Canada

I really loved Canada. It was so much more in every way than I expected – the scenery, the people, the variety. We enjoyed the tour itinerary, and what we didn’t love, we were fascinated by anyway.

We started in Vancouver, and went to Grouse Mountain as our travel agent recommended. It was okay – the grizzly bears were wonderful. The scenery was obcured by smoke, a problem for much of the first week or so of the trip. Glad I went, wouldn’t bother going back, though I loved Vancouver.

The tour proper started on the second night with a dinner, where we met our awesome travel guide, but also met the fascist group who would be the bane of our existence for two weeks. Hard drinking, small thinking, white trash with money. Ugh. But we also had some great people and I prefer to remember them instead.

Our first excursion was a First Nations guided tour up Indian Arm. Of great historical and spiritual signficance for the Salish people, I have the pretty scenery got dull after a bit because I was so bloody tired. But after a bit of a nap, I woke up and engaged our fantastic guide, Cease Wyss, in convo, which proved to be rewarding in the extreme. Amazing lady – an ethnobiologist, musician and drummer, canoe teacher, and instructor to First Nations actors. She made the trip a real highlight of the tour, and a great start. (Pictures after the cut – click to see full sized version in a new window) Continue reading “Canada”

North America – wow!

We took 2600 photos on this trip, and still couldn’t capture the full magnificence of it all. I’ll do my best to convey a little of it for you, but honestly, if I could pay for you all to do this trip yourselves, I would. It’s magical.

I will break up the photos into several several posts –  Canada, Alaska, Seattle, California, Mad Hotels, and Critters. But in brief, we had a magnificent time, stayed in some damn nice hotels, saw amazing things, met wonderful people (and some shitheads, meh), and ate lots and lots of incredible meals. It was as different an experience from the New Zealand debacle as you could imagine. I would heartily recommend APT as a company to tour with as well. So professional.

As a direct result of this trip, we bought a DSLR camera, a Nikon D5300 with telephoto, and we also booked a cruise to Antartica for December 2015. We fell in love with cruising, and Holland America proved itself to be a wonderful, safe and clean cruise line. A friend who will remain nameless was scornful at the idea of only spending three days in Antartica, but since the boat can’t land, and even if it did, I’m not sure what I would *do* in Antartica given the weather and limitations on exploring etc. I’m perfectly content with my choice. We go to Chile and Argentina, as well as the Falkland Islands. It’s a trip I would never do by land. Can’t wait.

 

Our stay in the rainforest

It was our twenty-third wedding anniversay on 20 July (!!), and we spent it at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat in the Lamington Plateau. This was our second visit there, but last time we went in summer. This time, it was mid-winter, and during a cold snap. Like last time we went for an all inclusive package (excluding lunches), so we could do pretty much what we liked. Continue reading “Our stay in the rainforest”

And we’re back!

Actually we’ve been back since last wednesday. Shattered doesn’t begin to cover the mental exhaustion caused not only by flogging the car on the roads for three days straight, but also contending with the worst sequence of roadworks I’ve ever seen in any country. On our last day we literally could not go for more than twenty kilometres at any point without being slowed, stopped, or diverted, and all with billboards screaming about accidents and speed cameras. The information overload and the concentration involved damn near killed me. Continue reading “And we’re back!”