Canada

​P A R T   O N E :

T H E    A M E R I C A S

CANADA:

LOONIES, TOONIES AND BOONIES
Go West!

In your Sunday best,

Go West!!

In your pants and vest,

Go West!

I don’t remember the rest,

Go West! Go West!

(Me, a la Village People)
8-10-02

I’m in Toronto! I haven’t really slept for about a day and a half – I have been snatching little dozes in the only ways you can when you’re using public transport. 

Early this morning, I left Helen’s quiet country cottage under a cold English mist, hitched a ride to London in no time at all, in the time saved got an unplanned bus to Reading to say goodbye to my dad, zipped and back to Gatwick by this afternoon. Eight hours of ariel time-warp later and here I am. 

There is the slow dawning that I’ve shifted from the fantasising of several years into this situation where I’m actually, finally, at a foreign airport clutching a ticket that says ‘Canada’ on it. The surreality is slowly starting to wear off… It’ll take a little while to adjust. 
We flew in via Chicago and over the Mississippi, I didn’t know the river starts from this far north. Remarkably, you can travel nearly all the way from Hudson’s Bay in the Arctic all the way to the Gulf of Mexico by various watery routes. A first glimpse of the mind-boggling scale of The Americas.

I meet two guys who are on their way to Minneapolis. They are nice friendly Americans, blowing negative stereotypes out of the window before I have even got off the plane. 

I chat with an English ex-fireman from the Midlands who is busy emigrating out to Canada with his girlfriend. It’s good to have some reassurance that there is at least one other fellow Brit doing a runner from the safety and comfort of his own home. 

We have flown over Greenland which is an astonishing sight – looking out of the window, the only three things I can see are the plane’s right wing, the thin sky of near-space and an endless sea of ice below. We are up so high that we are able to see the real life Earth and sea below resembling bits of the world map I had been looking at only the day before. It’s amazing to actually be able to recognise and put names to some of the coastal shapes far below.

When the Portuguese explored this part of the world with their horses and canoes in the sixteenth century they marked it down on their maps as ‘Ca’nada’. This translates as ‘Land of Nothing’. Don’t tell the Canadians. They are nice people and deserve to be treated as our friends.

Northern Canada looks as sparse from the air as it does from the map. 
I’m provisionally thinking of visiting Niagara Falls as it seems to be local to where I now find myself. Then I fancy going to Newfoundland and then afterwards hitching to the Yukon, preferably all without freezing to death. It’s not too bad here in Toronto right now, about sixty degrees during the day. 
Now it’s 11pm, and I need to find a place to sleep. Either I attempt to sleep in the airport, or I venture out into this completely unknown place and see what I can find. I opt for bedding down on a nice indoor carpet right where I am; with a metal bench and a corner of wall and window as my motel for the night. The room service is rubbish, but at least it’s free.
9-10-02

Niagara! The lush film location that launched the career of Hollywood’s most glamorous star ever.

Well, if you’re going to do something random, you may as well do it in style. I am at Niagara Falls. Its name alone conjures exotic filmatic images of romance and intrigue. Best leave it like that really, cos the real thing is something of a disappointment. Whatever natural grandeur it once possessed has been truly blighted, and has fallen from it’s former glory just as Marilyn Monroe ultimately did. If you squint and hold your right hand in front of your face, you can block out all the neon casino vulgarity and maybe see it how it really was before the conquesters turned up. Now it’s all full of Holidayhardrockinn hotelmotelthingblah. Anyway on the map, it’s just down the road  from Toronto, so along I come, just for the whateverness of it. Okay, in truth so that I can casually toss into a conversation an ‘Oh yeah, I went there once’ just in case I’m ever with someone who is looking over a map of exotic holiday destinations or watching that particular Marilyn Monroe film. 
The geography here is going to take some adjusting to. What looks on the map like it’s ‘just down the road’ is actually more than a hundred miles away. This place is hooooooge. If a Canadian road map was the same scale as a British road map, you wouldn’t be able to unfold it on the dashboard of a car, you’d need the back of an empty articulated lorry. Really.
Travelling by coach, I pass a few familiar places, causing slight confusion in my mind that has not yet quite totally arrived in Canada yet. London and Windsor are just down the road, and Whitby, Lincoln and Peterborough are nearby too.
I arrive at Niagara late in the evening. Task number one; find somewhere to call home for the night. It is dark and misty, which by my rules of engagement is a double bonus – lesser visibility means more likelihood of finding a suitable spot to be unseen in.

After having found a sleeping place, I dump all my stuff in the bushes here and go for an unencumbered walk. I am going to go and find an internet cafe. It really is neon Americana-a-go-go on the Canadian side. I am hoping that it’s only like this because the other half of the Falls is in the US (the town of Buffalo). I am hoping that Canadians in themselves have less excessive tastes.
10-10-02

Upon waking up I take my plastic poncho thing off me and my bags. Quite a heavy dew. My sleeping bag is damp on the outside, and so are parts of my coat that I am using for a pillow. Methinks I shall have an interesting time juggling me and my stuff in all the undoubtedly wet places I am yet to encounter, especially as I’m supposed to do it whilst being up a tree in a hammock and avoiding being eaten by bears. Camping out during the dry parts of the year is a doddle, but in winter I end up having to be vigilant in trying to keep rain out and end up making do with being either terminally damp or having to make fires regularly (something I’m not in the habit of doing).
Niagara Falls, or ‘Gahnawehta’ to the original local Cayuga Indians, is actually three falls; by the white man’s names – Horseshoe, American, and Bridal Veil (largest to smallest). Horseshoe is the most powerful waterfall in North America, whilst all three combined let through more water than any other falls in the world. Together they straddle the US/Canadian border. It is on the Niagara River which drains Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. 
In the dark of the night, I knew I was somewhere near the water’s edge but in the morning it becomes apparent that my sleeping spot is a mere ten foot away from the edge of the 200 foot high gorge just downstream from the Falls. Fortunately there is a nice sturdy fence separating me from certain death. I can hear birds between the white noise of the falling water. Sun’s just coming up. 
There is suburban sprawl on both sides of the gorge, I can’t really see from here what it looks like on the US side, all I can see is the sides of a few big houses and a few cars blanketed by a veritable throng of large friendly-looking deciduous trees. Actually my trip to Niagara has definitely been worth it just to wander in and out of the streets here on the Canadian side. It’s a bit of a thrill to actually be amongst all those big clapboard houses that you see on American films and TV, where houses have verandas and big beautiful trees in the garden. It’s all very cosy looking in a 1970s chunky knit jumpers kind of way.

Not many houses have really big gardens, but just seeing what stuff people have in their yards is fascinating; kids bikes, bits of wood, skateboards, gardening in progress. Ordinary life stuff, just slightly maple syrup flavoured. 

I’ve always had a bit of a fascination for seeing inside other people’s houses (especially if they are creatively interesting) and this satisfies my voyeuristic tendancies to some degree. Added to which it’s also Halloween, and outside most of the houses seem to be engaged in a friendly competition to see who can get the best looking house front. There are pumpkins (real, plastic or orange rubbish bags with faces on them), ghosts (some are bed sheets hung in trees), Draculas at the window, cauldrons in the garden, fairy lights, ‘Happy Halloween’ hanging on the doors. There seems to be a vogue for having pairs of mannequin’s legs that disappear waist-down into the lawn and occasional limbs hanging from trees. No heads though, curiously. 

I love the style of the houses. For a start they’re nearly all wooden which instantly makes them look warm and really homely. The rest – only a few – have vinyl sidings made to look like painted clapboard. Paradoxically, it’s only the motels and tourist stuff that looks horrible (i.e. concrete and bricks). Of the wooden houses, it looks like the town council must have said ‘Okay, here’s an acre of land, go and build whatever you like – just make it look good though.’ Houses have verandas upstairs and/or downstairs, round turrets (very Scottish), spiral staircases outside; and are for the most part painted really beautiful colours; Norwegian rust reds, deep blues, mustard yellows like you often find at an English seaside. No two houses are the same. I know we don’t have the same availability of space and wood, but the Brits are missing something here. So often there is potential for beauty and yet so often we pass up the opportunity.
I meet a scruffy English guy who is living here. He’s moved here from Portsmouth after having met some American woman on the internet.

Neither the United States nor Britain would allow them to legally live together in either country, so she’s moved to Buffalo NY and he’s moved here. It’s going to work out cos they are having a baby. Ah, the romantic naivety of relationship glue.
Last night I met two raccoons which are marginally less than totally shy; I say ‘Hello’ to one. It stops rooting about for food for a moment, looks up at me in interrupted surprise and then hops off into a bush where it can carry on its business without being looked at. They are slightly smaller than Jack Russels, have bushy stripy tails and a mask that makes them look like bandit foxes. 

The squirrels here are completely black, beautiful and also completely crazy. They are going bonkers over something and then I see what – thousands of little tiny walnuts.

Unfortunately upon closer investigation, I discover that the walnuts taste like pants, so I won’t be foraging for those. I find loads of tree-garlicky type plants, which are like tiny garlic cloves clumped in a ball at the tops of stems. I stuff loads in my bag in the spirit of true huntery-gatheryness. And I’ve found a plant that looks quite like stag-horn sumach, but smells like malty-coffee when you rub the leaves. Doesn’t seem to be edible though. 

It’s the middle of autumn here, and quite mild during the day. 

I am on my way to Sydney later on today, which should take thirty-six hours by bus, and then after resurrecting myself with some of yer actual walking, I have decided to get the ferry to Newfoundland, where if you care to take a look at a map, you may find one or two class comic place names.
11-10-02 

I get to the bus at the other side of town with five minutes to spare…

Running with a heavy rucksack always makes me feel like a prize turnip. It is an activity that no sensible human being should ever indulge in. I suddenly feel sorry for soldiers. 

Toronto to Montreal looks much like southern England just more stretched out and as such is not very interesting, I like New Brunswick better – endless maple forest blazing in glorious red orange and yellow; it all looks self-sown too (i.e. natural) . Now I get why the Canadians have a maple leaf on their flag. 
The symbol of the maple leaf was first used by French Canadians in the 18th century, and then in different forms by Ontario and Ottowa. In 1834 the first major of Montreal called the maple ‘The king of the forest, the symbol of the Canadian people’. In English-speaking Canada, ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ was the unofficial national anthem. Eventually in 1965, the differing maple emblems were amalgamated and homogenised into the non-specific maple leaf-ish shape that we see today. Well, ain’t that just a 1960s type thing to do eh?
There are no villages or towns at all between Fredricktown and Moncton – that’s about 180 km of unadulterated forest colours. 

Moncton, Nova Scotia. Change at the bus station, stretch legs, have a bite to eat, get some fresh air and write… 

Oops! The next bus having loaded my rucksack onto it just left without me (too busy writing to notice it leaving). I am informed that  all is well and it just means that it gets there before me. Phew. I hope.

It’s now about 2.30pm and a bright sunny day. My head seems to have a lot of music in it at the moment which is a good thing to have in your head (tunes from the funky Basement Jaxx album ‘Rooty’ almost exclusively).
Today’s observations: 

I’ve seen three cop cars in two thousand kilometres. 

There’s almost no litter at all. 

I see a squashed skunk on the road. Maybe I’ll see a live one. 

All the college kids are back home from New Brunswick to Cape Breton for Thanksgiving weekend. I meet a few of them that get on the bus. They’re really friendly and we talk loads. It seems the Englishman is something of a novelty.
End of the journey, North Sydney, Nova Scotia.

There’s been a family of four on the bus all the way from Ontario. They are the heroes of the journey. An unmanageable mountain of baggage and two quietly tired youngsters; quite an achievement to get all this way with their souls still intact. I reckon they must be on their way home. 

A tall gangly guy, very friendly, ushers us foot passengers onto the boat from the shuttle bus. He instantly fulfils my image of the main character ‘Quoyne’ in the book The Shipping News. 
The ferry that will carry us from the tired late night of North Sydney to the bewilderedness morning of Newfoundland is the ‘Leif Eriksson’; named after the first white man to set foot on America (more about him later).

It’s 11 pm and I’d been on that bus journey for thirty-six hours, with only two brief stops. I finally re-unite with my rucksack. I’m really tired. I cry small tears of joy at having finally arrived at a moment that feels like adventure, like I’ve let go of something that was holding me back for a long long time; fear.

Finally doing what I want feels rather like suddenly rediscovering an old friend and wondering where the hell he’s been all this time.
It doesn’t matter how far out you go, it’s still the centre of your world. I now find myself in the heart of my dream. 

This time last week I was drinking whisky with Helen, David, Andy and Becky E. It’s curious to think that I had absolutely no inkling whatsoever of where I would be in seven days time… 

It’s 11.30 pm. Time for bed said Zebedee.
12-10-02 

I sleep on the vibrating wobbling ship and just before first light we reach Port Aux Basques. 

It’s chilly and I am somewhat stunned into wakefulness. There is nothing to do but start hitching from the port straight away, especially as now is likely to be the only time I will get a ride out of here – it looks like the only cars here will be the ones coming off the boat; there doesn’t seem to be much other local population otherwise at this time of day. I make my way off the clanking ferry ramp and walk for the first time in what seems ages, out into a cold stark morning. At least it’s dry. Up a short hill away from the harbour, I find a decent vantage point for hitching.

Unexpectedly, a guy with one leg comes out of nowhere hopping past at a furious pace; he stops long enough to tell me that he’s had an argument with his girlfriend in the town the night before and now she’s driven back 850 km to the other side of the island without him. He’s an odd character; hopping off down the road swearing to himself. I have to presume that he is actually going to stop somewhere and hitch. St John’s a long way, even with both legs. Off he disappeared into the distance taking his swearing with him.

Not long after. I meet another hitcher with the most fantastic accent; I collect accents, and this one is a trophy. It’s a mixture of Dublin, Cornish and Canadian. Very good indeed. An accent so rich and rarefied, you could bottle it and sell it or keep it to get pissed with at Christmas. 

The region of Nova Scotia/Labrador/Newfoundland is known as The Maritimes, and the accent fits it so well; all sailing and pipe-smoking salty sea-dogs. I get a lift to Doyles about twenty miles up the road with a guy who is going to dig his potatoes. Twenty miles is a long way to go to do your allotment. I think he is escaping the missus.

We drive through two very pointy mountains (Twin Mountains). Very booby. Auspicious perhaps?! Now all we need is a David Lynch moment (noooo!)

It’s another glorious sunny day, perfect for diary writing whilst waiting for a ride. That I have met two hitchers as soon as I start out is an encouraging sight in this unknown quantity of a place, but who knows how fortunes change. 

Terrain-wise, travelling from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is a bit like going from Scotland to Skye, except that Newfoundland is about the size of Britain almost.

One of the first things I discover about Newfoundland is the way you pronounce it; ‘Noof-un-len’. Maybe they are descended from English East Anglians who also have taste for short-cutting long place names; beginning to end with barely a middle.

I’ve discovered cinnamon and raisin bagels with margarine and raw onion makes a healthy eating snack option. They do not sell cheese and onion pasties here (bastard things – they are Satan’s smegma pies). Also in the grocery store I’ve just been to, I purchased myself a child-sized plastic bowl with a comedy giraffe on it.

My next lift comes in the form of another pick-up truck, with father and son Eric and Aaron who are very friendly. I join them in a breakfast of Crown Royal whisky with coke and ice. They have Thermos cups and the only thing I can drink out of is my new giraffe bowl. Not ideal; I have difficulty in not spilling any. Not very manly either; I can just imagine earnestly stepping up to my regular bar, the barmaid saying ‘Your usual?’, me saying ‘Yup’ and her reaching up to the shelf with my personalised plastic giraffe bowl on it. 

They are off to snare rabbits. I find out quite a bit about the hows and whys of hunting rabbits and moose, which is all very interesting but I’m darned if I can remember any of it. 

They drop me off at a service station but are really keen for me to go off eighteen kilometres into the forest with them; and if I want to go and ‘get a shower and get cleaned up’, Eric would wait for me to do that first. He tries to persuade me further by declaring that they ‘are just a normal healthy pair of regular guys’. Quite what prompts him to say that is unclear to me and an awkward brief silence follows, as I am rather inebriated and can’t think of anything to say to such a remark. Another cup of whisky and ice still fails to persuade me, and we part ways, with them turning back up the road to their hunting spot.

I don’t know how justified my anxiety is about this, but it is more friendliness from two hunters with guns, a better sense of direction than me and a keenness to get me drunk than I feel safe with. Instinct says it is all a bit too ‘Deliverance’.

I have to go and sleep off the booze in the woods.

Leonard Alexander who picks me up next reckons Newfie people are completely okay but that ‘yeah, anywhere else in the world and it would be a bit kooky’. Leonard is a TV mast repair man who isn’t supposed to pick up hitchers but does anyway. He is part Irish, part English and with Mik-mak on both sides, which he tells me is the most full-blooded Native American I will come across on ‘The Rock’. I try beef jerky, just for the novelty of it. It’s really chewy and a little bit salty. It seems quite healthy for a meaty thing, but I don’t plan making a habit of it.

Leonard is trying to convince me to stay on The Rock whilst I have the chance and not to leave, cos there’s nowhere better in all of America. (He’s driven all through the US and had lived in British Columbia for eight years.) He reckons that once I’ve met a lovely woman here, I’d never leave! As he goes into a garage to get his coffee and jerky, a song plays on the radio that goes ‘Had enough of being a rolling stone, I just want to hang out in St. John’s Town…’
Today I’ve seen two dead bears on the backs of trucks, but no moose. Also today I meet the amazing Jim who has cycled 6714 km from Vancouver Island for a cancer relief charity. He started on august 15th, which means he must be doing about a hundred kilometres a day. He’s doing it for a cancer relief charity.

Twice I have cycled long distance; once with a girlfriend from my home in southern England through the Pyrenees to Barcelona, and once from John O’Groats to Lands End (north to south through Britain). Its a wonderfully liberating thing to do with your time and a great way of getting yourself back in balance; nothing to figure out beyond what to have for lunch and where to stop to put up the tent, tons of physical exercise and lovely unexpected adventure. The best psychotherapy in the world.

Like hitch-hiking or walking, it has a rhythm of its own quite unlike ‘normal’ life, a beautiful kind of otherness.

Cycle touring seems to attract curious well-wishers, sometimes sparking inspiration for those that might be able, and offer an opportunity for old fellas to wax lyrical about a similar bike tour they made in 1932 or something like that. I love the stories of the old guys; they seem to underline the timelessness of thrifty living and the love of natural beauty that is an integral aspect of cycyling that comes, unbidden. 

It gives me a glowing sense that what I am indulging in is fundamentally Good.

The only downside is, what do you do when you get to the end of the journey? Jim’s epic journey was about to end in about three or four days time, and I was very glad to learn from him that his family were going to be there to celebrate his achievement at the other end.
I wave Jim a heartfelt good luck and goodbye as he wobbles away down the tarmac and over the horizon. 

The sun’s going down, and it’s getting rather cold quite quickly. I’ve had three lifts all day and get about seventy kilometres along the ways, which is a bit crap. I don’t mind it today, but it’s got to get better really. 
13-10-02 Sunday.

I wake up just after Stephensville, then get picked up by a fire-fighter Christian on his way to church. He’d moved from northern Ontario about seven years previous and bought three and a half acres of woodland for twenty dollars (that’s seven pounds fifty) and built a house on it. I guess that’s the difference between Britain and a country with half as many people and twenty five times bigger. 

It was quite cold last night, but I’ve got used to it and it doesn’t seem so cold now. This could just be my core temperature lowering itself; which is potentially rather dangerous, so I have to be watchful of hypothermia. I’ve had hypothermia before, so at least I can recognise when it hits me; it dulls my thinking, and makes me talk erratically. It’s warm enough in daytime, but my hands are a bit cold. I need to tighten up by getting a Thermos flask, gloves and string to make heat and habitation more secured and comfy. 

I get picked up by Terry Brooks just as I am getting out of the last car. It’s at Cornerbrook by a really amazing gorge and Terry asks me to take a picture of him posing with his sky blue Dodge ‘street rod’, a souped-up 330 horsepower hot rod built on a 1940s car. Fantastic!

Not long after at Pasadena, I get picked up by Brent Griffith whose ancestors were from Bristol. We talk about cars and football and it is a really nice ride. He is smoking dope oil but I don’t want any. Smoking weed, I am later to discover, is the unofficial Canadian national sport; everyone seems to be at it. Brent is a fifty year old fire fighter too. When he drops me a hundred kilometres short of Grand Fall-Windsor he has a root about in his trunk to find things for me to have. He gives me a small radio, some fantastic socks and a tin of meatballs. The latter I would generally regard as being well dodgy probably, but in this instance are made karmically good by the spirit in which I am given them, I don’t think too hard about what is in them! Ordinarily I would never buy the things. Sitting in the boonies in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by natural peaceful lovelieness, the free food is delicious.

I get a nice big lift that more than compensates for my slow progress so far. 

Steve is going to do a ten week electrician course in St. John’s, and he brings me in from just before Sheppardville at the Baie Verte Peninsula turn-off, so I guess he brings me 550 km, which more than makes up for yesterday.

Hitch-hiking, like everything else in life is subject to the laws of nature. No matter how events seem to be turning out, it ‘s funny how you always seem to get to where you going, somehow or other. If only I was able to apply this awareness to every aspect of my life.

We pass the splendidly named ‘Dildo’ on the way, but sadly don’t get a chance to visit any souvenir shops that may have been there. I wonder if they do a stick of rock with the name running through the middle? Or maybe there is a giant concrete effigy in honour of the town to welcome you as you arrive? 

I could go to Avalon too, but I reckon I’m just not cosmic enough.

No-one knows how Dildo came to be named. It’s not something you would admit to is it? It is possible though that it might be Captain Cook’s fault, as he was known to have a habit of giving new areas rude names just to upset over-sensitive types. Apparently the locals have tried a few times to change the name. Its never worked (as is apparent).
Lesson one of speaking Newfie. 

1) Take a Canadian accent (like a US accent, but more laid-back),

2) Say ‘d’ for ‘t’ and ‘oi’ for ‘i’. Should sound lazy and a little bit Irish, sometime west country English and sometimes Canadian.

 

The Newfies really are a friendly lot – When I arrive at the edge of St. John’s in the early evening I go to get some warming nosh to see me through the chilly night. I get given double portions of ‘taters’ (potato wedges) with two different lots of toppings because the two friendly waitresses can’t decide what exactly to give me. I kept telling them I don’t mind which one I get, so they give me both, just to make sure! This is all in between the counter assistant going all gooey and telling me that she’s got a thing for English guys. Unfortunately I’m on a mission and anyway she only looks about fifteen.

On her recommendation, I’m going to walk into St John’s tomorrow to watch the soccer game finals which should be fun. It will also be Thanksgiving day.
14-10-02

This morning I wake up in Paradise. 

Really – I’ve been to Hell* (and back), and now I’m in Paradise. A couple of years ago whilst cycling with a girlfriend to Barcelona from England, we pass through a cute little village in France called ‘Richard’. So just for the record, ‘I’ve been to Paradise, and I HAVE been to me…’

*Hell is a quiet little village in northern Norway with a typically Norwegian amount of nothing going on in it. The best things about Hell are the great postcards you can get from the post office; a picture of the village with the sky painted red and ‘Greetings from Hell’ written in Gothic script across the top. The other great thing about Hell is the wooden shelter where you wait for the train; it probably has more heavy metal biker graffiti than possibly anywhere else in the world.
I am in a really dense and dank pine plantation strip between a housing estate and the highway and not far from a crackling fizzing electric pylon, which has between it and the highway a big advertising hoarding straight out of the 1950s which reads ‘Welcome to Paradise’ and shows a happy smiling family all holding hands and skipping in the sunshine.

As I get up from my sleeping arrangement, two people come into the pines to cut themselves some firewood…

I slept comfy under the pines last night, but I do need to get some cotton to sew up various draughty holes and make a snoooood out of the sexy thermal blanket I borrowed from the ferry. Okay, I nicked it.
I’ve been in Canada seven days and in the 2900 km I’ve covered I’ve seen only four cop cars, one of them being at the soccer match I watch in the afternoon. For three dollars (one pound-thirty) I watch the Gold Medal National Soccer Final (Men’s Team) – the ‘Ladies’ match was in the morning. It’s Manitoba V. Newfoundland, and the quality looks to be about third division (says me the footie expert, not). I expect a similar comparison could be made between our top national hockey team and yer average lower level hockey team here. 

