Vancouver (6)

Whale Watching Waiting

Getting on the first outing of this year's season, I took a great speed boat tour along the islands in the Georgia Strait off Vancouver. While the company boasts a guarantee and a "90% success rate", there was no whale around anywhere. However, there still was plenty of wildlife in the beautiful scenery to look out for and be seen:

Porpoises - These guys are fast, this is the one and only photo I got. From a distance of less than two meters though.

Bald Eagles - Which are by no means bald.

Sea lions - Totally laid back. Just enjoying a day of sun on the rocks.

Cormorants

Seals

So - no disappointment at all. And who knows, maybe I will be back some time. :-)

Vancouver (5)

Vancouver (4)

SkyTrain

Vancouver's municipal train system is called SkyTrain - a bit strange at first, as its downtown parts are underground. As soon as the trains leave downtown Vancouver, the rails are mostly on stilts however, often giving great views of the surrounding parts of the city.

The coolest part about those trains is another thing though: They run driverless and completely automated over the whole network. But the driver's seat still exists, and sitting in it directly behind the windshield, looking on the tracks while the train drives from station to station is a bit eerie - but really fun too.

Vancouver (3)

唐人街

Vancouver has the largest Asian population in Canada, and one of the largest in America - so Chinese is very often found as a third language on signs, e.g. at the airport. And in Chinatown, Chinese replaces French as the second language:



Chinatown is a very colourful part of town, with lots of shops and restaurants - and a wonderful small Chinese park, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden, built according to the principles of Taoism to represent the garden of a - fictitious - imperial Chinese scholar.

Vancouver (2)

Capilano Suspension Bridge

A bit to the north of Vancouver, there's Vancouver's (self-proclaimed) oldest attraction: The Capilano Suspension Bridge, built for the first time over 120 years ago using hemp cords - and by now replaced by a steel-cable-supported version.


While its entrance fee is on the high side, it offers a great view over the valley beyond and leads to a "boreal rain forest discovery park" with walkways along (and over) the border of the valley, and a great system of walkways between trees at considerable height, supported by enormous douglas firs:

(flying to) Vancouver (1)

I really look forward to crossing the continent by train - although flying over it is not that bad either if the view is decent. And it was, permitting me to see what the term "plains" really means: Saskatchewan is flat, and quite incredibly so. No hills, no ridges, no forests, no anything - its flatness is only interrupted by the occasional river. And even more incredible: All of it is irrigated, in regular squares, their basic size being 2x2km² if I timed it right¹ (that makes the view in the photo 20km wide in the middle):

I knew beforehand that Canada has lots of agriculture - but experiencing it by flying for hours over a third of a continent with nothing but fields from horizon to horizon (and that horizon is quite far away when seen from a viewpoint 12000m above ground) makes it much more real.

And then of course, at the end of the flight, there are the Rocky Mountains:


Leaving the Mountains behind, the approach over the lights of Vancouver (you can actually recognise Chinatown from above: It has different streetlights) at dusk is very beautiful too.

¹:
The basic unit is in fact the square mile, as I know now. Should've guessed that...
That makes my distance estimate wrong by roughly 15%. Not all too bad, considering all I knew was the plane's speed in km/h.