Vancouver is known for its mild weather - there are no extremes. In the three years I’ve been here we have never had a proper storm - you get two flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder and that’s it, storm over.

This weekend everything changed. A beautiful and hot sunny day turned in a wild stormy night. There were at least 2 storms circling round our house, coming in from the East. I’ve never seen so much lightning - it was forking down and dancing across the sky and was so pretty. Crashing thunder and heavy rain completed the picture. Once the storms had started to pass over us on their way downtown the sun set and caused the sky to turn such a magnificent shade of orange that I just had to go out in the pouring rain and thunder to look at it in awe. We can’t actually see the sun set from where we live, but you could tell that the sunset was totally stunning.

There were fireworks scheduled for Saturday night - South Africa’s entry in the Festival of Light. We were sure they were going to cancel it, but no. 300,000 people still turned up and were treated to fireworks in a thunderstorm - South Africa v God. God won, hand’s down.

Here is a video - a time-lapse of photos taken over the 24 hours showing the sunny day, the storm, the sunset and the fireworks:

Time-lapse Vancouver July 25th

And here’s a still from the same camera showing the incredible orange sky. This hasn’t been doctored at all and as we all know pictures of sunsets never show how beautiful it really is - still it is pretty apocolyptic.

An interesting article in the Vancouver Sun today

Humans are not going to stop wanting to spread out into beautiful wilderness areas, constructing houses and homesteads that encroach onto the traditional territory of wild animals, but the importance of preserving wildlife corridors to enable cougars, bears and other predators to get from one side of their habitat to another without having to come into contact with humans is essential to stop this currently small issue becoming a major problem.

We’ve been talking about it for over a year, and last weekend we finally had our first climb! We never got round to doing an indoor course and decided that learning out in the open in beautiful scenery would be much better anyway. We joined our friends Ruth and Dave, Brigitte and Tim in the Cal-Cheak area just outside Whistler, which has many different climbs for different abilities. I initially just went along to watch and hang out with the guys and maybe learn a bit of belaying but once I was there and had seen Graham do a climb and make it look pretty easy I decided to have a go.

We started off on a 5.5 (5.4 being the rating of the easiest climbs you can do) - I only ended up getting half way up because my feet were killing me in my borrowed climbing shoes. I’m not sure if it was because they were too tight or because I was flexing my feet in a way I never have before, or because I was wearing socks when I should have been barefoot, but when I got over the crux (the hardest part of the climb) I had to beg Dave to lower me because my feet felt so crippled. It was disappointing not to get to the top, but it was enjoyable enough that I have commited to trying it again.

Graham was a natural and he really loved it.

He went on to climb a 5.6 and a 5.8 before the end of the day, which looked a lot more scary than this little cliff. He’ll definitely be going back for more!

And on the way home we saw our first bear of the season munching grass along the highway.

The big news round here lately has been about the recent rash of cougar sightings and attacks in Squamish, BC. At the weekend a cougar attacked and killed a dog that was on the Stawamus Chief hiking trail with its owners (on-leash), and attacked another dog. It was emaciatied so likely was killing to survive. There is Youtube footage of the cougar taken by the owner, but I have no idea why he wasn’t sensible enough to just get the hell out of there.

On Tuesday, a 3-year old girl was attacked by a cougar while out walking in a park with her mother. I know this area well as it was where we were walking/snowshoeing at Christmas. It is not in the middle of the wilderness. It is a built up residential area surrounded by forest and cougars should not be coming into populated areas like this unless there is something significantly wrong with their own territory or unless they have lost all fear of humans and see them as easy prey. The girl is OK - she got away with just a couple of minor injuries after the mother fought the cougar off. It seems that this one was well fed and likely a younger cougar practicing its hunting skills. Full story here.

Meanwhile, a dry, hot beginning to the summer has contributed to conditions that has allowed a wildfire to burn for almost a month now around the Tyaughton Lake area near Lillooet. The fire started on May 29th and has now reached 8000 hectares with many evacuation orders applied. The guys fighting this fire have had a hard job, but seem to be slowly getting things under control - it is now at 70% contained according to this most recent article. The skies around Vancouver have been hazy this last week due to the smoke from this fire - pretty amazing that the effects can be seen this far south of the fire. We’re all hoping for a bit of rain for once before more fires start springing up!

I really wish I owned this house:

Oh hang on, I do as of June 1st!!!

Life has been moving a bit quickly lately but in totally the right direction.

We’ve been feeling a bit stressed and budgeting very hard recently, due to the (we hope) move that we are about to make to a house on the North Shore. Monkey decided to take me out on a date night to a nice restaurant using one of the coupons in the Entertainment Book - a great discount book which provides us with lots of 2-for-1 meal vouchers that allows us to afford to go to more expensive restaurants while still remaining within our budget.

To cut costs further, we had a bottle of wine at home beforehand (a German Riesling called Devil’s Rock - a new, inexpensive favourite of ours) then headed to Griffins at the Farimont Hotel on Georgia Street. All of their entrees are pretty expensive but they all include a dessert buffet (which you can also have on its own). Monkey had the prime rib with yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes and I had the evening special surf and turf (5 oz tenderloin and a skewer of 5 prawns) with blue cheese potato parfait. Both dishes were delicious - the meat, especially, was perfectly cooked and so tasty. The dessert buffet had a lot of options - cheesecake, double chocolate mousse, fruit mousse cake, little macadamia nut treacle tarts, fig tart, profiteroles, chocolate and cointreau gateaux, cookies, creme caramel, chocolate bread pudding, fresh fruit and meringue cake - all of which were nice enough but nothing special. We were so full from the main course anyway that we didn’t need much dessert, but we tried to have a tast of each. In conclusion we give the restaurant a big thumbs up for the entrees but wish that there was an option NOT to have the dessert buffet included in the price. My surf and turf would have been much more appealing at $34 as opposed to $42!

