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Tuesday, August 19, 2003

 
Some thoughts on Vancouver and the island...

Soup and a sandwich - clam chowder + salmon salad = trad Vancouver lunch, v. fine.

Glittering glass ziggurats, "old" colonial houses, the odd green street just like England and the post apocalypse zone of East Hastings Street...

On climbing the "Grouse Grind" on Grouse mountain, a haiku (feel free to point and laugh)

Hot sun, falling rain
Steam rises, green umbrellas
Heart rejoice, leap high

On the ferry to Vancouver island:

Mountain tops shimmer in smoke stack heat haze.
Ship shudders and the wind whips in.
High and bright is the soul of the morning.
The birds and the beasts see us coming in.

(y'know that might be a song right there)

Vancouver Island was amazing -

It was like stepping off the edge of the world - we went out onto the open Pacific from Tofino (on the west coast of Vancouver Island) in the 21ft Titan Zodiac "Seafire" with 2, 150bhp outboards. Flying along at just under 40knots wrapped up like the Michelin man in layers of clothes, full survival suits and ponchos over that... the endless waste of the ocean (nothing between us and Japan!) rising up in mighty swells greeted us rudely with facefuls and gobfuls of freezing saltwater. And there be monsters here! Stellar sea-lions lounging on rocks like fat whiskery drunks in dirty macs, wild orcas dorsal fins slicing through the waves backs arched and the odd tail flipped high, grey whales blowing - huge fish stenching breath like the world's biggest tuna fart! and on our return fat sausage harbour seals and the swift grey backs of porpoise.
And then...
a walk through the giant green cathedral of virgin temperate rainforest, dripping and shining with moisture, feet slow hollow drumming on the boardwalk the only sound - and out of the trees into Hot Spring Cove where scores of us assorted tourists of all shapes, sizes, ages, nationalitiesand costumes lolled in the hot water which falls in a steming shower into a cleft in the coastal rocks, sulphurous water from the earth mingling with the cooling sea at one end. Some of the crazier folks went into the sea itself - Graham, skipper of the Seafire swore that if you got hot enough in the speing that it "just made your skin tingle". Hah! Having been swimmming in the water off Long Beach I wasn't going there!

... oddly after being out in the waves on the Zodiac, despite all the thousands of others who do this every year I really felt like the last of the great explorers! ;)