I ask a middle-aged man on a bike for directions, and have to stop myself from telling him how much he sounds like a Dubliner. I’m sure he’s already perfectly aware.

I could take endless pictures of clapboard houses, all beautifully contrasting colours, and sometimes Georgian-esque shapes. But I’m not going to. I’m also having to restrain myself from taking endless pictures of trees and V-neck scenery i.e. impressive mountain/valley conjunctions that ultimately end up all have a habit of looking exactly the same no matter where you are when you take them. Squashing a vast panorama into four inches of plasticised paper rarely does justice. You can’t hear the birds singing or the babbling of running water either.

(*Yes, I wrote this before the advent of mass computer gizmos.*)
15-10-02 Tuesday. 

I wake up in the Anglican Cemetery in St. John’s next to some dead geezer called ‘Chafe’. There were weird kids in here last night spoofing about around the gravestones wearing big black capes. Well it is Halloween almost. It was a bit freaky for me curled up in my cocoon of a sleeping bag. Eating out last night at the Bagel Cafe reminds me of Galway City where I lived for a while. Gently laid back and friendly without being self-consciously ‘friendly for the tourists’.

Visit the town’s museum with history about the locals, Viking and the white settlers, and will probably get a bus out of town and start heading out west towards Labrador. 

I get the sense that St. John’s harbour is ‘the other end’ for sea traffic that comes across from Europe. In a strange way, it feels like Scotland is just next door. I meet a guy from Aberdeen who’s come over with BP. There’s lots of talk (and work) of prospecting in the interior for oil. I hope it doesn’t change these people too much when it inevitably comes. Change didn’t do much good for the Beothuk who were here first… They got completely wiped out.
On my way to the university to get the use of a shower and use the library’s internet. 

I wait at a bus stop and get chatting with a very lovely young lady; she also happens to be heading up to the university. We sit talking on the bus grinning and being into each other. She has a lovely face and almond pixie eyes that feel like they are the stillness in the world. Ooooh! Anyway, she goes her way and I go off to send emails, and am left feeling all gooey and romantic for the rest of the day.

 

Retracing my steps back to the west of the island, I walk out of St. John’s; the outskirts is a horrible mass of warehouse stores and pizzarama land. Something of a shock after so much glorious wilderness. A taxi stops, thinking he’s got a fare. Intuition tells me this is one of those spots I might never get away from so we haggled a cheap deal. He takes me to somewhere sane and useful miles away for about four bucks.

I get a lift with Preston Coole, who is anxious for a decent job – unemployment is high here, even though half the population of the island is in St. John’s. He is in the middle of a row with his father and it somehow has made its way out of St. John’s, onto the highway and into a completely different place miles up the road. All whilst shouting at each other via mobile phones and driving at a hundred miles an hour, which is all very dramatic. 

Bizarre as this is, this suits me fine, and much progress is made for the hitch-hiker. (I hope the same can be said for the inappropriately named Coole family.) I’ve never hitch-hiked through the middle of an argument before.

It’s much the habit of all the drivers I’ve met here for them to introduce themselves with their full name and shake me by the hand as soon as I get in. The only people ever to do that before coming to Newfoundland were scary born-again Christians.

The other thing drivers do here is make a point of stopping at gas stations and filling me up with coffee/’pop’/anything else I might fancy, and then they’ll go out of their way to drop me at a decent hitching spot. My kind of people!
Paul Langdon, my next companero is a federal conservation officer, fighting oil pollution in the courts (if you see what I mean). 

After some distance, he stops at an Irving gas station, where what looks like an air hose to me has the words ‘loonies only’ written on it twice. I have seen it before and wondered what an earth it meant. It takes me until today to discover that a ‘loony’ is a one dollar coin, named after the bird thats depicted on it (‘the loon’) and a ‘toony’ is a two dollar coin. Ah, I see.

Paul brings me a marathon distance halfway across the island to the bay-within-a-bay of Lewisporte, where he lets me sleep on his ‘pleasure-cruiser’ (i.e. spacious tug-boat) that he has spent the last ten years building. Being surrounded by water, it actually ends up being colder than sleeping out in the woods, but the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. 
16-10-02 

I wake up with ‘Ordinary Day’ in my head, a song by a friend Paul Gill from back home who happens to be something of a folkie songwriter. 

I am feeling a bit sad about leaving Newfoundland. Its been exaggerated by briefly meeting with the lovely woman on the bus in St. John’s.

Paul Langdon comes to move the boat to a different spot (for further internal construction work). After that he drives me to the edge of town where I spend a hooooge amount of money on a fur hat and decent gloves and waterproofs.
Today’s bizarre sign printed on the side of a pick up truck rather tickles my fancy. It reads ‘Hiscock’s Self Service’. Quite what it relates to I shall never know. Is it just me, or is there a bit of a theme developing here on this island? 

‘Arch’ is my next lift today, a gritty cheerful drinks-plenty-of-rum and chews-tree-trunks-for-breakfast kind of a guy. Actually his speciality is doing dangerous metalwork in extremely tall places in desperate moments. Very fine chap indeed. James Bond, eat yer heart out. Eat your heart out. What a peculiar expression. Anyhow…
Then a military man called Gus on his way to Toronto for a seven week course in the martial art of pen-pushing. Another fine gritty salty kind of chap. Sorry, I’m making these people sound like road surfaces. Its a strange business when people that have lived and breathed the Island way all their life suddenly find themselves on their uppers. It seems to be the common story of the Island, of people leaving and going huge distances to live another life just to survive.

Echoes of the migrations of the last two centuries. This is another aspect, as well as the landscape and the character of the people that makes this place remind me of Scotland.
Then from Deer Lake a short ride of twelve miles with one of the old West Coast incomprehensibles.

I was warned back south a while ago of the probable difficulty in understanding some of the people here. Half Irish, half Nashville twang and way too much amphetamine. Just nod and say yes. 

My ride is with a logging man (I didn’t catch his name), who is in ‘innatainmun’ which involves him singing along to his synthesiser which is pre-programmed to play blues and rock ‘n’ roll. He is very upset that the Japanese who made the synthesiser haven’t figured out that maybe someone might like to program Newfie music into it. Before I realise what I have said, I suggest that maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. I really can’t imagine synthesised folk music being in any way a good thing, excepting perhaps it having an extreme cheese comedy factor. He doesn’t notice my faux pas as he goes on to complain to me how he can’t get songs for his karaoke machine. Maybe I am as barely decipherable to him as he is to me. Any one out there got any Newfoundland karaoke? 

No, thought not.

He is also telling me how the real unemployment figures have been smudged by the federal government, how the figures are close to seventy to eighty percent unemployed, and how the government have screwed Newfie people by bringing in ‘experts’ from outside to run mineral explorations etc, leaving nothing for the Newfies. Sounds familiar.
Newfoundland was England’s very first colony; the start of it’s empire, established in 1610,  and it still retains a strong air of independence, identifying more with England and the Crown than with Canada.
(Whereas the rest of the provinces joined forces to become a constitutionally united Canada between the 1870s and mid-1890s, Newfoundland was the last to join, leaving Britain reluctantly in 1948 along with most of the rest of the British Empire; The end of the Second World War had left the British Empire close enough to financial ruin for it to off-load many of its former colonies as they had now become liabilties. 
In Newfoundland, with its newly Canadian status, whole villages became derelict. Communities of people were being ordered out and shovelled off The Rock and into industrial parts of Canada right up to the sixties. The Ottawan central government didn’t want to support Newfoundland as it was ‘too marginal’ for them. It is still happening in a few places.

It’s quite usual for people to have to travel thousands of miles to as far away as Vancouver to visit distant parts of their families. 
The Northern Peninsula has a different geographical feel to the rest of what I’ve been travelling through in Newfoundland; it feels like a distinctly different place. There are wide flat places by the sea, and grand mountains off to the east and fjords that disappear into the sky.

Another guy brings me all the way to Hawkes Bay where I am now halfway up Northern Peninsula. I am writing this by one of the few orange street lights, wrapped in my sleeping bag. I am right next to the sea and the Torrent River. Tonight I’ll sleep on top of a board-walk, and not under it, because it’s all on a slope and a bit rocky and crap. Much as my head might like to be ‘under the board-walk down by the sea’, I don’t think I’d get any sleep, and if I did, I’d probably wake up needing a piss, try and sit upright and hit my head.
From Gros Morne National Park and up along the coast is superb – the mountains drop down from the east to a flat plain that the caribou roam, across to some wind-flattened pine scrub looking like aero-dynamic go-faster bonsai. Across the highway to the west the land slides under the Atlantic where waves break gently on bouldered outcrops in the distance. Tiny white clapboard houses nestle up to the edge of the coastline defying all that the weather throws at them. That’s enough purple prose, I’m off for a walk by the sea to freeze my nuts off good and proper and then I’m going to bed. Moon’s about three days off being full.
18-10-02

Yesterday was a slow day, but it suited the surroundings for it to be like that, somehow. Lots of little scattered handfuls of clapboard houses, sheds and boathouses at the sea’s edge with place names straight out of fiction: Deadman’s Cove, Sally’s Cove, Nameless Cove, Torrent River, Shallow Bay. 
Today: Thumb out. Bracing wind. Back to the tarmac.

Later I meet Dennis the lighthouse keeper and his friend Glen. That lift lasts about two minutes, so we’ll have to leave the fine details of that one to our imaginings.
Heading to L’Anse Aux Meadows, the site where two Norwegians, polar explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne-Stine Ingstad in the early 1960s dug up a Viking village. It put the boot into the whole notion of Columbus being the first European in America.
Towards the tip of the peninsula, the bays become sheltered by wild-looking headlands and huge rocky outcrops in the sea. It looks a really dangerous maze to have to get a boat through. My lift declares there must be a storm coming ‘cos all the boats is in’. As the peninsula to our right thins out and merges with the bouldered shore, the road rises, twists and falls away wearing through a landscape that’s much like a green boiling sea of giant waves that’s been frozen in time.

I arrive at L’Anse Aux Meadows just before twilight where the land settles down before finally disappearing under the sea once more. 
There seem to be two sites; I’ve only looked at the first one so far. It is perched right on the shore. A psychedelically colourful bog rises behind it; rich in luminous lichens, white green and red mosses, and sprinkled with ground hugging blueberries and partridge berries. 

The site has reconstructed A-shaped long-houses where it’s all turf roof and no wall. I can’t go inside it and look around cos it’s out of season and everything is disappointingly locked. I scramble up the side and look in through hatchways in the top. I can’t see anything but a long drop; it’s almost completely dark. I’m still impressed though; This is an awful lot of turf roof. I feel excited by the place. Viking stuff is something I like to think I have a feel for.

I pick lots of partridge berries and some nameless but delicious dark red berries (huckleberries?) which don’t seem to have killed me yet. (I tried four or five the previous day to no ill effect.)
I sleep in a similar and much smaller version of the long-house but which has no door; a Viking-style pigsty. After I put a load of hay down that’s been left over from summer tourist season and put my ex-army poncho across the doorway, it is relatively cosy.
What strange fruit shall come from plowing this flinty sea

first steady rock on which I set my eyes 

shall be mine; for that I deserve as my just reward.
According to two Icelandic sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red:

Leif Eriksson is attributed with leading Viking ships here some 500 years before Columbus. He was the son of Eric the Red who before him had established a settlement on Iceland.

Eric the Red was exiled from Norway for manslaughter and settled in Iceland, and then after more murder was exiled again to Greenland where he established the first permanent European settlements. His son Leif Eriksson was born around 970 AD.

Leif sailed first to Norway in 999 AD where he converted to Christianity and was ordered by the king to take the new religion back to Iceland and Greenland. After hearing a story from a merchant of there being land to the west of Greenland. Eriksson sailed first to possibly Baffin Island, then Labrador before arriving at L’anse Aux Meadows, being aided by favourable winds and currents. The area is disputed to be the land known as ‘Vinland’ referred to in the Icelandic sagas; The archaeological discovery of butternuts found at L’anse Aux Meadows are not native to Newfoundland, but are from much further south on the North American mainland. It is suggested that L’anse Aux Meadows was only an over-wintering site and the Vinland of the sagas may be referring to lands further south to as far as the coast of New York. 
I’ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like to sail to such far-flung places away from home with probably not very much in the way of resources on board their small ships. When the Vikings landed, they named the place ‘Vinland’. In archaeological diggings, Grape seeds have been found. It’s reckoned that back then, the climate was then somewhat warmer and was able to support a very different lifestyle than it can now. The climate getting colder and fierce opposition from the ‘Skraelings’ – the Native Beotuk people – meant that Leif Eriksson didn’t last very long in North America.
The first site I have visited is a community project constructed using partly modern materials.

The second site at L’Anse Aux Meadows though is the real deal and is even more impressive than the first, in fact it’s fantastic. The walls are made entirely of peat. Six foot high and eight foot wide at the bottom and about four foot at the top; pine logs for rafters. The original roof beams might well have been made of whale ribs, but both are of an authentic style. A thick wooden door hangs on leather hinges. The roof is dense with seaweed. This structure is made of what can be found right here anyway. Situated as it is, it feels like it is earthed solidly to this spot. The peat walls soak up all sound reverberation; the total opposite of what it feels like to be in a big stone church. It feels warm, intimate and deeply peaceful. This is my favourite building out of any I have ever encountered; anywhere, ever.

I want to live in one. The ultimate in earthy living. If I had known, I would have slept here (in fact I am tempted to just hang out here all day and stay the night again). I stay here for quite some time, mesmerised and quietly soaking it all in. No-one else here, right next to a rocky shore and a really heavy mist. It’s well ace. 

The soundlessness and stillness is a magnificent respite from the battering outside of the relentless wind, rain and sea-foam. Now, it is something to imagine how it might have been to become uprooted into the unknown and then build this place with your people. With such a life of unrelenting dark weather, it is no wonder that they filled their hearts with Gods of fire and vigour.
The Vikings also left a trail of these black-houses on the northern islands of Scotland and western coast of The Outer Hebrides, whilst on their way to build the first Dublin. They are peculiar buildings in that they have no chimneys; smoke just seeps through the thatch and doorway, hence this is how these dwellings got their names. I can just imagine the occupants grimed head to toe like kippers, pouring out of the doorways coughing and gasping for breath and cursing the gods for not inventing chimneys yet. Still, it’s probably better than being outside in those harsh northern winters. No wonder the Vikings had a reputation for being so stroppy. It’s all that smoke in their eyes. ‘Harald! Lit erse eenverd air cerrntree weeth prurpur houssis!’ ‘Yaah, thet ees air gooot eydeeea.’ 
I take lots of photos of the building as well as the beautiful bronze sculpture which looks as if to represent the bough of a ship in a heavy sea. Seems to sum up my own feelings about the whole place, which is rather gratifying. (Note the previous poem.)
I have one of those ‘I never want to leave this place’ moments. But inevitably, I do.
Mind transported, I walk back into the slightly desperate-looking cluster of bungalows that is the village. 

Even in the small isolated communities here, there is strong evidence of summer-time tourist stuff: quirky B&B’s (you can sleep in a miniature lighthouse in someone’s front garden), ‘antiques’ and Viking style crafts etcetera. Makes me wonder what people here do when the tourists have gone home. Go fishing or insane probably.

I buy the best tin of beans I have ever tasted (better than Heinz. No! Impossible! Maybe I’m just hungry) and I get invited in to someone’s house to eat them, I am feeling a bit inward and anti-social so I decline the offer; I am still full of the magic of the old Vikings. 
I get to Cook’s Bay turn-off from just south of L’Anse Aux Meadows riding on the back of a pick-up truck sharing the back with 750 lbs of whelks, some of whom must be sensing that something is not right in whelkworld. As we speed down the highway they try to escape. Having a broader over-view of the situation than the said whelks, I can see the futility of their attempts and so do not assist in their escape bid. Very entertaining ride, and also I don’t freeze to death en route which is encouraging.
Next lift is with a clean-shaven smoothie local who is in the business of employment and regeneration (B&B’s and oil mostly). I put to him the notion of conservation holidays as way of getting tourists in. He has a habit of feeding back to me what I’ve just said, except by mutating it into some kind of government-speak sound-bite thing. Freaky. People like him make my skin crawl.

This place is in a rum old situation.
When I get to St. Barbe ferry terminal, I find a likely camping spot on the other side of the road.

I rig up my tent experiment using the poncho, pointy sticks and string, and gladly it works very well at keeping the wind and mild rain out, which makes a huge difference to my night time comfort, hoorah! Tis positively cosy.

I read some of ‘Biko’ the Donald Woods book which manages to knock this whole venture into a cocked hat of irrelevance. Hmmm..
19-10-02

I’m writing from indoors out of the weather. Waiting to cross the Labrador Straits.

Found a new berry to try this morning – it is white and in part has a taste similar to a few berries I have tasted before (i.e. cloudberries, sweet creamy/peaty/vanilla) but the main over-riding taste is very familiar, but I can’t quite place it at first. And then I get it; Euthymol toothpaste. Well strange. I eat three. I won’t be eating any more until I know what they are and I definitely and conclusively not died. 

As I write, George W Bush is still threatening to blow Iraq to pieces. 

St. Barbe is one of those places that looks like it spends all year hanging around in the rain with its hands in its pockets waiting for august. Like most ferry ports, it’s got a few concrete hotel buildings that look like they may have been built using cheaply hired-out Russian labourers during communism in the 1960s. How they might have ended up here I’ve no idea. Fell off the back of a fish processing ship perhaps.

There is a welcome interlude of drying gusts of wind, to undo the joint-gnawing terminally on-off drizzle. 

The few other buildings here are the same as everywhere else around this part of Newfoundland, but slightly more hopeful and employed-looking. 
As I look out the window I can see the charred foundations of what used to be the pub. Right behind it is the fire station. To the left is the gas station which is proclaiming ‘for every litre of gas sold, one cent will go to buying a new fire truck’. Think about that for a moment. I’ll leave you to fill the gaps, however you like. I wonder how much else will have burnt down by the time they’ve saved up enough pennies. (Got enough cents? …Doh.)
One of the minor drawbacks of hitch-hiking is having to satisfy local curiosity about how I came to be here; over and over again. I occasionally have lapses in enthusiasm for telling this story, which is bit awkward if I’m feeling too slow from a sleepless night. This is relieved by finding out what people do themselves and thus finding out lots about the locality.

Over the course of the journey so far I’ve learned to predict what people are going to ask me and I tend to pre-empt them with some sort of semi-autopilot introduction of myself: ‘Hello! I’m Richard, I come from England, sixty miles west of London, a place called Reading, I’ve been in Canada x weeks, I landed by plane in Toronto, got a bus to Nova Scotia, hitched round Newfoundland for two and a half weeks blah blah blah’. The other thing I get is ‘What makes you come to Canada this time of year?’ usually accompanied by an expression which reads as ‘You’ll freeze to death – everything’s closed for winter, you should have gone somewhere hot like a good sensible tourist’. 

I tell them that it is all down to an ultimatum issued by my good friend Helen two days before I left England. She said: ‘Well you’ve been saying you’re going to go travelling for the last two years – either you should just go or you should just settle down, stop talking about it and forget about it’. 

This shocks me out of my procrastinating pattern and the very next day I was standing in Norwich town centre asking myself what actually was stopping me from going. I realised it was actually nothing, except for buying a ticket and some travel insurance. In my habitual uncertainty, I went and bought both, leaving my senses in a strange ‘What the hell have I gone and done now?!’ kind of reeling feeling. 

The woman in the travel agent says: ‘Where would you like to go?’

Me: ‘Canada!’

Her: ‘Whereabouts in Canada would you like to go?’

Me: ‘Er. Anywhere. East. Anywhere on the East Coast’

Her: ‘Okay, when do you want to fly?’

Me: ‘As soon as possible’

Her: ‘How about Thursday?’

Me: ‘No that’s three days away. I have to go today or tomorrow otherwise I’ll just change my mind and not go.’

Her: ‘Oh well then!’

Me: ‘Yes it’s a bit like that really…’ 

Next day I’m on the plane, and eight hours later, I’m in Canada, still not sure what the hell I’m doing, but liking it. The other reason for coming to Canada is that I’ve often fantasised about making a trip across the continent, maybe by push-bike. And anyway, being in the cold is no better or worse than the afflictions of various other countries; sunstroke, dysentery, malaria, mosquitoes or being robbed. 
I say goodbye to Newfoundland. The ferry crossing is largely uneventful but for the joy of sofas (nice plump fluffy ones!). I am offered a lift to Quebec by a woman on the ferry (also nice, plump and fluffy), which I turn down in favour of more northern and worthy travel exploits; like rain and getting wet and trudging through bog.

For months after, I often wonder what sharing a motel room with her might have been like… Considerably warmer and less worthy for a start.

An old bloke on the ferry is wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a Dalmatians head on it with ‘Dalmatian’ written underneath. Which is how you might expect a native of Labrador to declare his allegiances.
After landing, there are a couple of hours of daylight left, and I manage to get to the scattering of houses that is L’Anse Aux Loup to erect my tiny dwelling blob. 

Poncho tent held up by found twigs. Tricky to get in and out of. Not exactly ideal camping equipment for what is soon to become a full-on Canadian winter…

The next day (Sunday) after several miles of walking down the highway through endless empty moorland nothingness, I manage to get a ride across the vastest amount of spruce/larch filled wilderness I’ve ever seen. There is so much lichen on the ground it looks like peppermint green snow in lots of places. The landscape is even more spacious than in Newfoundland. Amazingly, Labrador’s only got 26,000 people which is pretty darned empty for a region that’s slightly larger than the whole of the United Kingdom.
After asking about on the ferry, there is much conflicting information about how I can get to Goose Bay way up in the north; 500 km of road is being built (for logging primarily and then tourists) and a huge stretch from Charlottetown to Cartwright (the last bit) isn’t open. Eventually it turns out that at the very northern end of the road, they’ve only got three and half kilometres to build in the middle…

So here I am eeny-meeny-miney-mo-ing a choice of route north from the Charlottetown junction. Either I go directly north on a road of dubious completeness or I hitch out to Charlottetown itself where I could take a boat from there. I hitch a ride with the first vehicle that passes; a construction worker. He stops and tells me that it is totally possible to get up through the incomplete road, so I let that be my choice and travel with him.

We arrive at his destination, the road-builder’s compound at the boggy far end of nowhere.
Looking like a modern-day Siberian gulag but with diggers and bull-dozers, this is literally the end of the line. No more road, just dense spruce forest all around and a broad stretch of smashed tree debris and mud ahead of us where more road is due to be laid. It all looks somewhat apocolyptic.

Going into the shelter and warmth of one of the grey portacabin boxes, I get introduced to some of the workers.
I end up sharing a cabin with an unsuspecting guy called Geoff who is left to keep me amused on his Sunday afternoon off. I feel a bit awkward really, cos I think hosting visitors is not really what he is after. They work twelve hour days, (sometimes eighteen!) seven days a week, and Sunday afternoon is his one bit of free-time. Anyway we get stoned and drunk, and that is the end of that. (It’s a luxuriously cosy night’s kip too)

Next morning is the first sight of snow, falling grimly on the construction site compound and disappering into the wet churned mud. EEK! 

The hospitality is great. I guess when you are somewhere as vast and empty as Labrador, and you’ve got some boney arsed clueless English tourist on your hands, I suppose you’re going to do your best to make sure he’s going to travel well. As it is, I get absolutely loaded up with cake, coffee and multiple sausage sandwiches to take with me, and I get a ride with the famous Ian from England (London via Bovey Tracey) who everyone I had met since the St.Barbe ferry had told me about. ‘Wow! Two Englishmen! You must meet!’ 

Me and Ian confirm each others sense of random Englishness. Two random people is saner than one. He’s been living here for two years now, and is clearly in absolute desperation to talk to another Englishman.
October/November 2002

We get to ‘The Gap’ (as it is known) and am led through the qwog left after clear-cutting through the pine forest. Meanwhile, Ian from England has gone off to do his work of weilding a spanner at some piece of machinery or other. I am led by another guy that happens to be walking across The Gap too. It’s quite hard work stepping over endless small felled trunks and (trying to) dodge bog. I discover my boots are about as waterproof as an open packet of biscuits. 

