Seeking An Extraordinary Life - A Travel Journal

A quiet morning in, and I spend most of it catching up on odd jobs - waxing my boots (well overdue), sewing up a split seam in the lid of my rucksack, rearranging and cleaning out my kit. I've managed to compact things a little more (always a cause for celebration) by losing an excess shirt (I replace two black t-shirts with the awesome green shirt I picked up yesterday), one of my filofaxes and some paperwork I don't need, which means I can immediately fill the new space with my excess food stores which I've been carrying around in yet another bag.

After lunch I walk out with Nicki and Dan to see the inkjet kiosk and hang out with Robin for a while. He's there with his workmate Chris, a thoroughly hyperactive but very sweet girl who talks most of the time and has a huge collection of reptiles. She tells me about her snakes as she shows Dan how to inject cartridges with ink and reset chips.

The job is actually very interesting to follow - they can refill any inkjet cartridge on the premises in about half an hour, which requires an arcane selection of techniques and tricks all discovered within the company - one cartridge must be drilled in a certain spot, another clamped or squeezed, bits prised off and re-sealed with hot glue, some have to be pressure-filled using a vacuum pump (and occasionally explode). When a new printer is released, someone in the company has to effectively reverse-engineer it to find out how best to fill it.
Shown opposite: My only photo of Robin. This is why I'm a writer not a photoblogger.

They are tested using an amazing collection of printers arrayed under the desk, all with names bestowed by staff members - there's Lou Diamond Philips, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and one particularly unreliable model is known as Jam Master Jay.

With everybody home in the evening I say goodbye and good luck to Dan and Nicki, and Robin drives me to the ferry. It's a sad moment saying goodbye to yet another new friend so fast (and yet again I forget to get a proper photograph), and I'm further brought down by mounting nerves about the border crossing. This is the one everyone has been warning me about everywhere I've been - U.S. Customs and Immigration are purported to be cold, vicious, procedural and inclined to make things as hard as possible for incoming travellers.

In fact it's not too bad - there's a quick form to fill in and the guy I deal with is pretty brusque and obviously enjoying his position of power, but I'm through in five minutes without incident and met on the ship's gangplank by the purser, with a broad smile and a welcoming "Hi, how are you doing?" "Better now that's over" "Yeah, everybody comes out of that room like..." he puts on an expression of fixed horror for a moment and stands with legs shaking "...that's why I like to meet 'em with a friendly face. You have a great trip now."

I feel better, but once I've settled on a bench with my bags and we begin to pull out, my mood drops again. I begin to wonder if all the things that have made this trip great so far - successful hitching, making friends along the way, the generosity and hospitality of so many people - were just products of Canadian goodwill and will disappear in the States. Is my journey about to take a downturn? Will I meet coldness or even hostility from here on in?

As these gloomy thoughts develop the young man standing at the rail notices my baggage "Hey, where are you headed?". Inside of two minutes Mehal Shah is sitting with me, excitedly listing places I just have to see and drawing maps in my notebook. Mehal's parents are from India, he's living in Seattle and actually works for Microsoft as a software engineer (which sparks some lively debate). My concerns about America are washed away as we talk.

The views from the boat are spectacular - the sun touches the horizon as we are crossing, sending half the sky orange and everything else into deep blue shadow by contrast. The landmasses behind us are sillhouetted against the incredible sky, and halfway across the water a whale (possibly a humpback) surfaces three times a little way out on our port side, blowing spray and flipping its tail. It looks small at a distance but the slowness of its movement gives away its huge size.



Customs at the other side are even more relaxed - a few questions (mostly relating to how I'm going to support myself), not even a search, and I walk out onto American soil for the first time, my second border crossing complete.

I'm fairly tired and emotionally drained from all the up-and-downs of the afternoon when I walk up into Port Angeles, Washington State. The harbour has a rather rank, rotting-seaweed smell to it and the town is mostly deserted. I don't know where I'm sleeping or where I'm going next and I'm starving hungry. Comfort food seems to be in order, followed by an attempt to find the local youth hostel based on the very sketchy advice of the immigration officer.

I walk around town for some time, finding only pricey seaside-town restaurants, but finally set eyes on a 24-hour supermarket where I wander around happily acquiring Pringles, Reeses peanut butter cups, and a big box of (shame) non-free-range fried chicken. Then it's off to find the hostel and the directions prove as unhelpful as they initially seemed. I walk for almost an hour into the town's eastbound retail ghetto before concluding that I'm not going to find the place before checkin ends, so I find a grassy hill next to the baseball stadium and munch chicken and chocolate while I ponder what to do for the night.

There's a National Park area further up the road, which usually seem to have camping, but after walking that way for some time my foot is flaring up and I spy a patch of wasteground where I will be partially concealed by bushes, at least while it's dark. It's another boundary-pushing moment for me - I'm inevitably going to be seen by a few people and I have a real stigma about being thought of as "sleeping rough". But tiredness overcomes my misgivings and there's a satisfying feeling of power at shedding another inhibition, being able to put practicality over social programming and self-consciousness. I lay down my mat, slide into my sleeping bag and sleep well.

Labels: borders, British Columbia, Canada, port angeles, United States, Vancouver Island, victoria

I wake to the creaking of floorboards after a pretty good night's kip, wrapped in my sleeping bag on Robin's couch. Robin has to work today, so I hang around with Nicki and Dan for the start of the morning until I have my bearings and a plan for the day.

Dan is macho and swaggering on the surface but a sweet guy, built out of athletic muscle, with bouncy energy, an evil grin and a constant undercurrent of jokes and wry observations which surface in his sentences unpredictably. Nicki is dark-haired and olive-skinned, and exudes a calm kindness and warmth in whatever she's doing.

They are living in Costa Rica when they're not visiting here, and building a dream business - guesthouses in a beautifully designed and built community structure with a lot of eco-friendly features. It's an exciting project and they're both excited about it, looking forward to returning in September to continue work.

With a map and copious thorough directions from Nicki I finally walk into town. Downtown Victoria is a surprise - by no means small but really laidback compared to the other cities I've visited in Canada, with a minimum of hardcases and junkies, attractive buildings (apparently there's an ordinance against skyscrapers) and calm streets.



I have pretty much a touristy day (apart from picking up a beautiful green shirt in the Salvation Army for $5.00), and see a pretty good cross-section of Victoria's attractions - the small Chinatown area with it's beautiful Gates of Harmonious Interest, the tiny Fan Tan Alley, less than 4 feet wide in places and once lined with opium parlours and gambling dens, the Native Art gallery with beautiful carvings and prints, craft stalls on Market Square, the harbour itself, the Empress Hotel cocooned in ivy, the government buildings, and the totem poles by the museum in Thunderbird Park.



After a bit of a search for anything affordable to eat I have teriyaki noodles for lunch at a restaurant called Noodle Box, probably the best asian food I've ever tasted. It's a big box of fried beef in a fresh-tasting teriyaki sauce (given a kick with fresh lime), with udon noodles, incredibly fresh lightly-cooked veggies and crunchy raw beansprouts. Strengthened, I find a ridiculously cheap internet cafe and hammer out a good few blog pages.

In the evening Robin is already committed to a barbecue so Nicki, Dan and I go out for a drive to stock up on drinks and munchies - ginger beef, sandwich meat, chips and sausage rolls. We spend a happy evening munching, drinking, debating and watching endless Family Guy DVDs.

Labels: British Columbia, Canada, Noodle Box, Thunderbird Park, Vancouver Island, victoria

I manage to sleep moderately well despite repeated awakenings by the crows, alarms going off at 3am and two hyperactive poodles in the next trailer over. I take a leisurely breakfast looking out at the sea, and spend much of the morning catching up on journal notes - midmorning I go foraging for fallen branches in the little patch of woods behind my campsite (the alternative is to pay 5 bucks for an entire wheelbarrow of logs which would be a bit of a waste) and build my first unaided fire to brew a cup of tea, extremely satisfying.

I strike camp around lunchtime to be out of the way of incoming campers for that night, and at around 2pm Norm and Robin return from battle with the deep. They have another four rock cod and a flounder, and have thrown back a huge variety of more interesting things - Lingcod, small salmon and a dogfish which cost Norm his knife while he struggled to avoid its spiked tail and get the hook out of its mouth.

I am despatched to light the fire and Norm produces hot dogs, buns, mustard and delicious relish from the RV, washed down with more beer. Robin and I say goodbye at about 3 and get on the road, and by 10pm we are rolling into the outskirts of Victoria. At Robin's I am introduced to his housemates Dan (who is Norm's son) and Nicki, I shower, shave my sunburned head till it stings and sink joyously into their luxurious couch.

Labels: British Columbia, camping, Canada, hitchhiking, toquart bay, Vancouver Island, victoria

Norm has told me to be ready at 7 and I set an alarm, but in fact the crows wake me at 06:30, alighting in the tree above my tarp and going through their incredible range of noises from clicking and buzzing to hoots, howls and squeaks, all at ear-splitting volume. I lie awake for about 15 minutes trying to collect my thoughts when Norm appears with a lifejacket, so I drag myself out of my sleeping bag, grab a few essentials and stagger bleary-eyed and shivering to the dock, wondering what I've let myself in for.

Norm is already in the boat, alert and immaculate in his Tilley hat and windcheater and warming up the two motors - a powerful 40bhp Mercury and a little auxiliary Yamaha outboard. I zip into my lifejacket and clamber with reasonable grace into the front of the boat, Norm unties his painter, I finally manage to untie mine and we pull out of the dock under low power. The morning is grey but beautiful, the clouds hanging low over the mountains and trailing through the passes, the water still. We roll slowly out into open water with the big motor just ticking over, then Norm opens the throttle all the way...and we fly.



