A Year and a Day #7: Under the Yoke of the Youth Hostels – British Columbia, Canada

Under the Yoke of the Youth Hostels
Sunday, 24th August 2003

Ben and Beth departed home for Brussels on August 8th and I flew to Seattle in order to get up to Canada. A connection in Las Vegas (I gambled a dollar in an airport slot machine and promptly lost it) and an unnecessarily unpleasant border crossing, the details of which I won’t bore you with (it was pretty boring at the time), and I reached Vancouver.

I spent quite a lot of money in California, and the general reduction in my savings since I started travelling was starting to concern me. It’s been tricky to balance concentrating on not wasting money and freaking out about every expense. The US is also a bit of an expensive place, and as a result I feel quite limited about making spontaneous changes of plan. I’ve been staying in youth hostels all the time, which cost around $20 a night, but step outside the areas that they cover and hotels seem to shoot up to $60-80 without much inbetween… So although I feel like it would be better to slow down and spend a while in different places (for example I developed an inclination to visit some Native American areas after visiting various museums), financial reasons mean I haven’t really done that.

So I decided in Vancouver to slim down a bit the US/Canada part of the trip: I’m cutting out a few nights in Seattle and its surrounding area, not going to the islands off Vancouver, and just going to Yosemite rather than that plus Redwoods National Park and maybe the Grand Canyon. It sounds all pretty trivial now I’m writing this (ooh, poor little rich boy can only go to one National Park), but this is the essence of the life I’m now leading: trying to best use the relatively fixed financial resources I have. I reminded myself that the purpose of this section of the trip was to visit some of the English speaking cities that I thought I might want to live in at some point (principly Vancouver, Portland, LA and San Francisco). It doesn’t help though meeting people who say, “Oh, St Helens is the most amazing thing I have ever seen, you didn’t go?”

Vancouver

Vancouver is certainly everything people said it would be. I cycled along the sea wall of Stanley Park with seals playing a few feet from my bicycle wheels, with the mountains that cradle the city as the backdrop. I also went to see Vancouver’s Steam Clock, possibly the most boring city attraction ever. Like a mug I spent five minutes watching it, waiting for something to happen, but no, nothing.

I stayed at Vancouver Central, a hostel which turned out to be a rather impersonal and uninteresting place, although I met three fun Australian girls while having a cooking disaster (I bought some salmon, noodles and mushrooms, only to discover that the hostel only had a microwave. The most polite thing to say about the result was that it tasted bettter than it looked). We went out on the town, ending up in the hostel’s own next door pub/club. I had a great time.

It was a strange night, and was a reminder that Canada is very much a separate country to the US. Half the crowd was incredibly dressed up, the other half looked like they hadn’t bothered making any effort to change clothes at all, and neither group appeared to mind that the other seemed to have come for a completely different night. Also, there was quite a frisson in the air, with some very determined older women and some truly appallingly bad pulling attempts from some of the men. It was fun to see grown men using tactics such as meeting a girl’s eye as she walked past and doing a little dance shimmy to try and impress her. I was pleased to see that half way across the globe this technique produced the same amount of scorn it does at home. I’m toying with trying it in countries across the world, to see if it works anywhere. Perhaps Tahiti?

I would say more about Vancouver, which is unquestionably a superlative city, but frankly it was ruined for me by the few days I spent up in Whistler, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, which was one of the most beautiful places I have ever stayed in.

Whistler

Not a bad view for a hostel

Whistler mountain and village is two hours by bus north of Vancouver. The international youth hostel is a way away from the village and sits at the edge of Lake Alta. Words fail me to convey how stunning it was to stay there. Each morning we walked out to the hostel’s porch and looked out at the sun rising over the rippling lake, the forests and the snow capped mountains. At night we sat on the wooden jetty floating on the edge of the water, drank wine, sang made up songs and talked about anything. The social atmosphere was that of old friends on a camping trip, rather than the random travellers staying in a CAN$20 a night hostel we actually were. It was one of those times that made me so incredible thankful that I am a budget traveller, rather than those unfortunates paying to stay in the tourist shopping mall village. Over the last month I have wandered the cities of North America often feeling frustrated and limited, knowing I could have a great time if I only spent a comparatively small amount of money (say $50 more a day), knowing all the time that I couldn’t afford to. But this was one of those times that budget/backpacker travel surpassed normal tourist travelling to such an extent that I felt geniune pity for the people that had come to Whistler and not had this amazingly beautiful experience.

I met three particularly cool people at the hostel – Craig and Mark, from New York state who were on a holiday in Canada, and Bobbi, an eastern Canadian who was heading off to Australia. One day the four of us took the ski lift up to near the top of Whistler mountain and did the two hour hike to the summit. Although my breathing quickly began to sound like a rusty steam bellows, it was a great walk and we reached the peak to stare out at the mountains surrounding us in all directions. In southern England, every centimeter of land has been utilised and categorised – here was wildness heading off beyond the horizon.

Me and my friends by our lake in Whistler

Parts of the peaks of these mountains have ice on them all year round. On the way back down, Mark and Craig found a thick sheet of padding (from one of the ski lift struts) lying at the bottom of an icy punchbowl. They used it as a makeshift sled, and once we had seen that they had survived the first run, all four of us piled on and kicked off. To an applauding audience and an entourage that held our bags and took photos, we hurtled down icy basins, ending up in a dissipated tangle of limbs. With ice sodden hands, feet and backsides, we headed back down to the ski lift as winter sport celebrities.

Canada has Bears!

Whistler is prime Black Bear country – the Anthropological Museum in Vancouver is full of bear themed totem poles and carvings from the original inhabitants of British Columbia. One particular totem pole had a bipedal, fifteen foot snarling bear holding a tiny terrified human up to its chest. Having shared the Whistler area with the bear population for a few days, I began to appreciate that perspective. Bears in Whistler are pretty used to humans: if you are walking alone, talk calmly to yourself and the bears should leave you alone (talking helps them identify you as a human, apparently). This was strangely little comfort when I was actually walking the fifty minute journey from village to hostel through wooded paths. One night, a British hosteller had been walking back in the near darkness, turned around and saw a bear cross the path some twenty feet behind him. He watched the bear disappear back into the woods, then ran the remaining kilometers.

View from the summit

I didn’t have such a close encounter, but from the safe height of the ski lift down Whistler, we were lucky enough to witness three bears foraging in the mountain forest. For a true city boy like me, this was a pretty cool encounter with the wilderness.

With real regret, on Thursday we packed up our stuff and headed back to the city. I wonder whether I should have stayed longer, but the hostel was out of vacancies and I wanted to get going towards Mexico for financial reasons.

I sat on the jetty and dangled my feet in the water of the lake one last time. I was heading south, planning to eventually reach the ice at the other end of the world, at the glaciers of southern Chile.