At the other end of ‘The Gap’ I get a ride in a hooge dumper truck. Sitting in the cab, I am buried under my luggage. We have to drive through a river about a metre deep which is immensely bumpy. The vehicle’s enormous wheels are obliged to scramble across huge submerged boulders. We get thrown all over the place and my rucksack cushions me from probably getting a right battering. At the other shore and somewhat disorientated, I thank my chauffeur for what has definitely been one of the very shortest, most bizarre lifts I have ever hitched.

My chauffeur, having radioed ahead, passes me over to my new driver.

I get a ride with the chief surveyor who takes me up to the other site compound on the other side, whilst telling me all about survey stakes along the route. I neglect to tell him that I already know all about survey stakes. (I had previously had a night-time hobby of removing them from building sites I didn’t approve of.) Curiously, his name is Kevin Stapleton, which I’m sure used to be an alter ego of Julian Cope (ageing pop star of the eighties who also didn’t think much of the environmental destructiveness of building sites).

Another ride to Cartwright up the unfinished road (bumpity-bump) and I find I have two days to wait for the freighter ship that goes to Goose Bay, my next proposed destination.
I somehow manage to find the windiest most exposed spot on a prominent headland right next to the Atlantic to erect my newly upgraded dwelling; a four metres by three metres sheet of blue poly-propelyne tarpauline. I just bought it in the local store; the sort of store that sells tinned fish, bread, wellies, fishing gear, bullets, bear-skin hats, cornflakes and last weeks newspapers and has weather-battered people wandering aimlessly around in it trying to escape the rain and/or remember who they are. 

How will this tent upgrade fare? I can now truly say that I have experienced the full meaning of the expression ‘nylon nightmare’ (common phrase used by ‘new-age’ travellers in the UK). Whilst my tarp is unyeildingly and relentlessly trying to flap me to death whilst simultaneously trying to drive me into deafness with its endless gun-shot whip-cracking, rain has managed to creep into almost everything and my sleeping bag is sodden. And it’s too wet and windy to light a fire anywhere. My fantastically expensive Thinsulate Gore-Tex gloves completely fail to keep the rain out – they’re totally utterly crap. My poor cold wet thumbs keep buckling stupidly and anyway, my matches are damp and my lighter seems to need the merest excuse to rust to a standstill.

And my boots are no good.

Somehow, with a drip on the end of my nose, I manage to stay sane by thinking about nice people I know and by reading ‘Biko’ by wildly flickering candle light.

The next day I resolve to further improve my lot by going back down to the stores to buy a pair of wellies. It is then that I discover from the locals that last nights storm was one of the worst in living memory. So it wasn’t just me being a wuss then.
Cartwright sits at the entrance of Sandwich Bay and was settled by George Cartwright, a fish and fur trader in 1775. He sold it in 1815, and it was then later sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1873. The company has owned it ever since. In 1956 it became incorporated into the great Canadian empire.

Cartwright came to the attention of the world media in March 1978 when Greenpeace activists came here in protest at seal cub clubbing for fur-trading.
Cartwright is tiny (800 people) and has apart from its one general store no public buildings except a library which opens two  hours a day, so I have nowhere to go and gently steam for free.

The freighter from Lewisville (Newfoundland) comes today! Hoorah! Hopefully there’ll be some fantastically hot boiler room I can go and regain my marbles in. I am seriously considering abandoning hitching and spending a couple of hundred quid on an all-Canada bus pass; or maybe I can find rides on the net?
Right – I’m off to take picturesque photos. Cartwright has got a pioneer character, nearly all the houses are small cabins, painted white and very basic. It gets cold up here so it makes sense to live small (and cosy). Some houses are so basic, they are little more than insulated sheds and boathouses with chimneys, cobbled together out of plywood and whatever else might have been handy at the time, decorated with old nets and ropes and old floats and buoys.
Sunday night 10-02.

I might have found a ride on the net, I’m not sure; a Norwegian chap called Morten is driving all the way from Montreal to Vancouver. That would be really handy if it works out.

Bad news. The freighter doesn’t come in cos the weather is so bad. I will have to wait until Sunday at the earliest. Tom at the freighter office (‘the only gay in the village’, earnestly religious and bitchy) offers me back to his friends house where he is looking after two mad boxers (dogs, not sportsmen). This gives me a chance to ‘re-group’. He decides to let me sleep in the harbour office, which I am extremely happy about – it has two heaters, and neither of us has to make loads of effort to try and get along. That and the fact that no doubt I must be smelling like lord knows what by now. The office offers me the chance to dry everything out too, which is an added bonus.

Getting dry = reclaiming sanity.
I spend two days reading Biko and taking photos of the houses in the town. I stop after a while cos it looks like I might be a spy or something. They had trouble with Greenpeace environmentalists a few years back over seal-clubbing; coming from their nice cosy affluent lives in the city and deciding they have the right to tell the locals here how to live. It’s curious to note how what might sem like a cut-and-dried moral issue to most of us in our cosy supermarket-enhanced lives looks actually quite different from the starting point of having to eke out a living any way you can on the edge of the artic tundra.
Cartwright has limited excitement. There is no pub and I end up having a long conversation with Heather the librarian, who is maybe related to TC Lethbridge (a writer on various subjects relating to British Pagan cosmology). I spend idle time talking to the woman in the post office who has family connection with Liverpool. She went there once and thought it was ‘very dirty, but interesting’.
Come Friday and I have to decide whether to try to meet up with Morten in Montreal or not, which is a total gamble as I’ve had no response from him. Do I wait two more days and head west to Goose Bay or do I to head back down to Lewisporte on the ferry that is coming in today and then hitch-hike onwards to Montreal?
Sitting up on the headland away out of the village, I decide that I can’t face another two days of spinning my wheels waiting for the next ferry. I hastily decide to leave; just as I see the ferry come rolling in. In something of a scramble I pack my stuff, dash down the hill and go to say my thank yous and goodbyes to Tom. 
Coming back overnight on the ferry (another free kip indoors) I watch ‘Primal Fear’ (Richard Gere/Edward Norton) and ‘Dr Doolittle’ and two other really cheesy films. Watching TV is satisfying…
Sailing into Lewisporte is spectacular. We go past ninety miles of islands and craggy outcrops all drifting past. On the Labrador Straits I see my first whale and a couple of baby iceberg ‘growlers’ – so called because the noise boats make when they scrape along the underside of the hull. 

Nothing really spectacular, but I can cross them both off the tourist list of ‘must-sees that I don’t keep.

I get chatting to a bloke out on the top of the boat and he gives me lift to Cornerbrook, stopping off first at the shop I bought my hat and gloves in. I swap the crap gloves for some nice cheap ones and get a part refund. It baffles me why in a place like this they would be happy to sell duff gear to people. Somebody might die!

 

We get back on the road again. 

At Cornerbrook, I manage to blag a free use of the internet in a ‘Staples’ computer store right by the highway to see if Morten has responded (he hasn’t). 

I get picked up just before dark. We quickly end up following right behind the bus I will need to catch at Stephenville that in turn will take me to the ferry in time for the night crossing to North Sydney. It’s all a bit ‘Phew! Will we make it in time?’ 

We do, and sitting on the bus getting my nerves settled I zone out watching ‘Shallow Hal’ on the bus’s video. At Port Aux Basques I watch most of ‘Serendipity’ with Kate Beckinsale (phwoar). Watching that left me feeling all spacey and lovely. Though I don’t see the last five minutes; I have to get on the ferry. 
I sleep very well on the ferry. 

In the early morning getting off the ferry at North Sydney again I have to wait twenty minutes for my rucksack to be extricated from the baggage hold by a uniformed chap driving what looks like a golfing buggy, by which time all the ferry traffic has gone. I end up walking seven kilometres in torrential non-stop rain with hardly any traffic on the road. On the boat I’d been umming and ahhing about directly asking truck drivers for a ride, I’d rather leave the choice entirely to them. I guess I’m paying for my own reluctance now. 

This is the start of a really really weird day…
After running non-stop from Cartwright to Port Aux Basques, I come to a crunching halt. After walking the seven kilometres in the worst most miserable rain ever, I get cold and a bit grumpy and give up for a bit.  I go and nurse my gloominess in a Tim Hortens cafe over a hot chocolate and two cheese croissants. (Tim Horten’s is what Canada has instead of McDonalds and is an altogether more pleasant experience.) Duly revived, I go to the phone-box on the other side of the road outside a curiously named burger bar called ‘Lick-A-Chick’. I call Greyhound buses about getting an all-Canada bus Pass (a 630 dollar ticket) and then go to sloop about in the rain some more.
I am ruefully thinking about how hitching is all ups and downs, and how I’ve got from Cartwright to Sydney almost without a stop, and now I am stuck. I literally am just thinking ‘Well, I can’t be here forever cos someone always turns up eventually’ when a woman pulls over, flings open the passenger door and in I get. She’s called Rhonda. She’s saved the day, my bacon and my sanity. And she’s great fun.
We chat non-stop all the way and we have a ‘real hoot’ as she would say. A slightly book-ish studenty-type in her early thirties she’s a bit of a globe-trotting type too. She tells me she doesn’t usually stop for hitch-hikers, but she thought I looked like I was in a bit of a jam. (I was!)

Partway through the journey we come across a truck that has jack-knifed on a bend and we stop to see if the driver is okay. We call him over. He’s hurt his back a bit and really is in shock. He’d been coming downhill round a bend in the heavy rain and had come really close to hitting another truck head-on. Now his truck is really close to hanging right off the edge of the road. Rhonda gives him her phone so he can phone the people he that needs to. His voice is really really shaky. We give him some coffee. I have tears in my eyes.

This man is a walking miracle. He was inches from being very dead, he’s literally stared death in the face (and so has the other truck’s driver – who now I think about it – where the hell did he go? Why didn’t he stop?) 

Anyway our friend here will get to see another Christmas with his family. Astonishing. I am really blown away by how we really can’t take anything for granted. 

The guy then goes and talks with a cop who’s turned up, and off we go, back on down the road. We marvel at the turn of events and their fatefulness. I’ve just started getting on a bit of a cosmic roll after seeing ‘Serendipity’ which is one of those ‘trust the universe’ type films. 

We talk about folks she now knows around the world that she can go visiting. It must be lovely to be able to turn up somewhere exotic and exciting and have a friend there ready and waiting to meet you.

At the end of the ride at New Glasgow we go very happily our separate ways, and I say to her ‘There you are you see – we’re not all axe murderers’.
I really wish I hadn’t said that. As I am very keen to point out to Rhonda, I’ve spent seventeen years hitch-hiking, and I’ve only encountered two cars I refused to get into, and one that I wanted to get out of. I’ve been propositioned by a couple of men, an old guy once put his hand on my knee saying ‘Sorry I thought it was the gear stick’ and I’ve been prayed at, baptised, sermonised and even exorcised by various scary Born-Agains, and have been driven high-tailing it down the road by two teenagers on acid co-opting the steering, two pissed Irishmen out on a week long non-stop bender, and that’s been about it. Pretty good for seventeen years I think.

Cheerfully I walk up the slip road eating a very nice apple, admiring the exotic autumn colours, when a slightly battered old motor pulls over next to me, with a slightly battered old man in it. I get in, ‘Great!’ I say ‘I’m not even trying! I like it when that happens!’
He is an old guy, with the heater on full blast. At first I think it’s because he feels the cold but I later suspect it is an attempt to get me to take my clothes off. Fairly innocuous conversation at first, even though he’s not very forthcoming and it’s me asking most of the questions. It turns out he’s seventy and called Jim, never got married; was going to when he was seventeen and then he got told ‘he wasn’t allowed to’ and gave up the whole ‘man meets woman’ thing. 

Next he volunteers to tell me how he once hitched a ride to Vancouver and was invited to share the too-small bunk with the driver every night. He goes into further details, but I’m not going to bother retelling them if you don’t mind. At this point I notice that he seems to have some sort of affliction going on down in his trousers that he seems to need to scratch. Maybe he has a catheter that is giving him some trouble. He becomes more persistent with his down-below goings on and I’m looking straight ahead and out of the passenger window trying to distract him with ordinary conversation (which fails). I start to think he’s doing what I think he’s doing. I’m not about to look to find out as this will probably just encourage him. I feel like saying ‘Look I don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t want to know, but either you stop doing it or let me out of the car right now’. 

But I don’t. I don’t want to get abandoned in the middle of nowhere miles from the nearest anything just cos of some twisted old perv. I want to get to the next town. He doesn’t stop fiddling. I’m looking out of the passenger window. I give up talking to the creep. We get to the turning off the highway. I can’t wait to get out. Evetually he stops the car. I get my bags out, he’s sitting there grinning at me with his trousers very undone. Bleaurgh.

I don’t say anything to him and bizarrely, I feel really shitty as I walk down the road. 

I realise I feel so shitty because I let him do it. I had felt like saying to him ‘I pray to god you’ve never been near any children, cos if you have, I hope somebody chops your dick off.’ Not nice thoughts. 

After he’s gone, I stand by the side of the road saying it all out loud. It’s all a bit after the event, but better than not saying anything at all maybe.
I realise that after not asking drivers for rides on the ferry, this is the second time today that I let myself in the crap because I’ve kept my mouth shut, when really I should have done something about it. Hmmm 
After about forty-five minutes of traffic and high wind, a pick-up slews over in front of me, loud country-rock music blaring. The door is flung open, beer cans all over the floor and this big red-neck leans over and yells ‘Yee-harr! Jump in! We’re going hunting!’
Sometimes I get picked up by people that are totally okay but I’m out of my depth with. This ride is a bit like that, but actually he’s dead friendly in a funny pissed machismo kind of way. He offers me a beer, which I accept as it is probably the best way of preventing myself from worrying about possible impending death due to drunk driving.

I tell him about the previous lift and he laughs and so do I. He tells me to ‘Look out for anything that moves in the woods, and we’ll stop and shoot it and call it road-kill! (Hyuk,hyuk!)’

Not revelling at the thought of seeing innocent creatures being brought to their knees by a drunken man’s bullet, I dutifully spot nothing much. I tell him helpfully that I saw a rabbit two miles back. He says ‘Did it have antlers? We calls them jack-a-loupe!’

Then I tell him I just saw an orange and black thing with a five foot neck. ‘Where?! Let’s get it!’
He considers shooting a cow when we drive past a field full of them. ‘They’re just over-weight deer after all, and anyhow, there’s loads of ’em.’
I see a shadowy figure in a trench coat walking in the side of the road, and we stop to pick him up. Even from this distance, he has the ambience of some baddie out of a horror film.

He’s called Travers, is about the same age as me, has short badly cropped hair, crap trousers and a serious piercing gaze. He looks like he’s just escaped from the local loony bin.

We have some seemingly lucid chat about history and ancestry and how Travers once lived in Ramsgate in Kent. I have an Auntie Gladys in Ramsgate who is convinced she’s related to the queen. Maybe it’s something they put in the water there.

Travers has a very serious expression and keeps looking at and wringing his scratched-up hands which have bruises all across the knuckles. He tells me that there are thirty million trees in the woods and that I shouldn’t mess with the woods because they are dangerous, and bad things happen in them.

Then he tells me that he feels like he is the father of Nova Scotia, and that in all the churches in New Brunswick they worship Judah and they are all very very heavy people. This guy has an intensity that makes a black hole seem like Hugh Grant. An odd pair to be wedged between.

We get dropped off and Travers taps us both for some change. He heads off across the highway in the direction of a cafe.
I try hitching in the last hour of daylight. I’m standing in a cutting on the highway, which is a really gloomy wind tunnel. It gets dark, I give up and head for the woods.
I set my tarp up and lay my stuff out under it and light a fire, which produces all steamy smoke and no heat for the first half hour, stinging my eyes and filling my nose with snot. I hope Travers doesn’t spot my ‘fire’ in the woods. Once it gets going properly, sitting by the fire is nature’s equivalent to watching TV at the end of the day. The firewood is wet and at its best still produces a ton of smoke, but little heat. I’ve since figured out that you should take upright deadwood and not stuff lying about on the ground.

October; a Monday.

Next morning, and having not spent any part of the evening with the delightful Travers, I find myself in full possession of my limbs. Capitalising on this fact, I attempt to find internet access so I can exercise my god-given fingers but it is too early in the day, and I am in the middle of nowhere special. 

I make do with doing star-jumps in defiance of the cold. 

The only sign of civilisation is a gas station and a couple of motels in the quintessential Americana style: 1950s concrete one storey high with jaunty angled architecture that screams ‘Tear me down! I’m a eyesore!’ at you whilst at the same time proclaiming to be something akin to a post-modern paradise. Somehow, it all makes me think of Elvis dying on the crapper whilst eating his last fatal burger.
I go back out onto the highway and after an hour, I hitch a ride ten miles along the road with two students going to the next town up, Sackville. Partly out of physical coldness, I verbally vomit about the previous day’s weirdnesses and apologise cos I just have to get it out of my system. 

We talk about how life gets whipped up into little vortexes of strangeness sometimes. Like those times you bump into someone you know in the street, and you get talking and then someone that they know turns up, and then another… Before you know it, you realise that there are all these connections going on that you were previously unaware of, which is a nice surprise; then that half an hour trip to the shop turns into totally tangential event. That’s a friendly example; Sometimes shit just happens and coagulates like a blood clot all over your day (ergh!)
Sackville is a tiny university town which is the perfect antidote to yesterday. Like every other town, it is full of autumn colour and the place has a lovely quietly creative vibe like university towns usually do.

It’s beautiful but chilly. I decide that today I either find out what happens with Morten or I buy a big fat hairy bus ticket for the rest of the trip. I’m in a bit of quandary about abandoning hitching, cos it feels like I’m about to say goodbye to a large part of the roller-coaster drama of the journey.

I check out the internet in the university library (beautiful classic 19th century Scottish stone architecture).

Nothing doing with Morten, so – bus ticket it is. Off to the travel agent; They inform me that I can get a Canada pass in Moncton the next town up. The next bus to Moncton is in four hours. I celebrate my decision with a ten inch pizza and decide to see if I can get a ride to Moncton instead of loitering pointlessly.
I hitch a ride with a young guy about twenty-five who’s part-time army, part-time hospital volunteer. I’m really impressed by his glowing sense of knowing what he wants to do with his life. He’s also a really nice guy. 

I splash the cash at the bus depot, and have to wait three hours before I can go anywhere. 

I head down-town looking for a library to write in. Whilst I’m looking round a young woman touches my shoulder, smiles the most amazing smile, like she’s known me all her life and offers me directions. I thank her and wander off feeling like I’ve just been injected with pure love. 
Later I get on the bus and wind up in Woodstock, New Brunswick. I notice happy smiley people getting off the bus, meeting up with family and friends, having hugs and then they’ll all be going home to big dinners, warm houses and comfy beds. 

It’s cold and I head for the trees. 
When I’m looking for somewhere to sleep at night, I go where there are no lights. Usually I’ll find one of three things: water, fields or trees. 

I light a fire, more successfully than last time. 

I sleep okay, go for a very early morning walk at first light and get to properly see where I am. I’m in a wood next to a paddock full of horses.

Going for walk thaws me out and I find what I think might be wild blackcurrants. There are loads of them and they taste really good. I am impressed that they seem to keep fresh whilst hanging on the vine long after the leaves have fallen. I have saved some seeds, cos they’re definitely an abundant, hardy and tasty fruit to have. 
I spend the day in Woodstock (trying to) catch up with various financial loose ends and chat loads with a bloke in the community computer resource place whilst trying to use the internet. He’s a real chatterbox and we enthuse about gigabytes and that sort of thing.
I get the bus at 4.30 pm and wind up in Riviere Du Loup, Quebec at 8 pm. Getting off the bus it’s bitterly cold. I don’t really fancy sleeping out – it’s losing its appeal, especially when I’m in the middle of a town: Another thing I do when I’m expecting to sleep out is I’ll keep an eagle eye open on the way into the town I’m arriving in, looking out for possible places to sleep that I can head towards when I get off. Empty buildings, constructions sites, parks with cosy-looking dense bushes, under quiet bridges (not so good – cold stone sucks away any body heat completely).

 

Luckily, the bus terminal stays open until 4 pm, and then opens again at 6 am. It’s also very quiet, which is great. The staff are happy for me to sleep there, and they turn the heater on for me when they see me get a blanket out after a little while. The heater is a bit noisy, but I’m grateful for their consideration which makes me feel particularly welcome.

At 4 am a member of staff wakes me up and I wander into the connecting Normandia restaurant in my socks where I stay until six writing some of this, drinking hot chocolate and eating poutine (chips, cheese and gravy). 

Along with very good pizza, for me poutine (pronounced ‘poo-tin’) is further evidence of true civilisation in Canada. Whatever other faults I might discover in the national character of this vast country, poutine is an anchor point of all that is good and proper (Amen).
At 6.30 I get on another bus to Quebec city and then another to Montreal. I don’t bother looking round either city; I don’t really have much of a taste for them, most cities tend to be fairly similar (mind you, so do most towns too). I suppose I would consider looking around just to be duty-bound tourist pfaffing. I just press on; West! West!
The region of Quebec is entirely Frenchified, lots of Virgin Mary shrines all over the place. Everywhere, roads and shops marked only in French. The trees of New Brunswick have almost completely disappeared under vast tracts of farmland, and won’t reappear again until Ontario. 
I end up some miles out north west of Toronto; in Renfrew, Ontario where the cold is starting to be a challenge. Renfrew is a small town, which is often good because there are often more opportunities to find shelter than in big towns; often you can find an open doorway into something with a roof on it. I do my usual thing of wandering off in an obscure darkish looking direction and wind up at a hospital. I make the mistake of telling the security man on reception of my situation, and would it be okay for me to stay there the night? He apologetically but firmly says ‘No’. I sit in a waiting room for an hour round the corner, then decide to leave. The lights are too bright and I don’t want the humiliation of being chucked out after having being declined permission. 

I go wandering round the town to see if anything crops up. Nothing much does, so I ask a cop who can only suggest a motel. 

I wind up doing something I’ve never done before and hope I never have to resort to again. (Mostly because I don’t stay warm.)
Next to the recommended motel is a factory warehouse. Round the back I find a couple of large metal dumpsters. ‘Ah, this must be my motel’ I ponder whilst freezing my nuts off.

I get into a dumpster full of cardboard and manage to bury myself in it. It’s all a bit nasty really; the cardboard is all stacked at forty-five degrees and more-or-less completely fails to protect me from the cold-magnet effect of the dumpster’s metal body. 

I have an early morning wake up call when I hear loads of crashing about. 

I stick my head out of the hinged door on top to see a guy in a municipal truck halfway to emptying the dumpster next to me into a compactor. He stops when he sees me, and he asks me if I have a friend in the about-to-be-crushed cardboard. I reassure him that it’s empty as far as I know and he gets on with his job. 

I was actually going to try to sleep in this other dumpster, but it was too full of cardboard. I wonder what would have happened if I had climbed in there, and I’d had few to drink the night before? I guess I would have been processed and recycled into a hundred cardboard boxes, and done a lot more random global travelling than I’d bargained for.
I get out of the dumpster, thank him for the alarm call and head for the real motel where the bus is to arrive in a couple of hours. Physically, I feel like an utter wreck.
It’s okay to wait inside the motel; I flumpf into a fat squidgy leather sofa and am invited to drink lots of coffee with ‘Gerr’ a sixty year old guy who tells me all about his passion for travel and steam trains. 

He doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered about letting me get a word in edgeways but I don’t really mind – it’s a welcome contrast to the night I’ve just had.
On the bus I realise I really do need to figure out a strategy for not freezing to death. Literally.  
This has probably been the worst rough sleeping I have ever had, and I have tried sleeping out in some strange places over the years…
One time near Dundee in Scotland I suddenly found myself stranded with about twenty pence: my gamble on getting to my final destination hadn’t worked out. I spent a humiliating half an hour trying to beg enough for a bus fare. I have never begged before or since, I was crap at it and only managed to get 50 pence.

It was raining and I had no tent and was in a town I didn’t know and had no money. A bad combination. Starting to walk out from the town centre, I found some garages.

