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April 2001

Victoria and Vancouver

David Aaronson
2005-09-25 16:26:16

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We arrived in Vancouver just after rush hour on Friday evening. After a brief rest in our Burnaby hotel, we walked to the skytrain - Vancouver's public transit system - and went into the city centre. The dining and nightlife district in Vancouver is a somewhat historic area called Gastown, shown in this picture. Vancouver naturally has the tall pointy structure which is mandatory in all major Canadian cities. The tower at Harbour Centre is actually attached to the top of a hotel though so it's not quite as scenic as the towers in Seattle, Calgary and Toronto. We have no skyline pictures of Vancouver due to a general lack of time in the city but it is truly a picturesque setting. This is one of the few streets downtown that you cannot see mountains at the end of (1). Grouse Mountain just north of town features night skiing apparently well into April.

The next morning we visited Stanley Park which is a massive chunk of land attached to one side of downtown Vancouver. A maze of trails and roads separate different areas of the park and the average visitor would be hopelessly lost forever without the frequent signage. A highlight of the park is the Vancouver Aquarium, whence we took this picture of a beluga whale (or its tail at least) engaged in morning aerobics (2).

Naturally, there were also otters lest you think you might get through one of our trips without the obligatory otter pictures (3). However, this time we feature sea otters which unfortunately had to be photgraphed through not-so-clean plexiglass.

Along with several outdoor pools, the aquarium has a couple large indoor exhibits featuring the Pacific Northwest, coral reefs, and the Amazon. It's hard for us to tell definitively what else was in the park since there's doubtless much more than we saw. There are at the very least a couple large gardens, bike and rollerblade rentals, and some fairly aggressive geese.

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