Norm's little boat is narrow, so it's been built with three hulls, the second one open at the front and back. Sitting still or under low power the hull fills with water and makes her heavy, stable but wallowing. Under full power the water clears out and the boat rises to aquaplane, skimming over the surface of the bay with almost no resistance. The dock, then the campground, fade away behind us as we race out of the bay, riding on a pillow of our own bow-wave and throwing an arc of spray on either side. On our left the sun is breaking over the mountains, striking the water burning gold. On our right the Broken Group trail away into the misty grey distance of the open ocean. I hunch down in my fleece, pull my cap down against the cold rushing wind and all my sleepiness is blown away.

Once well out across the bay, Norm cuts the engine and starts the little Yamaha on a slow pulse, moving us slowly across the small waves. We are trawling, Norm's usual method of fishing, which requires a bit of equipment. On the back of the boat are two Scotty winches, each of which lowers a tennis-ball-sized lump of lead - the cannonball. Up to four fishing rods are set in holders on both sides of the boat, and the lines attached to the cannonballs by a clip. The weights are then lowered to a chosen depth, carrying the lines with them, and the lines trail behind the boat. Each one is fitted with a big flat spinner shaped roughly like a skateboard, which keeps turning in the water, and a lure (they come in various designs) just above the hook.

When a fish takes the bait and hooks itself, the line is pulled free of the clip and the rod can be taken, the fish fought and (hopefully) landed. That, as it turns out, will be my job. When we get a bite Norm will grab the rod, give it a jerk to set the hook and pass it to me to reel in. It sounds like a lot for my first outing but Norm is encouraging and I'm buzzing to have a go. We're hoping for salmon - the best sport and the best eating in the bay. Norm sets and lowers the lines, and we cruise on into the bay with just the low hum of our engine and the lapping of water against the boat.

Norm and I get to talk properly for the first time as we both scan the surface of the water for bird activity, surfacing baitfish which might indicate the presence of bigger fish feeding underneath, and the various forms of wildlife which coming into the bay. He turns out to have a wealth of stories about fishing and the rest of his varied life. He's owned a number of hotels and bars, run charter fishing trips for many years as well as spending countless days fishing and sailing himself off the coast of the island. Now he's an area manager for an inkjet refill company with several stores under him, and seems happy in his role.

He tells me about catches lost and won, crazy charter parties and wild nights in the hotels. He tells me about a killer whale, separated from her pod, which became a major nuisance around the bay pestering boats for attention and damaging equipment - she got annoyed by the sonar depth-sounders fitted to the hulls of many boats so she used to bite them off. He tells me about the rise and fall of fish populations and the problems caused by rocketing seal numbers - in some areas you can't catch salmon at all because the seals will take them right off your line while you're reeling in.

He tells me about the perils of the hotel industry - marking bottles of whiskey to catch out thieving employees - and the charter fishing industry - hulking macho oil rig workers who break every line because their reaction to "Let the line out so the fish can run till he tires" is "Can't...let...fish...win!"

Then Norm spots the starboard line twitching, a movement imperceptible to me. He hooks the rod out of its holder, gives it a strong yank forward and passes it to me where I stand swaying in the bows. All of a sudden I'm holding my first loaded fishing rod. I can feel the living fish on the other end of the line moving around, the vibrations travelling down the rod to my hands. I start reeling.

There isn't much of a fight to it although in the rocking boat it's far from easy - there's resistance but the fish never pulls the line back on me, and after a minute of winding first the flat spinner, then the silver shape of the fish is drawn to the surface. I manoeuver it to the side and Norm holds it up. It is indeed a salmon, and a pretty quick catch, but too small to keep. Nonetheless I'm excited enough that I completely forget to take a picture before he slips back into the water (Norm uses barbless hooks - you lose a few more fish, he says, but there's much less chance of hurting or killing the ones you put back). Still, there he goes. My first ever catch.

We are back to trawling and waiting, and watching the surface. We pass through a shoal of baitfish scrambling to the surface - there are bigger fish feeding underneath but they can't be persuaded to take our bait. Then we do get another bite, and this time it does put up a bit of a fight. When the spinner finally comes to the surface it is dragging a chunky orange-brown fish with big bulging eyes and a spine of sharp quills - a rockfish or rock cod, not salmon but a reasonable size and, according to Norm, good eating.

I hold the basket out and Norm slips the fish off the hook where it flops around gasping on the plastic. "Hand me the Bonker, would you Mark?" The Bonker turns out to be a short wooden truncheon tucked under the seat cushion, and Norm applies it to the fish's forehead with three sharp blows, which stuns it. Nonetheless it comes back for a bout of thrashing at odd intervals for over an hour, a little unnerving to say the least.

Back to waiting, and as I scan the horizon past Norm's shoulder I see something like the outline of a black buoy between two islands...which slowly tips over and disappears under the surface without a splash. Excited, I point that way "Norm, it might be just me, but I think I just saw a big fin over there". He looks "Yeah, I saw something out that way but I think it's just a piece of driftwood bobbing..." then the sillhouette surfaces again, this time in full profile, unmistakeably a curved black fin "oooohyeah, that's a killer whale."

We watch entranced, fishing forgotten, as the fin disappears then surfaces again, this time accompanied by a curve of black body and a spout of water from the whale's blowhole. I try to catch a photograph but get nothing but blur. One more time it surfaces and is clearly visible, and on the next appearance it is just a sliver as the whale turns away from us and heads out between the islands to the open ocean. We're quiet for quite a while before the conversation picks up again.

Soon we have another bite, but it's another undersized salmon and goes straight back in. Norm tells me about the night he went with a friend to bring back his new yacht from the yard. The builders had been sloppy and slow and it was mostly unrigged when they picked it up, so they decided to take it home on the motor, but partway they were hit by a severe storm as it was getting dark. Unable to raise more than a few yards of sail to stabilise the craft, they avoided a huge rock in the middle of the channel by inches using the just-barely-responsive rudder, and after a long night managed to bring the boat to shore and call for rescue. "That time I really thought we were dead" he says matter-of-factly.

We pause for delicious bran muffins from Norm's bountiful cooler (he bakes them himself, replacing half the fat with applesauce) and get one more bite before we head in - after a bit more of a struggle I land another species of rock cod, a little bigger than the first. By now the breeze is getting up as it passes 11am, and the water is getting chopping with whitecaps in the distance - too much for this little 14 foot boat. We haul in the lines and Norm cranks the big Mercury back up again. As we race back in, the water is becoming corrugated and we bounce off the rollers with a significant jolt.

Back at the dock we are met by Robin, one of Norm's shop managers. He's 25 with an earring and a goatee, a permanent expression of (usually unjustified) innocence and a huge cup of coffee in his hand. Norm introduces us, Robin mocks our fish and I head off to check on my gear and get some lunch.

In the afternoon Norm takes us both out on another run. The sky is stormy and the bay is pretty rough, but just within the parameters of the boat, and it takes some skillful handling on Norm's part to keep us bouncing on the waves instead of rolling under them. Between bone-jarring bounces and sprays of salt water Robin and I get to talk. It turns out that he's also a psychology student - he's halfway through a degree in Psychology and Forensic Anthropology while working for Norm, who encourages all his staff to get some qualifications and expand their options.

We are very much on the same wavelength, liking and hating the same things about our subject, and when I tell him I'm staying one more night then heading back to the southeast of the island to cross into the States he announces "Heay, I'm going back to Victoria tomorrow. I'll drive you down, man, wouldn't be any trouble to put you up for a couple of nights". Another weird connection made by a near-total stranger's generosity.

The fishing is pretty poor - we nail two more rock cod in the first hour, both on my side of the boat, so Robin is left with nothing to do but apply the Bonker, a process which to be fair he does seem to enjoy. "Are you knocking it out or tenderising it?" enquires Norm as Robin lines up his fifth blow. "Man, I'm a psychology student, I should know how to kill brain tissue". Robin and I switch sides, at which point the fish stop biting entirely.

Finally we give it up as a bad job and return, damp and chilled. Norm fillets the catch...



...and I'm invited up to the RV where he produces cold beer, crisps and dip, and prepares an amazing selection of side dishes on the tiny cooker - caramelised onions, potatoes, baby carrots and a delicious caesar salad - to accompany the simply fried rock cod. The fish is very good, richly flavoured and sweet. We eat, drink and swap stories until nearly midnight when I stagger off to my own camp. Norm and Robin invite me out again for the morning run but I gratefully decline, citing a need for some real sleep before I develop serious mental problems.

Labels: camping, Canada, fishing, rock cod, salmon, toquart bay, Vancouver Island

Today is basically spent lounging around, catching up on more photographs (finally up-to-date with the uploading now), lying around in the sun and reading. Very restful, and my foot feels much better already. The hostel is busier than any other I've staying in so far, with Americans, Canadians, a Scot and an Irishman all resident right now. I've chatted with a few of them but mostly right now I need a bit of (relative) me-time.

I've been sharing use of the free internet machine with Rachel, an extremely precocious 12-year-old staying here who is one of the major producers of Naruto fanfiction on the internet as far as I can tell. Her dad is English originally, and knows my hometown of Bedford and the surrounding area very well as he used to go to the nearby village of Wymington (actually my girlfriend's home village) for his holidays when he was a kid - he's from Tottenham in London himself, but has been living in Australia for many years.



I may have just done a bad thing - I've introduced Rachel to Lolcats. She's been on the site giggling at them for an hour now and the addiction is spreading - she's just snared a tall blonde Dutch girl who just checked in and they're shouting captions to each other. I don't think anyone else is getting on the internet machine for a while...

Labels: Australia, British Columbia, Canada, London, Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, Wymington

I head out early by myself, grab some breakfast in Safeway and sit on the beach for a while doing a little writing, and by 9am people are already starting to line the streets in preparation for the Pride Parade. At 11 Yo and his roommates join me, and we find a good spot on a corner and settle in. It is another hour before the parade is scheduled to begin, and a further half hour before we see its first outriders, a couple of dozen female riders on bikes and scooters.