One was broken open, and when I looked inside it was stacked nearly almost to the top with flattened cardboard boxes. With only about a two foot gap between the cardboard and the knobbly concrete ceiling, I slithered myself up into the gap.

Surprisingly, it was a very comfortable nights sleep; dry and warm and infinitely superior to the horrible stretch of hours I have just experienced in this Canadian cardboard pile.

 

Extreme cold though was once my saving grace on another occasion in Perth, not far from Dundee: Again, not quite managing to get to my destination of Inverness, I found myself on a quiet late night roundabout on the outskirts of town with nothing going anywhere.

It was snowing lightly and there was the beginnings of a bitter wind. No tent; I never ever carried one in the old days – I never needed to; reliable rides or ingenuity always saved my skin.

Following my nest-finding nose, I noticed nearby was a railway line. ‘Where theres railways theres workman’s huts’ I thought.

Scrambling through a thicket of wintered brambles in orange sodium-lit darkness, I scrambled through til I got to the chunks of clinker by the tracks. I was in luck; with my nose starting to go numb, I only had to walk about 200 yards til I got to the silhouette of a workman’s hut.

The door was ajar. Thank god. I pushed it open with my foot; it was stiff and it took some effort. It was pitch black inside (I had no torch) and I swept the floor blindly with my foot, to see what sort of space was there to lie on. I felt my foot moving aside small chunks of broken concrete and plaster and what felt like scuffed old newspapers. Feeling my way round, I lay out my sleeping mat and my sleeping bag and climbed in fully clothed. After having travelled 500 miles alternately standing in the cold by road-sides being mostly ignored and then being obliged make polite conversation in cars and lorries when I wasn’t, finally it was only my exhaustion that meant that I got any sleep at all I think.

On such nights, I would wake really early just as dawn was breaking. Probably a built-in defence to stop me dying of hypothermia from lying in the cold for too long. I creaked myself upright, rubbed my eyes and dimly saw the detritus I had been sleeping in.

I wiped concrete and plaster dust off my sleeping bag. Then to my surprise, I found that I had been sleeping with my face mere inches from a substantial mound of very frozen human poo. Very rarely is extreme cold such a marvellous friend.

 

One time I was moving out of a caravan in Mid-Wales and was ferrying my stuff out. I had been staying put a while and had accumulated apart from my usual detritus; a large A2 sketch pad, a unicycle, and some other random objects that seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was carrying it all by bicycle to the nearest train station in Llandrindon Wells. Over the course of three round trips I moved it and stashed it under a handy bush not too far from the station; ready for me to get the train, all ready to go, the next morning.

It was five miles each way and Wales doesn’t do ‘flat’. On the return of my last trip I was exhausted. ‘Stuff it’ I thought ‘I’m just going to sleep right here in this field. I’ll get back to the farm and say goodbye in the morning.’

It was summer, not all that warm but it was okay. I could afford to sleep in the open.

A beautiful night, the milky spread of stars in deep space above that you only see once away from dull orange urbanisation. I fell asleep grinning. I was awoken from reverie some time later. Splat. Wet in the corner of my eye. After first getting my sleeping bag wet, my face was the last to know; It was raining.

So gloriously tired in my bones I had just enough brain-power to decide that morning couldn’t be far away, and I’d be fine. I slept through the rain, fading again to sleep to the sound of soft random splatting on my sleeping bag.

Finally waking, a rising sun crow-barring my eyelids apart, birds making a raucous din, I found myself caked into my heavy sodden bag. I was wet through. ‘That was quite some kip’ I thought, awkwardly peeling myself out. There was still a bit of lingering drizzle in the air but fortunately it changed its mind, like Welsh weather does, and soon I was able to stand up and air myself to some degree in a slight breeze.

I went and said my goodbyes, and then spent the rest of the day on the slow train back to Berkshire, recovering.

 

These are just the really rough times though.

 

At its best, sleeping out meant making a brief but intimate aquantance with a spot; In high summer with no chance of rain, against a dry-stone wall for a sense of slight seclusion and to keep windy gusts off. Glittering stars for a roof.

A blanket of white to greying cloud will keep me warmer, though darker clouds mean possible rain.

I love watching high-altitude winds pulling clouds across the sky, the moon seeming to be journeying through them, it’s ever-changing light show holding me in total silent fascination until my eyes finally give up and sleep comes.

Sometimes for a degree of invisibility, but more often for the friendly companionship, I would sleep under the nurturing density of a hawthorn bush or the lofty assurances of a grand old motherly or fatherly oak.  Oaks seem to be differing genders which seems to be dependant on the way it physically looks and carries itself.

Above, the spangle of twisty branches fingering out into the night. Maybe the gentle gush of wind blowing through leaves like a lullaby.

Anywhere there are signs that a sheep has been sleeping under a tree is a good bet. You can be sure that’s the driest spot in the field.

Oaks and  sycamore in leaf will keep off all but the heaviest of rains.

Because of the way some trees branches bow down close to the ground, a tree will often retain a significant amount of day-time warmth in the air trapped under the branches – not a lot but certainly a noticable amount.

Gradually through the day the sun will heat the ground under the tree without breezes ever really being able to get in and sweep the rising warmth away. I notice it most in autumn and spring when the sun is still warm but the nights are stone cold.

 

Sleeping out, my mornings are nearly always the same, something of a ritual really. From having lay down and slipped away from the wonders around me and into sleep, so my waking is usually something like the same thing in reverse. Over the course of days, there is a certain rythym to it all.

If I’ve slept badly, it is like being stoned and having a slight hangover, but normally I will rest pretty soundly.

Bird song is the first thing I am usually aware of, sometimes a frantic dawn chorus, sometimes jackdaws and rooks, my favourites. Sometimes a lone blackbird, my other favourite, singing for all it’s life every unwritten symphony you never heard before.

Maybe a cold exposed limb has woken up the rest of me. Then, eventually or otherwise, depending how bleary or clear and ready I’m feeling, my eyes will open, and maybe I will see the place I’m in for the first time in daylight, maybe not. It will be different anyway; The weather changes, clouds move on, sheep move around.

 

Never ever sleep in a field with cows in it. They’ve got hard feet and they’re bloody heavy and I wouldn’t trust one not to acidently stand on me.

 

Maybe a farmer is brrrmming about some way off on a quad bike. Maybe there’s the dull insistant roar of endless traffic nearby.

 

I will sit up, maybe meditate if that’s what I’m into at the time. Lean against a trunk or wall. If I can do it without some unyeilding knobbly protrusion sticking into my back then that’s bonus. Otherwise I will prop up my rucksack as a back-rest.

If it’s cold, I will put on whatever clothes I didn’t actually sleep in, leaving as small a gap as possible of nakedness between getting out of my bag and getting dressed so as to conserve maximum body heat.

 

A casual breakfast of whatever random edible may be in my bag. Maybe there’s some blackberries nearby.

I will chew my way into readiness to go. Then folding all my stuff back into the compactedness of my rucksack, my spread of personal debris goes back to just being me and my bag; The place is now its own again and I’ve maybe a couple of things left to do before leaving. I probably need a wee. And then I will say thank you to the spot I have slept in; for getting me through whatever kind of night it was –  for keeping me safe, for keeping me alive, for keeping me dry, for the peace of the place, for the dreams I had whilst sleeping, for the company of trees and/or whatever brief encounter with wild life that may have occurred.

 

Anyone sleeping out in town on a regular basis has almost certainly lost their way, but being in the country and on the move is a different matter altogether; I feel so blessed by what all this naked contact unclothed by houses has given me.

It’s not all roses of course; Often-times I’ve got so fatigued and beaten by weather and the inaccessability of warmth and modern comforts. Numerous times in my wanderings I have envied the man who comes home every day to the loving embrace of his wife and his children, eats a big hot meal, fills his head with TV and sleeps in a big warm bed with a fluffy duvet and a companion.
If it’s warm and the place is right, I’ll very occasionally just get up and stretch with nothing on at all, getting fresh air to my limbs as an alternative to being able to have a wash. Sometimes it’s nice to just sunbathe luxuriously on top of my sleeping bag; just me, my skin and the big wide place I’m in.

Being naked is only an occasional occurence and usually only something I will do in particularly beautiful and secluded places. It feels wonderful in hot summer air, but if its cold and clear I will last about five or ten minutes before I have to get my clothes back on, but even that feels like a rare meeting with the elements. Standing naked in the rain feels like nothing else, especially if its warm. 

I don’t regard myself as a ‘naturist’; its not something I feel driven to do often but when I do its because it feels right to do it; to be in nature just as my mum made me and to acknowledge some deeply held part of my being in the world. Many people in the world are naturally naked every day, but we white westerners have left that behind somewhere. 

 

One time in the summer when I was part of a conservation volunteer group living in a cottage in Snowdonia, we had a party at full moon one night and it all went rather haywire. I had had enough of someone throwing food round the house and someone else trying to nail planks across bedroom doors with people behind them. 

In dismay, I left our house at the bottom of Snowdon, and went off for a walk up into one of its fine hanging valleys.

Finding myself in another world entirely and enjoying the pale blue glow of the mountainside, I felt myself wanting to merge even closer into this moonlit place. I stripped off to just my boots, walking naked through the night with my clothes tied in a bundle and the arms of something long-sleeved around my neck so everything rested on my shoulders.

A friend was at a dance camp in the next valley over at Nant Gwynant, so I thought I would walk through the night to where she was to get there hopefully in time for a cooked campfire breakfast. (I was planning on being clothed by that time of course.)

Walking up here with just my skin, the mountains and the moon just felt like heaven. It was amazing to be in one of Britain’s most popular tourist spots and be completely alone and intimate with the place. It felt as if the place gets the chance to be itself again for a moment, to breathe freely and remember what it is again before the chattering classes turn up again the next day. I congratulated myself for having extricated myself from our chaotic household and having turned a nightmare into such a beautiful dream.

On I walked. I tried briefly to walk without my boots on, but having to carry the clumsy objects bouncing on my back coupled with having to negotiate every sometimes stinging step soon made me put my boots back on again.

Over the night I carried on walking. Eventually I started to descend slightly, after having been walking on a long stretch of flat for the latter part of the route.

I saw ahead a small pine plantation. I couldn’t recall there ever being a plantation on the side of Nant Gwynant. I was puzzled.

As I went further ahead, the tops of houses started to appear over the brow of the bog in front of me. I must have taken a wrong turn and walked to Beddgelert. No I couldn’t have done; there’s an enormous lake on the way, I would have seen it.

Still walking, and still baffled, it gradually dawned on me that the place I was looking at was Llanberis. Where I lived.

Somehow I had managed to do a U-turn and come back home again, down the other side of the valley I had walked up. I could have sworn I was going in a straight-ish line. Well I wasn’t. Tricky places, mountains.

The sun was coming up and not wanting to surprise any early morning dog-walkers I re-clothed.

Obliged to break out of the magic of the moment at some point, I went back to our house, just long enough to slip unseen past unconscious snoring revellers, get my sleeping bag and some food and the fare for the first bus that would be heading down to Nant Gwynant.
One time, me and Gill, my girlfriend at the time, decided to go to Devon to pick walnuts.

We lived in Radstock in Somerset, the next county over so we figured it would just be a day out home in time for tea.

We set off on my Honda C50 moped; not only illegal but also slightly unfeasible given the lack of power of the bike. Struggling up the extreme hills of the Quantocks, we finally reached Porlock where we had heard there was an abundance of walnut trees.

Well… we found one walnut tree, in a car park, and we got a few nuts but it was nothing to shout about. Having a bit of a sit down and picnic in a field though, we did find an abundance of magic mushrooms.

Dum-de-dum-de-dum… Well have a guess at what happened next.Soon we found ourselves somewhere else entirely without even trying. We decided to go on an adventure in some nearby woods, and somehow before very long we were both completely stark naked and declaring ourselves to be the Queen and King Of The Woods. How we managed to avoid embarassing encounters with unsuspecting walkers is both a mystery and a god-send. Probably they saw us before we saw them.

Eventually we realised that time was indeed passing, it was soon going to be dark, we were neither of us in any fit state to ride a shonky moped sixty miles and we didn’t having any camping gear. And we had about sevenquid. Enough for a bag of chips each.

Ooh.

By now we’d put our clothes back on.

In the struggle to think coherently, we realised a bed and breakfast was out of the question. So…

We found our solution. Or rather, the only option available to us. We tried to ‘sleep’ in a baby-changing room in a public toilet in a car park.

It had a light that had no apparent light switch, a table top barely big enough for an adult to lie on and most thankfully, a door that was lockable from the inside. Being the gallant chap I am, I offered Gill first refusal on the table and she chose it; scrunched up barely able to squeeze herself on and her arse hanging precariously over the side. And she snores like a drowning train.

I lay on the tiled floor and got through the night by alternating which parts of my body to numb on the cold floor. There came a point where my back and thighs could take no more of the endless numbing and kneeling with my head tucked into my knees became the nearest I could get to being comfortable.

The fleuro light glared brightly and buzzed all night long, Gill didn’t get very much snoring in, and pretty much no fun was had by all.

We must have looked a right pair of zombies when we emerged in the morning…
More satisfactorily, I have slept out in a block of flats with an accidentaly open door in Marseilles only to be woken in the morning by some guy swearing at me loudly. I had no idea what he was bellowing, but it wasn’t hard to work it out.
Perhaps the strangest place I ever tried to sleep was when I was in Oslo one time trying to find work. Somehow I’d met some guy on the street and got chatting to him. When he discovered I was sleeping out on a hill-side in my tent (it was the Skandanavian version of late autumn), he told me that he worked in a hospital and that he reckoned he could get me a bed to sleep in. The Norwegians can be a funny lot sometimes and this seemed like a slightly peculiar offer, but I thought I’d give it a go.

I turned up at the hospital reception at 8.30 pm as he had directed to me to do, and I waited in the admissions area. He didn’t come for half an hour and I thought maybe the whole thing was just a wind-up.

Then he appeared, in his hospital uniform. He saw me and beckoned to me to come with him. We went to a lift and he whispered to me conspiratorially about what the plan was. He brought me to a dimly-lit ward specifically for eldery men. Nearest to us was a vacant bed. ‘Here – this is a nice bed for you eh? You will sleep warm tonight.’

I looked doubtfully at the bed. It looked very recently vacated. There were somebody’s family photos smiling enthusiastically over the empty bed.

Really not sure this is a good idea. I sit tentatively on the side of the bed. The family are still smiling at me. No, not at me; at whoever it is that isn’t here any more. I told my well-meaning friend that I felt like I was jumping into somebody’s grave. ‘No, no it is alright, the old man has just gone home to see his son and daughter for three days. He will be back on Monday.’

Great! I’m borrowing the bed of some old fella I’ve never met without asking! I tell my friend I can’t do it…

That night I slept out in a nearby pine forest. It was cold without my tent but at least I had my integrity to keep me warm.
In Norway because of the extreme cold of winters, the law there says that if you have no money, you may present yourself to the nearest police station and they will give you a nice warm cell to sleep in. (Otherwise the streets might end up by morning littered with the frozen bodies of wayward drunk people.)

I was on a Christmas break from a Norwegian school I was at for six months and was heading to the airport at Kristiansand. I got there a day early, and had nowhere to stay. I had almost no money, and a hostel would have been really expensive. I thought I’d try out the police station stunt. In order to look really stuck, I buried my stuff in a bin-liner under a snow drift in a car park and stuck a big stick in the top so that I would be able to find my stuff again the next day.

Feeling somewhat nervous about this cheeky escapade but bouyed up by being able to play the ‘naive tourist’ card , I walked into the station and told them I had nowhere to stay and had no money.

‘You must come back at eleven o’clock tonight and register.’ was all I got from a rather up-himself looking desk sergeant. His manner did not invite further questions, so I left.

With three hours to do nothing in, I went to the cinema almost directly across the road and watched a rather good James Bond film. (I forget which one; a Pierce Brosnan one with Robbie Coltrane hamming it up as a Russian baddie.) Afterwards suitably entertained I burnt off the remaining time looking at an exhibition about the Northern Lights which was lovely. At the appointed time, I duly made my way over to the cop shop once more and handed myself in.

Little did I realise that I would not only be accepted without too many questions, but that I would also be treated as if I was a criminal. Force of habit I suppose. As soon as I was through the desk hatch and ushered in towards the cells, what was anyway an almost total lack of friendliness evaporated completely. My attempts at pally chit-chat were lost on them. Into a grey shiny cell I was deposited with only one woolen blanket. The heaters blasted away noisily to compensate. It was a very odd night, though I did sleep soundly.
Still in Skandinavia and considerably better than that was the time I was inter-railing and found myself in Copenhagen. It was April and I had been wandering around the small city a little bit. Looking for a good place to sleep I thought maybe I could find a public toilet and lock myself in. When I investigated this as a possibility I understood immediately that I had hit dignity nose-dive central and immediately abandoned such a stupid thought (I was only about twenty and probably stoned).

Walking round aimlessly I really had no idea what I was going to do, excepting maybe that I might just walk around all night.

By chance I wandered into a quiet area full of very old buildings and stately plane trees. I happened upon a curious and ancient-looking large wooden door with a gothic arch, built into a high old brick wall. It looked very inviting and different from all the noisy modernness I had just walked away from. I tried the latch. The door openned.

Going through the door was like stepping into a secret garden. I had walked into a large square neatly-trimmed lawn surrounded by high brick walls, it was completely secluded and peaceful. All around the edges of the walls were double rows of rose bushes. In the middle was a large round pond. Sitting round the pond and milling about was about forty cats.

I had never been anywhere like it.

In one corner of the garden was a small shed. I went to the shed and found it was unlocked. In the shed was two old Christmas trees and some rolls of rockwall insulation. I lay out the trees, flattened them and lay the rockwall on top. Putting my sleeping bag on top of all that, I set myself up for sleep with my head at the door so I could watch the cats through a gap in the door.

I think this must have been the most amazing place I ever slept.

There have been many places I have stayed over the years that have left their mark in my memory, becoming it feels, like they are a part of me.

Meanwhile, back in Canada…

I am still recovering from my hellish night in the Dumpster Motel;

I have a relatively short ride to North Bay through endless trees, in the Ontario style. Actually, it reminds me a little of southern English countryside, with undulating hills, small patches of woodland and hedgerows hemming in around small farmsteads.

Gazing out of the window, I pretend that I am travelling through Berkshire where I grew up, and then tell-tale Canadian landscape markers burst through the fantasy: a Mack truck flashing past on the other side of the road, large clapboard farmhouses, enormous polka-dot stacks of pine trunks piled up along the roadside.
I arrive in North Bay late afternoon and decide that buying a proper winter sleeping bag would be a good idea. I get directions to ‘Lefevres’ winter sports shop from some guy called Gary on the bus.

I buy a huge thick sleeping bag (effectively doubling the size of my load) and a couple of camping knick-knacks. The man in the shop tells me my wellies are no good for winter and that they will get me killed.

He informs me that wearing them out in the boonies might keep the wet out, but all the sweat in my feet will stay in and freeze and kill off my core body heat. And then I would quickly die of hyperthermia.
He goes off for a moment and brings back a pair of walking boots. He tells me that if they fit me, I can have them! Gob-smacked (yet again) by generosity, I can just about get my murderously sweaty feet into them, but once on, they fit perfectly.

The previous owner has returned them unused cos they had ripped the Thinsulate liner inside trying (and failing) to get them on. They are Gore-Tex too, and I am to discover later, pretty good at keeping the wet out. 
I bounce off back up to the bus depot – wearing decent footwear makes a difference psychologically as well as me not having to go flapping about in sweaty wellies. I was getting occasional sideways glances whilst wearing the wellies. I don’t think they say ‘upwardly mobile’ to the average Canadian somehow.

 

I chat with the woman at the bus depot, I’m okay to sleep there till the bus comes in the morning. I think she is subconsciously impressed by my dazzling new boots. 

The journey on the bus passes through Saulte St Marie and onwards to Thunder Bay. The ride along the top of The Great Lakes is magnificent.
I get talking to an eighteen year old woman who says she has an alcohol problem and is off to Vancouver to try to find her dad. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she doesn’t find him. I can’t help feeling rather concerned, and I’m hoping she can make some good choices about who she decides to hang out with when she gets there. She’s running an activities group for kids in her home-town cos she doesn’t want them to get into drinking like she had. She’s a bit of a star I reckon. 
Later I get talking to a guy of twenty-five who lived with his parents in Pakistan for two years who has lots of stories to tell, though I seem to be able to remember none of them. We get stoned along with another woman we meet (who looks like ‘Amelie’ from the film of the same name), and we talk unfathomable bollocks through the night. Arriving at Winnipeg and having exhausted the conversational possibilities, we all part company, heading where we need to head to next.
I’m absolutely in need of a scrub down, a clean-up and a break so I find the youth hostel and book myself in.

I lunge straight for the washing machine and wash everything possible. I am forced to resort to having a long soak in the bath because showers are not allowed. Tragedy! 

After this bout of domestic heaven, I just hang out chatting with other nice people also patently foolish enough to travel in Canada at what many Canadians seem to regard as the wrong time of year. Actually if this is the level of back-packing that goes on around now, then I’m glad I’m not here in the summer; the place would be crammed chock-a-block. 
I get talking to a Romanian guy of about fifty who’s trying to see his son in Winnipeg but his ex-wife doesn’t want to know him any more. He’s pretty upset about it understandably. I gather he’s got a bit of a gambling habit. 

I meet an Indian chap (as in Asian) about forty who’s in computers in San Jose. Not literally. He’s up here to meet up with friends. He has a very refreshing sense of clarity, precision and honesty about him, which is very relaxing to be around. 

I also meet a suave Quebecois guy who attracts the ladies with his Jesus-like looks without even trying (bastard). Also I meet a vegan Mennonite (a religious sect; not neccessarily an unusual fossil) peace activist from Maine who shoots video for Indymedia: Another American who blows the stereotypes out of the water again. 

Also a Swedish couple who are young and seemingly stuck to each other (aah!) and a very lanky guitar playing stoner dude from Toronto who is so laid back I can see right up his nose whilst he’s happily admiring the ceiling. He’s very much the romantic on-the-road-wherever-the wind-takes-him type of character whom I instantly like – sometimes these kinds of characters can be so impossibly ‘cool’, that I just want to slap them. This guy though is a real good ‘un.

 

I don’t see much of Winnipeg and I can’t be arsed anyway. It’s a huge ariel shopping mall of a city; all shiny chrome and marble concrete blah. Apparently this is where Winnie the Pooh came from, which I refuse to believe, though I am somehow convinced that this is where Glen Miller crashed a plane and died. I think the cold has messed with my head. 

I could stay put in the hostel for a while, but decide against it as I have the feeling that I just want to get on really. Actually the temptation is to hang out for ages just chatting to new people and getting lardy on endless pancake breakfasts and brunches. It rings alarm bells warning of a cosy but expensive inertia is what it really boils down to.

 

Escaping the evil clutches of comfort, I get the afternoon bus the next day to as far as the small town of Virden where I am going to stay the night, but the place is so bleak, dull and quiet that I decide to get the next overnight bus out again. 

The bus doesn’t arrive until 11.30 pm so I check my bags in at the one and only hotel, stretch my legs for an hour and then go and see ‘Swimfan’ at the cinema. I should have realised how much popcorn I would get when I’m in the belly of the largest maize growing region in the world – tons; about twice the size of the largest tub you would get in an English cinema and it only costs a dollar (about forty pence).
I miss lots of scenery through the night. I think all I’ve missed is lots of oil derricks in a big flat dull place. I am reliably informed that the only thing interesting about Saskatchewan is its name. I’m almost in Alberta by the time morning comes. 

Pass the time watching ‘Stepmom’ on the in-flight entertainment which is a soppy-goo family film which has me in tears even though it has the weirdly unpleasant distraction of Julia Robert’s bizarre and improbable zeppelin-sized lips. She must have arse-implants to stop her from falling forwards.
Aaaaah…. television….

TV has the marvellous/fantastic/appalling capacity to fulfill the most sedentary of lives.

It enables a vast swathe of physically and mentally worn-out 9 to 5ers to maintain an interest in life.

When I was a teenager I would come home from school and be systematically ignored by my parents because they were both absorbed in a bunch of dancing coloured dots.

I felt like the TV was a more important member of our family than I was.

But so it is that most of us relegate ourselves to the rank of dull spectator to the superior doings of the interesting, the informative and the occasionally talented people we see on TV.

