Emerging into the light from the sub-ground-level train station beneath Yaletown, Vancouver, the first thing I smell is weed. I catch a whiff at least three more times in the 800m walk to the apartment we have for one night to recover from our long-haul flight, before we pick up our campervan.
Welcome to Cannabis
It so happens that my Canadian buddy in NZ has messaged to wish me a fun trip. I reply, ‘You folks have really embraced the whole legalisation of cannabis thing, huh?’ He says we should get amongst, just for the cultural experience if nothing else. Buds, drinks, chocolates or gummies – apparently the shops are like Apple stores (with more helpful staff).
Cannabis was legalised for recreational use across Canada in 2018 becoming the second nation in the world to do so (after Uruguay). According to the latest Canadian Cannabis Survey conducted by Health Canada, approximately 26% of Canadians aged 16+ reported using the drug for recreational purposes over the past 12 months (that’s around 8 to 9 million people) though only 6% of the overall population report using it daily or near daily. Retailers are everywhere – and I mean everywhere. In every little town – and sometimes on random strips of land in between – the brightly painted facades welcome you. With roughly 3,800 stores across the nation generating annual sales of $5.5 billon CAD, it’s big business.
My Canada Travel Blog
Despite my good buddy’s encouragement, we haven’t stopped into a cannabis store and we’re unlikely to do so. Our drug of choice is the outdoors and we’re here for a more natural high (literally and figuratively) with ‘as much hiking as possible’ planned for our Canadian Rockies Roadie. 18 nights covering 2,500km, book-ended with nights in Vancouver.
This is the first leg of ‘our big trip’, visiting Canada, Iceland, Scotland (family), Nepal, Bhutan, and ideally somewhere else on the way back home to NZ, depending on dollars remaining. I’m planning to write about the internal journey too; what taking four months away from work does for the mind, body, and soul, but this is my attempt at a travel blog – ideally something that’s helpful for anyone planning to visit this part of the world, and something to accompany the Facebook photos (TBC if I ever get on the ‘gram, folks; your strong encouragement has been noted).
On a more personal note, this is a bit of an experiment. For many years of my young life, I wanted to be a writer of some kind. I took a year out maybe 7-8 years ago and got into writing flash fiction. Often, I liked the output, but the act of writing so precisely was a painstaking experience. However, I still feel a pull towards writing and I want to see if I can find a voice doing this. Can I write quickly? Find a balance of being informative and interesting? Can I be original or funny? (I’ll take mildly amusing, a wry smile even). Can I put something I’ve written out into the world that doesn’t feel perfect? Part of this is practicing, and I hope to get better as I go.
Anyway, enough preamble. We’re making nine stops on this Canadian Rockies Roadie. Let me tell you about Vancouver to Whistler.
Vancouver: Just for the night
We’ve been to Vancouver before; a stopover on our way back to the UK roughly a decade ago so this isn’t a go-to post for ‘things to do in Vancouver’. There wasn’t too much thought that went into selecting Yaletown for the night, other than we remembered it was a funky little place with a lot of restaurants. The agenda was eat, sleep and buy the millions of toiletries I refused to bring from NZ (every kg counts when you’re trying to pack a wardrobe crossing multiple seasons in 4 months).
Yaletown gets its name from Yale, a small town in the Fraser Canyon roughly 180km east of Vancouver. During the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in the 1880s, Yale was a major boomtown and railway equipment repair hub. When the CPR later extended into Vancouver, the repair shops, heavy machinery, and maintenance facilities were relocated to Vancouver. The workers followed, and this community began to refer to their new neighbourhood as Yaletown. The area grew into an industrial warehouse district filled with red-brick warehouses. Today, these have been converted into restaurants, boutiques, tech offices and loft apartments.
Yaletown is a little glitzy on a Saturday night. We see plenty women in kitten heels and strapless dresses; guys in sharp shirts (there are a fair few high-end places to eat). We opt for a cracking Italian called Capo & the Spritz – outstanding burrata and a great spot for people watching at the crossroads on Hamilton and Davie Streets. The cost of eating out in Canada generally is similar to that of NZ – though this is before the tipping kicks in. There are usually options to pay 10% and 15% but 20% is the recommended.
We stay at Level Yaletown. Unremarkable, and clean enough other than I reckon someone has broken a glass in our room and housekeeping hasn’t got all of it as I end up with something sharp in my foot. Cue the tweezers and a hasty search for jandals amongst the 60kg of luggage, to prevent further mishap. (Compression bags – wonderful, though not the undetectable extension charm of Hermione’s handbag I’d hoped they were).
The next morning, we have beautiful (giant) waffles at Nero, just a few doors along from our apartment, and order an Uber to take us to the outer suburbs to pick up our campervan. We went with Indie Campers who have a whole range of RVs of different sizes. I think we opted for the smallest one – the ‘Up Country XS’. Which I’m going to presume now means, ‘Extra Small.’ Me: ‘Ooh, it’s so cute! We’ll be so snug in that bed!’ If you’re planning to lie entirely prone for 8 hours, this is the van for you. One flip over and you’re either on the wall, on your other half’s arm, or perilously close to rolling onto the floor. (I’m giving it a bit of a rough time; we’ve had some pretty decent sleep and after Andy Marie Kondo’d the heck out of it, the space works great. And the two-burner stove can’t be faulted).
Anyway, we hit the road to Whistler, our first stop for two nights, just before lunchtime.
