Whitehorse

First sight of the Yukon

We've actually been in Whitehorse for 5 days now, getting up on Saturday PM, but I ran into some problems with the power supply up here. I have a range of transformers supposed to deal with the issue, but they aren't working for the laptop. Bizarrely however, it turns out that a simple adapter for the standard Australian transformer works fine. So I'm trying to catch up now. The weather to date has been fantastic, as you can see; this picture taken on phone through plane window, so not quite ideal conditions. Note the golf course.

You don't get such a clear idea of the way Whitehorse is sandwiched between two ridges

Whitehorse

 from this perspective, but it is, which makes it very narrow and quite long. One local told us it's about 35 km from one end to the other - maybe, but it's be lucky to be a kilometer wide. It runs from First Avenue, next to the river, up to Fourth Avenue. Going the other way I have seen a 72nd street.

Wood-fired Brooks Mogul 2-6-0

The landscape is briefly startling; fir, aspen, silver birch nothing at all like anything I've ever seen, but it is just as monotonous as any Australian landscape. Of course in reality, neither landscape is monotonous to the focussed eye, but fir trees, it seems to me, get a much better press
(undeserved) than eucalypts. It's certainly much greener than any Australian landscape, but with 1/3 of the worlds freshwater it would be pretty bad management if it weren't.

Whitehorse itself apparently rarely gets (heavy?) snow, despite the cold, because it's too dry. However, there is snow clearly visible on the hills around the town, even in midsummer. The hills don't look particularly high to me, so it must be a pretty fine margin of dryness. (I'm reminded that when I was in Daqing in 2002, the general feeling around town was that winter wasn't as cold as it used to be - maybe Whitehorse is the same) Certainly the museum has a lot of pictures of people struggling through snow between 1898 and 1927.

Narita

Main street of Narita, near the temple

 Narita Airport, it turns out, is not dissimilar to the airport in KL. It’s a long way from the city proper, the humidity is 94%, and it’s extremely green, mainly with rampant bamboo, but also half a dozen golf courses and plenty of rice fields. In fact, the imperial rice fields, possibly amongst others.

Buddha demonstrating equanimity in the rain

 We transited here overnight, but actually we had 24 hours which turned out to be plenty of time for some pleasant and leisurely sightseeing. Narita Airport dates back to 1970 and the town/village has been increasing its commitment to suburbanity ever since. At first glance it seems like it might be a bit like Tullamarine (with extra bamboo), but actually somebody in the town planning department has done a nice job of carving out a very pleasant tourist day-spot, with a very large temple complex, restored nicely and still operating as a temple, complete with monks, drums, incense, and chanting. And rain. But it’s warm rain and by the time we’d sat on the bus getting back to the hotel we were already dry.

Stele in the grounds of the temple

The town centre is small, just a main street which struggles to get started, and mainly features restaurants and food/souvenir shops. I was a bit surprised by the music on loudspeakers, but it wasn’t unduly obtrusive. Eel seemed to be the signature food (probably not altogether surprising if you live in an estuary) as well as some kind of pastry with amorphous goo on the inside. We had sushi & tofu with beer in a three table bar for dinner on Tuesday PM, then coffee and toast next to the railway station for breakfast (cheaper than the hotel). Narita has two stations, one for the Japan Railways line, the other for the Keisei (a private company) line. Just around the station is a faintly insalubrious nightlife, presumably for homecoming salary men, although on the wet Tuesday night we didn’t actually see anyone. A few of the bars had “No foreigners allowed” signs - In a way that’s probably a reasonable sign that it’s not an out-and-out tourist trap.

vancouver

 I can't say I took much to Vancouver. It reminds me of Adelaide, or Brisbane perhaps. A small city, which doesn't really know itself and in promoting what it thinks people might like to know strays a long way down the path of the disposable modern city. In fact, there is probably a very interesting history to the place, or in fact, several competing histories, but it would take an excavator to find them. What I can tell you is that it has a lot of Starbucks - maybe 12 or 15 in the tiny downtown section (Yaletown, Chinatown, Fogtown) we stayed in, and that Starbucks in Vancouver are worse than Starbucks in Sydney. The coffee tastes even more like chicory. Still, I like a bit of public art, and this head fits the bill. Is it Ozymandias? Or some local legend? Whatever, very good. I have a feeling that there is a bunch of art happening in Vancouver that might be more of its heart than we saw this time through.

Pretty much the obligatory view from hotel room shot. There's a very definitely new high-rise stage of development going on.

Every last Friday in the month the city cyclists colonise the roads and ride en masse through the city, provoking outrage in car drivers stuck for 20 minutes as the parade passes. There's only one thing more self-righteous than a peak hour driver, and that's a peak hour cyclist with a few hundred of his mates in tow. You can't see the argument in this picture, it's taking place somewhat to the right.

Just testing what the phone in the camera can do - not too bad really.