As a teenager I always felt seperated from my parents by TV, and had a keen sense of urgency to not become another dulled victim of its power.

Someone once illustrated just how dull watching TV is; ‘There are two things you will never ever see anyone doing on a soap or a sit-com. One is going to the toilet and the other is watching TV.’

That observation was made in the 1980s. These days people make Hollywood blockbusters that often involve and sometimes rotate entirely around the doings of the internet. That must be some kind of measure of just how exciting we have collectively become.
I am, of course, an utter hypocrite.

(The world is world is full of strange paradoxes and contradictions, so I thereby reserve the right to be a hypocrite.)
As a teenager at home, instead of going out and having loads of mates, I retreated into the Vic-20 home computer in my bedroom, and I was so absorbed in it, I would actually dream solutions to gaming programs I was writing; streams of neon-green gobbledegook running past my sleeping eyes.

I grew up a nerd; in the days when being a nerd was not in the least bit socially acceptable. (Now we’re all nerds and don’t even realise it.)

If it was not for the Monday to Thursday late night ten to midnight slot on Radio One, The John Peel Show, I don’t think I would ever have realised that I actually really was a person that counted for something.
After leaving home at eighteen, I have struggled ever since to remain engaged in having a real life and not just fill myself up with television and computer screens.
I find it confusing when I sometimes get told by people what an exciting life I have led when by my own standards, there seems to have been far too many blank pages.
We fill our heads with far-away fantasies of how life could be better if only… (insert fantasy of your choice).  

Come a bleary Saskatchewan mid-morning, it’s time to get off and stretch our legs and everything else that has endured the tortuous not-even-half ‘sleep’ of the night bus.. I’ve been told how scarily empty and dull the prairies are, but I am really quite surprised how much I appreciate the vast openness of it. The sun is beaming down which helps, and it is a crisp cold morning. Just the job. I think previously having lived near the East Anglian fens has had me in training, and it makes a nice change from being completely surrounded by trees nearly all the time. 

I would reckon that up to here, about seventy percent of everything I’ve seen so far has either been trees, lakes or sea (all of it gorgeous too!) 
I am going to get off at Medicine Hat, unwittingly making the mistake that maybe cute name equals cute town. When I get there it becomes apparent that actually maybe they should have  called the town ‘Dreary-Estates-With-No-Particular Character-ville’.

Medicine Hat boasts of having ‘the Largest Tipi in the World’. What that involves, I soon discover, is a cone of steel tubes forty-five foot high by the side of the main road, which presumably gets clad with something equally unnatural and inappropriate during the tourist season. 

I put my hands over my eyes as temporary blinkers and escape from planet Medicine Hat on the next available bus and head for Calgary with its re-assuringly dull name.
The approach along the highway to Calgary is famous (well, in Canada it is). From a distance all you see is a big bunch of skyscrapers slap bang in the middle of the prairies; very little in the way of suburbia. It’s like the whole place just rises up out of the ground from nowhere, looking like a giant concrete graphic equaliser.
I stop off for pizza for lunch. You can get a huge slice for a dollar, which is fantastic – it’s true what people this side of the Atlantic say about British food; the British make rubbish pizza – pizza here has soft tasty bread (not thick dry and tasteless like the in the UK) lots of freshly chopped vegetables, that taste new and actually nutritious. Num-num-num-num-num…
November 4th Monday 5 am. 

Greyhound bus station Calgary. 

When I arrive, I dump my stuff in a bus depot locker and head off round the city for the rest of the day.

Calgary has no litter, lots of trams and little other traffic. There are pan-handlers and down-and-outs who all seem to be First Nations people. I’m aware of a huge incongruence between the ‘Come and see our native crafts and cultures’ element to Canada’s tourism and the very apparent mess some of these people seem to be in. 

The guys in the station cleaning all night are Sikhs, but I didn’t see them here during the day. As usual, they always seem to get the crap jobs. 

The security guard here, very obviously a bit of a toker, lets me and someone else ‘sleep’ in the bus depot overnight (we are not supposed too). Before that, he first takes us down to the drop-in centre on the other side of the city, but the floor of the place is littered with bodies. Not really my kind of place ‘Ooooooh! Shit! The place is full of crack-heads!’ is the security man’s thoughts on the deal. Anyway it’s 5.30 am now in the bus depot, my head’s mashed and in a couple of hours I’m going to see some dinosaur thingies (hopefully).
November 5th 2002 written whilst sitting admiring a life-size plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur in a car park:

Well, the bus for Drumheller and its National Park turns up at 6.20 am. I ask the driver if he can drop me ten kilometres short at the Horseshoe Canyon. He says he can’t as there’s nowhere safe to stop. No matter. Halfway into the bus ride I ask him if he can drop me anywhere near it, to save me a long walk. I’m not really sure how this is offensive, but the man is blustering and looks and behaves as if he wants to swear and shout at me and/or give me a kicking. I’m confused by this. ‘Maybe I should just get off at Drumheller?’. He drops me off at Rosebud Junction which is just as far away as Drumheller is, but short of where I want to be. What a jerk. He gets my bag off the bus, he looks fit to burst. I apologise for seeming to have ruined his day. He tells me that I haven’t. Whatever has happened to him, I hope he gets it out of his system before he loses it and crashes his bus.
Here I am in undulating prairie with only the curiously soporific nodding natural gas derricks and a cold light wind for company. I start walking to keep warm. There aren’t many cars, and I can hear each one quietly roaring down the highway from miles away. I get a lift from a nice middle-aged couple from Saskatchewan on their way home from holiday in Banff and they drop me off right by Horseshoe Canyon a few minutes later. 

Hey, whaddaya know? There’s loads of space to drop me off in. This is my first view of ‘The Badlands’.
 

‘Badlands’ is a pretty much self explanatory term really. It’s land that’s full of loose sand, slick clay and usually not much else but extreme wind and water erosion. Often difficult to walk across on foot and completely useless for any kind of farming.

And also a popular kind of area for governments to make as reservations for First Nations peoples.
This place is a much smaller grey to white version of the Grand Canyon. This one’s only about a hundred metres deep. It looks like the back-drop to either a cowboy film or the old-style Star Trek scenes where Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock are trying to find Dr. McCoy who’s been kidnapped by some bloke in a green shag-pile monkey suit with fangs and boggly eyes.

I dump my bags near the top out of easy reach and view of any passing traffic and very cautiously make my way down. I am cautious partly because of slippery fine clay surface and largely because of a lot of mixed-up foot prints in the snow. There are deer prints and some kind of dog (fox?) prints all crossing over each other like there has been some kind of scuffle. What worries me most are the really big prints that I imagine could be bear prints. Getting out quickly from here is steep and slippery. Bears can run at 50 kmph. I go down anyway, taking care to leave all foody stuff away from my bags. I’m on my guard. I half expect the boggly-eyed Star Trek monster to step out, claws raised – ‘Raargh!’. After about fifteen minutes of getting a feel for this strange landscape, I decide I’m not going to push my luck any further, and make my way out again.
Standing by the roadside and about fifteen minutes later, I get a ride into Drumheller; a town notable for its abundance of life-size plastic dinosaurs that are littered about the place. Rick’s the driver and decides he’s going to show me some ‘Good old western hospitality’. He messes about with gas drilling rigs for a living, but he’s hurt his ankle and he’s taking the rest of the day off. He takes me to a bar, then we visit a suspension bridge, stopping en-route at a liquor store, then we stop at ‘The Last Chance Saloon’ in Wayne which is a quirky weather-battered pale wooden place and serves its beer in jam jars. We have soup and beer here and Rick gets up and does a country music turn. He does a spiel about picking me up and plays ‘One More City’ a Merle Haggard song about a lost vagabond that can’t settle anywhere. I am touched (and drunk) and I have a tear in my eye.

Onwards through the Badlands we stop off at Rick’s work camp where it looks like he’s getting a bollocking for some reason. We change cars to Rick’s Lincoln (one of those big slab-like American cars with fins) and cruise over to a place called Patricia, drinking more on the way.
In the bar I have by now lost the plot majorly. I usually get drunk on three beers, and I’ve had nine beers and one alcopop thing. Rick gets the burgers in and tries to set me up with the barmaid for the night. Unfortunately she declines on the grounds that she is now married and has a baby. I wouldn’t be very able anyway and I probably look a right mess. More beer and before I know it, Rick’s paid half for a room for me for the night and he gives me his address and we part company. I ruefully can’t help thinking that I am not the tough drinking partner he might have been better off with. Ahhh, fuggit. I go upstairs, watch TV a bit and sleep off an awful lot of weird cobblers that’s whizzing randomly through my head that I can’t figure out at all until it occurs to me to count up how much beer I’ve had. Drink lots of water, feel dreadful and then sleep.
In the morning I’ve got a death-defying hangover and my body feels nervous all over, heavy and reluctant. Realise I’ve lost my fur hat, coat and penknife somewhere along the line. Usually anywhere I leave, I always double-check the space I am about to vacate. Too pissed this time. After a large fried breakfast to try to anchor me down, I pfaff about trying to figure out what to do about not having a hat and coat. The manager gives me some replacements that someone else has left behind, gives me Rick’s address and then gives me a ride up to Dinosaur Provincial Park. Just the place for clearing my head.
More canyon, but this time this place is much bigger than the Horseshoe Canyon. According to the information board, it is seventy-six square kilometres that has the Red Deer River running through it.
I make my way down to the visitors centre at the bottom and take a look round the various trails. There is practically nobody here except the warden, Fred Hammer (good name for an archaeologist). He’s a total chatterbox; cabin fever I think. I strongly suspect that I am the first person he’s seen up here for a long while.

Walking around here is the strangest place I’ve ever been in my life. Most of the time its totally silent except for when the wind blows through the abundant sage bush thats everywhere around. 

The smell is amazing. I can see why its used for ceremonies by the Native Americans; the burning of it gives a wonderful evocation of this eerie and special landscape. 

There’s also lots of prickly pear here. The wild life at night is quite noisy and next day after camping out here I am able to see some of the things that have been making all the noises. There are quite a few mule deer (called that cos they’ve got big ears), a couple of rabbits, very large owls (very impressive in flight), an eagle-y type thing, and a couple of porcupines which like to spend their time killing off the cottonwood trees by eating the bark. I’ve always thought that porcupines were supposed to be like large hedgehogs, but these ones climb up trees and sit on their hind legs, which makes them look a little like shaggy koalas, and in their languid manner, makes them quite sloth-like.

There are coyotes here, to complete the ‘Wild West’ effect. 

At sundown and sunrise they all yowl and announce their existence to each other. The yowling lasts a couple of minutes and though I can’t see them, it sounds like there must be about twenty of them scattered across this fairly stark landscape. 
I think I might have found a fossil whilst I was out and about, it looks like the end of a leg bone sticking out of a rock by a couple of centimetres. I haven’t written very much about this place, but it’s one of most interesting parts of the trip so far. 
I am getting a bit bored of my own company, and am thinking about booking a flight home for Christmas.
After spending two days here, I decide to leave. I’m in the middle of nowhere, and this park is the end of the road and has practically no visitors. Fortunately, Fred Hammer the park warden and cabin-fevered chatter-box, gives me a ride back to Brooks, the town on the TCH (Trans Canadian Highway) fifty kilometres south. It’s where he lives, where my bus goes back to Calgary from, and where my hat, coat and penknife might be; Fred gives me a ride to Rick’s house.

Rick’s in the shower but I am greeted by a fluffy white dog and Rick’s Newfie girlfriend (‘If you can’t get enough, get a Newfie’ as the saying goes). She’s a diminutive country-and-western trailer-trash peroxide barbie-doll blonde and fabulously friendly. She helps me get the required objects from the trunk of Rick’s Lincoln, and I zip away again, cos my free ride has to go home and be with his kids. Wow people are amazing sometimes.
Stop by at Boston Pizza before the bus is due, and have absolutely fantastic Greek salad and lasagne which is cheap and could feed about three people. I am served by the lovely ‘Ebony’ who is dark, short and yummy. Hmmmm…!
On the bus to Calgary I get talking to a guy going to see his estranged son, and who doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about it. He’s a bit drunk and slightly odd in a dark sort of way.

It’s snowing for the first time and there’s a bit of a blizzard blowing, really big snow flakes. The traffic has been caught out and everything slows down. 

We get to Calgary about 11 pm, I am hoping to stay in the bus depot overnight again, but there’s a different security guard on duty this time and I get kicked out along with two other guys. The guard helpfully suggests that we could stay in Tim Hortens all night; not an amazing prospect. I equip the other two with a hat each. (I have three for some reason, and we’re all baldies.) They smoke cigs, we all drink a beer or two (one guy has his coat seemingly lined with cans) and we eventually succumb to the inevitable and ‘do’ Tim Hortens.

We linger over hot drinks as if to make our stay legitimate, talk nonsense and ‘check out for hot chicks’. An assortment of befuddled night-owls pass through, including a couple who we reckon are either doing coke or shagging in the wash-room or both. They are unintentionally very funny when they come out, trying too hard to look inconspicuous whilst giggling and rubbing their itchy noses, obviously looking like they’re sure everyone knows what they’ve been up to. Which of course we do. 

Counter service is provided by a chirpy middle-aged Serbian woman with too much eye shadow and big black hair and red lipstick which makes her look somewhere between Dot Cotton from EastEnders and an extra for The Munsters. She speaks fabulously broken English and tries to engage us with her passion for Nobel peace prize winners. When this doesn’t quite work, she tries to strike up a breezy conversation about Ernest Hemingway. 
It gets to 6 am comes and we escape back to the bus depot and get our respective buses. I bump into the Swedish couple from Winnipeg and we grunt hello and fall asleep in front of each-other, then I wake up and go for the Vancouver bus.

I’ve been looking forwards to seeing what all the fuss is about with the alledgedly stunning Banff area, it being something of a tourist hive; but almost everything is obscured by low cloud. I’m deep in the heart of the Rockie Mountains now. The icy mist has the affect of making everything monochrome, like I’m seeing the whole place in black and white, and with the top of the picture chopped off by low cloud, rather like a badly taken photograph.
I stay at the Kamloops hostel which is a converted law court in the centre of town. 

A grand building with a wood-panelled and spacious interior, it lacks the cosiness (and piles of people) of Winnipeg. I meet a nice Irish chap. It’s always a nice surprise to meet people from back home (or close to); it feels almost like meeting family or something. 

The next morning at 7 am, I chat in the kitchen with a fantastically brimming woman who’s going to Seattle to meet someone who can teach her three-strung harp playing (it’s complicated). She’s an absolute elastic band of excitement and very funny. 
I walk up through the ‘burbs and have to stop to soak up the amazing view of this little town hanging in two joining valleys in the Rockies:
November 10 Sunday.

Sitting on the suburban mountainside of Kamloops. A broad town of 50,000, sat in the ridges of the Rockies. Traffic rumbles, slight smog hangs, the sun rises warming my back. For the first time it feels warm without me having to do anything (i.e. walk lots). 

A huge dark winding river dominates, anchoring the town to the mountains. A long distance freight train sounds its hello, echoing on the walls of the steep sided valley. Beautiful snapshot. Birds twitter, the sage smells cool and old. No snow – the sky brilliant blue, magpies glide. A distant kayak, a red blip on the vast sinuous black flatness of water.
At the Greyhound depot I get talking to Dana. We talk for the entire bus journey and she is really quite inspiring. She’s very bubbly and unfortunately has a fiance (lucky chap). She broke both her knees playing rugby at school when she was seventeen, she spent a year learning to walk, then another year learning to run. She had decided that she was going to make a list of everything that she wanted to do by the time she was twenty-eight. She’s done all of them except travel round Europe. 

She’s the ‘executive manager’ (self-appointed title) of a company that makes gimp masks and latex fetish weirdness; what she likes most about this ‘job’ is the fact that she can spin peoples heads telling them about it, which I wholly approve of. 

She’s also been ‘mum’ to a kid left stranded by her ex-boyfriends junkie ex-girlfriend. She’s such an all-round person, I feel really inspired by her. She and her man are having two weddings, one a dry Catholic affair for her Mexican chaps folks, and the other a shin-dig on the beach of Stanley Park (in Vancouver) to which they’ve invited every person that they can track down from their pasts who has had any sort of influence on their growing up, including the guy who was selling them hot dogs in the park when they first snogged nearby.
We are later joined by Jenn, a guitar player from Quinell, and we all end up telling filthy jokes and being too loud. (We eventually get reprimanded by the bus driver.) 

We get into a conversation about porno, and I am wondering what the fascination with Japanese cartoon porn could possibly be, when you could have the real thing. As Dana points out, it’s because cartoons can do despicable naughty things that you can’t do in real life. Expanding on this theme we invent ‘plasticine porno’ where plasticine characters can morph themselves extra rude bits as desired. Over time, Canadian-scale bus journeys do tend to invite a certain level of mind-warp. Maybe you just had to be there. 
Prince George is a major stopping off point between north south east and west traffic, giving it more of a hub than a lot of towns have; it still manages to feel like a small town. 

I stay at Jenn’s for two nights which is great. It’s lovely to be able to sleep in a proper house. Well actually it’s her student halls (University of Northern British Columbia, a relatively new university). We watch films ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (excellent) and ‘Queen Of The Damned’ (not so excellent). We eat pizza and lollies and talk about animals, growing fruit and vegetables and our mutual love of the English language. She’s really warm-hearted and someone I could get to be good friends with.
November 12th (day after Remembrance Day)

I get a taxi down to the bus depot and bump into a middle-aged English guy and his Californian wife who are also going to Prince Rupert, where I’m off to as well. He comes and sits next to me and keeps himself busy by telling me lots of little bits of history of all the places we pass through. Me having the kind of mind that will only deal with three traffic directions at a time before it decides that my brain is full, has a bit of difficulty keeping up with John (for that is his name). 

He plies me with some dodgy looking BBQ pork which afterwards sits strangely in my stomach. We stop for a lunch break halfway and I get fed some more. I am told that I am staying or not with them for the night. (This is in between some sort of minor domestic argument the two seem to be having between themselves.) I have a slight suspicion that the argument is over my staying. So that’s my accommodation sorted. Sort of.
I’ve got a serious head-cold by now, which adds a certain something to the whole continuous-no-gaps history lesson whether-I-like-it-or-not thing. Finally John gives up and he goes and sits with Peggy his wife.
I talk in a rather more bi-directional way with a couple sitting in front. We are talking about drugs and their various merits and tribulations and I end up telling them that I had snogged the bloke I lived with at a party when I was on ecstasy. This has the all-too-familiar effect of making the guy I’m talking to think that I’ve suddenly crossed the line into being some kind of scary monster that is ‘coming on’ to him. This partly amuses me and partly annoys me because it’s such a predictable and small-minded knee-jerk defence that most men have. Mention anything vaguely not heterosexual and they start feeling the need to pump up their defensive testosterone-ridden swagger. This must be because men seem to be only capable of operating on a sexual level much of the time. I don’t know. Funny creatures.
After freaking him out (he’s only a youngster) I get talking to a very nice chap from Bristol who has been in Canada for five months and is doing research for the Rough Guide books. 

He is a non-religious Religious Education teacher who’d been to Canada before with his girlfriend and looks like he’s retracing old steps, I imagine that maybe he’s exorcising old girlfriend ghosts or something. He seems a very light kind of person so maybe not. 

On this trip, he’d re-visited New York City where he had been with his girlfriend too. He tells me how they had met a Scottish backpacker on September 10th in 2001 in Times Square, and were going to meet her the next day for lunch at the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre. They didn’t meet up with her because they had to go and do something else. He remembers standing in Times Square the next day in the confusion thinking they could all have been up there. He says one of the worst things was the taste of the building’s dust and just getting his lungs full of it….
Upon arrival at Prince Rupert, I’m not exactly looking forwards to being a guest, which I suppose is a little ungrateful of me really. I think actually that I’m not really very well, and given a choice would much rather be hiding from the world in a snuggly bed. Anyhow, their flat is very nice and full of lovely art stuff. 

I am talked at by John which is rather stifling as he seems to have failed to have noticed that I don’t seem to have very much to contribute to this unrelenting verbal history of Canada. 

I like Peggy though, she’s an ex-nurse/therapist in a mental hospital and very gently spoken. We get on very well. I make a point of saying thank you to her for her cooking and hospitality, something her husband seems to take for granted. 

He’s an alright chap really and well-meaning, we are none of us perfect after all. He reminds me of George Melly the large and loud jazz man and occasional BBC broadcaster. Not that that has any bearing on anything at all. 

Lovely food and a big squidgy couch to sleep on is an excellent way to combat a cold.
I go out for a long walk in the pouring rain and discover the edge of town and some lovely dank forest. 

Upon my return, John tells me that my vagabond ways put him in mind of a chap called Robert Service. 
I round off my stay off by reading some poems by this chap, who I’ve never heard of before, but is very famous in the north of Canada. He is an English chap who’d come over for the Gold Rush and ended up writing about it’s colourful characters. He had come originally from Lancashire, so I read one out in my best Lancashire accent about a woman with a boil on her arse, and then I literally have to yank my boots on and rush across the street to get the bus before it goes. 
Robert William Service was born in Preston Lancashire in 1874, and started adult life as a banker. He left England at the age of twenty-two and bummed his way round BC and the Western US on the hunt for gold and simultaneously dreamed of becoming a cowboy. He ended up working in a bank in Kamploops, and then finally got a transfer as a bank clerk in 1904 all the way up in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Service spent his spare time writing verses, and was asked to write something for a local show happening in town for which he wrote ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, relating the outcome of a bar-room brawl and featuring the larger-than-life characters who were the gold-rush hopefuls (called ‘sourdoughs’). His poem proved popular and soon other poems followed, being published in the local paper The Whitehorse Star. 

His popularity grew and his first book in 1907 ‘Songs of a Sourdough’ was published. 

His writing was considered doggeral but this was as he intended – to write straight-forward verses for the entertainment of the common man; he was regarded both as ‘The Bard of the Yukon’ and as ‘The Kipling of Canada’. He never regarded himself as a ‘poet’.

His work is freely available on the internet and best read with a broad Lancashire accent.

This grace was reputedly the first thing he ever wrote, when he was six and staying with his grandma in Scotland:
God bless the cakes and bless the jam;

Bless the cheese and the cold boiled ham:

Bless the scones Aunt Jeannie makes,

And save us all from bellyaches. Amen
Service was tapping the same vein as Jack London, both writing about the wildness of the Yukon and its inhabitants; they both went on in turn to influence writers like Jack Kerouac, also out searching for the nature of man in big wild country. 
Such is his fame, he has a statue in Whitehorse, a main road in the Yukon, a postage stamp in 1976 and three schools bearing his name; one in Dawson City, one in Anchorage and one in Toronto.

Back on the bus again… 

A few days of comfort indoors has made me realise just how much sleeping outside/dozily rattling overnight on buses and slouching in all-night cafes I’ve been doing, and it has finally caught up with me. Fantastically bunged up and snorting snot all the time. Yum. 

The ride back from Prince Rupert I see in daylight for the first time, and it’s very beautiful, the road skirting endlessly round vast glassy grey lakes and big ominous mountains. 
I get the next bus straight up to Whitehorse, which from Prince Rupert must be about 2500 km or something, most of the rest of the way from here is in the dark. (Dull verging on surreal.) I’m getting used to huge distances, and I am completely unfazed by it. I notice an increasing number of people complaining about the length of their bus ride. ‘I’ve been on this bus for eight whole hours’ (moan/whinge/squirm) 

to which I nonchalantly respond; ‘I’ve been on the bus since Moncton, New Brunswick’ which artfully knocks the fart out of their sails.
Bizarrely, I bump into Rick again at Dawson Creek. I don’t feel like talking to anyone (lergy and historical overload in Prince Rupert) and make the terrible mistake of pretending I don’t see him. After all the goodwill he put in my direction, I realise (too late) that I’m behaving like a tosser and then spend the next couple of hours feeling crap about it. I tell him this when we stop for lunch. He’s visibly not impressed either by my attitude, or my whingeing, and reminds me that I still owe him lunch. Oops, I’ve screwed up. That bit of yikkiness bothers me for the rest of the journey until I ‘fall asleep’.

