vancouver Island ferry. The city is big enough to have a buzz but not so big that it’s congested or stifling. Despite still not having a car by this stage we made full use of the bikes lent to us by Sarah’s Uncle Clint and Aunt Margaret, whose lovely house we were also staying in.
One night we had a BBQ on the banks of false creek as we watched the sun sink over the mountains and sea. The next day we cycled around Stanley Park, a huge forest park on the peninsula of downtown before embarking on a ride to Grouse mountain. Grouse mountain is hard to miss. It’s one of the big ones to the north of Vancouver, the one that didn’t have enough snow at the start of the winter Olympics. We were being guided by Charles, a friend of Sarah’s from her stint at a logging camp a few years ago painting huts. I guess we should have realised that riding our bikes up a mountain on the outskirts of Vancouver wasn’t going to be all that easy but we just had to get to the start of the chair lift at the very least. Two hours later we were still grinding our way up the mountain. Sarah finally submitted after a brave effort and on shaky legs started walking up the mountain. We were all bathed in sweat but thankfully not bothered by insects which have been remarkably few in number during our visit, as remarkable as the long stretch of sunny clear days that we’ve enjoyed.
When we finally got to the start of the Grouse mountain park proper we had two options. We could take the chair lift straight up which takes about 6 minutes. Or we could do the Grouse grind, a famed hour-long slog climb up the mountain, mainly on stairs. We took the chair lift purely because we had a dinner to get to with a number of cousins and didn’t want to run late. Mm-hmm.
The top of Grouse mountain is far from wilderness. It has been sculpted to suit what it is thought tourists want and it isn’t too far from the mark. Apart from the monstrous cafe/gift shop and the slightly obscured views they serve up a slice of Canadian wilderness culture in spadefuls. There are two grizzly bears who I guess are teenagers now but were found and adopted as orphaned cubs. They had a bit of a wrestle in the pond for everyone before taking a wander around, showing off their stupendously scary looking claws. We helped ourselves to a delicious Canadian fried doughnut type thing with cinnamon sugar and lemon and then watched the cheesy outdoor lumberjack show with a pair of stereotypically lumberjack-looking lads as you could hope to see. Together with a painfully perky host they hammed their way through a script which did allow them to show off some choppin’ and sawin’ skills. One of the guys did have a pretty impressive scar on his cheek (he was the former tree climbing champion) so they obviously had some real life experience.
After a slightly hair-raising descent down Grouse mountain on a bike with suspect disc brakes we rode back through Stanley Park and I was deposited at the harbour-side pool for a quick swim while Sarah went to send an email about the cousin’s night out. The Canadian summer evenings fooled us again and we didn’t realise that we were pretty much running late for dinner before my swim. So while I was relaxing in the water and sunning myself in the chilly wind, Sarah was racing back to get me and resume our feeble attempts not to run late for everything.
Vancouver, like many North American cities, is laid out on a grid pattern. This makes it very difficult for tourists to become lost, but I’m betting most tourists don’t ride bikes 10km home in the dark on their second night in town after quite a few drinks. That’s our excuse anyway. I was enjoying riding west on West 4th street so much that I completely forgot that we needed to turn left at some point. We ended up on a totally pitch black highway in the forest riding down a hill before Sarah’s fear of bears made us reassess our direction. It took about an hour longer to get home than it should have but we saw a fair bit of the city as a result.
The stark difference between construction in Vancouver and Sydney is wood. Vancouver is very much a town made of wood. New houses are not made of the spindly timber frames covered in brick that you see in Sydney. The houses are assembled with more wood than you can poke a stick at. The bare frames look like huge slabs of wood with windows, just waiting for their copious insulation and a bit of a render. Wood fills the air.
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