(Message sent Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:59:21 -0700)
Hi everyone. I'm writing this from a gorgeous little park on an island in the Bow River in Calgary. (My park bench is at N 51 03.380 W 114 04.202.) It's mid-day, the sun is shining, and the park is full of happy people having fun, plus some joggers.
Like Vancouver, downtown Calgary seems a very pleasant place for a big city. The streets are wide and straight and clean, and on every corner stands a vast, soaring, gleaming, marble-faced skyscraper looking like it's just been completed.
I traveled from Vancouver to here aboard a train called the Rocky Mountaineer. The trip took two days, with an overnight stop in a sprawling town called Kamloops. I had opted to go first-class, despite the eye-popping price, partly to see what first-class travel was like, but mostly because of the first-class carriages. They are double-deckers, with a dining room on the bottom deck and the main seating on the top deck. The windows in this deck are wide and wrap around to cover much of the ceiling, so you can look up. There is also a small observation deck, open to the elements.
The views were spectacular, and vary greatly as the journey progressed. At first the surrounding terrain consisted of heavily wooded craggy mountains. Then you turn into another river valley and suddenly the terrain is all soft, crumbly sandstone. Then you travel through a very arid area where the hills have been sculptured by the winds. One place in this section was called the "Painted Bluffs", and consists of rocks with abrupt, fractured planes, each plane a subtle, faint pastel colour - just a slight tinge of red, or green, or yellow, each plane a different colour from its neighbours.
This area has two claims to fame beyond its inherent fascination - a scene from the X-Files was shot there, and it's the local rattlesnake make-out point. Apparently for a few days each year rattlesnakes from all over the area get together for a big snaky love-in.
Then on the second day you travel past a series of tall white bluffs - apparently the remains of the sediment from an ancient lake that emptied catastrophically when the glacial ice-dam that had formed it gave way.
And then finally you are into the astonishing Rockies themselves - immensely steep slab-faced mountains with craggy, broken ridge-lines. The last of the winter snow was still sitting on the tops, making its way slowly down into a series of steep gullies, looking like mini-glaciers near the tops, melting to become steep, fast-flowing white cascades of water as they reached the tree-line.
For some reason many of the peaks have fractured into nearly-horizontal and nearly-vertical planes, giving the appearance of step-pyramids. The remaining snow had preferentially settled on the horizontal steps of course, giving an impression of a giant cake, with alternating snow-rock-snow-rock layers.
And then abruptly the Rockies are completely gone, and you are traveling through low rolling hilly pastureland.
The train spent much of its time following river valleys, and the rivers were just as varied as the mountains. Some were broad and calm and blue, many were white or aqua-marine with suspended rock-flour from the glaciers, while most were muddy, brown, angry-looking rivers running very high with lots of whirlpools and contrary currents.
Another fun aspect of the trip is the wildlife spotting. A spotter in the engine carriage at the front would radio sightings back to the attendants in the carriages who would call out, "Bear on the right!" or whatever. We saw lots of bald-headed eagles, ospreys in their nests, funny little guys called ground squirrels, poking out of their little piles of earth to stare with apparent interest at the train, elk, beavers, foxes and a moose. There were also two bear sightings, but I wasn't fast enough to spot them myself.
There were also some amazing feats of engineering along the way. One section of the track as originally laid down had a gradient of four degrees. This may not sound like much, but it's dangerously steep for a train, and that section caused numerous derailments and deaths before it was fixed in 1904. They fixed it by diverting the track towards a mountain into which they cut a spiral tunnel that turns through 220-odd degrees, rising as it does so. Having left the mountain some 15m higher than it went in, the track heads straight for another mountain and repeats the trick. Amazing stuff.
I was lucky enough to find myself traveling with Sam, a journalist from Pittsburgh. She is spending two weeks traveling around Canada under the auspices of a Canadian tourist board, blogging as she goes. You can follow her adventures here. (I get a couple of mentions.) She turned out to be the ideal traveling companion - funny, intelligent, articulate, and with a knowledge of Monty Python skits greater than my own! She could even do the accents spot-on, and at one stage had me cracking up over her impersonation of Eddie Izzard impersonating Sean Connery!
The Rocky Mountaineer operation is an extraordinarily slick machine. For example, you check your luggage in at Vancouver, and when you get to your hotel in Kamloops (paid for as part of the ticket), your luggage is already in your room. When you leave the next day, you just leave your luggage in the room, and it magically finds its way to wherever you are staying in Calgary.
There were also loads of staff on board. Our train had both a Train Manager and a Guest Services Manager, and our carriage had two top-deck attendants, two bottom-deck attendants, plus two cooks.
However - and unfortunately there is a 'however' - I had a problem with the service: there was far, far too much of it. This is not a criticism so much as a mismatch of requirements. They seemed to feel obliged to keep us entertained. And maybe this is appropriate for the target demographic - Sam and I were the youngest on our carriage - but it wasn't right for me. The entertainment centred on food. We got fed a pre-breakfast snack, then we went down to the dinning deck for breakfast, then there was a round of drinks, then a pre-lunch snack, then lunch (itself three courses), then another round of drinks, then a biscuit, then another round of drinks. The meals were long drawn-out affairs, with conversations that started with lines like, "Back in 1953 when I first starting working in Defense..." and, "When I was in the Merchant Navy..." These people were all interesting and well-traveled, and had there been nothing to do I might have welcomed the diversion. But I found myself resenting having to be polite to strangers while who-knows-what wonders whizzed by unwondered-at. Frankly I would have been a hundred times happier with a pack of sandwiches on the observation deck.
But that's a minor thing, and all-in-all it was a fabulous, spectacular experience.
Tomorrow I fly to Winnipeg to meet my good friends Victoria, Jon, and Rory for the first time. Stay tuned!
Love Joff.
PS: Hey! Guess what! I met my first grumpy taciturn Canadian! It was a taxi driver who clearly felt that taking the likes of me to my destination was beneath his woefully under-appreciated talents. All he said to me all trip was "eleven", this being the price of the fare, which he had helpfully rounded up, presumably to relieve me of the burden of having to decide on a tip.
The people really are astoundingly friendly. A worker in a menial job will give you a genuine, beaming smile and welcome, where the equivalent person in NZ might give you a forced smile or platitudinal politeness. Just now, in the park, a road crew was working on a path. A guy driving a roller stopped by my bench and said, "Sorry about the noise sir!" Can you imagine a Kiwi road crew acting like that?
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