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July 18 - Manitoba
Manitoba starts right where the flat lands of Canada do. The joke goes
that a neighbor tells a farmer that he thinks his dog ran away, and the
farmer looks to the horizon and says "Yep, looks like he left 3 days
ago." (The same joke is made in North Dakota.) Despite being just north
of North and South Dakota, Manitoba has Winnipeg, which is a good sized
city. Winnipeg suffers from a poor self-image -- someone from Winnipeg
told me that Drew Carey made some jokes about the town, and when people
in Cleveland are looking down on you, things are grim. Winnipeg is the
Slushy Capital of North America, despite its frigid winters, and a girl
at the youth hostel counter told me that they had a picture in the
paper of a guy in a blizzard sipping a slushy at a bus stop.
Winnipeg is also the gang capital of Canada (someone said North
America... and I said "Ahem... Los Angeles?" They conceded the point.) The
main problem is with biker gangs like the Hells Angels - who are a problem
elsewhere in Canada, like Quebec, which explained why people sometimes
looked at me a little funny. There are also native gangs. Even so, it
was a little hard to take seriously. I locked up my motorcycle, but was
never really worried.
What I did take seriously was the mosquitoes. They were unreal - far
worse than Ontario. I'd never seen anything like it before in an urban
area. Even in the middle of mall parking lot nowhere near trees, water,
or anything else welcoming to wildlife I was fighting them off. I
decided that enduring them was stupid when I had other options - besides,
when I get to Central America I don't want to try to endure malaria - so I
went to the United Army Surplus store and bought one of those mosquito
net hats. They look really stupid but work. I also picked up a new set
of waterproof boots and a new jacket.
My reason for being in Winnipeg was service on my bike, at this point
hitting 6000 miles, so I hung out for two days, the second of which I
made it to the local Fringe Festival. Apparently performers in Canada
traveled a fringe circuit from East to West, and there were some really
clever acts in the middle of Winnipeg. There was also a really good local
music scene. But at the same time, the local paper was running stories
about how young people were leaving in droves like in other places in
the Great Plains, leaving an aging population that was getting fewer in
numbers. As I drove through the dwindling farming communities of the
plains I wondered why America and Canada didn't just pull out of
Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota and maybe half of Manitoba and let
these lands return to the people that originally inhabited them, given
that the settlers seemed to be losing interest and leaving themselves.
July 19 - Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan was even more desolate than Manitoba, and I blew through
it as quickly as I could. The land gradually was turning from lush green
plains to semi desert as the moisture disappeared, just as it does in
the US. The land was ruled by grass and grasshoppers, and the whistling
wind was the main fact of life. I actually like traveling through the
Great Plains. I spent 2 weeks bicycling through western Minnesota, North
Dakota and eastern Montana, and after a while I got into the flatness
and the constant wind the way that some people come to love the desert.
But by this time, I really just wanted to be in Vancouver. I made it to
Regina, and the hostel was completely booked because of the Canadian
league football game between Edmonton and Regina - a local rivalry. The
hotels were booked up completely. So it was with a feeling of extremely
mild regret that I bypassed Regina and headed out to find a campground.
It had been a long day on the motorcycle, and I was beat, but in some
ways being out on the plains was more inviting than being in a three-horse
town at a Best Western, across the street from the Walmart anyway.
Buffalo Pound Provincial Park was far off the highway, about 12 miles,
and was a gorge that descended from the plain around it to a lake. The
name comes from the herding and slaughter of buffaloes that the native
Canadians used to make at the spot, and you can imagine since it was
the largest local body of water it probably was an important meeting
place and cultural area. It was probably considered sacred. The park was
pretty well organized, with the occasional nod to the environment. But
the clientele were mostly locals, so with a fairly typical western (as in
west of the Mississippi) mentality the white Canadians at the park were
using it to its fullest, including speed boats that kept going until
after midnight on the long thin lake. The place had been pretty well
trashed by the previous campers in a way that seemed a little shocking,
even by the standards of the small drive in lot, motel-with-trees kind of
park that this was. Garbage was everywhere, including the large,
recently caught rotting fish that someone had decided to return to nature
right behind the grill. It was one of those moments where I looked at the
place and thought "stupid white men", annoyed that I was one of them.
July 22 - Alberta
I kept moving the next day, onto Calgary, at what is a brutal pace for
a motorcycle, especially one that isn't really a cruiser bike. As I was
reaching Calgary, about 100 miles out, I saw a tiny but dark storm
cloud on the horizon. The deceptive thing about storm clouds on the Great
Plains is the big sky effect makes it impossible to tell how far away
things really are, and I remembered having tiny clouds like this become
giant storms when I was cycling through North Dakota. Within half an
hour, I was trying to outrun a gigantic storm front that took up most of
the sky. In another 20 minutes I was wondering if there were any
tornadoes inside of that storm front, as the Trans-Canadian highway ran first
southwest towards the storm, then northwest towards its edge, as it
kept getting bigger. It looked bad, and I could see houses a few miles
away disappear behind a curtain of silver that looked like very heavy
rain. I kept moving at 130 kph (80 mph) trying to get past it, and I was
relieved when I did. Then as I noticed another set of tiny clouds right
in the direction of Calgary. The rain seemed to be falling right on the
downtown area, as far as I could tell from 15 miles out. All I could
see was some skyscrapers on more flat plain, with no hint of the Rockies
behind them, which was disappointing. I ended up getting soaked by a
downpour for 10 minutes, while the sun setting to the west blinded me
through the brilliant spray.