What follows is over two hours of floats, walkers, cars and bikes of all kinds, a colourful pageant expressing the spirit of what is said to be the biggest gay community in Canada. It is colourful, loud, outrageous, exuberant, beautiful and tasteless by turns but always positive and energetic, music blaring from every float and people handing out sweets, condoms, stickers, toys and shirts everywhere.



When the last float - a giant cup full of foam and ecstatic dancing drag queens - has passed, I say goodbye to Yo and his friends and walk towards Burrard to pick up the Skytrain again. I'm following the parade route so I move with the tail of the crowd, in a bubble of noise and energy, until I turn off as the crowd becomes too thick. Back in the relative quiet of the regular city crowds everything seems a little dull and grey.

I ride back to Main to get my kit, and crossing the park there I'm accosted by one of the more functional residents. I give him a few coins if only because I'm loaded down with them, and exchange a few words. On realising that I'm English he immediately puts on an apalling fake English accent a la Dick Van Dyke and claims to be from Liverpool originally. I extricate myself, telling him I have to get on as I'm going to the island, but he calls after me "'Ere, 'ave you bought yer silly ticket yet?" I turn to fend him off and he says "Go to Granville and Georgia, get the 357. Two bucks 25 express to Horseshoe Bay. He turns out to be exactly right, and have saved me considerable trouble.

The bus out to the ferry terminal is quick and smooth, and I check my rucksack in good time for the 1710 to Nanaimo. The ferry station is an odd mixture of airport design and industrial port infrastructure - the waiting room is all glass and modern displays but reached by a long walk along steel walkways. The ferry is big - pretty much indistinguishable from the drive-on drive-off ferries between Stranraer and Belfast - with a full restaurant and shop.

I go straight up on deck and get as far forward as possible to see the views, finding a spot along the front rail of the top deck, in front of the cockpit, where a couple of girls are already sitting against the wall. I sit down there, munch crisps and watch the sea ahead.

The journey is about an hour and a half, and I pretty much stay in place. It's sunny but the wind gets up very quickly once we move out of Vancouver bay, and once we are out in the open water it's a powerful gale across the boat. Sitting in the middle at the front we are relatively unaffected, but if you move to one side the wind can blow you down the deck if you're not careful.

There's not a great deal to see except miles of unbroken sea and the trail of the sun across it, until we start to approach Nanaimo and the soft purple shadow-shape of coastline breaks up into individual islands and the bay. The coastline is beautiful, tree-lined and hilly, but once again I'm feeling that deepdown tiredness and a surprise stab of homesickness - maybe it's just all the quiet after the bustle of the city. Frankly all I want at this point is somewhere to rest, and maybe a hug.

I'm given directions to the HI hostel by the very friendly staff at the terminal, which turn out to be accurate apart from the distance - it takes me an hour rather than the half hour they estimate, and on the way there my Chinaman's Peak-battered ankle starts to play up again. Then I get lost, and at 8pm I'm climbing uphill in a daze with shooting pains through my foot, having no idea if I'm going in the right direction, when I spy the words "Nicol Street Hostel" on the front of a lovely white and blue house on the other side. I cross and go up the drive, and am immediately met by a motherly middle-aged woman who introduces herself as Monie and says yes, they have rooms for the night.

After that all is wonderful. Monie signs me in, gives me the quick tour of the neat and clean house, I drop my gear, get settled in, meet the other residents and quickly fall into bed to sleep for 10 hours.

Labels: British Columbia, Canada, ferry, gay pride, Vancouver, Vancouver Island

I wake up on a headless and footless bed, under a low ceiling of bare joists interwoven with cables and pipes. The floor is bare concrete and every noise from the house above is amplified into huge creaks and crashes.

I'll rephrase that.

I wake up on a real bed, with a real mattress with springs in. There are walls keeping the wind out and a roof over me in case it rains. There are no new mosquito bites on my head, there are no spiders on my face, there are no ants anywhere. Dogs are not licking me, rock concerts are not taking place anywhere in sight. Luxury, I suddenly realise, is incredibly relative.

I join Charlie and Mary upstairs for breakfast. The house is really nice - all wooden floors and white surfaces, spotlessly clean, with a balcony looking out on the street. Behind it is an unruly garden with several trees and great piling overgown flowerbeds. I am introduced to the other two members of the family - Blackwell the incredibly soppy cat who pretty much hangs around waiting for attention, and Chico the Chihuahua.



Chico is purebred, with all that entails - he's not just neurotic but pretty much completely insane, a little white huge-eyed bundle of nerves and adrenaline. After a little while he gets friendly enough to come up and put his head in my lap for a stroke, but whenever I go up or downstairs he thinks I'm a violent intruder and attacks me, barking furiously. He's kind of sweet though.

Charlie mostly contributes a gravelly muttering over his paper and drinks vast amounts of coffee. Once his first cup is out of the way he begins the series of phone calls by which he maintains his business - a blank sheet of paper and various notepads scattered over the table begin to fill up with notes and numbers. Charlie hauls scrap himself on the International, but he is also involved in numerous side activities and deals, working with his huge number of friends and business associates in the area.

After breakfast Charlie and I move out to the shop for the day's work. Charlie's workshop is in fact a two-storey-high shed roughly the same size as the house, divided into two garages with full-height powered doors. In front of it are the International, still with the Meteor on the back, a silver Chevy and Mary's car, as well as a good-sized boat tucked back in a corner and covered in muck. Beside it are a very battered propane-powered forklift, a little yellow Mitsubishi digger/bulldozer and a golf cart.

Inside, the garage is lined with benches and storage and everything is piled high with tools, cables, straps and hardware. The first garage has an inspection pit in the floor, along the back of the second is Charlie's workbench with tools hung along the wall and dozens of drawers full of parts. The second garage contains another forklift, a drill press, a huge gas broiler and numerous other pieces of equipment as well as piles of propane and oxygen tanks. You could build, repair or destroy pretty much anything in this place.

First job of the day is to get the Meteor down. With me providing heavy labour and occasionally holding things, we drag out a thick metal wheelramp and cut it in half with a steel saw, then lower the car off the back of the pickup on the winch and let it roll down the ramps. At this point Charlie's friend Bernie and one of his "guys" (half-employee half-colleague) Jim turn up and everything goes on hold for about an hour of conversation and digging out some washers Bernie needs for his boat hitch.

Bernie is solidly built and silver-haired, and working mainly with boats at the moment. Jim is huge and mournful, with an impressive beergut held up by red braces and a thick beard - in his engineer's cap and jeans he looks like a depressed lumberjack. The conversation is fascinating. These guys are real old-school North American old-timers. They work with wood and metal, build and modify their own houses, own and work on numerous vehicles. They know every vehicle Ford, Chevrolet and Lincoln ever put out and pretty much any part in them. Between them and their numerous friends they can probably muster any piece of heavy machinery or tool you could ever need from a bandsaw to a bulldozer. They communicate mainly in yups and insults.

Once Bernie has toddled off it's back to work - we drive out a couple of blocks to pick up a scrapped car (I get to work the winch, to my enormous excitement, and drag it onto the flatbed) then a couple of blocks the other way to drop it at the scrapyard. Charlie knows everyone there, having built up a strong working relationship over many years - he gets a better rate per tonne than anyone else who does business here.

After all this hectic activity we stop in for an early lunch of soup, then I'm despatched to clean the enormous International truck for the rest of the day. It's a very long hard job in the hot sun, and I get pretty tired and worn by the time (I think) I'm done. Then my definition of completely clean differs a bit from Charlie's and I have to go back to do a few corners again.

It's educational to be back to doing this kind of work after a long time of deskwork and college - I'd forgotten how hard it is to work to someone else's spec. I get pretty frustrated and wound up at myself for my poor performance, but shake it off, finish the job and I have a couple of hours to myself to relax and unwind before dinner. Once again it's great when I'm a bit miserable just to plug in some familiar tunes on the MP3 player and just be somewhere else for a while.

Over dinner (beautiful spaghetti bolognaise and salad) we are chatting away and the conversation comes round to computers. Charlie's already mentioned that he doesn't really like the things, but now he says "Well, I've got one downstairs if you want to take a look at it, hasn't worked for a while." He takes me down after dinner and opens the door next to my basement room, which I had assumed to be a cupboard. To my surprise there's a nice clean little white room with a window onto the garden, and a 2-year-old HP Pavilion all set up, with broadband and a printer.

I have a poke around on it and find it's pretty badly broken and won't log in, so I offer to get it working and Charlie's very happy with that. He barely uses it but his son and granddaughter have tended to have it on when they come over - he only uses it for car and house listings and a bit of email. To my surprise I find that I have a day of IT work ahead.

Labels: Canada, cars, oldtimers, Pickup truck, scrap haulage, Surrey, Vancouver

Finally I crawl back into my sleeping bag for the last time under my favourite tree, and I am woken by Dave's dog Zu-Zu licking my face. I'm ready to go in good time. For the first time since I've been here in Canmore the morning is cloudy, a thick fog hanging down over the mountains and hiding the peaks. It seems fitting weather for saying goodbye.

Renaud emerges from the Chateau just in time for me to make my farewells and thank him profusely for everything he's done. He is moving on shortly himself - his job at the current site will be gone shortly so he's quitting now and heading out in a few days with some of the other Quebecois to Okinagan Valley, about which I've heard stories ever since I arrived. It's a kind of isolated weather system, a hot desert valley between snow-capped mountains where an extensive irrigation system allows a fruit-growing industry to flourish - peaches, plums and cherries all growing in the middle of the Rockies. It's a sort of legend of the migrant worker community, the laid-back work and endless parties talked about in hushed voices.

Okinagan is on one of my possible routes west - at a certain point I can either go due west direct to the Vancouver area or I can branch south and pass through the valley. I had thought to aim for Okinagan next, but I've had my best times by just thumbing a ride and seeing where it takes me, so I resolve to do the same again - if I end up in Okinagan, so be it. I walk just round the corner from the camp (most convenient hitching location yet) onto the westbound Highway 1 and put out my thumb as the clouds begin to slowly roll back. Soon it is another blazing sunny day.