Rick leaves the bus early in the journey thankfully saving me from any further squirming.
We stop off three times on the way up – once in a lay-by high up in the Mackenzie Range. It’s a gloriously light place full of distant snowy peaks and black rock. One of those views that’s so vast and seemingly all-encompassing, it makes you think that this really is the only place in the world. 

These are the slightly gentler mountains that bring the Rockies to their eventual northern conclusion. 
Further on we stop at a house in the middle of nowhere, where the driver opens a luggage compartment under the bus and removes a car fender which he then delivers to a solitary small wooden house that stands resolute in the howling wind and snow. I guess Greyhound also doubles as a remote goods delivery service. The driver takes ages; I expect he’s having a bit of a chin-wag and giving the occupant some much-needed human contact along with their new fender.

The last place is a cafe/restaurant, also in the middle of nowhere. We all get out, grateful for the break, stagger round a gift shop, buy coffee and muffins and stagger back out again. Some of us smoke fags in the cold pure air. I don’t smoke so I just stand with my hands in my pockets and blow breath-vapour and pretend I do instead.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon (which isn’t that much of a claim considering its nearly all wilderness). It was named after the White horse Rapids (which look like a horses mane). For such a northerly town, its one of the driest places in Canada, most of the seaward rain landing on the mountains first. 

It was established in 1898 as a gold-rush settlement until finally being incorporated into Canada in 1950. Before the sourdoughs turned up, the area had been used for several thousand years by several different First Nations tribes who would seasonally each pass through the area.
We arrive in Whitehorse at 4.30 am. Me and some other bus passengers head for Tim Horton’s and do the Hot Chocolate thing. The bus driver is in there too, and I can’t quite figure his accent. A short exchange goes thus: 

me: ‘Are you a Kiwi?’ 

him: ‘Are you Irish?’ 

me:’ You must be Australian!’ 

him: ‘You must be English!’ 

That is the sum total of the conversation; We seem to have deduced each others nationalities by potentially offending each other, but it is all good-humoured. 
I get talking to a native chap (half Cree/half English) who’s from Manitoba and a bit drunk. We have an interesting conversation about land and peoples different priorities towards it. 

He asks me ‘if people in England like the Indians’ and I tell him lots of people are into the ethics of the cultures but that too many people put them on pedestals and romanticise them. He tells me about his medicine bag, and I reply that I used to wear a stone I once found, and used it as a ‘telephone to the gods’. We go off for a walk together, and then he goes off, on the chance of a mechanics job in town. I head off to the Bees Knees backpackers hostel. 
I turn up and am not sure if I’ve made a mistake. There’s lots of boots in the hallway which is a good sign, but it’s just like I’ve walked into someone’s private house. 

I sit on the couch without putting any lights on, not sure what to do next and a couple of minutes later, Dona, the woman who runs the place wanders in in her dressing gown. She’s slightly surprised to see someone sitting in her living room in the half-light. She sorts me out somewhere to sleep and I spend the next six days here, doing very little but sleeping in lots, going to see movies and messing around on the internet. I’ve decided to get over my cold before I do anything else. 
I spend a day painting the bedroom of a friend of Dona’s, a nurse who’s just moved to the town and get a free pizza for my efforts. (Very good.) I go see the new Harry Potter film, The Chamber of Secrets which reminds me of home, especially the bit right at the beginning where they fly over English countryside. (It brings a tear to my eye.) 

I go see ‘8 Mile’ the Eminem film, which does not remind me of home. It’s the only other film playing here. It’s provincal here.

 

Also staying in this tiny hostel, is a South Korean chap with hi-tech gizmos a go-go: a digital camera, a laptop and all sorts. He is a highly motivated chap; he’d been to Churchill to see the polar bears and now he wants to see the Northern Lights at least once in the three weeks before he has to go home. 

Every night about 7 pm he would anxiously ask each of us ‘You fink I see Norrren Lie fiss erening? You fink?’

He’d peer out of the window for a minute and then scamper out into the snowy night-time gloom with his camera.

I feel really sorry for the guy. I’ve been blessed enough to see the Northern Lights six or seven times, and it is truly truly awesome as the Canadians would put it.

Each morning we would see him eating his breakfast with a worried far away look in his eye. ‘I did not see Norrren Lie’.
Trying deliberately to see the Northern Lights is probably like trying to pick up a beautiful woman. You can be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, but there’s nothing to say that it’s actually going to happen.

I think in my lifetime I’ve probably had better luck with glowing lights in the sky than I have had luck with women.
The first time I ever saw the Northern Lights I was in a place called Bracke in northern Sweden. I was inter-railing, my first travel trip outside of Britain and alone.

I’d made it down to Spain, and now I wanted to go as far north as I could. I’d got as far as Trondheim but because it was Easter, all the trains were messed up. I remember waiting at Trondheim Station and seeing the ice on the lake, where it had thawed enough to break up and re-freeze at crazy angles like icebergs. The ice was one metre thick. 

In the waiting room a man introduced himself as an Iranian Catholic called George, who then goes on to express an interest in what I had under my trousers.

‘My underpants’. I looked at him crossly.

‘No,no, I mean underneath your underpants.’ He slimed a grin at me and I got up and waited outside.

The train comes, and dozens of brightly dressed blonde people bustled themselves and their skis onto the train. The train stopped in the middle of nowhere. It being Easter, this is as far as it went. A ski resort called Bracke. 

Not having the funds or the inclination to go skiing, I bedded down in the nearest night-time abode, a small wooden hut in a children’s playground; no door and a square hole for a window. 

Some time in the night I woke up and could see clouds moving swiftly across the sky. That’s strange. It doesn’t seem windy. A while later I looked again and this time the wind seemed to be blowing the clouds the other way. This was really weird. I stuck my head out the door to try to get a better view of what was going on. It wasn’t windy at all. It wasn’t clouds. It was lights. 

From a midpoint in the sky, roughly above my head, beams of light were appearing from a single point, and radiating outwards in every direction down to the horizon. It was filling the whole sky.

These pulsing beams got faster and faster, pouring out to the horizon. When they reached a certain speed, they would start to slow down until they started going backwards, being sucked up back into that single point. They would go faster and faster and then start radiating outward again. This carried on for about four hours as far as I knew. Lying on top of my sleeping bag, watching utterly utterly transfixed by this breathing sky. Eventually the cold got the better of me, and I retired to my little hut.
Two days later in Trondheim I told a Norwegian from further north (Bodo) about it and he was totally unimpressed by it.

‘What colours did it have? Oh we usually see it with several different colours. It’s Gods apology to try to stop us from all killing ourselves in the winter time’.

I made the mistake of accepting this chaps kind offer to stay at his house in Bodo to sit out the Easter weekend. What joy. He invited me into his basement where he had pencil sketches of mutilated bodies all over his walls.

‘I am an artist’ he droned Norwegianly.

‘Oh!’ I said diplomatically, and high-tailed it out of there as soon as I could.
The second time was in Scotland on the Black Isle up by Inverness. I’d just come back from the pub and was being miserable about something, I don’t know what. Everyone else went indoors and I sat outside asking for cosmic help.

What I got was a bunch of dancing colours up in the northern end of the sky. It was a red shifting haze with a dancing green curtain that blinked on and off all the way through it. Well that’s some kind of answer I suppose.

The third time was just after I’d run away from a strange meditational cult group (Transcendental Meditation). I was in the suburbs of Newbury and I was wandering around aimlessly. Sitting in a patch of grass I meditated for five minutes, opened my eyes and found one single magic mushroom without looking for it. I ate it. Nothing happened of course – one isn’t enough to do anything.

I saw an orange blob of light loping about near the horizon to the north. Of course it could have been a man-made light or it could have been the mushroom. Whatever it was, I later discovered that the Northern Lights are visible roughly seven times a year as far south as London (near Newbury), but people don’t know it’s there to see cos there’s so much light pollution.
The other times I saw the lights (I definitely did see it these times) was back in Norway again, but further south near Lillehammer up in the mountains where a bunch of us lived at an international school. One notable occasion was when we were doing this game called ‘Busterton’ which involved a group sitting in a sauna at night-time til it got unbearably hot and then running outside to roll down a hill wearing just our underwear. (We were supposed to do it naked, but we were too shy for that.) And then, before your body got the chance to really register just how cold it was, we all ran back into the sauna and really pumped the heat right up. And then, when we all agreed that it was absolutely unbearably hot again, we would all run outside again and would have to run round the outside of the house, which in our case was an ex-skiing hotel; rather large.

Some tried to cheat by wearing flip-flops (jandals), which only served to slow them down. Have you ever tried to run in the snow wearing flip-flops? Wearing only your underwear?

The gods smiled down on us and rained upon the sky a glorious fire of lights, to serenade our silliness.

Another time, I guess it must have been before that, we had two African guys staying with us; Kenneth and Papius from Malawi. It had just started snowing, which was great – neither of them had seen snow before. They didn’t like it much. They both agreed that  it was strange and beautiful, but didn’t really suit their hot African blood.

At the same time I’d wandered out and noticed the lights, and a German woman comes out with me and we lay in the new snow as flecks fell on our faces. We lay back and marvelled at the sky.
Every time I’ve seen the lights, it’s been different. This time it was like someone was holding a giant lighter just below the horizon behind the mountains, and the flame was flickering ten miles high across the whole sky. If I’d had the inclination it would have been romantic.
Meanwhile, back in the Yukon:

One night, we’re all sitting in the living room chilling out, regardless of the Norrren Lie when in strides this stranger, hands on hips, legs apart imposing himself into the middle of the room. ‘Hi! I’m Tom! I’m from the United States!’ 

He thrusts out his hand, shakes hands firm and brisk. Oblivious to any previous conversation, starts to tell us his story.

‘I just drove up from Chicago, I’m on my way to help out with my brother’s German-style bierkeller up there.’

Oh! He’s going to Alaska! This could save me from spending 350 bucks on a bus ticket (it’s 1500 km). I ask him if I can get a ride with him in the morning. He looks anxiously around at all these nice friendly people and nervously says that I can. Then he continues;

‘Wanna know why I’m leaving Chicago? Cos of the damned Mexicans that’s why, stealing all the jobs and anything else that’s not nailed down and generally lowering the tone of the place. Chicago used to be beautiful but now they’ve turned it into a shit-hole. Everyone wants a piece of America, but let me tell you we shall give Bin Laden and his Al Quieda buddies a lesson they won’t forget. The Arabs and the Jews are always going on about how badly they get treated, but do you know who the missing lost tribe are that God declared would rule the world? It’s ‘us’ as in ‘U.S.’ Yep, makes a lot of sense if you think about it… Who goes and keeps the peace in all these goddam crazy countries when everyone else just wants to sit and talk about it and do nothing? We do, goddam Canadians ain’t much better, letting anyone and everyone into their goddam country. Bin Laden could be in Canada for all they know.’

Throughout all this, me and the New Brunswick stoner I’ve been smoking with are raising eyebrows at each other in disbelief, me mouthing silently to him ‘I can’t go to Alaska with this nut!’. I’m pulling loony faces and he’s trying not to laugh.

This is my second American in Canada. The first one (the Mennonite in Winnipeg) was a nice guy, but this one wore all the negative stereotypes like proud badges. I suspect three days non-stop coffee-fuelled driving had brought out the worst in him. How the hell am I going to wriggle out of this? Lucky for me (probably for both of us) he goes to bed early and then leaves early before I have a chance to get up. Truth is, I just fake being asleep until I think he has gone. 

Eventually I get up.

New Brunswick: ‘It’s okay! He’s gone!’ 

Phew – what a relief!
The next day, I make an attempt at hitching to Alaska and spend five hours freezing my arse off (it’s minus ten). Well my hands to be more precise, and promptly give up – getting horribly cold is definitely not on my list of things to do. I get a lift back into town with a Tlinget couple and go back to the hostel, much to everyone’s surprise. I leave the following afternoon, this time heading back south again. 

Bee Knee’s is a lovely place to stay; it is more like sharing a house with some mates. Very good. Must remember to send them a postcard of the Uffington White Horse. 
The ride back down south is uneventful and long. I manage to actually sleep on the way which is a bonus. I woke up an hour or so before Jasper, a popular skiing resort. The snow-topped mountains roll by under the moonlight, which is really quite beautiful.

It occurs to me that the Greyhound drivers are superstars. Every day they can be driving over a thousand kilometres up through windy mountain roads and pine forest, often way out through the middle of nothing. 

At a later point in the journey back down to Jasper, one driver tells a passenger very flatly to put their cigarette out whilst on the bus, not to give him any lame-ass excuses or he’ll put them off the bus right there and then. This is a serious threat; being dumped off hundreds of miles from anywhere in the middle of winter is not something you would want to have happen to you really. Just don’t piss off the driver, he’s got a job to do, okay?
When I get to Jasper the bus route ends and I have to find a different way of getting to Banff. The first thing I see when I get off the bus at 6 am is a small group of elk who’ve ventured into the town to munch grass. They’re pretty big, about the size of ponies, and very graceful. It’s freezing, so I wait in a shop/cafe where I am obliged to listen to the young guy running the shop telling me enthusiastically all about something or another. I am way too tired to pay any attention. 

After a lost attempt at post-bus snoozing, I leave and attempt to hitch out of town. Bafflingly, I get two short rides which somehow take me round in a circle back to the edge of town, taking me almost nowhere.

 

I fatalistically consider staying at a nearby youth hostel, but it has a noisy boogie box going, which instantly inclines me to leave and get back down on the road again. 
It’s a great place to stand and hitch, with a fantastic huge golden mountain staring right back at me. The sort of place and frame of mind where I wouldn’t care if I stood there all day. 

It doesn’t take long to get a ride, and I travel all the way down to Banff with two really nice oil rig workers. I give them twenty bucks for gas, cos they seem a bit stuck. It’s a fantastic journey. 

If anyone fancies cycling in Canada, Jasper to Banff is the one I recommend; it’s absolutely stunning. It’s about 350 km of endless mountains with only a couple of hotels, one gas station and two youth hostels. This time of year, both the hotels and one the hostels is shut.

 

I’ve been unsure as to whether to go directly to Vancouver from Prince George, or whether to give the Southern Rockies another shot; the time previous had been really cloudy and not very interesting. I’m really really glad I’ve come again, I’m going to check out some walking round Banff today, and then head out tomorrow. 
November twenty-somethingth. 

Banff, the world-class ski resort. The buildings look noticeably Alpine. This could be Switzerland.

At the hostel in Banff I feel like everything that comes out of my mouth is a verbal toad turd. I just don’t feel young and hip enough to hang out. A young guy of seventeen taking loads of drugs (but on the face of it extremely together) decides he’s going to talk to everyone else but not me and hints to others in the room we are sharing that maybe I am the sort of person that might steal everyone’s valuables. That’s the difference having stubble makes I suppose. I think he decided to take a dislike to me because I disagree with his argument ‘that drugs are good for you!’ – I think I pissed him off when I say it’s easy for him to say that when he’s seventeen – see what you say in ten or fifteen years time when you’ve rotted half your brain out. 

I don’t even bother trying to talk to anyone, cos I know I won’t be able to make a conversation; I am having one of those needfull introverted kinds of times. I recognise it for what is is, and don’t give myself a hard time over it. 
I see ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ Which is sooooo beautiful and very funny. Great film. 

At some point I overhear a woman talking and I’m trying to work out where she’s from. I can’t figure it. She isn’t Australian and she isn’t South African. Maybe she’s from New Zealand. It eventually surprises me to realise that she’s actually English. I’ve been so saturated in Canadians that I’ve forgotten what English people sound like. Weird.

Actually I regularly get Canadians asking me if I’m Australian. There’s definitely a Cockney London accent and a Norfolk/Suffolk accent which both sound like a certain kind of Australian. Especially if you mix the two together. 

The other question I get asked is ‘Where’s your dog?’ on account of me having my sleeping bag in large plastic ‘Pedigree Chum’ dog food sack.
I go for a short walk near the hostel and then come back when it starts getting dark – walking in the woods in the dark is a bit freaky, cos of the prospect of bears. 

I am walking in an ex-river bed which is also weird. If it had been flowing, it would have been up over my head. I guess it must have been redirected for some hydro-dam somewhere. 
As I am leaving the hostel, I get chatting to a very pretty Aussie woman, which re-instills my self-esteem to some degree, which is nice. 
The bus ride is weird too. The guy I am sitting next to has taken Valium and sleeping pills (and then some more, and then some more, and then some more). An older guy keeps coming stumbling from the front of the coach to the back, bouncing off the other passengers, he drawls something incoherent and they do a deal. Oh great, a taster for Vancouver, fantastic! 

Later on, the young guy steps on the foot of a really fat black woman sitting behind me. She tells him to watch what he’s doing, and he just drawls ‘Black on a black floor is pretty hard to see’. Then he goes to the toilet again for a mysteriously long time and manages to fall into it in the process by the sounds of it. The black woman with her other very portly friend cackle lots. They both have a real bitchy sense of humour. 
They moan endlessly about the scenery going ‘Oh look! another lake! My! Did you just see that particularly tall mountain?!’ They are urbanite types, who have never travelled on the coach before, and are now wishing they hadn’t, presumably because of the lack of space. Their attitude makes me laugh too, as I am starting to get a bit mountained-out myself. I have just had about 6000 km of them after all.
We arrive at Kamloops (again) and stop for the inevitable ‘eat some food cos it’s different from sitting on the bus’ at the depot. Three Indian women (as in from yer actual India) are dismayed because a young man has just stolen a handbag from them. Guess who by? By Valium boy of course, who although not in the immediate area, is tangled up in making the world’s slowest getaway. He ambles out of the men’s toilet; just as we’ve figured out that it’s him that’s done the crime, and after we all guess wrongly that he must be miles away by now. We are told the police are on their way, and we watch him wander about the place like we don’t know what he’s up to. He goes and asks someone for directions, and then points grandly in the direction he’s about to attempt to escape in, just so we know exactly how to anticipate his next slothful move. Off he bumbles, out the door towards oblivion, and the bus driver and another depot worker go to haul him back in – he offers no resistance whatsoever and is calmly led back into the depot office. 

Meanwhile the three Indian ladies are still standing around waiting, slightly baffled and wanting to know what happens next and whether this is normal Canadian behaviour. 

Shenanigans over, we all board the bus except for thieving Joe Slowcoach, who we all reckon will probably end up heading straight back to the jail-house again. He had told a number of people that he’d just got out of prison. The rest of the journey to Vancouver is uneventful. 
Upon arrival at 10 pm, it’s warm and dry. A friendly security guard at the bus terminal gives me tokens to store my bag in a locker (I’m stuffed if I’m carrying it all the way round Vancouver) and he helps me out with directions for the good hostels to go to for the night. I get the bus to Granville St, passing first through Chinatown, which has the biggest single population of Chinese outside of China. 
My socks are stinking, hot and slimy and capable of murder. All I want to do is get clean and go to bed. I get lost trying to find the hostel, and when I do eventually find it, they won’t let me in, because I don’t have photo ID with me. (My passport is in my rucksack on the other side of town.) 

I am rather miffed, and I rant for about a minute, just to let them know how I feel. I stomp out and try the Global backpackers hostel on the other side of the road. Same thing. Try another hostel. Same bullshit again, except this time I’m being reasonable. I get back on the bus, go back across town to the depot, blah blah blah and back again to the hostel, present my ID and money, et voila. 

I sort out my very unhappy feet and then crash. 
I’m sharing a rather stale and stinky room with one other snoring chap on the bunk below me; who I don’t meet until morning. I’ve got no bedding, but it’s not cold, so it doesn’t matter. It’s quite noisy outside, and I don’t have earplugs. I decide that I don’t like Vancouver. 

Next morning, I meet my room-mate who’s getting up to go to work. It turns out he’s a Newfie, and as usual, I’m overwhelmed with generosity and good nature. This fine chap starts my day wonderfully and am led to decide that maybe I’ll give this city another chance. 
I decide against my previous intention of just getting right back on the bus to Victoria, and go check out the Mountain Exploration Co-op near Cambie Street, on a recommendation from Helen in England. The whole block is full of shops selling hiking tat. I’m not especially excited by this; I’m already carrying enough stuff to make a grown man weep, but the surrounding area is rather lovely. There’s a good view of the down-town skyscrapers with the snow-topped mountains behind them. 

Nearby there are lots of Chinese/Korean food shops selling lots of really cheap really good food. Just my luck, I’m not in the slightest bit hungry. 
The housing just uphill is fairly middle-class but not snobby-looking. There are loads of brightly painted clapboard houses with lovely gardens and avenues of big fat beeches and oaks. It’s a dry warm sunny day in the last days of November. Now I’m starting to see why Vancouver has its reputation as being the second most liveable cities in the world (Melbourne is top it would seem, or is it Zurich?) 

I get the bus, supposedly back to the Pacific Central bus depot, but end up somewhere completely different by mistake, which makes for an interesting diversion. 

I buy loads of cheap raw vegetables from a Chinese shop, including some weird squidgy fruit thing and some puffy soya blob things that even though they taste like tin, are somehow rather more-ish.

I get the Skytrain, which is a round town train that can’t decide whether to be up in the air or under the ground, so it fluctuates between both. I get to Pacific Central Station and board my bus. 
I’m pleasantly surprised that it is distinctly warmer in this end of the world (though as I write, it’s been pouring with rain for the last two days). Lots of people from the snowy places tell me that the weather is miserable here mostly. I just tell them that I’m from England, and I’m used to it. Anyway, apart from the novelty factor, I’d rather be warm(er) and wet than quaking and shivering my way through minus thirty degrees. 
I take a short ferry ride from Tsawwassen to a place on nearby Vancouver Island called Swartz Bay, squeezing our way in between a labyrinth of densely packed islands that glide past each other. (This is called parallax motion, don’cha know.) As a first view of here, it’s as if the West Coast is a mirror image of the East Coast, a wild array of mountains dropping into the sea. Lots of people are out on deck soaking up this fantastic panorama. I think this may be one of my favourite types of journey (along with the journey into Lewisporte from Cartwright). It’s very cold, but worth braving the temperature for. 

I chat with someone whose accent I can’t quite pinpoint. His name is Alex and he’s from just north of Glasgow, and has mixed his Scots brogue with Seattlified American. He’s showing a cousin from back home around, and when he goes back down below deck from too much cold, I stay up top talking to her, and of course in my own way fall in love with this travel-bugged older woman with the sexy Scots accent. Being me I’m not sure how to make the crucial moves, and before I know it she’s gone, maybe forever. I know she’s planning to look around Victoria for a few days so maybe we’ll bump into each other, maybe we won’t. 

Maybe, maybe… I spend the rest of the bus trip to Victoria feeling emotionally glazed over, mourning my imagined missed opportunity.
Victoria is a pleasant enough but unpre-possessing place. As usual, the outskirts are full of the usual pig-ugly concrete ‘This-could-be-anywhere’ of Canadian Tire, Walmarts, motels and service industry detritus. The ‘city’ centre (it’s only small) is well-known for being particularly English, and I suppose there is something in the streets that reminds me of home – I think it’s the eclectic array of Victorian and different modern architectures. 
I book into the youth hostel for three days and ‘do’ all the tourist places. I go to the Natural History Museum. What is it about museums that always makes my knees ache?

There is a First Nations section upstairs which is interesting/weird. I have very mixed feelings about looking at a ruined people’s heritage being put on display behind glass cases by the descendants of the people responsible for bringing it about. One particular ceremonial robe for some reason has the effect of emanating a fierce disgust, which I can feel rather strongly. 
Also at the museum is an Imax theatre which I’ve never seen before. The screen is astonishingly big, a full six storeys high and eighty-one foot wide. I go watch a film about a space station. NASA giving itself a pat on the back for spending enough money on glorified boys toys to feed the whole world several times over (probably), and an infinitely superior film about Ernest Shackleton which is an absolutely incredible story of improbably heroism against all the odds, the images of giant icebergs, mountains and glaciers is fantastic, the music is beautiful and the story is narrated by Kevin Spacey and Michael Ganbon, who both have great voices. Wonderous…
Also on my unashamed don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself tourist trail (I am hoping that I might bump into The Scottish Woman again), I visit ‘The Crystal Gardens’ which is home to the most unexpected joy; a butterfly house. To stand in the middle of lots of giant exotic butterflies that are dancing round you is like being visited by angels. (Help, I’m going all new-age.)