I made it into downtown to the hostel, and within an hour went out
drinking with some other new arrivals and a Quebecois who was there working
the oilfields, trying to eventually get down to Honduras and Australia.
He explained that the Cowboy Bar had once not let him in because he had
an eyebrow piercing, and the local culture was pretty redneck cowboy
and proud of it. We were at a penny a drink happy hour at a bar, and they
served doubles of cheap booze with any mixer for 2 cents. I expected it
to be a college crowd, but it seemed like a fairly good mix of ages
drinking fast and hard. I was on a long line, so the guy next to me asked
me to get him 5 drinks with mine, which I did, not realizing that the
bartender would get pissed at me for not tipping heavily. The other guy
took the drinks and split. The bartender looked at the Canadian dollar
I handed him and said "Do me a favor, don't come back." I ended up
tipping him for the 5 drinks, making it still a cheap but not really
pleasant hard liquor drinking session. The English guy with us was tattooed
and goth looking, so we decided to slip out of the Fox and Firkin (which
turns out, is a Canadian chain) and went off to a faux-Irish pub for
beer, where we critiqued the abominable Guinness pouring. Miles was off
to a reservation on the American side of the border where he was going
to be a guest, so neither of us was really loving the cowboy thing.
He'd been routed through Dallas on his way over from London, so he'd
really had it by the time he'd got to Calgary.
The next day I hit the Glenbow Museum before leaving town. This was by
far the best part of Calgary. The main feature was a temporary exhibit
of the Group of Seven in western Canada. The Group of Seven were
Canada's premier landscape artists before WWII. I'd seen some of their stuff
with Cathy in Montreal, and I wasn't really impressed. Turns out, this
was because their best stuff is in private collections, and the pieces
they had done on the landscape near Calgary and Banff was their best
work. The Group of Seven hadn't all been in the West, and the "Seven" was
actually somewhat variable anyway, but the main painters were
incredible, and of them Harris did the best job I've ever seen of conveying the
sense of enormous mass that the Canadian Rockies give you. That day and
the next I drove through Banff and Lake Louise, and saw some of the
actual mountains that they had painted, which were easily recognizable,
and I had the problem taking pictures of them with a camera that one of
the painters had complained about - nothing will really adequately
convey the sense of scale, the stomach wrenching sense of vertigo that you
actually get from looking UP at them. The highway ran right underneath
some of the largest peaks, and because the Rockies have strata of rocks
in them that in some cases goes diagonally, it sometimes felt like the
faces were even taller and more above you than they really were.
Traffic slowed down as people wound through the passes and tried to see the
mountains around them while driving. A motorcycle is a great way to see
them, since you can look up and in any direction, the only danger being
that you'll drive off of a cliff while going "wow." My average speed
dropped from 80 to around 55, more from sightseeing than from the road
conditions.
Of course, the road conditions were terrible also. Trucks were having a
hard time getting up and down the grades that went as high as 8%. As
the day wore on, you went from the near darkness of the shadow behind a
mountain to the sun right in your eyes and back again with every turn,
and the day that I left Calgary I decided to stop after only 160 miles
because the riding conditions were bad.
July 24 - British Colombia
Yesterday I made my move from Golden, near Banff, all the way to
Vancouver, my longest drive yet. The saving grace was that the coastal range
in BC has a four-lane highway all of the way through it, so I burned
through to Vancouver in 8 hours. It was also incredibly hot in the valleys,
and freezing as you climb out of them. I nearly fell off my bike on
arrival at the hostel, but it was worth it to finally be at the west
coast. Waking up today was like a bad hangover, and my legs and back and
butt are in some pain. Tomorrow I push on to Seattle, a hop of 200 miles,
but then my motorcycle will be in the shop, and then I'll be on the
ferry for Alaska, so I'll have some time to rest (plus I'm supposed to
finally get a gel seat, which should really help.)
I did some driving around town today, and the scenery is gorgeous, like
Seattle and San Francisco. The Fort Stanley Park is like being in a
northwest forest, five minutes from skyscrapers. Another five minutes
through downtown and you're at the beach. Life here does not suck. I've
been editing my journal notes in a Korean internet cafe, surrounded by the
sounds of carnage in Halflife Generation as all of the kids in here try
to kill each other (but it's only $2 Canadian an hour.)
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