Once again I have a wait - I am stood by the road for over two hours before Stefan pulls over. He's on the Canadian Olympic Ski Team, a cross-country skiier, and has spent the morning out on the local roads roller-skiing. I've seen these odd-looking characters the previous day on the way to the hike, poling themselves along the hilly roads in full ski gear with wheeled skis. It turns out that Canmore is the headquarters of the team, and training is all year round by any means necessary.

Stefan is blonde, tanned and easy-going, and the first person I've talked to this entire time who actually comes from Canmore! He has an extensive CD folder and we flip from Silverchair to Weezer to Metallica as we wind across the incredible landscapes of the Rockies. We wind higher into the mountains and shortly we pass Banff, the town just visible on the other side of the escarpment it half-embraces in the middle of a sea of trees.

Stefan points out the best peaks and slopes as we go, and the places where the big competitions take place. He's enthusiastic about my journey - he's travelled extensively himself between skiing and his own holidays (he's also an avid surfer) and recommends Malaysia particularly for budget luxury. "We stayed there on this island in private little houses, with guys there the whole time to cook whatever we wanted to eat whenever we wanted it, the rest of the time they just kicked back in hammocks and slept. Stayed there two weeks, we didn't spent more than 150 dollars."

The scenery around us is incredible - we are climbing higher now, valleys opening up on either side, the road clinging to steep mountainsides and slipping through passes. Everything is covered with fir trees up to the highest peaks, except where mile-wide patches on the slopes are bare, covered only in green grass or brown earth. The square-shaped ones are clearcutting by the wood companies, Stefan explains. They replant but they're still slowly depleting the forests, and in some places they're cutting into old-growth forests which can't be regrown.

The irregular-shaped bare patches are caused by avalanches, which are regular in winter and often take out the roads. Some of the mountains have avalanche-strips the size of small villages all the way round their sides. At intervals there are tunnels built over the road, providing a roof which the most common avalanches can pour over without causing damage or blockage.

Stefan drops me at his turnaround point, Rogers Pass, where there is a hotel and a rest stop. I sit down outside for a drink under the gaze of the snow-capped peaks at either end of the pass, but move out to start hiking again pretty quickly as it is already past 1. This is where my journey splits - my next ride will determine whether I go south to Okinagan or due West. I walk a little ways down the road and stick my thumb out.



It's another long one - after 2 hours I move a bit further down the road, which seems to do the trick as within 10 minutes a massive blue International flatbed towtruck pulls over. I hoist my rucksack up onto the bed (my arm muscles are definitely benefiting from hitchhiking) and clamber up into the cab, which is the height of my head. "Where you going, Junior?" "Anywhere west, basically" "Well, I'm going to Surrey" "Great! Where's that?" "It's kind of a suburb of Vancouver there". So I end up bypassing Okinagan and riding with Charlie Lewis.

Charlie is in his late fifties or a little older,looks like a slightly shrunken tanned Santa Claus in little rectangular mirrorshades and swears like the entire cast of Reservoir Dogs. He hauls scrap metal and scrapped cars for a living, chainsmokes Players and is on his way back from the other side of Calgary where he's just picked up his latest acquisition - the beautiful near-mint condition red-brown 1953 Ford Meteor town car currently taking up most of the flatbed, its polished chrome gleaming in the sunlight.

Charlie is gruff and growling, and spends most of the 8 hours or so we are together keeping up a steady cheerful stream of abuse at the cars which are keeping him from his preferred speed of 40KPH over the legal limit. "Ah you fuckin bastard you drive like an old woman GET OFF MY ROAD, EH? I'm just going to run this guy over and kill him, Junior, hope you don't mind..." always with a Player wagging in the corner of his mouth.

He likes to speed up on tight mountain corners, overtake in the last hundred yards of a disappearing second lane and on steep downhills when he has to brake he hangs onto the wheel in a wild-eyed pantomime yelling "Oh God we're all going to fuckin die!" followed by up to a minute of satisfied chuckling. I take to him quickly.

Conversation is limited over the deafening rattling of the enormous truck, but I tell him my situation, what I'm doing and he immediately offers me room and board at his place in Surrey if I help out with a few jobs while I'm there. We roll on through the mountains and as it is getting dark we stop in Chiliwack for dinner - Charlie buys me a sandwich and a bowl of chilli at the popular Canadian cafe he insists on calling Horny Tim's, as an advance on my work. We then attempt to eat two sandwiches and a very full polystyrene bowl of chilli while bouncing along mountain roads, which requires focus. At one point I'm balancing the chilli on my knee while unwrapping Charlie's sandwiches for him, and he's steering with his elbows because he's getting his coffee.

We're on the Fraser Valley now heading for the coast, and the mountains are smoothing out again into foothills which rise and fall in gentle curves on either side. As it gets fully dark we stop for a fillup and more coffee for Charlie, then barrel on to Surrey where we arrive at about half past ten. His wife Mary is waiting for us, watching from the window of their nice two-storey wooden house. By this point I am so wiped out by residual-jetlag-augmented sleep deprivation I exchange a few pleasantaries with both of them, drop my gear in the basement room they've given me and pretty much fall flat on the bed asleep.

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Labels: Calgary, Canada, Canmore Alberta, hitchhiking, Rogers Pass, Ski, Surrey, Vancouver

I get up this morning in unexpected cold, shake myself awake and walk straight up to McDonald's for a restoring coffee. As I come back outside the full panorama of the Rockies spread all around me strikes me slightly gleefully insane, and I have a small fit of disbelieving giggles which restore my good mood.

Now I'm wrapped in my fleece, my feet are propped up before the firepit, the air is just starting to warm up and I'm wondering what to do with the day.

Later

In the end I trek into town for a bunch of shopping and to update the blog. To walk through this town is even odder - like an Austrian ski resort in scorching heat, and with prairie dogs everywhere. They pop up out of lawns, tracks, there was even what I'm sure was a burrow in the middle of a thick tarmac path, which was pretty impressive. They're really tame, too...you can get right up close, less than five feet away before they first drop down, then bolt.



The town centre seems larger on foot (naturally) and it's quite a stroll to find what I need - a hardware store for a tarpaulin (the full form of the word has apparently gone completely out of use here, as I get several blank stares before someone says "Oh, you mean a tarp!". I suppose you'd get the same reaction most places if you asked for tarmacadam), a backup notebook (this one's getting perilously close to full) and the library for net access (I can get one hour per day for free, which is pretty good). Then I find an internet cafe for another two hours and I'm still not done, but catching up.

Arriving back, I find that a makeshift stage has been erected from tarp(aulin)s, rope, several small trees and various bits of decorative stuff borrowed from camp residents, and I that the Wapiti Tents First Annual Toast-n-Jam-boree open air concert is in the starting stages.

The core band now tuning up and desparately trying to get the mics to work are four guys from Ontario who are holidaying here, but eveyone has called in musician friends from around town who are ready to play and a serious night of music is in store, almost entirely organised by the camp residents.

There is even a sound engineer, a big guy with long grey curly hair and glasses in an orange tie-dyed t-shirt with a bit of professional attitude and a short temper, but who deals manfully with the limitations of his situation which include dozens of power cables snaking everywhere, anarchic and slightly inebriated musical talent and dogs attacking important pieces of equipment.

With the mics finally online the band launch into a series of 70s to 90s rock classics on guitar, bass, drums and electric fiddle, a fantastic sound and virtuoso performance even if the singing is a little more enthusiastic than harmonious. The guitarist then takes a solo spot for some dark rock instrumentals with impressive percussion tricks on a heavily distorted guitar.

At first only three of us are there watching and listening, but after the first track the space begins to fill up as people drift in from the shed, the tents and the town, settling in clusters on the grass, bringing chairs, spreading blankets and old rugs (or in one case dragging an ancient sofa out of the bush). The music continues, with players beginning to come out of the audience as band members step down to get a beer and relax. The fiddle player comes back on to play classic mountain bluegrass tunes on a banjo, then songs of his own written in the same style.

I move round from my seat at the side of the stage for a better view, and settle under the trees by my bedroll where Dave, Dale and Andy, all hairy hardened construction workers, are alternately watching the show and throwing pine cones at each other. Dave is working in Canmore right now and is a regular face around camp, with his peaked cap and bulky camouflage jacket, chortling through his moustache.

Dave owns (as far as I have worked it out) two of Wapiti's extensive and complex dog population. They are almost all related in some way - some belong to longterm residents, others are given away as puppies to visitors who then return year on year. There are consistent strains throughout - a little boxer, a little husky, a little german shepherd, a weird trace of greyhound - but it's impossible to keep track of the bloodlines without serious insider knowledge. They roam the camp freely (except for the few which are restricted to a leash due to kennel cough), getting attention from everyone, and are considered part of the family.

As it gets dark and the sound equipment is taking up all the slots in the main power box, the camp supervisor runs cables from his own caravan to hook up the spotlights around the stage. John is in his late twenties or early thirties (I keep feeling like asking people's ages is going to push me over the line into being a journalist rather than really being somewhere), blonde and unshaven under a canvas fishing hat, and wearing a pair of khakis which are splitting everywhere and held together by safety pins and big crude stitches of what looks like red yarn.

He has a permanent expression of slight melancholy around the eyebrows even when he's smiling, and a sort of zen anarchist outlook which makes him ideal for his role - officially he's just here to take fees and monitor that the rules are being followed, but in practice he also settles disputes, redistributes valuable camp accessories and tradeables like old sofas and rugs, and acts as counsellor-cum-youth-group-leader to his residents.