Whistler: Parkbridge Riverside Resort (150km driven)
Andy, unsurprisingly for anyone who knows him, adjusts superbly to driving on the right-hand-side of the road, confidently interpreting Canadian traffic and the corresponding rules. We seem to drive in endless loops of highways merging onto other highways but finally we’re out of North Vancouver and heading to Whistler, via Squamish. Once we hit the outer limits of the city and join highway 99 the scenery picks up. The highway is elevated along the coastline; boats of all sizes dot the inlets between the mainland and Vancouver island, and other smaller islands. The sky and the water compete for the prize of being the most enticing blue. And every so often little groups of road cyclists (elbows tucked, bottoms high) zip downhill, in Vancouver-direction. The uphills don’t look as much fun, but I get a little FOMO nonetheless. Just in general, I’m excited to get outside.
After a quick stop for provisions and lunch in Squamish, we get back on the road to Whistler (small world: the lad who serves us in Tacofino has just graduated from Stirling Uni, where Andy and I studied and met). We get to Parkbridge early afternoon and on check-on get an education on what it means to be ‘bear aware’ as bears are frequent visitors to the campground. Despite us both having had jumbo sleeps in the Vancouver apartment, we’re a bit tired by this point in the day so we don’t ask about bear spray when we can’t see it on the shelves in the campsite shop. That’s a little anxiety-inducing for me, but I’m on a bit of a high that we are finally here so I don’t worry about it so much. We park up the van in our shady spot and get some ice-creams to eat in the late afternoon sun, dangling our legs over Fitzsimmons Creek which runs through the resort.
Parkbridge is a great campground. Clean shower facilities, and a great little firepit where you can lift the circular rim to sweep out the ground underneath meaning you always have a dry base to burn the wood on. Andy cooks up some steaks as I try to defend a bag of chips from a cheeky bluejay in one of the fir trees. No sooner do I turn my back to fill our water bottles but the bird has landed on the picnic table and stabbed the bag with its beak several times. Ok, bluejay, your navy-blue quiff rocks, but your card has been marked.
Anyway, dinner is good, and we poke the fire, burning fat logs into the night as the stars gradually appear.
Whistler Village and a Warm-Up Hike
There are a few multi-use trails that run between the campsite and Whistler Village. And when I say ‘multi-use’, the trail signage shows a hiker, a biker, and a bear. Again, a bit unnerving, but there are plenty people on the trail and noise seems to be the best thing for keeping bears away, in general.
It’s a cold day too – not freezing, but grey and distinctly un-Canada, based on every photo you’ve ever seen – but all good, we’ve got plenty warm clothes with us. We mooch around the Olympic Village (Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010, with the outdoor alpine events held at Whistler) where just about every outdoor clothing brand you could ever think of has a store. We’re not big shoppers so we’re not that fussed for it, but you could shop up a storm here, and I bet it is gorgeous in the snow with the shopfronts all lit in Christmas lights. We have lunch and head for the ‘Village Gondola’ (there are many gondolas).
The gondola is an expensive thing. It costs us the best part of $200CAD for the pair of us, though it’s nearly 5km long and takes about 20 minutes to cover 1,175m, dropping you at the Roundhouse Lodge at 1,850m above sea-level. There’s usually another gondola you can take from there to Whistler Peak (the Peak Express) or you can take the ‘Peak 2 Peak’ over to Blackcomb Mountain, but neither are open at this time of year.
Outside at this height, it’s damn cold and there’s a good wind blowing. This is not a day for stunning views over Whistler; it’s a moody, misty afternoon, but we do see a couple of hoary marmots as soon as we get outside the Roundhouse Lodge, and chipmunks and squirrels frequently scurry across the tracks. The trails are quiet on a day like today. We amble round the Harmony Lake Trail, adding a bit of the Harmony Meadows Trail. In terms of difficulty, trails are usually shown as green (easy), blue (intermediate), and black (difficult) on trail maps – just like ski-runs. The Lake Trail is blue and the Meadows Trail is black, but the going is easy in terms of the terrain – earth, roots and rock; I think it’s just the ascent on the Meadows Trail that lifts it to a more difficult level. It warms me up anyway!
There’s a good 10km (black) trail that takes you up onto the ridge but we need a longer day, more energy, and better weather for that. We do our wee loop and head back down to the village, nabbing a ridiculous dairy-bomb of a hot chocolate from Rocky Mountain Chocolates and taking a few quick pics of the Fairmont at the north end of town. We opt to take the route past the Lost Lake on the way back to Park Bridge. There’s a lot of stressy bear signage, but we see nothing (thankfully) on the way back. The mountain bikers help, I reckon; Whistler is like Queenstown on steroids – there are mountain bikers and bike trails everywhere.
Whistler Stop: The Verdict
This was the right amount of time to spend here for the energy levels, season (i.e., Fall), and weather we had. We’d come back for longer if we had a ski-trip planned, as there’s plenty of big blue runs by the looks of the maps (and anyone we know who has skied here has loved it).
The campsite (Parkbridge) really met our expectations too, though unlike the Australian campsites we’ve visited (our only frame of reference) the central BBQs were few and far between. However, that seems to be the case with the other sites we’ve since visited. What is fantastic (again, the case with most of the sites we’ve since visited) is the potable water tap and the firepits at every camp spot, and the trees that segregate you from your neighbours, bringing a little privacy.
All in all, Whistler was a strong start to our big trip – I suspect sunshine and clear skies would have made it a spectacular one.
Next Stop, Sun Peaks…