 

One time at a friend’s house I happened upon a book containing the art of a painter new to me called Emily Carr. I tried looking for her work in British art bookshops, and being the largely Euro-centrics that we are, could find nothing. So it is a nice surprise to find that Victoria is her home town, and that there is a gallery with some of her work in it. When I go to visit, I am told I can’t see it because the room is being renovated. I’ve been looking out for this woman’s work for years, and am not going to be dissuaded by a decree from some dreary official. It’s an odd selection; none of her best work, but still worth a look. It’s always good to see paintings ‘in the flesh’.

 

Emily Carr was born in 1871 of English parents in Victoria. She was a writer as well as a painter but she came to painting late in life. She studied painting in England and Paris, and when she returned she was among the first in Canada to break free of the ordinary styles of the time. She had a modernist and post-impressionist style, and was heavily influenced by the native culture too. She painted very dark and moody forest interior landscapes – the forest interior is naturally dense, dark and sometimes claustrophobic. Her native scenes, usually featuring totem poles at the centre point of village life. She was chronicling a people who variously through subjugation, the ways of the Europeans and smallpox brought to them from the white man,  were struggling and sometimes failing to survive.

Her work has a unique quality due in large part to her subject matter.
There is also on show some pretentious modern art bollocks; huge paintings of boring blobs that must have taken all of ten minutes to paint, with the usual verbose justifications on board. There is also a collection of Japanese ‘erotic’ prints of po-faced and uncomfortably flat-looking people with ridiculous over-inflated genitals. The Japs do seem to have an odd idea of what’s sexy. Something much more sexy is the movie I go to see later that evening about Frida Kahlo; who despite having a rod of steel up her spine was one of the unflattest people to have ever come out of Mexico.

  

Spending time in museums and in art galleries where creativity has been boxed in and commodified is sometimes weird. When ‘art’ become a rarefied ‘high’ thing it can become elitist and sometimes fails to acknowledge our common human. 

Bring the creative spirit out into the open beyond galleries, make it a common thing that all may share and participate in; this is much more socially pro-active.
Something I find endearing about rural areas is the way that people celebrate what they’ve got in a way that cities don’t need to. In the city its harder to be a medium sized fish in a big pond full of excitement, but in the boonies people will make the most of what they’ve got.
To say ‘Wow!’ upon the sight of a mural on an otherwise dreary building says; ‘We can improve our world, we can share and celebrate what we have.’ Its not about money. Its about creating a sense of aliveness and hope and maybe moving people forwards even if its just a little.
On the way to Victoria, sitting on the bus pasing through a place called Ladysmith I was surprised to see a huge painting of Pamela Anderson spread over the side of a building. I’m not a fan of Pamela Anderson particularly, but it was a great example of how a mural can say something significant about a place without me even having to stop and ask. Ladysmith is where she grew up.

There have been quite a few free art shows to alleviate the boredom on my long bus journeys; scenes of local industries in Ontario, a massive Inuit (Tlinget) stylised eagle in red, black and white in Whitehorse, a great long stampede of horses in Alberta, loads of other interesting images and murals too frequent to mention; all of it telling me that the people that live there are alive and awake, and have something going for them that distinguishes them from everywhere else that you’ve been to. The perfect antidote to seeing the same old consumer warehouse chains spread ubiquitously across the world.
Back at the youth Hostel, the chap running the check-in desk is a guy from Middlesex. Both him and his Canadian desk accomplice have been to the south of England; we have fond reminiscences of Wiltshire, stone circles we both like, of White Horse Hill etchings and of the countryside. Very nice to have a taste of home. Another excuse to whip out my man-boobs, and show them my tattoo of the Uffington White Horse.
Whilst walking out one evening along the shore I climb up a little slope and bump into a man and woman sitting on a bench talking. We say our ‘hellos’ and exchange pleasantries, and then a short while later the woman leaves to go home. 

It looks like they have only just met each other, and maybe she’s weirded out by my turning up. Anyway, he’s drinking wine (with a crystal glass – very refined) and I discover that he’s English and called Stuart. He’s been living here for seventeen years (came over with his mum) and has more recently been living with his Chinese girlfriend. 

Now he tells me that his girlfriend is dying of cancer, and he seems to be not only losing her, but losing his faith in Christianity as well. Her parents don’t like him cos he’s not Chinese and he’s distraught; hence he’s talking to the woman on the bench and telling her all about it. 

Now I’m the new listening post and I end up telling him about how I saw my mum come to me in a vision after she’d died; She came to tell me that death was a real liberation for her as she no longer had to carry the burden of her broken body any more.
He can’t deal with the unfairness of it all and says he wants to be with her; maybe he should jump off the cliff? He doesn’t look to me like he would, but he’s obviously very upset. After he’s drunk his bottle of wine, we decide to go to his flat and he arranges to meet me outside the youth hostel, whilst he goes off on his bicycle to get another cheap bottle of wine. I don’t see him again after that. I think this is more due to difficulty co-ordinating the bike than anything more sinister.
Having ‘done’ Victoria (and not bumped into the elusive sexy Scots woman) I hit the road on a ‘Laidlaw’ bus heading north to Port Alberni, via Nanaimo, Vancouver Island’s second largest town. It’s very foggy here, but not too cold.
I can’t seem to find the snack shop, despite directions and meet a middle-aged nurse from Lancashire who’s lived over here for years. She helps out a young woman who is having to juggle a crying baby and several bags of baby tat. I comment that the reason Indian goddesses have lots of arms is so they can cope with domestic living more easily. I realise afterwards that in this end of the world that such a joke might not actually make any sense. Oh well, I think it is funny. (In Canada, people from India are ‘East Indians’.)
It’s still misty in Port Alberni. I buy snack gunge at a petrol station and get a ride after ten minutes. (There’s only one bus a day to Tofino and I’ve missed my chance by over an hour.) 

My drive is going to Ucluelet which is nearly where I want to go, but he drives me to Tofino anyway, which is very decent of him (especially as it is now dark). 
So here I am, at the end of the road (literally). I couldn’t go any further west without leaving Canada on a ship.

From the moment I had stepped off the plane in Toronto, I had decided that Tofino (by recommendation before leaving England) was to be my actual ‘final’ destination. 

There’s an old adage about travelling being all about the journey, not the destination; but I knew from a lot of previous confused experience that I needed to have a definite ‘end’ point. I needed to be able to pass through everywhere else en route without the hesitiation and uncertainty of wondering if this is where I wanted to stop/ live/ get married or not. It saves a lot of mental distress, especially when the traveller gets care-worn.

 

What happens next, I don’t know. Let’s see what the wind brings.
I book in for three nights at the Whale-Watcher’s youth hostel. On my first day I take a walk in a random direction to see where I’ll end up. I wind out to an edge of the town and reach a sign for Tonquin Park which leads to a very inviting looking board-walk which mysteriously descends a cranky mossy staircase down into the depths of the forest and disappears round a rocky outcrop. It leads to a lovely little cove on the right. I am looking for a potential camping ground; hostels eat money slyly and fore-shorten adventures rapidly.

I go exploring the interior with its many fallen trunks. These cedars are pretty big, around three or four foot wide, with very little salel (bush under-story) in this part. It looks like this must be the place that Helen told me about where people live in the summer. No-one here now, just a couple of old blue tarps (one ripped) and the occasional beer can. I explore further, and it gets dense, so I turn back. 

This area is famous for being ripped apart by loggers. This bits okay though, I guess because its so close to a town. I notice that in a few areas, it looks like elongated triangular strips of bark have been cut from the trees. I guess this must be a native way of using bark without destroying the trees, but I’m not sure what they’d use it for. Roofing shingles perhaps? Dunno. I wander into another part of the forest just up from here by the shore, and am busy soaking up the dank muddy red hugeness of sculptural fallen trunks and root-plates that stretch out like monster and dragon skeletons when I bump into a grinning chap called Jim. He’s with his dog, and he and his girlfriend are living in the forest here. They’ve been here a day, so they’ve only just set up camp. I wander over and say hello to his girlfriend Jess who’s busy collecting firewood. We chat and then go and hunt out the tarps I’ve found; they’ll be useful for making a more secure camp. 

Maybe I’ll come and live with these people; I’ve been thinking about it anyway, but thought it would be wet and lonely (i.e. horrible). It would be better with others. 

The day progresses. Jim comes back, we collect wood and I look for somewhere to make camp; not really totally convinced that this is a good idea. Its very damp here and I am only just recovering from lergy, but maybe it’s better than throwing all my money at the youth hostel. 

We have rice for tea with mussels found on the rocks on the beach, when two other newcomers turn up. One is another Jessy, a punky type from Quebec, a lanky chap who seems to have learned English from watching ‘Easy Rider’ and wears a yellow fleuro jacket, and the other a straight-looking young woman from Belgium called Sofie. Some dodgy fireside drumming inevitably ensues as a substitute for music, I sigh into the murky gloom and gnaw on the remains of the chewy not-quite-cooked rice. 
It gets dark, we are supposed to be going to the pub as it’s jam night. (Every Friday local likelys get up and make some kind of musical noise.) Jessy, Sofie and me try to find our way back through the forest by holding hands in the dark. There’s lots of squelching mud, slimy slippery branches and trunks to cross, and some of the broken branches are sharp and pointy and prone to giving us an unexpected jab. It’s dangerous as well as nigh on impossible, so we give up and get the other Jess to guide us down over the rocks using her head torch. 

Punky Jessy, Sofie and me split from Jim and Jess and head for the pub. En route we stop off at the trailer where Jessy and Sofie had spent the previous night. Rob’s a loud amiable pot-head surfer who lives with a couple called Mark and Jen. (Much quieter, older and wiser; the kind of people that will end up running a small-holding one day.) We stay a little while, Jessy stays behind saying he’s tired. I think he’s hoping Sofie will stay with him so he can attempt to get into her knickers. It’s been kind of obvious by the way he clucks round her like an over-sized cockeral. That he has a pink mohican on his head kind of adds to the whole effect.

 

Me and Sofie go to the pub. She talks about ‘finding god’ and we talk about doing things that make life worthwhile. She reckons I should be doing theatre. I like the notion of combining entertaining self-expression with sounding out a ‘message’. Afterwards, we swap email addresses and we might see each other the following day; I go back to the youth hostel.
I spend the next day visiting Meare’s Island with a young couple from Toronto. For twenty bucks each a guy motors us across the inlet in a tiny boat. We arrive on a rain-shined pebbled beach, and we are put in the direction of another of the mysteriously inviting board-walks that is breaking out through the dense trees and  onto the beach. We spend four hours wandering round a trail that has some amazing old growth forest. It’s a place of dense dark greens, dripping lichens and mosses, tangles of vines and fogginess.

Many of the old cedars are over a metre wide, some two or three metres wide at chest height. There are two that are four and a half metres wide at chest height: I can put my arms round the girth twelve times. This place is truly wonderful.
In the evening I decide to go and check out a place called ‘Poole’s Land’ which belongs to one Mike Poole; he sometimes lets people put caravans, tents and other invented hippy dwellings on his property for a cheap rent. On the way there, I pop into Rob’s trailer to see if Sofie is there, but she’s not. I tell Mark and Jen about how I am on the way to Poole’s Land looking for a cheap place to stay, and right there and then they offer me a room in the trailer for a month for thirty bucks. Wow! the hostel costs me twenty bucks just for one night!

Rob is just about to move out, and the place is going to be torn down in a month (New Year). 
I move in, bump into two other Belgians, Jerone and Roel. They are astonished when I guess they might be friends of Sofie. ‘Gosh! How did you know we are friends of Sofie?!’ 

Well it’s not like the place is crawling with Belgians is it guys… 

They need somewhere to stay too, so it ends up with all six of us living in the trailer. 

A few days later, Jen’s friend from Toronto Jessica comes to stay, and so does Sofie’s friend Jill. Making a total of eight.

Oh yeah, and then there’s Mark’s two dogs as well, Denali and Monashee (named after Alaskan mountains),two very chilled people just like their owner. 
I’ve been spending my spare time writing the diary and putting it on the internet, taking photos and doing huge drawings on the beach drawing in the clean flat sand with a stick. It’s great to have such a huge canvas!

I’ve also had the feeling that I’ve been trying too hard with people. To go from a month and a half of not having to get to know people beyond ‘hello/story/goodbye’, it’s taken a bit of adjusting to suddenly share a confined space with seven others, all of whom know at least one other person there really well. 

Sofie asks me to show her how to meditate and I think it intensifies my wobblinesses; I feel like we may have somehow ‘merged’ a bit in the process. That and the small amount of BC weed that I’ve smoked. One toke gets me very stoned, and any more than two puffs, and I’m practically tripping. This stuff is about ten times more potent than anything I’ve ever smoked in the UK. Actually it’s horrible; it sparks off all the usual paranoiac bollocks that I always used to get from smoking. So that’s enough BC weed for me thanks.
Coming up to full moon, we’re supposed to be playing a party game but it almost ends up in an argument. My heads too flipped out to untangle the cross-wires to really see what’s going on, so I just go out for a long walk, and amazingly I manage not to mentally beat myself up in the process, and not behave in any sort of melodramatic way that I sometimes can. Maybe in a small way I’ve grown up a bit. Anyhow the next day…

After Talking with Jessica in the Tofino Botanical Garden:

An inken sculpture, flat upon the page, It makes you think doesn’t it? I read an explanation, a story, here in the endless rain, among the fine expressions of intrigue about the world; other sculpture that fill this space. We speak over coffee. I wonder how to use what I have; don’t we all.

 

I meet who Jessica reminds me through her poetry book that ‘We are all like rabbits and potatoes in a big sackful of stars’. 

Find the ground, see which way is up and see if you can find a smile in there too.
If we could all lay ourselves out flat like a poster, as we truly wish to be seen, as we truly feel we are, how different things might be instead carrying ourselves in the strangely crumpled ways that we often do.
Instead we have to feed each piece ready for interpretation through the funnel of the moment and the eye, that widens with safety and constricts in fear.
Yep. That’s the dope talking… What on earth is that about?
Full moon December 2002

On the midday I decide to spend some time alone; I’ve been getting rather emotional the night before, and figure that a day away would give me and everyone else a break. I decide to go on a photo-hunting mission. As I leave the trailer I go to the Esso garage and get myself a steak and cheese sub for my lunch. (A ‘sub’ is an American baguette roll.) 
I walk down to McKenzie Beach and take pictures of ripples in the sand that the receding tide has left as it washes round small stones. It has a Zen garden kind of effect, leaving the stones with what looks like an energy flare emanating from them. I am always fascinated by the beauty of water flowing to its lowest place. I love the subtle fire-like swirling carving it leaves in the sand. 

I also take photos of craggy rocks, which look like enormous lumps of coal, many have a gold and copper-tinged edges that give them more definition.

 

After this I walk back up the road and hitch a ride up to Comber’s Beach. We’d been to Gold Mine Beach the day before, and I thought I’d extend my photographic adventure. I figure with a name like Comber’s Beach, there’ll be loads of interesting stuff. I take about 150 or so pictures of curiously sea-worn logs, stones and ripples. 
Having exhausted the possibilities with that, I start back along the enormously inviting stretch of beach in the direction of Tofino. 

I am really getting into the walking and enjoying the whole wondrousness of the shore and its fantastic stretches of sand, so much so that I just keep walking and walking and walking and on after sun-down. 

Walking Long Beach takes about two to three hours. Even though I can always see the houses at the other end of the beach, they never seem to get any nearer. My head is going into over-drive rather, worrying about not getting involved with Friends Of Clayoquat Sound (an environmental group concerned with ending the clear-cutting of the area’s old growth forest) and how I can justify to myself going to Mexico on a frivolous holiday (amongst other anxieties). 

I decide to try out ‘walking meditation’, just focussing on footfall and breath, which is interesting, even though I seem to end up walking into the sea a couple of times, and getting water in my boots.
The full moon rises, and shines down across the vast arcing stretch of glistening beach. It has been so long since I’ve done any proper amount of walking. I really get into the endless stride that is leading me back towards home. It has just got dark, and I reckon I can be home by about midnight-ish. 

It rains mildly a couple of time, which is okay even though I don’t have waterproof trousers on. After Long Beach, which seems to be about six to eight miles long, the scenery changes, and small  craggy islands are dotted about just off-shore along the beach, it is like being somewhere very tropical. (Just not hot!.) 

The coast gradually becomes rockier, and soon I have to start jumping from crag to crag to escape from getting wet – the bush at the edge is not something that you can just easily stroll through – and then I soon have to start figuring out the best ways to get up and down the rocks and across pools and little sea channels. 
It’s dark and I never notice getting tired. I have a couple of dangerous rock faces to climb up (about five or six metres up) and then I notice that all is not well; and I am starting to realise that I might be neglecting my safety. After more scrambling and increasingly difficult routes, the crunch comes when I get to a sign that reads ‘Caution: area not patrolled. Headland impassable even at low tide, no trails marked.’ 

This must be the end of the line. There is no way I am going to do any more scrambling up and down on the rocks, I am too tired. Now what do I do? I can’t go back; I haven’t the energy or wits to deal with those rocks again, and the tide is still rising. 

I sit for a while and start to get cold. I start to imagine coastal rescue coming out to find me, the folks back at the trailer wondering what has happened to me. Have I committed suicide? Have I slipped on the rocks and fallen into the sea? Am I just staying over and having a few beers with someone I have met on the road? Anything can have happened to me.
In something like desperation, the only route that seems left available to me is to head into the bush. This I quickly discover is about as easy as trying to push my way through a jungle of giant mattress springs. The salel is completely unforgiving. I push my way through it in utter darkness as it whips my face, tangles round my feet, bashes my shins and slips out of my control as I try to get past it. To make matters worse, the ground is uneven with slippery fallen trunks and I can’t even see the ground. I fall frequently, sometimes head first, and I manage to rip my trousers on the right leg from the backside to the knee. Everywhere is a dense mattress of thick moss, which saves me from being hurt in my numerous falls. 

I eventually found a huge fallen trunk about sixty foot long and four foot wide. The underside of the trunk has dropped away onto the ground whilst the rest is left suspended above. The bottom half is flat and moss-covered and almost comfortable. I almost manage to sleep on it. At least it protects me as it briefly starts to rain. 
As I lay there I realise my hopes of walking all the way back along the coast have turned into an awareness of how thoughtless I have been. I have no waterproof trousers; I am soaked from the waist down, I have nothing to light a fire with (although it is wet there are polystyrene floats on the beach that might get a fire going). I have no compass, have only a memory of what a road map of the area looks like. I have drinking water, and five pieces of kelp which I am merely presuming to be edible. I’ve also told nobody of my plans, except that I am going to Gold Mine Beach (where I consequently don’t go of course). 

I also realise that I am very lucky for a number of reasons: I have very strong boots with amazing grip. (I am convinced they have saved me from slipping on the rocks and into the sea.) The road back home is parallel to the sea, so I can’t get too lost. I am especially lucky that it hasn’t rained very much. Otherwise I would have been really exhausted by now.
I give up trying to sleep, as it isn’t happening anyway. It was only my body-heat being reflected into the wet moss that was making it comfortable. Now that’s all used up and I can feel my back starting to get cold and tensing up a little.

I try to head up to the next part of the beach past the impassable rocks. I follow the sound of the sea. I eventually come to where the sea is again and pushing myself out through the edge of the salel, which is enormously dense and about as much fun as trying to squeeze through a cheese grater, I have the nasty feeling that I have come back to where I had started. Looking at the small bay, it takes me a couple of minutes to realise that I have struggled for maybe the last two hours using up precious energy in order to get precisely nowhere. 

I stand out on the beached logs and start to panic slightly. 
I wonder whether I might become another of those people you hear about on news bulletins who become a statistic just by going for an ill-prepared walk. I wonder how long it would take for a boat to come past and see me if I were to stay right where I am. I wonder whether I will die of exposure or hypothermia first. I think again about all the people in the trailer speculating on my whereabouts, knowing that ironically they are only a few miles away. 

I can’t think what to do next so I figure that as I am very tired and starting to get a bit delirious (I am starting to hear things) I will try to rest and wait until daylight. 

I am shivering almost constantly where I am standing, so I pull my arms in from their sleeves and pull my wet legs up under my upper body clothing. Hunkering down with my head tucked into my knees and my hands and arms variously under my armpits and over my legs, I try to conserve body heat. Leaning my head and body against a log, I think I doze off a couple of times. The night seems to take forever.
Light does eventually come though, and I feel more alert; relatively. The touch of my legs against my trousers is unpleasant, added to by the fact that I have an eleven inch rip down the back of one trouser leg. The weather is still dry and calm. I am lucky.

I decide against heading into the bush again, cos that is too difficult. I reckon as well that I must be really close to McKenzie beach, so instead of walking for miles back the way I have come, I think there must be a chance that I am only a few coves away from home. (I blank out the possibility that there might be twenty coves to a kilometre.) 

I see next to the caution notice a visible trail, which is the encouragement I need. Following it is easy, leading me out to an easily traversable cove, and then round another. I come to the happy conclusion that the sign must have been indicating that the tricky length shoreline that I had already covered yesterday evening must be the impassable bit, and that now I must be on the much easier home run, however long that must be. 

I am warming up and drying out. I can feel my stomach rumbling and I have a slight unsureness in my balance. I’ve been trying out some proper rock-climbing that I might never have tried before unless I really had too. 

I come out onto a cove where there is no obvious way across the rocks, and have to force my way through the bush for about half a kilometre to find the next cove. 

It’s hard work, but it is getting me closer to McKenzie Beach. I see with this cove I am in the same situation again and have to do the same dodgy clambering all over again. Hopefully there wouldn’t be many more coves like this, and that I will just be able to follow round on the exposed rock of the shoreline. 

I come out onto a small cove with ten metres high sheer rock all the way round on the other side with overhanging trees and a black indifferent sea churning away icily below.

 

There is a trunk balanced on top of two pinnacles of rock from one side to the other. It’s wide enough to shimmy across, but there is nowhere to go after that. I’m not sure my judgement is up to the risk of dropping into the sea anyway. After spending a few minutes trying to see a way round, it is apparent that I have no options left except turning round and re-tracing my steps on some increasingly tricky footholds. My balance is too screwed and I am risking making an omelette of myself. 
I don’t know how near or far I am from McKenzie Beach. The only thing I do know is that the road can’t be too far away; maybe a couple of miles inland? I find a stream that empties into the cove, and crawling on my hands and knees I start to follow it back upstream. The foliage is slightly less dense along the stream, which is good. I figure it must be taking me uphill and therefore inland in some kind of way too. 

After a while, this logical hope dissolves, and I wonder whether I really am getting anywhere at all. I decide to go away from the sound of the sea instead. 

After another unknown length of time, I come out on top of a minor peak, which enables me to see a little better through the trees. 
On the skyline I recognise the twin peaks of Meare’s Island just opposite Tofino. For the first time, this gives me a bearing. This means that I now know which way home is, and can guess better where the road might be. I head off in a new direction, halfway towards Tofino, and halfway towards where I think the road must be. I stop occasionally and listen out for the sound of passing cars. Sometimes I think I can hear them, and sometimes I can’t tell it from the continuous dull roar of the sea. I think I hear voices a couple of times, but I suspect that is just wishful thinking and delirium. I call out ‘Help!’ now and again across the valley of dense vegetation just in case I might be near a trail with people on it. 
A little while later I see something that really makes me hopeful: I see a TV transmitter on top of the hill opposite. It means that there must be a road or at least a clear track from there to the road. It becomes what I hope will be the end of all this bush-wrestling. I have no idea what time it is, and I really want to stop. A couple of times I feel my legs cramping up, and I am starting to lose the will to move. I don’t want to risk it getting dark before I get to the transmitter, even though it is only half a kilometre away. Once it gets dark, I will have to stay put – trying to move let alone keep my direction will be almost impossible. I am already running on empty, and I’m not sure I can shiver my way through another night so successfully this time. Apart from which, I don’t want to cause any panic back at the trailer.
I push on; downhill, through bog and uphill again, guessing which way the transmitter is, because by now I can no longer see it. I scramble up a steep bit and through particularly dense bush. It seems worth it to gain height so directly. To my surprise now, the transmitter is only about thirty metres away; my slog is almost over. Scrambling up, I see too a building here and in front of it a low concrete block wall. I clamber over it and onto a gravel track, my vision of sanity.