John is a fanatical skiier "Ski till you're free, man!" and outdoorsman - he was featured on the news last year after spending three full years living rough in the bush, but his girlfriend is more tied to her creature comforts - like a roof - so he rented a U-Haul trailer for a while "19 bucks a day, cheapest rent in town!" He's just bought his sister's station wagon and is completely in love with it. It has fist-sized rust holes in the sides, a significant radiator leak and is decorated inside with star and unicorn stickers. John is sitting on the tailgate, bouncing gently up and down with a huge grin on his face, planning what to do with it - mainly live out of it. He's going to install storage in both sides so the middle is insulated, then put his bed there.

We hang out by the car and talk for a while as various campers come and go for advice or to sign in, then John offers to show me how to split logs into cords of wood for the fire. After about half an hour of strenuous axe-work I'm getting pretty good and have no serious injuries, so John gets reckless and announces that we're going to make fence-posts from the big logs. This involves hammering the axe into one end of what I would estimate is a 60Kg length of tree-trunk, then lifting it on its end with the axe on the bottom and dropping the weight of the trunk onto the axe-blade to split it.

We are distinctly uncoordinated - John hasn't done this for a while and I really don't have the strength to lift a log of that size - and on the fourth drop John gets his fingers under the log as it comes down. He staggers around for a while saying "Gonna be fine man, gonna be fine - it's good, I'll shake it off" and holding his flattened index finger from which blood is beginning to run steadily. The nail is hanging off. Finally he sits down on the tailgate again and lets me get my first aid kit, from which he extracts a pitifully small plaster and wraps the fingertip up.

John continues our conversation calmly despite the steady dripping of blood from his finger and my increasingly worried comments and suggestions that he get down to the hospital. He shows his flattened digit to anyone who comes by and talks away without concern while they stare worriedly at the blood and his increasingly pale complexion, and intermittently shakes off sprays of red onto the back of the car with an expression of interest. Finally he lies down on the grass. "I'm just gonna lie here for a minute, man, till I feel better. This is good though, this is a good example of what you should do when someone's kind of in shock". "So are you going to go to the hospital now?" "Yeah, I'll go in a minute. It's okay, they know me pretty well down there. I kind of injure myself a lot".

Finally John consents to go to the hospital, although he insists on driving himself. I decide that there's not much more I can do, and go back to the party. A sort of supergroup has formed of all the players who still have the energy to play and can fit on the stage, and the sound is superb - we have guitars, fiddle, keyboards, one drumkit and two guys on tabla, plus a cowboy in the audience playing spoons. They're currently howling out the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" to great effect.

Two kittens have been passing among the audience for some time - someone brought them down looking to home them - and back under the trees at the edge of the audience Dave seems to have ended up owning both of them, mostly through not trusting anyone else to take care of them. He seems slightly bemused. And the so the night wears on. The supergroup seem to have hit a creative balance where they can just keep playing (barring a few technical problems), and I and a fair number of others cluster around the firepit, adding wood until it's an overflowing inferno.



We talk back and forth about music, mountains, and travelling stories. A friendly glassy-eyed guy from Ontario gives me two beers, an extremely drunk Quebecois girl borrows my socks. John arrives back from the ER, high on endorphins (but nothing else - the hospital for some reason don't give him any painkillers), with a huge bulky bandage on his finger. "8 stitches man, right through the nail!" Eventually I stagger off to bed at about 2am - it's a measure of how tired I am that I fall asleep immediately despite the well-amplified rock concert taking place roughly 50 feet away.

Labels: Alberta, camping, Canada, Canmore Alberta, live music, wapiti tents

Today is a long ride - the heat is still oppressive, and one of the few features the Chateau is missing is A/C. Keeping a liveable temperature requires constant speed and careful manipulation of various vents and windows. But the conversation's good and we're making steady miles toward Calgary. The dead flat land of Saskatchewan begins to slowly undulate, and prairie dogs begin to show up on the yellow grass hills, and sometimes perked up on the shoulder like little hitch-hikers (or flat on the road like little furry pizzas).



Midmorning we pick up another hitcher, a genial Stoner/Jock crossbreed called Paul Gerard Kenneth Hollohan (he insists I give his full name) with a biohazard tattoo on his neck and constellations on the back of his calves, a rock dude beard and the boundless energy of a 6-year-old. He's demanding to be immortalised in prose here, so I'm asking him for a quote.

Paul says "Hi". We're coming into Calgary now.

Later

Calgary is almost entirely gridlocked, and throbbing with noise and heat. We crawl through traffic for almost an hour before dropping Paul at an intersection - he doesn't really seem to know where he's going but seems confident that going left will get him there. For the short while we spend in the city I don't see anything to distinguish it from any other town or city we've passed through, except for the jam-packed traffic which Renaud says is all the consequence of the crazy rush of people to the province and the city.

But as we begin to reach the outskirts, something is very different. One moment we are moving slowly with the other traffic on a level road, the next the road drops away in a long gleaming curve and on the horizon, below the ranks of perfect white clouds against the deep blue sky, is a sillhouette of deeper purplish blue - the Rockies. We're cruising at speed now as the traffic spreads out, and Renaud turns up a rock station out of Calgary. ZZ Top blast out "Sharp Dressed Man" as the mountains loom closer and closer.

The road is going up and down in long curves over the foothills, and every time we come over a brow the mountains are bigger and clearer. They slowly go from indistinguished blue outlines to huge masses of grey and white rock, carpeted with evergreens, impossible in relation to the flatlands we have just left. And we go up into them, the road curving smoothly round their feet, turning slowly past startling blue lakes, the mountains slowly encircling us until there's no horizon, only Rockies and the sky.



Canmore, where we shortly arrive, is a mountain town in a long valley which has caught the fever of the Alberta oil rush and is busily turning itself into a millionaire's getaway. Renaud points out the brand new big-money hotels, shops and flat, including the one he is working on, a huge complex with windows and eaves pointing in all directions - they've added a storey while he's been gone. It seems half the town is under construction, everywhere there are sandy yards with prefab frames going up. It's all in a faux-European-ski-resort-style, which is at least in keeping with the rocky peaks surrounding us.



The town is swarming with people, mostly on foot - shops and facilities are mostly clustered quite centrally. There's a large temporary population of skiiers and hikers, Renaud tells me, but most of all Canmore is full of temporary workers; many of them Quebecois. They come across the width of Canada to work in hotels, restaurants, cafes, shops, and to catch their own little bit of the oil rush. Construction is probably the biggest source of work, a constant vacuum drawing in workers from across the country. If you can hold a hammer and turn up for work two days in a row, you can make serious money here. But the cost of living is rocketing as the town becomes whatever it's becoming, to the point where the people building it can't afford to live here.

Many of the Quebecois workers and a few others live on the municipal campground, (which is where Renaud keeps the Chateau), in tents and makeshift shelters, along with a small shorter-term community of ski bums and hikers, again mostly French-Canadian. As we roll into the campground (known as Wapiti Tents) it becomes instantly apparent that Renaud is a celebrity here. There are cheers and waves from all sides, cries of "De retour!" The campground comprises a large dusty yard, with a big open-fronted shed on the left lined with kitchen facilities and lockers, and a long trailer on the right which contains the office and washrooms.

Behind the trailer is a lean-to with a huge pile of logs and chopping block and a little further down is a communal firepit. Beyond the yard is the shortterm camping field, dotted with clumps of trees, tents and trailers, and to the left is the longterm camping area, locally known as Quebectown. It's mostly a network of tarpaulins, tents and nets strung between the dense trees.

The population here consists largely of the Quebecois segment of that very distinct youth-hostelling generation, identifiable around the world (although rarely in such large numbers) - the new flower children. They are uniformly young (18-24), tanned, in perfect physical condition, and eerily good-looking. Clothing: Lots of loose cotton in tribal or aboriginal prints, jeans shorts, endless Teva sandals and battered trainers. Braided wristbands and bandannas are not just accessories but badges of membership for this constantly-moving, relaxed, positive tribe. Most surfaces in their vicinity for long are painted with simple animal and plant designs and collages, hand and footprints in multiple colours are popular.

Intellectually, indepth analysis is less important than a general peace-love-eco-freedom philosophy, but there are many crossovers with eco and political activism groups. Dreadlocks (for both genders) and scrubby chin-only beards proliferate. For pastimes; most play instruments, guitar and drums (especially tribal and indian drums) are most common. Many spend time on crafting activities like braiding and painting, facilitating the tendency to decorate themselves and their environment. Sports are popular, the more competitive ones less so, ones with minimal equipment like frisbee or hackeysack the most widely-practiced. They are always soft, gentle, friendly, always touching shoulders and arms, making eye contact, exchanging gestures.

Here at Wapiti they are interspersed with their predecessors, the original hippie wanderers, now working as carpenters, drywallers and technicians in the Canmore construction boom, and saving for the perfect retirement in B.C. or home in the other provinces (where they have any longterm plans). They are uniformly bearded and moustached and often still longhaired, burnt red-brown by the sun, lined, tattooed, dressed in denims and t-shirts over narrow rock-hard labourers muscle. They drift easily between dirty jokes, travelling stories, poetry and song and local gossip, and they mingle easily with their younger counterparts.

We join the group at the picnic tables in front of the shed, and Renaud is instantly the centre of attention, the focus of a dozen rapidfire French conversations, I listen and pick out the odd word, and Renaud translates whenever he gets the chance between sentences. Once they figure out that I am english-speaking, those who can talk to me too, asking about my journey and telling me about the town and their exploits. Surprisingly many Quebecois speak only French, I discover, and language is a major problem for many of the economic migrants here in finding work.

Finally the group begins to split up and I fetch my gear from Renaud's camper. I'm here on my own terms now, and it actually stumps me a bit - for so many days I've been working to somebody else's schedule. I find a spot under the trees with a view of the mountains, and lay out my mat - I don't have a tent any more and it's a balmy night tonight, but I make a mental note to pick up a light tarpaulin for less friendly weather - drop my rucksack and I'm left with nothing to do.

