Victoria Travel Guide
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If you really want to understand Vancouver, stand at the edge of the Inner Harbour (the Canada Place cruise-ship terminal makes a good vantage point) and look around you. To the west you'll see Stanley Park, one of the world's largest urban parks, jutting out into the waters of Burrard Inlet. To the north, just across the inlet, rise snow-capped mountains. To the east, right along the water, is the low-rise brick-faced Old Town. And almost everything else you see lining the water's edge will be a new glass-and-steel high-rise tower. As giant cruise ships glide in to berth, floatplanes buzz in and out, and your ears catch a medley of foreign tongues, you may wonder just where on earth you are. Vancouver is majestic and intimate, sophisticated and completely laid back, a bustling, prosperous, world-class city that somehow, almost miraculously, manages to combine its contemporary, urban-centered consciousness with the free-spirited magnificence of nature on a grand scale.
Vancouver is probably one of the "newest" cities you'll ever visit, and certainly it's one of the most cosmopolitan. I can guarantee you that part of your trip will be spent puzzling out what makes it so unique, so livable, what gives it such a buzz. Nature figures big in that equation, but so does enlightened city planning and the diversity of cultures. Vancouver is a place where people want to live. It's a place that awakens dreams and desires.
The city's history is in its topography. Thousands of years ago a giant glacier sliced along the foot of the coast Range, simultaneously carving out a deep trench and piling up a gigantic moraine of rock and sand. When the ice retreated, water from the Pacific flowed in and the moraine became a peninsula, flanked on one side by a deep natural harbor (today's Inner Harbour) and on the other by a river of glacial meltwater (today called the Fraser River). Vast forests of fir and cedar covered the land, and wildlife flourished. The First Nations tribes that settled in the area developed rich cultures based on cedar and salmon.
Some 10,000 years later, a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railroad came by, took in the peninsula, the harbor, and the river, and decided he'd found the perfect spot for the CPR's new Pacific terminus. He kept it quiet, as smart railway men tended to do, until the company had bought up most of the land around town. Then the railway moved in, set up shop, and the city of Vancouver was born.
Working indoors, Vancouverites have seemingly all fallen in love with the outdoors: in-line skating, mountain biking, downhill and cross-country skiing, kayaking, windsurfing, rock climbing, parasailing, snowboarding, and variations on all the above. Why shouldn't they? Every terrain needed is right there in their backyard: ocean, rivers, mountains, islands, sidewalks. And when they're not biking or kayaking, they're drinking coffee or eating out. In the past decade or so, Vancouver has become one of the top restaurant cities in the world, bursting with an incredible variety of cuisines and making an international name for itself with its unique Pacific Northwest cooking. The new food mantra here is "buy locally, eat seasonally."
The rest of the world has taken notice of the blessed life people in these parts lead. The World Council of Cities ranked Vancouver second only to Geneva for quality of life (and who wants to live in Geneva?). Surveys generally list it as one of the 10 best cities in the world to live in. It's also one of the 10 best to visit, according to Condé Nast Traveler. And in 2003, the International Olympic Committee awarded Vancouver the right to host the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Heady stuff, particularly for a spot that less than 20 years ago was routinely derided as the world's biggest mill town.
Though some "heritage buildings" still remain in Vancouver, the face of the city you see today is undeniably new. Starting in the 1960s, misguided planners and developers seemed intent on demolishing every last vestige of the city's pioneer past, replacing old brick and wood buildings with an array of undistinguished concrete high-rises and blocky eyesores. Citizen outcry finally got the bulldozers to stop their rampage. Luckily, landscaping and gardening was an ingrained part of life in this mild climate, so plants and trees and shrubs were not uprooted for endless parking lots. You may be amazed, in fact, by the amount of green and the number of fountains and the overall lushness of neighborhoods like The West End, which also happens to be one of the most densely populated areas in the world. A building boom preceded Expo '86 and followed it as well, spurred on by enormous amounts of cash pouring in from Hong Kong and Asia. The new towers, made of glass and steel, are much lighter looking and seem more in keeping with the hip, international image that Vancouver is developing for itself.
If you miss the old in Vancouver, you'll find plenty of it in Victoria, some 80km (50 miles) across the Strait of Georgia on Vancouver Island. Victoria took the opposite approach from Vancouver and preserved nearly all its heritage buildings. As a consequence, Victoria, beautifully sited on its own Inner Harbour, is one of the most charming small cities you'll ever find (it has about 325,000 residents in the Greater Victoria area, compared to over two million in Vancouver). Since it's on an island, accessible only by ferry (the best way to go) or floatplane (buckle your seatbelts, it might be a bumpy ride), a more leisurely sense of time prevails in Victoria. It's a perfect antidote for stressed-out mainlanders.
For years Victoria marketed itself quite successfully as a little bit of England on the North American continent. So successful was the sales pitch, residents began to believe it themselves. They began growing elaborate rose gardens, which flourished in the mild Pacific climate, and they cultivated a taste for afternoon tea with jam and scones.
For decades, this continued, until eventually it was discovered that not many residents of Victoria shared a taste for bad English cooking, so restaurants branched out into seafood, ethnic, and fusion. And lately, as visitors have shown more interest in exploring the natural world, Victoria has added whale-watching and mountain-biking trips to its traditional London-style double-decker bus tours. The result is that Victoria is the only city in the world where you can zoom out on a boat in the morning to see a pod of killer whales, and make it back in time for a big afternoon tea. Add the Butchart Gardens, a truly world-class garden that celebrated its centenary in 2004, and the Royal B.C. Museum, and you've got all you need for a memorable holiday just 90 minutes from the big city.