 

My head is sore with thirst and worry, but I give myself a pat on the back for getting out before dark. Walking down the long and steeply curving track to the bottom feels both bizarre to my fatigued leg mucles. It feels like trying to walk across an endless bouncy castle with my pockets full of lead. This doesn’t stop me though from having an absolutely heaven-sent sense of relief. 

I wonder what the reaction will be when I get back? 

I feed myself fantasies of miso and flat-breads and maybe some chocolate too. 

I stand by the road, trying to thumb a lift, looking like what I am; a bum that’s slept in a wet ditch and then been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Eventually a car full of native Canadians stops and give me a ride back to the trailer park. I get indoors and no-one is in. Maybe everyone has gone looking for me or maybe they are just getting on with their day. There is no note or anything to say. I take off my wet clothes, put some dry ones on, and squat over the heater. I almost fall asleep on it. Waking up long enough to fix myself lots to eat, I then write a note which I leave in the middle of the floor: ‘Got lost in bush, V. tired so sleeping’. I later find out that Roel and Sofie had gone to Gold Mine Beach to see if they could find me and Roel mentions how he almost got washed out to sea standing on a huge log that got dislodged by the waves. He had wondered whether something like that had happened to me.

I am going to move into a cabin in the woods with the three Belgians, but we are all getting messed around by this builder guy who seems to be full of bullshit stories about how he’s going to get us a place to stay, and then making excuses as to why it isn’t working out. (Why do some people insist on being so unfathomably dumb?)

The Belgians get fed up and go off to trek through the bush and look at waterfalls, and I stay here to watch TV for Christmas on my own. Surprisingly, I’m quite satisfied with this arrangement – I get a whole day of peace and quiet to myself to be comfortable and get on with writing, watching some interesting programs about Islam, the origins of the Christmas story (Bethlehem and all that).
Canada is a place where its people primarily still belong to the land and sea. Now it’s the largest country in the world since the break up of the Soviet Union. The Canadian landscape of much of the country’s mountains and trees not so much dominates as engulfs whatever human activity lies within it. Most places there’s a good chance you can still drink mountain stream water straight (though BC has 500 contamination spots).

The air is still clean except where a town has a pulp mill, in which case the whole place will stink like rotting cabbage. What in most cases is perfectly good higher value lumber is being sent to the US for a fraction of the lumber value to make pulp newspaper, and even now the US has decided it can get its pulp cheaper from China which screws the whole Canadian process further. Japan are buying Canadian logs and just burying them in the sea, in anticipation of some future pulp shortage. 

The logging companies now take care to do their dirty deeds on the other side of the mountains away from the highway, thus leaving the facade of intact wilderness.
The Maritimes on the East Coast, what was one of the largest fishing grounds in the world, is now forced to experiment with catching lobster and whelks; the waters having been fished almost out of existence. (The Newfies blame the Spanish and Portuguese for having greedy methods.) The West Coast is fighting battles over what fish remain, who they supposedly belong to and so on.
For such a vast expanse of natural resources, its relatively small number of people (thirty million) and its recent white settler history of only three or four generations, Canada must have been easy-pickings, with relatively little internal conflict. (Once you include First Nations peoples into this picture, this whole notion falls flat on its face of course.) 

Now I don’t know who the political heavyweights of Canada now are, (but I imagine that First Nations peoples still only have a marginal influence), Canada seems to be reaching some sort of crisis point with itself. Some of the seemingly endless stable resources of the country have either gone or there is dispute over their future position in the country’s economy.
Tofino has a grand fairytale-sized beauty. Small offshore islands have trees bursting out of them like they’ve been playing ‘How many trees can we squeeze onto this tiny bit of rock?’. 

Some of the islands have grand wooden cabins, and some cabins are ramshackle concoctions that somehow seem to belong there more. 
Rising up behind these small islands in the wide inlet is the foreshore of Meare’s Island, home to some very very large trees, and beyond that, the icing on the cake (as it were), the snow-capped inland of Meare’s Island as it rises even more grandly out of the low clouds in the far distance. 

In a more seaward direction, the small islands persist, and the ocean endlessly rolls in, sometimes in great curling folds to either stroke sandy beaches or smash onto rough pointy outcrops of black black rock. A haven for whale-watchers and neoprene-clad surfers.
You can see history in these rocks. Predominantly it looks like lava cooling, shrinking and splitting. Some of the rock looks to my inexpert eye, like it must be where the lava spewing out of ancient long gone volcanoes made this the new edge of the land. In some places, huge pale speckled grey granite boulders, all beautifully rounded, adorn the shore-side like a giant broken necklace. I presume these must be left over from some glacial retreat. I wonder whether the forests must be full of them, except we just don’t see them because they’re covered in moss and tree debris. 

To see all this detritus of the earth; old trees, rocks from one age strewn across rock from an even older age is a bit like looking at stars – where you’re seeing all these time-spread objects right now, together, but actually they all got there at different times under differing unseen forces. Quite amazing really.
Apart from having the usual seams of white marbly rock running through them (whatever that is), some of the black rock seems to have a dull metallic sheen on parts of the surfaces which looks like copper or something. 
Thousands of trunks pile up along the shore edge. Some of them are huge trunks weighing many tonnes, that some storm at some time back has thrown up into the most unlikely of places way up onto high rocks; some look as if the are there as bridges across otherwise impassable stretches. Most of them have washed up here after accidently breaking out of log-booms on the rivers of Washington and Oregan. They get worn and rounded in the same way stones do.
In the shallows, you can find anemones, sometimes starfish, frequently mussels. The bird-litter of mussel and oyster shells and the occasional orange bit of a crab’s leg fill the birds favourite feeding spots. (Out of the worst of the wind and rain I would imagine.) Over time the shells at older spots are so broken down they are halfway to becoming sand.
The villages (summer tourist towns) of Tofino and Ucluelet are a mixture of ultra-new (just being built) luxury housing down to your average Canadian house and all have been built using wood. 

Thank god – I see one house with a ‘distinctive’ frontage of pretend dry stone walling (except that it looks like vertical crazy paving). Apart from it being obvious that whoever built it doesn’t understand how stone-built houses really look, it looks strangely really over-heavy, like it’s about to sink into the boggy ground. After being used to seeing only wood houses, seeing one made of rocks is really weird.

The old-styles and the hippy influences are the best, blending in more with a taste for the meandering lines of raw wood.
Probably the most ingenious dwelling I have seen is the body of an old aluminium caravan mounted onto a home-made raft. The raft is kept afloat by a fishing net full of plastic bottles lashed under the wooden base. Cannily, the guy that built the place, by collecting hundreds of plastic bottles off the streets of Tofino, earned himself the respect of the townspeople, and they are happy for him to be moored on the leeward side of a tiny island just off-shore from the town. No rent. Nice job!

Great testimony to this can be found in the beautiful book ‘Builders of the Pacific Coast’ by Lloyd Khan.
I have fulfilled an ambition, and am currently living as ‘trailer-trash’ which is most famously an American tradition, where all the industrial misfits live. (That’ll be me then.) I think trailer parks are great. They’re unpretentious and incline their owners to inventive construction.

The Belgians have gone off on a slightly abortive hiking trip whilst I stay nice and cosy in the trailer over Christmas. They’ve gone in search of waterfalls but the whole event turns into one big soggy waterfall as they get rained off after day one of what is supposed to be a three day hike.

Whilst they all disappear to Victoria to spend New Year with Jill while she house-sits there, I set a new world record in the field of ‘Distance Travelled Just To Go To The Cinema’. 

I hitch all the way up to Nanaimo to see the ‘The Two Towers’, the second Lord of The Rings film, a round trip of 350 kms.
My first ride happens more-or-less instantly with a very friendly truck driver that I meet right outside the trailer park as he’s filling up with fuel at the gas station. I had met with him at the gas station before on another day, and we had spent some time ‘shooting the breeze’. It’s nice to see him again, and is further enhanced by having a toot on some of his fabulous home-grown. 
It’s really exciting to me to be having a ride in a real live American Mack truck. I’ve been hitching for donkeys years – I must have sat in the passenger seat of hundreds of English trucks and some of them would have romantic ‘scenes of the road’ with big American trucks, confederate flags, eagles, noble Indian chiefs, that kind of thing. Now I’m in a real-life American truck! Perhaps I’m being a bit nerdy, but here I am, somehow inside ‘The American Dream’.

I get to spend my ride in very good company and also I have an incredible feeling of really ‘being’. Nothing to do with being stoned of course…

 

It’s something that happens so rarely that I don’t really ever notice how much real life just gets bunged up in the filter of my thinking head most of the time. There are rare occasions when my mind is quiet; either enjoying hard physical work or cycling long distances. (That’s why I love big cycling trips.) At these times I feel my body connecting with where I am. It’s good and I know that all is well. Doesn’t that say something about how much all that head-filtering monkey mind business is worth?
Anyhow, winding up through the mountain road, past a lake that I am told is totally full of fish; his house is on the far side of the lake, high above the road… somehow it’s all wonderful. A moment to be savoured.
It’s night-time by the time I get halfway to the tree-pulping cabbage-stinking town of Port Alberni. 

Looking for a cheap place to stay the night, I knock on the door of a ‘hostel’ and get invited into the home of a middle-aged native couple who charge me the princely sum of just seven bucks. (That’s about three quid.)

Next day I arrive at Nanaimo in time for the film, which is good, but not as amazing as the first film. Too many long drawn-out battle scenes with CGI’d orcs roaring about continuously. 
It takes me all day to hitch back to the trailer park, and I very narrowly avoid getting caught in the rain all night without shelter. (I did that one already thanks…) 
I spent most of the Christmas period watching TV shows about the beginnings of Christianity, which is actually more interesting than I might have expected. Mostly when Mark is around, we watch ‘football’ (as opposed to ‘soccer’). 

American football has got to be one of the weirdest games going; a staccato combination of a field full of guys standing around doing nothing for five minutes whilst a middle-aged guy with a baseball cap and a beer gut stands and points at random parts of the pitch, blows his whistle and then they all run at each other, crash, and then do it all over again. I have no idea what’s going on. Mark offers to explain it to me, but I much prefer the surreal entertainment offered by remaining ignorant of the rules.
One morning Mark is fixing himself ‘Kraft Dinner’. 

All the way across Canada, people would say ‘Ooh! Have you tried Kraft Dinner? It’s the national dish! You must try Kraft Dinner, Kraft Dinner rocks!’. I get Mark to show me this legendary but hitherto elusive Kraft Dinner stuff. It’s a small box of one-serve cereal packet proportions, about six inches high. In it is about sixty dried bits of pasta rattling around and a packet which when opened reveals a dried ‘cheese sauce’. Must be good stuff then. Mark cooks it. 

Kraft Dinner does not rock. It is shit. 

The pasta is the wrong side of al dente (probably Mark’s fault) and the ‘cheese’ sauce is a kind of watery plasticised slurry. I suspect that the love of Kraft Dinner is a measure of Canada being a nation of stoners that will eat anything given a bad enough dose of the munchies…

 

‘Oh Wow! Awwwwesome! I just tooted a TON of weed, and this here cedar tree tastes reeeaally gooood! HMM! Oh WOW!’

The trailer is due to be vacated January 6th; it is only me here now. Mark and Jen and the dogs have left. They have got themselves jobs in a posh hotel and have a new apartment to stay in. As I have no wish to wake up to the sight of a demolition ball crashing through the wall, I duly ease myself out and head up to Victoria to meet up with the others.
It’s great to see them all again as I stick my head in the Purple Turtle – Nobody was sure that we would actually see each other again. This is a refreshing hostel to stay in – it is really cheap for a start; ten bucks a night, about four quid.

There are a few shoestring travellers there, one an English guy (called Mike) from Woking who’s spent six years travelling round the world ‘looking for the perfect place to live’. As neurotic as that sounds, he’s a really lovely guy and introduces me to the possibilities of the blues harp (harmonica) – an ideal small lightweight instrument to play.

Most of the guys in the hostel are Canadians looking for work whilst escaping the harsh Canadian Winter thats settling in the rest of the country.
Our favourite room-mate is Tim, who looks like Meatloaf, with long straight hair and a huge scary tattoo on his back.

Tim is an ex-Hells Angel who’s biked over from Toronto and sold his bike in Vancouver. He tries really hard to keep up a ‘hard man don’t give a damn’ front that he must have been obliged to have whilst hanging out with the Hells Angels, but we all know he’s a soft and fluffy teddy bear really. We point this out to him, and he just looks surprised, then a bit sheepish, grins and says – ‘Shh! Don’t tell anybody! It’s a secret!’

The Belgians and me get the impression that Tim has seen an awful lot of shitty situations. He seems like he has gone through a lot to get to where he is now. He says if he had a daughter and she brought home a guy like himself, he’d throw him out cos he’d know the guy was full of shit…

Me and Tim occasionally goes down to the 7/11 supermarket for coffees and we sit outside and talk about life. Tim takes a slightly paternal attitude to us; and always wants to know how we are. Lots of wobblies going on; Roel and Jerone unable to make up their minds who they want to have sex with, Sofie wondering whether to have sex with God…
Tim is doing odd bits of building work here and there, and is aiming to save enough money to go to Jamaica in March.

Then there is Nelson who is a Native Cree, a chubby chap who can milk the native folklore cow for hours on end if you let him. A young chap who knows exactly how to survive in the wild, but actually what he wants is a JOB. I think maybe he could be a tourist guide with all that survival knowledge. Maybe he doesn’t want to.

The place is run by three white Rastas from Wisconsin who are heavily into the whole Rastafari religion thing, and live it in a somewhat bigoted way. Very serious people. Hmmm.
We hang out in various spots in the city. The library is the main one, we end up at the library a lot, addicted to emailing people. All a bit sad I suppose, but at least we are all at it together. That means I feel slightly less like a travelling computer nerd. (Only slightly mind you.) 
Another place we frequent is at the Solstice Cafe where there is a rather attractive young woman serving behind the counter.

We are all sitting in there one day, either quaffing coffee or lingering over the cheapest drink possible depending on the awareness of the individual to notice how money likes to evaporate when you’re on permanent holiday. 

There we are when we somehow get chatting to a rather loud and theatrical woman. 

The first thing we learn is that she isn’t Canadian but actually German and has the European habit of affecting a perfect local accent. Having found her audience, she goes on to tell us her prize story of how she fell in love, deeply, madly and unfortunately with a guy who was next in line to be the boss of his local Mafioso. She tells us about how she was delivered an ultimatum – marry into the Mafia or never see him again. The ultimatum didn’t come from him, but from the people around him. She called it off, and they spent eighteen years apart. 

After each having marriages and both breaking up, they started to see each other again in secret, but she knew that they were always being spied on by The Family. She was a security risk, and for the sake of togetherness, they both put up with having shadowy figures lurking about in the backgrounds of their lives, making sure that neither of them did the wrong thing.
Around this time outside a thrift store, I bump into the woman from behind the counter of the Solstice Cafe. She says ‘Oh I’ve seen you around in the library and the shops!’

Me fancying the wotsits off her can only manage a feeble ‘Umm, err, yes, errr, oh I’ve just remembered I have to go somewhere!’ and I wander off nervously, when really what I wanted to say is something slightly more along the lines of ‘Phwoar, I really fancy you, do you fancy going out and then if we still like each other, get on with some full-on shagging afterwards?’

I sit on the corner of the street feeling like a prize turkey, and it bothers me for the rest of the day until I see Jill and tell her about it.

She suggests that I could just into the cafe and ask her out and see what she says.

Der! Simple! 

So summoning the knock-kneed courage, I go in and bumble an offer of an evening out. She smiles and says yes. Out I walk doing rocket-ships all over my insides. She Said YES!
This of course is at loggerheads to my ultimate plan to travel round the world. My head is in charge; you better believe it.

 

When we meet the next evening, we walk round the city, go for a coffee somewhere and I walk her home. My hormones are going crazy. I behave myself. It doesn’t end in frantic sex. It doesn’t end in frantic anything. 

I walk off back to the hostel, wondering what’s going on. I can’t even figure out if my emotional roller-coaster is on a peak or a trough. Bonkers.
We see each other again a few days later. Her name is also Sophie and she’s lovely; a dread-locked ‘take it as it comes’ artist (a good one too) from Toronto way. I’m an artist of sorts too, and taking it as it comes is not what I’m doing at this point in my life. 

Am I being a fool or just being more determined than I’ve ever been before about pursuing my dream to travel? My guts are on a permanent lurch.

It’s been a strange couple of weeks – a whole bunch of people having their own emotional wobblies with girlfriend/boyfriend/money/direction stuff. Seems like it’s been flavour of the month; everyone stewing in the collective juices of hostel-induced inertia.

Jerome has been getting sticky with Chris, Roel with Floor (Belgian version of Flora) and/or Jill, Sofie with God, me with the Other Sophie… Even through the confusion I have managed to keep a good humour, which makes a nice change.

I am trying to think of a joke about Roeling around on the Floor but this is as close to one as I am getting. 
Then we all go to a disco in a bar at New Years Eve. I find myself dancing with Mi-Mi (stunning looking Quebecois). That’s never happened before, ever, with anyone. She’s so hot it’s not true. I end up asking her out (after deciding Sophie thing not happening, why not?), and she says no, but likes hanging out with me anyway. Now here’s someone who likes to take a risk;
Mi-Mi is the first stripper I’ve ever met. (French speaking too! Ooh-la-la!.) We go out for a walk up through South Park up to the seashore, and she tells me how she’d made about five thousand dollars one summer by becoming a stripper in Montreal. She’d always been shy and had decided to do something that really scared her, so she went to a strip club and made enquiries. 

She was only seventeen and was taken under the wing of some Hell’s Angels bikers. 

They did not try to take her earnings, try to have sex with her or try to get her to take drugs. They respected her and let her stay in their apartment. They escorted her to and from the club to protect her from weirdos. There now that blows away a presumption or two doesn’t it?

Tim from the hostel had been a biker from Montreal too. It would be strange if they’d met. I wonder…
I have discovered that yes, I can enjoy travelling alone, that yes, I can ask out gorgeous women (and they sometimes say yes) and yes, I can be sparkly and fun. Thank god. 

All things I have been habitually scared of, sometimes turn out in reality to be not so scary at all.
This whole time feels ridden with growing pains; on the one hand emotionally yearning for safety in the form of a girlfriend, but conversely I am struggling to just stick with this notion of being an independent traveller.

I ache. I am trying to live in my dreams. Real life seems awkward.  Sometimes it feels like I am making some headway. I feel relief and then remember to try not take myself quite so blinking seriously. 

Try to be thankful towards these emotional contradictions; these beautiful experiences here and there, those yearnings, those undone dreams. 

Possibility twinkles out there in front of me, scaring the wits out of me.

If I want to hug someone that’s not around, then I can imagine the spirit of them, and hug them there; it still feels like I am getting what I need, and who knows, maybe they can feel it too. 

There is, and always will be, contradiction, conflict, and choices to be made. 

There are no safety nets. The best I can do is try to learn different ways of truly embracing fearful, uncomfortable situations. There are always times of fear, sometimes great long stretches of it. With each deep tangle of self oppression hopefully we can learn to be gentle with ourselves first. What anyone needs first is love and fearlessness.
Keep taking the photos, keep writing the journal, and keep eating the bean sprouts. Try to keep some objectivity and feed the sparkle.

Bit by bit we make our choices – Roel is going to stay in Victoria to see how things go with him and Floor (they end up going to the Dominican Republic together), Jerone and Chris end up staying in Vancouver at her apartment because he can’t convince her to come to Central America.

Roel has been complicating his life by almost getting entangled with Jill. I think if that hadn’t been going on, I would have taken much more of an active interest in making friends with her.

Jill is from Nova Scotia, a part of the world I had liked very much. She has a lovely Irish-Canadian accent, and is very much a country girl with a down to earth character and a batty sense of humour. As I spent time with her, I have a sense that she’s someone who could be very good for me. We make each other laugh and loon about. Ah well, life is already complex, best not to make it any more so…
Belgian Sofie goes to a hostel in Vancouver to look for another travel partner as I am not being decisive about dread-locks Sophie.

A couple of days later in something approaching complete confusion, I leave Victoria to try to find Sofie in Vancouver, then I return again so I can write a note with my email address on it for Sophie, leave Victoria the second time and have another shot at trying to find Belgian Sofie in Vancouver.
Emotionally I’m feeling very uncertain; leaving Canadian Sophie is hard, possibly dumb. 

I find Belgian Sofie is in one of the Vancouver hostels after I go checking into a couple of others to find out if she’d booked into any of them.

She’s put a note on a noticeboard asking for a hitching partner. I hope she hasn’t found one. She’s not in her room; I leave a note on her door and next to the advert. Eventually we find each other and we are both relieved. It’s an expensive hostel so we arrange to go visit her friends Gary and Donna in the suburbs to the south of Vancouver… 
Surrey Vancouver, Gary and Donna’s January 19th 2003

Gary and Donna are middle-aged born-again Christians. I sometimes start to develop a nervous twitch at the thought of born-agains. Regular minding their own business religious types I can get on with quite sensibly usually. But some born-agains, well it’s like their own personality and identity often seems to abruptly end after a few minutes and then the very worst ones just seem to turn into brainless rhetoric regurgitators, seemingly incapable of rational two-way discussion or independant thought. There’s a whole range of folks in between of course, but these are the ones that really freak me.

They are the sort of people that elect morons like Bush just cos he’s a member of the same fan club.

Sofie warns me that this is the end of the spectrum that Gary and Donna are towards.

I am always intrigued though by the way that someone can go from being in confusion with themselves to having a simpler outlook on life which often seems to make them happy and have certainty. This in itself I admire and respect; there are lots of times when I wish I had this myself. I just don’t want to have to join a fan club and denounce anyone who’s not in it as being crap and wrong.
Before I met the Belgians in Tofino, they had been making money doing apple-picking in Kelowna (southern BC) where they met Jill and also Gary.

Gary and Donna are both from New Brunswick where money was tight, so they moved out west to try their luck. Donna was chained to the kitchen sink whilst Gary had gone apple-picking; he’s a carpenter and builder, but business was being a little slow.
Gary and Donna are hospitable, I’m in open-minded mode, we get well fed and me and Sofie help Gary put the roof on a shed in the back garden. Sofie gets to do menial things cos she’s only a girl, but Gary’s an old guy so we can sort of forgive him for being a bit like that.

Me and Sofie spend time walking about the ‘burbs, she having lots of instability about her spirituality and that kind of thing.

I’m really concerned she’s going to give in and become a born-again and I find it hard to be objective about what she wants. I have such a strong dread of bigotry, I wander just how un-bigoted I am being myself.
Things are okay at Gary and Donna’s. Gary is an interesting man who cares a lot about people and seems to have seen a bit of the world. He follows ‘the voice of God’ which I take to be his instincts, and that I find rare and beautiful. Donna on the other hand plays the good housewife but when we talk to her it gives both me and Sofie a headache. Gary wears the trousers and Donna makes his sandwiches.

She reels off Love of God in a blah blah way like she’s memorised it from somewhere. When we ask her what she was into before becoming a Christian, she visibly relaxes and seems to have fond memories of her hippy lifestyle. She catches herself and then turns back into God TV mode and goes all blocked up and cross looking.
Tensions come to a head when Gary brought back some churchy mates back to the house and everything is polite until the subject gets to the impending attack on Afghanistan by the Americans and Brits. Comments are made about the Afghanis being ignorant misguided Muslims, and this will be God’s way of sorting out the righteous from the rubbish.

I ask them if they mix with many people outside the church. They admit that they don’t. I put it to them that they probably don’t know many Muslims then. 

They don’t know any. 

So how can they start making judgements about a whole group of people they have no actual first-hand knowledge of? Yet here they are, making gutter-level jokes about them. That’s not very righteous is it? I thought it is supposed to be God’s job to make the judgements? 

I’ve had a gut-full of the bollocks that goes on in the name of religion, and here are some of the idiots that perpetuate the hate, sitting here right in front of me, wolves in sheep’s clothing professing violence and murder in the name of love.

I get a bit loud and have to leave. These people are full of shit.
I go for a walk and try not to get too fried over the whole scene, what with Sofie wondering whether to throw her lot in with them.