I wander around aimlessly for a while, still stunned by the presence of the mountains on all sides, altering scales, distorting the landscape. The campground is swarming now, but the language barrier and the fact that everyone here knows each other already, plus my tiredness from last night which is making me a bit blue, make me feel uncomfortable joining them. I settle for sitting by the fire pit, just watching the fire as it gets dark and exchanging a few words with those who come to cook food or just sit.

It's a McDonald's burger and fries for dinner (a McD drive-through is just opposite the campsite and everyone here drinks their coffee constantly, or at least drinks out of the cups - alcohol is technically forbidden here, but the police turn a blind eye if it's not in identifiable containers) and I settle in early. Unfortunately sleep is difficult when a serious musical session strikes up about a hundred yards away and continues till gone 2am.

Labels: Alberta, B.C, Calgary, Canada, Canmore Alberta, hitchhiking, rockies, Saskatchewan

We get to the fairground around 1pm. As a competitor Doug gets in free, I pay $10.00 and get my hand stamped with a star. Doug is welcomed warmly by the girls in the booth, and it quickly becomes clear that while the Reunion and the rodeo are province-wide events, the local community is very much involved here.

The Manitoba Threshermen's Reunion and Stampede takes place in the Manitoba Agricultural Museum in Austin, just down the road from MacGregor. It's a huge site, largely volunteer-staffed and supported, which houses literally hundreds of beautifully-restored and maintained pieces of historical farm equipment, vehicles and tractors, as well as replicas of older items.

It also has a large number of reconstructed historical buildings in the Settler Village, with fully authentic furniture and fittings, and several barn-size buildings full of artifacts, old motors and weapons, as well as the custom-built rodeo arena which houses touring events like the one taking place on the next four nights.

Doug parks alongside the pens where the bucking bulls and horses are held, and we try to locate his ride of the following day. The huge bulls look fairly placid in the heat, mostly lying still with tails slowly sweeping, or wallowing in their dusthole.

Unable to locate Doug's bull of the following day (named "Never Wrong"), we walk through the rows of antique farm machinery and engines. People here have a different relationship with heavy machinery. A large proportion of the population are farm people, and encounter the tractors, diggers and other machines themselves on a regular basis.

Those who aren't usually have at least a bit of real land themselves, and would consider it normal to hire a digger to put in a pool or move rocks and gravel for a drive, or a tractor to pull stumps. At the very least most people have a pickup truck for heavy carrying and pulling tasks. Most people have a preference for one of the big brands - Case, John Deere, Caterpillar and others.

The machines are pretty interesting in their own right, particularly the huge steam tractors and miscellaneous machinery like the reconstructed sawmill which sits in the centre of the site under an open-sided shed. The heat is stifling though, and I begin to feel distinctly dizzy and nauseous with it. It seems to affect Doug and the locals equally strongly, however, and regular breaks to sit and cool for 15 minutes in patches of shade help enormously.

We tour the historic buildings, including big fixed engines and a reconstructed railway station with telegraph office, at a slow pace, and then return to the rodeo area where the crowds are building up. Everywhere there are jeans, cowboy boots, big belt-buckles and stetsons - if it weren't for the overheard "eh", "oh ya" and occasional eastern "dis"es and "dat"s, this is a crowd straight out of the american midwest, at least as it's portrayed in movies and TV. And country music is everywhere, playing over tannoys, from a live band in the arena between events and blasting out of passing trucks.

Doug seems to know or be related to at least one in ten people here - a lot of local people volunteer help at the museum through the year, and many more are employed or volunteer to help set up, manage and maintain the event's competitions, the parade and of course the extensive rodeo events.

We get lunch at the local Lions Club dining area - I have a burger, a Sprite and a bowl of chilli for a very reasonable $4.50, and it's really good homemade food too. Then we move to the grandstand seats around the main arena to watch the parade.

For over an hour, more than a hundred antique steam engines, tractors, fire trucks and cars, horse-drawn wagons (including a train of reconstructed pioneer wagons, built by their owners, which travels 60 slow miles by road every year to be here) and other vehicles and machinery pass through the arena in a slow procession, introduced and encouraged by Keith Dunwoodie, a little wiry guy with a white stetson, big moustache, glasses and a huge rolling DJs voice, working at least half from memory but nonetheless naming every driver, the history and characteristics of their individual machines.












Again, many of the drivers are local people, driving their own restored vehicles or on behalf of the owners who are unable to be there. Some of the machinery has been handed down through families for years. The parade is followed by a stooking contest beween teams of audience members, and the stooks are then gathered up for a race between an antique petrol-driven threshing machine and a steam-powered one (steam wins by a nose). After a turtle race between two steam engines, each trying to reach the line last without stalling their engines, Doug and I wander off to explore the rest of the buildings.







We return for part of the Clydesdale Classic - the judging of various vehicles pulled by the beautiful Clydesdale horses popular in this area on appearance, control and presentation. Then we work our way back to the livestock pens. A younger boy, Clinton, is riding tonight for the first time in the Junior Bullriding event. He will be appearing as an exhibition rider, an option available to hometowners - he pays no charge but will not be elegible to be marked and compete for the prize money. It's how most of these junior cowboys get their first test of rodeo performance.

Doug has brought his own riding gear, some of which Clinton will be borrowing for his ride. He picks between two ropes, each of which has a noose 3/4 of the way down for the bull's neck (in the case of the Juniors it will be a young steer), with a heavy cowbell below that - Doug explains that the bell is essential, as it pulls the rope off the bull's neck after the rider lets go.

A little above the noose the rope is thick and plaited, with a thick leather-bound strand in the middle which separates from the body of the rope, forming a loop. This is where the rider will hang on. If he comes off the bull at the wrong angle, a riders hand can twist over and be trapped under the loop, pinning him to the side of the bull while it continues to buck, spin and - if he's really unlucky - roll.

Other essentials are the glove (thick multi-layered calfskin which protects the rider from rope burns), chaps (more protection plus essential fashion - Doug's are black with flames along the bottom and custom-made, they drag on the ground on Clinton but that won't matter on the bull), and a flak jacket in case the bull gores. Doug points out a spot on his chest where a bull hit him with a horn and the flak jacket rolled it off - without it the impact would probably have put one or more ribs through his lung.

Last are the spurs, also from Doug - Clinton has to add a hole to each strap with my swiss army knife in order to get them tight. He's a skinny 13-15 with very short-cropped blond hair and an engaging nervous energy and chatter, a noteable contrast to Doug's laconic gait and drawl. He's clearly in awe of Doug, who has ridden in several rodeos already, and peppers him with questions as he tries on and adjusts the kit.

We are joined by two of Clinton and Doug's friends, and as a sudden burst of rain passes over we retire to Clintons familys trailer and Doug and I get a beer each from the fridge (it's almost impossible to go anywhere here without there being cold beer within reach). We munch Lays crisps and talk as more people begin to appear and I am slowly introduced to a dizzying extended family of local people. Everyone is welcoming and friendly, everyone has questions about my trip and about England (and well-informed ones - many of these folks have been following the UK flooding on the news and ask if I know people who are affected.

As it comes to the start of the rodeo, Doug switches his baseball cap for a well-crumpled stetson and dons a check shirt over his habitual t-shirt - he will be assisting at the back of the arena, opening the gates of the "chutes", the narrow corrals in which each bucking horse or bull is contained while its rider finds his seat.

Moving around the arena we encounter the rodeo clown, Gordon "Bones" Marks, by his trailer. Doug knows him from previous rodeos and introduces us, and Gordon, a rail-thin man with a neatly-trimmed moustache visible under his thick makeup, is very welcoming. He asks for my full name and scribbles it on a bit of paper. Doug grins across at me, "Oh yeah, he's got something for you!". My heart sinks a little. "You mean in the show?" Gordon looks up at me, "Be back here after the barrel riding", wiggles his eyebrows under the greasepaint and returns to his trailer.

Now pretty nervous, I go to find my seat. Actually, initially I am terrified, but I try to turn the feeling around into excitement. I'm eased a little by the thought of what an amazing experience this is going to be - I've never seen a rodeo, now I'm going to be in one! I am joined shortly by Clinton's mum Cassie and her friend Lynne, who as it turns out have also been conscripted. I feel a little better.

The rodeo is engrossing and adrenal, a celebration of human (mostly male) and equine skill, strength and speed. There are team-roping events (two men on horses bolt from the chutes, heads down, a rocketing steer between them, and try to catch it by the horn and opposite rear leg - this is the way cowboys out in the field bring down a cow to treat or vaccinate it), calf-roping (one man lassooes a steer, dives off his horse and trusses it up), 2 and 3 competitor chariot racing which goes out of the arena and around a long loop of track before bursting back in on the other side, and of course the bucking horses and (junior, at this stage) bulls.

The family tell me that most riders go with one or the other and stick with it as the skills are mostly different - a horse tends to just pogo and buck up and down while the bull is more likely to spin. "And a horse will try to get clear when you're down...a bull'll turn around and try to trample you sometimes. Gets kind of sketchy out there" says Doug, invoking the oft-repeated cowboy's phrase for any situation in which there is a high likelihood of death, dismemberment or permanent maiming.

Clinton is up last in the junior bullriders as the exhibition turn. The boys before him are almost all off before the required 8 seconds, rolling out from under the stamping hooves of their mounts to get to the safety of the sidelines. Clinton's mum is on the edge of her seat as his turn comes. She had originally forbidden him to get into bullriding, and has only just discovered that he's been putting in hours of practice on Doug's practice barrel and the boys have built a makeshift chute on the edge of the family's land for him to practice on their steers.

Finally, on the other side of the ring, we see the tiny figure in blue and yellow Wrangler shirt, armour and chaps climb up, stand straddling the chute and lower himself onto the steer. There is a brief struggle as the cowboys around the chute support and direct him and his mount - the bull is working around already and must be facing the gate before launch. Then Clinton nods, the chute gate is snapped open and the steer leaps forward under full power and immediately begins to spin and buck, jumping half it's own height in the air.

