Rainy days out West

We arrived in Vancouver after the five hour flight from Ottawa (this is still the same country!) at 10am. The city looked a bit grey on the drive in from the airport: old apartment blocks and an overcast sky. After checking in to our downtown hotel we walked into town. Downtown is a lot nicer than we’d expected from the airport drive in. Lots of shiny glass apartment and office sky-scrapers with smaller brick town houses and churches in between. We went through the Pacific shopping centre (a bit small for the whole Pacific) to get to the harbour tower, the obligatory, elevated view of the city. The tower itself looks naff from the outside as it is just a tower block with an observation deck plonked on top, but the views are good. You can see Stanley Park, the bays around Vancouver and the mountains North of the city. The tower is educational too as it has plaques telling you about the city. The highlights being:

• British Columbia is 4 times the size of the UK (hey folks, this isn’t even the largest Canadian province) yet has a population of only 3.7million, 2million of which live in Vancouver,
• Vancouver Island is about the same size as Taiwan (for our Asian readers) or England (for our English readers),
• the roof of the BC Place Stadium is unsupported and is kept up by air pressure created by maintaining a higher temperature inside the stadium than outside.

After going up the harbour tower we took an electric bus to another island and went to the suburb of Kitsilano. This is a leafy suburb with tree lined streets. We bought some pastries from an organic food shop called Capers and then walked down a street lined with cherry blossom trees to the beach. We had the beach and views of the city, the forest and the mountains. We walked along the beach and the sea wall to Granville Island. An island in the same way as Colonel Saunders is a real Colonel. It has a lovely market and arty shops where the owners create their goods in open workshops you can look round.

We found that Vancouver is influenced more by its America cousins just across the border than it is by other Canadian cities in the East. Vancouver is larger than Ottawa and has a bigger downtown area. Ottawa is relaxed in a friendly, polite way, but Vancouver has a laid-back, hippy relaxed feel that can only have come from the clouds of dope smoked down the coast in San Francisco in the ‘60s.

Vancouver is blessed by its location and has many waterways, which reminded us of Sydney and Rio. There’s also an Asian influence in Vancouver as there is a large Asian population and lots of visitors arrive in Vancouver as the first stop across the Pacific. Our regular readers will remember that we said Rio and Singapore are the only cities in the World with rainforest. Well Vancouver claims to have rainforest too. I think this is stretching the definition of rainforest. Yes Vancouver has a forest and yes it does rain, A LOT. Does that make it a rain forest? We’ll leave that to the monkeys to decide.

We left Granville Island via the Aquabus and went back to downtown island for a pub meal in Yaletown Brew Pub. From there we walked back to the harbour tower and made use of the fact that tickets last all day and so saw the city at night all lit up. Photos in Album 7.