Monday, July 24, 2006

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Hello from beautiful Victoria on Vancouver Island, outside Vancouver. We arrived here yesterday by bus and ferry ... the ferry trip took 90 minutes on the largest ferry we have ever seen. A pleasant respite from all the walking we had been doing since our arrival.

Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia is large, busy and beautiful and must be one of the world's best kept secrets, although judging by the number of fellow tourists here, the secret has gotten out.

I can only imagine how pleasant it must be to live here during the off-tourist season.

Both of us are impressed with Canada. The little bit we have seen so far is very impressive. For those of you who haven't been here ... several friends have ... it's very similar to Australia; multi-ethnic, clean and runs along the same lines. The people are friendly and "civilised" as one of our colleagues from the UAE put it. I guess we did come from the same roots after all, for which we should be forever grateful; we could have done much worse than coming from British stock.

Everywhere around Vancouver are plastic or fibre glass bears like the one in the photo, but they are painted to reflect different themes. I have no idea what the theme for this one is. We've taken several photos of each other beside these bears which are quite large. Apparently they are being auctioned off soon for charity, so some will no doubt appear at the front of local houses, possibly as letter boxes or to scare stray dogs (or people ... perhaps mothers-in-law) away.

Yesterday we visited Burchett Gardens which are huge with hectares of beautifully coloured flowers and nice green trees and shrubs. Today we are off to Parliament House, the local museum and anything else we can find. Oh, yes, we are doing a harbour tour on a small, egg-shaped vessel of which I'll get a shot. The boats are some of the funniest I have seen.

Best wishes from Canada

Robin
for Robin and Christina

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