Clinton excels, leaning back almost horizontally with his left hand gripping the rope just in front of his groin (apparently a frequent source of non-permanent but horribly painful accidents for beginners), he is snapped back and forth but rides out his 8 seconds with room to spare, and definitely outshines the kids competing for prize money. The mums cluster round as he comes off, and friends and relatives are down at the front of the grandstand with video cameras.

Once Clinton is clear his steer continues bucking and running round the ring. As with the roping calves and bucking horses, two expert cowboys are ready on horses to run it down, slow it to a safe gait and shunt it out through a side gate.

Next is the barrel race, a lighting-fast slalom round three barrels, exclusively a women's event and one about which the men are less than excited. "So how does a barrel race work?" I ask Clinton's dad, an old-school cowboy with bright blue eyes in a lined but youthful round face. "Well," he looks down at his boot, scuffs a little dust and looks up at me with a half-grin, "you go for coffee or to the bathroom".

It's time for Cassie, Lynne and I to go down and meet Bones, who is by his trailer bouncing on his toes and doing extravagant back-bends. He leads us to the big gates where we hold for a minute, Bones constantly cracking dry jokes in his calm style and if not reassuring us at least keeping us distracted, then takes us into the arena, grabbing a surprised Doug on the way.

He keeps up a stream of patter with Keith in the commentary box over his throat mic, which is relayed over the tannoy speakers surrounding the stadium. "Hey, it's Bones again - who've you got with you, Bones?" "This is Cassie and Lynne and Doug from MacGregor, and this is Mark Hewitt from England, he's hitching around the world" "Is that right? Hi Mark, welcome to Austin" I salute the box through a rising wave of excitement and panic.

It's getting dark now and the spotlights are beaming down, cutting off the rodeo from the world outside. The smooth grey oval of arena I could see from the grandstand is now a vast stretch of grey mud and I'm in the middle. It's a quiet first night, but there are still a good 3 or 4 hundred people in the stands.

"And why have you got those guys and girls with you, Bones?" "Well Keith, I can't get any reception on my cellphone around here, and I need to make a real urgent call. And I've heard that with the right mixture of X and Y chromosomes you can boost a cellphone signal".

He stops us in the middle of the arena, and through a Twister like series of instructions he arranges the four of us into a sort of partial human pyramid with ungainly (and muscle-straining) limbs protruding in various directions, shouting out the number of bars of reception he's getting at each stage. Finally he yells "I got through...hold it...hold it...Bob! How you doing, buddy?" the poses we must hold are seriously painful now "Yeah, I just been fishing. No, not a lot, eh?" an even more agonising pause "I just caught four suckers". The crowd cracks up and we untangle and take our bows with enormous relief.

I return to the stand and enjoy the rest of the show on the wave of adrenaline. Okay, so I got humiliated in front of several hundred people. But I was in the rodeo!

The show closes with the serious business of bullriding. As each cowboy mounts the chute and settles himself on the bull straining and heaving in its pen, the audience begins a slow handclap that builds up to pounding applause. Then there is the long pause as the men wrestle with the sweating animal, the just-visible stetson dips and he's out of the chute, the annnouncer booming "Heeeeeeeee's got a bucking bull!", AC/DC or Ram Jam blasting over the loudspeakers.

It's a relatively poor showing tonight, none of the riders make the 8 seconds and numbers 2 and 3 both get hung up in the aforementioned hand-twisting way, swinging helplessly against the side of the bull until the watching men see an opening, dash in and wrestle them clear.

Animal rights campaigners have shut down the team-roping in other local events lately and are fighting most of the rest of the rodeo activities, to the rage of local rodeo-goers (which is pretty much everybody, it seems). I am still undecided. Certainly it all looks very violent, physical and frantic. But are the animals really being hurt? All the events are over in a matter of seconds, and even the frenzied bulls return to calm within a couple of minutes of being led out of the ring, and are mellow resting in their pens.

There are breakpoints where sports like the roping are instantly aborted if there's a mistake and the animal is being hurt. And the people here love and care about their animals, it's a constant part of conversation. They note to each other who's letting his horse get thirsty, who's riding hard, whose cattle look underfed. There have only been two animals killed at rodeos in anyone's memory, and everyone tells me about them - a bucking horse charged the fence and broke it's neck, and a calf was wrongly roped, suffering the same fate. That's on the whole Manitoba circuit.

I meet Doug by the gates, get a photo with Bones (who is apologetic for the gag and very interested and encouraging about my journey, showing me off to the kids who have gathered to get his autograph), and we head to his boss's trailer where Doug's finely-tuned senses have detected a cooler. I meet the feedstore family and we crack beers, slap mosquitoes and engage in what I'm learning is the popular social practice of standing in a circle in sociable silence, broken only by the occasional glug of a bottle or muttered "yup". Clinton arrives, still high as a kite on adrenaline and two feet taller from the praise he's receiving from all sides.

Finally we all move to the beer garden and line the wooden benches under strings of lights for a stream of Canadian Budweiser cans and music from the Barn Burners (they suck, but nobody really cares at that point). When Doug and I arrive home it's well after midnight.

Labels: bullriding, Canada, cowboys, Farm and Ranch Equipment, macgregor, Manitoba, Manitoba Agricultural Museum, rodeo

In the morning Jim drives me out to the road going west out of town with a bag of sandwiches and a nectarine the size of an apple. A better and more morale-lifting first Servas experience I couldn't imagine.

I catch the bus out to the edge of town and begin walking out past the perimeter highway to a good spot, but before I even reach the highway yet another pickup pulls up and I get a lift to the next town from Jason, a lorry driver who lives there and is heading home. Unfortunately this lucky break proved unrepresentative - I'm out on the highway for almost 2 hours without a lift, before retreating into a Chicken Shed for some cool, a cold Pepsi and a cheering burger. My chances of reaching Sasketoon or even the edge of Saskatchewan by the end of the day don't look promising.

But then things take a bit of a turn, and all for the better. About 15 minutes after leaving the Chicken Shed I'm picked up by Lou from Portage, in his near-death Chevy Celebrity town car. Lou is in his seventies, wearing an engineer's cap and dungarees, with a strong accent which makes it hard to make out what he's saying, and a distinctly alarming driving style which includes swerving to the right when he turns to talk to me and drifting left the rest of the time, once into the path of a large truck which blares its horn at us to Lou's apparent amusement "Hee hee hee, scared the hell outta that fella". In town he drives with aggression but few observations, and comments like "Golly I'm a poor driver - missed him completely" accompanied by more chuckles.

He stops in Portage at a Tim Hortons to let the engine cool "Or else stuff starts bubbling out of it" and we talk about his father, who was from England. While we're talking a slim, bearded man in his forties or fifties, who has been sitting at the next table drawing diagrams in a folder, turns around and introduces himself - his name was Keith, he's from Lancashire, and he's been living in Canada for some years but lost almost none of his accent. After giving me his card and telling me to call him if I got stuck out west (his daughter lives in B.C.), he leaves and Lou drops me on the edge of town. I'm there about 30 minutes when a beautiful blue Chevy pickup (with a crack across 3/4 of the windscreen) pulls up, and Doug and Jerrod take me on an unexpected and joyfully extended detour.

Doug is in his early twenties, tall and skinny with blond hair just a bit overgrown under a baseball cap and rectangular glasses. Jerrod is a few years younger, equally rangy and with red hair. They gleefully describe themselves as "hicks" and "rednecks" but these are smart, quick-witted guys with a big vocabulary and serious views on work. "You can always tell the country kids from the city kids", Doug explains (he does most of the talking, Jerrod is still hungover apparently), "they got no work ethic, they just want to lie around all day and smoke dope". Doug is having a week's holiday from the local feedstore (which we pass later - not the log shack I half-imagined with bins of grain and seed but an industrial expanse with bulldozers pushing mountains of silage and cereal around), and Jerrod works for Doug's dad building houses. They're cousins - it's a cliche but almost everyone in this small community is related at least to some extent. One of the local mums tells me later that her daughter is currently in a rage because the third boy in a row she has gone out with turned out to be a distant cousin.

The initial plan is for them to drop me on the highway when they turn off to their hometown of MacGregor, but coming to the turnoff Doug says "If you're not in a hurry we can give you a tour of the hills". I accept and we turn south onto a gravelly Provincial road where the truck begins to throw up a long tail of dust behind us. Almost at once the landscape begins to change from the yellow stretches of the central prairie to rolling green hills and plentiful trees of all kinds. We turn again and again on the narrow gravel roads between close hedges, with country music always on the radio at full blast.

The dust is everywhere - if there's a vehicle ahead of us, even so far ahead to be out of sight, the air is full of it, like a fine yellow mist over the fields, dimming the sun. In time we reach Doug's place, a small bungalow on a little stretch of land off a back lane and surrounded by trees. There are four vehicles in the yard in various states of disrepair, slews of spent shotgun shells in the weeds and broken beer bottles everywhere. But inside the house is nicely-furnished and in no worse a state than most bachelor flats I've seen.

We bring in the groceries, and with a call of "Looks like beer o'clock to me" Doug starts digging bottles of Canadian Budweiser (a much superior brew than the watery american equivalent) out of the fridge, and we settle in the cool to talk.

I notice through the window that there is a rodeo practice barrel strung between the trees, an oil barrel with a saddle across it slung between four sprung steel cables, and discover that Doug is a bull rider. He's been away from it for a year - last year he cut his left hand just before an event and had to ride with his weaker right, failing to qualify. But he's riding in two days, on the second day of the huge Manitoba Threshermen's Reunion and Stampede, held in the adjacent town of Austin. "I've got a spare room here...you should see the first day at least". I accept his generous offer, reckoning that I can spare a day if I keep moving steadily west after that.

