Well today I got up nice and early (love being able to just do whatever I feel) and mucked around and watched the news on Tellie for a while. The current weather forecast is for nice weather for the next day or two. Although it doesn't look too good after that for at least a week. Lots of rain is coming and it looks like it'll hit when I get to the big cities again. Oh well, at least I get to experience rural (sort of) Canada with brilliant weather. It's a bit of a shame that at the moment I get dropped off in the cities in the evening. I can see the nice natural beauty, but it's difficult to capture it with photo's. Plus only staying overnight makes it difficult to organise trips to other places where I can 'get amongst' it. No matter, I suspect that when I get to Banff and Jasper I will be spoilt for scenery, so at the moment I am concentrating on investingating and exploring what I have available to me. Namely, ever different type of coffee and food outlet I can find haha. I am liking Starbucks a lot. I have tried a few of the other 'fringe' coffee places, but I suspect that Startbucks uses some sort of addictive substance in their coffees to make it taste so good. Plus their staff know what they are doing and make the experience rather pleasant. Last night I went to a restaurant called "Boston Pizza" and I ate one of their massive pizza's. haha Well I wont be doing that again and the guilt trip I gave myself from eating so much crap meant that eating like that just wasn't worth it. Oh well I'm on holiday - so I can afford to splurge like that once in a while.
As mentioned previously, I'm off to Port Hardy today. This will be another 'smallish' town where I will be just staying overnight. In fact, it looks like I will be getting into town, off the bus just as the sun will be dropping behind the hills (about 3:30pm) and I will hope that acocmodation and the ferry port is not too far away. I like to find my next departue point before I head off to bed,but I suspect that the ferry terminal shouldn't be too hard to find considering it is probably the main feature of the town. Port Hardy is one of the few most northern towns I will be visitng so I am sturdying myself for some real drops in temperature. Although watching the weather forecast this morning I found out that the real lows come when you head in-land. The watery island locations tend to stay just above freezing... lucky me eh? haha
That's another thing I have noticed now. The word 'eh' is thrown around rather casually here. It's quite brilliant form a tourists point of view. I seemed to have picked up a similar version of it and I walked around talking to be going 'yah' all the time. I can't help bit giggle to myself and smile all the time, even when I'm just sitting down doing nothing but listening to other people talk. Plus the good old Canadian/American accent is a delight to listen to, it's like a free comedy show. "Haayy Bawb, haw yor duuing, eh?" haha too funny. Ofcourse the opposite happens when I open my mouth. I tend to make people turn their heads as the walk and I sometimes give them a wave and smile. The lucky ones get me saying ""cheers mate" to them.
OK well writing up a storm here as usual. I better stop and do some postcards (old school!) as I have got a few to do now before I leave town.
Cheerios eh.
Matt
Day 7 - Part 2
I have been taking some notes as I think about certain things through out my day today. Now I am going to try and write them down here and hopefully enlighten you are casually readers.
1) The bus is a lot smoother than the train. Mainly because it runs on a concreted road/freeway most of the time. Where as tracks go clickety-clack and make it that much harder to try and get some sleep. Plus the damn train like to toot the horn when going through a residential area which was about every minute or two. And it didn't just toot the horn once, it was several times so it made it rather difficult to try and get some shut eye. (Although lets just forget the fact that it was early in the morning and that people really shouldn't be trying to sleep at the time of the day haha).
2) Another noticeable thing was that the train had a lot of older people on it, who where quite happy to send a smile in your direction if you made eye contact with them. The bus however was the complete opposite. It had quite a number of younger people on it and most of the looked or smelt like hoods or drunk poeple hehe. I really can't decide if I like the bus or the train better. (The bus is also a little cheaper, but the train is a little quicker).
When I was on the bus from Courtenay to Port Hardy I met two guys on the bus. 1 was 62 years old and an ex-fisho. Halfway through the 4.5 hour trip had started drinking a hip flask of vodka. By the time we got into Port Hardy had just finished it. So it was not surprising that I could hardly tell what the hell he was going on about most of the time. Luckily for me he tended to laugh at the majority of his speels, meaning that I just followed suit and laughed a bit as well just to keep him and his mate happy. The second guy was my age, and missing a boatload of front teeth. He was apparantly a native to the region, and he tried about a million times to get me to go with them out to the "Res" which was short for Reservation. haha He promised me as much fish as I could eat, free alcohol and himself as a bodyguard for later on when he was gonna start a fight, because he reckoned that the night wasn't complete unless he fought a little. Later through the trip he decided that he wasn't going to fight (must've changed his mind for some reason) because he thought it was just too dangerous these days and people bought weapons nowadays and it just wasn't a case of fisticuffs anymore. Oh, yeh and they promised to hook me up with whatever type of girl I wanted. haha I thought I was either going to be buried or married if I went out to the Res. So I gratefully declined his offer and when we got off the bus I tactifully avoided them by walking around several corners in their opposite direction haha. Plus I decided to avoid them so I found the best hotel in town and checked in. They were of the opinion that the flash hotels and pubs were not for them and that hard living and drinking was for them through and thorugh. haha It was quite a bit of brilliant piece of artful dodging if you ask me :-)
Although they did tell/show me a couple of interesting tidbits on the bus journey from Nam. One, was a conveyor belt that we drove over when nearing Port Hardy, it came out of a quarry and went under the road (the road turned into a bridge at that point) and way down into the forest. They told me that the conveyor belt went for several kilometers right down to the ocean wharf where it was automatically loaded onto ships destined for the U.S. They were quite disgusted by this, sayin that all their natural resources were being sold off like that. Reminded me of back home a bit really. The other thing they told me was that because Canada had either the oldest or most recent (I can't rememer which sorry) ice age, it meant that their gravel was some of the finest in the world, which means that it was the preferred material to use for the creation of silicon chips for the world market. Pretty interesitng I thought.
I got into Port ardy at 3:45pm. There was approxiamtely 1 hour before the sun went down behind the hills. Now I know what it is like to be a vampire. It's a race to find a place to sleep before the sun changes it's location. In my specific case, it's because when the sun goes down, the temperature likes to drop a hell of a lot and it's not a good idea to be stuck outside for too long without the proper insulation (which I do not have). So luckily for me I asked a few people and found the Glen Lyon Hotel and as it's off season I got it at half price like most other places I am finding, which is turning out to be very good. Right next to the Hotel was a restaurant and I the waitress told me that they do 'All you can eat fish n chips' haha DO THEY NOT KNOW WHO I AM!?!?! Somehow I composed myself and actually went against ever fibre in my body and just just to have 2 pieces of fish. The All you can eat special was for 'Cod' only. I hadn't tried the cod before so I figured it would be was to try some first before I went and chowed down and enptied their stocks of fish :-) So I only ordered a pice of cod and a piece of halibut. The Halibut reminded me a lot of NZ snapper. the cod reminded me a lot of Hoki. I will be trying Halibut a lot more, it much nicer by far. So I ate my dinner and then decided to go upstairs to the pub. It was a great night, which I am continuing in my next post.
Ciao
Matt!
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