We drop Jerrod home for dinner with his family, stopping halfway to disperse to the corners of the truck and unload some recycled beer, and slinging our last bottles into the ditch as we come into town for fear of a police stop (when in Rome...), then return to Doug's place for a dinner of ham wraps (ham and salad wrapped in tortillas, very tasty), more beers and some comedy on cable. Dinner over, my host looks across to me "Want to go out and shoot some stuff?" It turns out that Doug has a Russian 7.62mm rifle behind the front door.

We grab another couple of beers and head outside. The evening is perfect, a cool breeze is lifting the day's heat, the sun is setting over the miles of rolling fields, crickets are buzzing everywhere and a big 3/4 moon hangs over the trees. We sit on the porch. The rifle is mostly polished wood with a bolt action, and Doug slides four of the big brass shells into the skeletal magazine and sets up four empty bottles on a trailer at the end of the yard, carefully set low enough that any misses will safely dig into the ground.

He works the bolt, putting one round into the chamber, and takes out the first bottle with his first shot, then hands the gun to me. It's heavy and unwieldy, but I set the stock firmly against my shoulder as instructed, line up the front and rear sights on the second bottle and to my surprise destroy it with my first shot. The kickback rams the stock into my shoulder with bruising force, and the report leaves my ear ringing for over an hour. We alternate, a couple of misses and a couple of hits, and Doug takes the last bottle which shatters particularly dramatically, the neck arcing 20 feet over to fall into the weeds beside his shed.

Some more TV, then we decide to head out to Doug's local, an unassuming building beside the MacGregor community hall which turns out to be comfortable and clean, with a great jukebox and a beautiful top-condition pool table. We line up stacks of coins on the edge of the table and begin a series of games interspersed with more beers and rum-and-cokes, finding that we are at a similar level of comfortable incompetence which makes for great play.

A few other guys filter in, with a couple of squeaking girls who lay siege to the jukebox, but we get in a good few games to ourselves, developing a continuous volley of banter, self-mocking jokes, elaborate and unlikely called shots, "off those three cushions, then the 14 and into the side pocket - well, I'll look like a genius if it happens now" and rapid calls of "that's what I meant to do!" when we sink an unlikely rebound. The night is so humid the cues won't slide over our sweat-sticky hands, and we find a partial solution by chalking them till both our rest hands are blue.

In time two other pairs form up and we play for rounds, which results in Doug and I buying a lot of drinks. We drive home through the warm night, chomp crisps and pepperoni from Doug's fridge in front of late-night hockey reruns and I fall asleep in minutes on the mattress in Doug's spare room.

Labels: bullriding, Canada, country, macgregor, Manitoba, rifle, rodeo, Saskatchewan, Tim Hortons, Winnipeg

After breakfast I went looking for a bank to finally sort out the debit card problem - I couldn't get money out of any ATM, despite Barclays having assured me last week that my card would work fine, and I was starting to worry. The kind staff at the Queen's Street branch of Royal Bank of Canada helped me heroically through a long and annoying process of tracking down the problem, which included spending 9 dollars on a call to the Barclays Lost and Stolen Card line, and it turned out that my account didn't record that I was going abroad (despite my having talked to a Barclays personal banker and explained all about it) so my withdrawals were listed as unusual activity. My card was unblocked and I'm safely equipped with cash again (although my jetlagged brain is having some difficulty dealing with the coins).

After the bank activity I went looking for a hostel I'd seen coming from the bus station last night, reasoning that in my groggy and confused state I'd be best to look for a relatively easy option for sleep tonight, catch up on my rest, plan my first Servas foray, do some laundry and repairs and also get on a net connection to update the blog here. However, turning at the bottom of Queen's Street I was hallooed in a strong French-Canadian accent by a diminutive moustached man in a vest and jeans, standing on the porch of a beautiful green painted colonial-era house.

This was Charlie. He informed me that this was his backpacker hostel, as good as the YHA place with free internet and without requiring membership (my card for YHA never came before I left and I was looking at having to sign up again). I was dubious at first, but when he led me round and showed me the inside of the beautiful wood-panelled house, (and his Backpackers International Hostel membership) I happily paid my $25.00 fee (including breakfast, en suite in a four-person room and this internet connection - can't be bad!) and here I am now - in fact, I've just decided to stay another couple of nights to get some real rest and relaxation for now. With breakfasts covered I can even get back under budget through the power of delicious instant noodles for dinner.

Labels: backpacker's international hostel, Canada, currency, Hostel, travel, Youth Hostel Association

08:20 Here, 13:19 There.

I did indeed sleep in the park - finally out of energy (no doubt partly because of the J.D.s) I wandered into a dark corner of the nice park leading down to the Falls view, crept back into the wild-ish forested border, unrolled my sleeping mat and went to sleep using my rucksack as a pillow. The night stayed warm, and although I only slept for about 4 and a half hours I woke up amazingly refreshed and with only a little stiffness.

It was dawn, 05:30, and once I had the gear strapped on again I walked along the deserted front (apparently Niagara does sleep at some point) and saw the Canadian falls up close. Looking back, the sky over the Rainbow Bridge to the U.S. was an incredible red-orange and curdled with clouds.

It struck me that the only way to start such a day was with a real diner breakfast. Searching for a diner round the sidestreets of the main drag I passed two stores selling nothing but Hershey's chocolate products, an oldfashioned soda fountain, dozens more gift shops and the Niagara branch of Planet Hollywood, on its own small hill encircled with old movie cars.

Finally someone directed me to Perkins diner, where I am right now. It's spacious, warm, big comfy leather benches to sit on, some of my favourite rock music plays in the background. I have just worked my way through their big breakfast option, the Tremendous Twelve - four sausages (or slices of bacon), hash browns (or potatoes), three eggs (cooked to order) and a stack of four sweet pancakes with loads of salty butter melting on them and a selection of three syrups - blueberry, wild berry and (of course) maple. It came with an entire thermal carafe of coffee, which I'm lingering over half-mug by half-mug while I write this. Not a bad way to kickstart the day after waking up in a shrubbery...

Labels: Canada, diner, Hershey Company, Niagara falls, photographs, Planet Hollywood, sleeping rough

It's still the 15th of July, 23:25 Canada time, 04:25 back home and in my body clock. I hopped off the bus in Niagara about 2 hours ago, to find that (I think due to my not specifying the stop when buying my ticket) I was still some distance from the falls themselves. It was fully dark by now and I walked along the river, feeling a bit of a sinking feeling as I went further and further with no sign of people, just rows of deserted and dark shops, guesthouses and motels - could Mary have been wrong? Maybe Niagara was dead and closed down on a Sunday night...

Then I rounded a bend and saw the edge of a huge red-tinted curtain of water, and a red neon tower standing on top of it - the most dramatic of several casinos around the Falls. At the same time, the first clusters of people appeared moving up the road in front of me. Coming closer, the whole spotlit sweep of both sets of falls became visible - and the insane neon Babylon which surrounds them. Every hundred yards the crowds got thicker.

Finally, at the nexus of the area, struck from every direction by the neon Mysteron beams of the Hard Rock Cafe, Fallsview Casino, Marvel Superheroes arcade, WWF Piledriver ride and dozens of other attractions, literally hundreds of people were pouring across crossings, swarming up to the observation decks to photograph and gaze, swirling in and out of the attractions.

With perfect timing, as I rounded the last corner, fireworks began to go off above the falls, reflecting off the acres of glass all around and echoing down the canyon. The falls themselves, almost lost in the light show, were lit by spotlights from end to end, shifting from red to green under the bursting umbrellas of stars. When the fireworks were over, and having pushed through the mass to get a good look at the falls, I headed up Clifton Hill, the core of the Niagara machine.

The crowd was comparable to several Piccadilly Circuses end to end, and on both sides the neon and showpieces pressed close and overlapped. There was a waxwork museum with a vast theatrical frontage featuring film characters in wax scenes and a talking plastic-stone sphinx cracking jokes, a huge glass-fronted Fudge Factory where you could watch the sweets being made, at least 3 haunted houses (all with movie characters - Jason and Freddie prominent), arcades, dozens of takeaways, a ferris wheel which looked to be almost as big as the London Eye, and of course more hotels and casinos, all crammed into one street not much more than a quarter of a mile in length. Everything was huge, open, loud, ringing with music and covered in flashing lights.

After walking the length of the street to the top and passing 5 others which only dealt in dollars, to my great relief I found a currency exchange which would change my residual sterling (from the sale of my bike) into Canadian dollars. Wandering back down the strip, still feeling very awake and drawn in despite myself by the frantic activity, I decided to dig in for the simplest of the available attractions - a real American (if not Stateside) chargrilled hot dog with onions, ketchup and mustard (which was delicious) and a couple of drinks in Kelsey's, the most (relatively) normal bar on the street.

Spotting it on the menu, I had to start with a real root beer float - a delicious but slightly disconcerting beverage, as root beer turns out to taste very slightly like TCP antiseptic, and the addition of the scoop of vanilla ice cream begins a slow continuous frothing reaction, which I only noticed when it started escaping from the glass and running over my hand. I've followed it with a couple (or four) Jack Daniels, which tastes completely differently over here, much more sour as I assume a bourbon should - maybe it's tempered for export. It's very nice like that though.

I finally got changed out of the Suit (which required a prolonged clothes-juggling process in a toilet stall) and now I'm pondering sleep options - after all, I've now been awake for 22 hours. A park seems my only real option at this point, I've already spent double my planned daily budget (although I think I can allow myself a bit of excess on my first day, particularly such a long and dramatic one). The barman, Tom, here at Kelsey's, has been completely professional, friendly and supernaturally attentive. Once I explained that I'd be pacing my shots as I was on a backpacker's budget, he started bringing me ice water between drinks.

Time for my last drink I think, and a wander out into the still-noisy night.

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Labels: Canada, Clifton Hill, Hard Rock Cafe, kelsey's bar, Niagara falls, Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort, travel