The date night went well - we got chatting to a lady at the table next to us and she commented that we looked so good together that she thought we were newly married! Well, I guess technically we are still newly-weds, but having been together for almost 8 years now I’m not sure that terminology applies!

Further to my blog post of July last year about Grizzly bears starting to arrive on Vancouver Island for the first time, I read an interesting article in the Spring 2009 edition of British Columbia magazine this week. It appears that more grizzlies were spotted over the summer and that instead of trapping and shooting them, like I thought would happen, the grizzlies will be a protected species on Vancouver Island. The population of black bears are certainly not going to like the intrusion onto their territory but wildlife experts say that because this appears to be a natural phenomonon, we should just let nature take its course for now and review any problems that may arise as they arise.

I can’t post the British Columbia magazine article, but here’s a December 2008 Vancouver Sun article on the same topic:

Vancouver Sun Article

I found it very interesting to note that grizzly bears have mated with polar bears in the past, but not ever with black bears. Considering black bears and grizzly bears live in close proximity to each other in areas like the Kootenays I thought that some cross-breeding would have occurred.

The other weekend we took a drive up the sea-to-sky highway intending to do some snow-shoeing at Cheakamus River but we were running out of time so stopped at Alice Lake Provincial Park instead. The idea was to do the Four Lakes Trail which we had snow-shoed last January and very much enjoyed, but when we got there we realised the snow was so compacted and icy that there was no way we could snowshoe on it, but also no easy way to hike on it either. We ended up doing an “ice walk” a third of the way around Stump Lake, and then a quarter of the way around Alice Lake. I was with two people who are much better hikers than me and I was really surprised that I was finding the ice-walking relatively easy compared to them, as I laughed at them falling all over the place and screeching. I think I have learned good ice-walking technique from walking to and from work during that period of heavy snow in Vancouver last year. Mind you, I was the only one who ended up falling on my bum, as they watched me slip and slide down a steep slope and fall over before deciding that they weren’t going to follow, and that they were going to give up and turn round.

We ended up sitting on top of some picnic tables next to Alice Lake soaking up the sun and admiring the view for about an hour before heading back to Vancouver via the Watershed Grill in Brackendale overlooking the river for a pint of beer . It was lovely to get out though, even if our exercise was a lot less vigorous than we had intended it.

The Alice Lake campground is supposed to open at the end of March but it is likely they will delay it this year because of the amount of snow. We’re finding it difficult to get out to the right places this year - most places are the same as Alice Lake - too much snow and ice to hike on, but too bad a quality of snow to snowshoe on. Add to that the extreme avalanche risk on the slopes and in the backcountry in the entire province, and this season has been a bit of a disappointment for most people. We are very much looking forward to Spring when we can get out and go camping and hiking and kayaking and maybe even swimming to make up for the disappointment!

As I like to share pictures and we took no photographs this time, here’s a couple from last year when the snow was good. The first is of me snow-shoeing ON Stump Lake and the second is the view from the Watershed in Brackendale where we had our drink.

In January I went back to the UK for the first time since immigrating to Canada and it was a very strange experience. Before we left we were feeling pretty damned miserable as it felt like it was the end of our holiday in Canada rather than the beginning of our holiday in England. We just did not want to leave Canada because we love it so much.

Once we got to England, there were a few things that immediately jumped out at me - firstly there are so many gates and hedges and fences marking people’s property and indicating ownership of land. Secondly, it seemed to be so bone-chillingly cold even though the temperature was similar to Vancouver’s. Thirdly, everything is crowded and cramped - streets are narrow which makes them very busy with traffic. Fourthly, everywhere is so flat! Lastly, yob culture is very much alive in the UK, and I found it shocked me a lot more than I ever thought possible. A lot of young men, especially, seem to put a lot of effort into looking and sounding insolent and threatening.

I think the hardest thing for us to deal with was that although it was wonderful to see our families and friends, it seemed that most people would politely ask us how our lives were in Canada but not really be interested in the answer. When we talked about “In Canada…this” and “In Canada…that”, we got the overwhelming sense that we were boring them and should change the subject. This was incredibly difficult because “In Canada…” is now our life and we obviously want to talk about how our lives are going. Instead we just talked about other people’s lives and relationships and the economy and the snow etc.

It is interesting that every other ex-pat that I have spoken to about that particular issue has felt the same. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a big issue for one or several of the following reasons:

1) They can’t fully comprehend living anywhere else and so they don’t find it particularly interesting and switch off.

2) They don’t want to hear about how much we are enjoying our lives because they aren’t enjoying their lives as much but are stuck there either because they can’t move or they won’t move because they can’t stand such a big upheaval.

3) It hurts them to hear of us happily and successfully enjoying our life away from them when they used to be such a big part of it.

4) They are (maybe unknowingly) patriotic toward England so don’t want to hear why we like Canada better.

I suspect it is more the third reason than any other. And I also think that we project our own feelings of guilt onto them - our guilt for leaving them behind and enjoying ourselves so much without them. We feel as if we are gloating every time we talk about our “new lives” and so assume they don’t want to hear it!

The good things about going back: it was a really social time and I realised that all the good friends I had that are as useless at contacting me as I am at contacting them are still my very good friends; meeting my friends’ new babies and seeing their new houses; the old English tradition of going down the pub(s); having the chance to have a proper catch up with our grandparents who cannot travel; spending quality time with the rest of our family; taking Graham for a long, nostalgic walk through my childhood neighbourhood; British lasagne, British Indian food and British Chinese food!

The current economic climate is hitting the tourism business pretty hard, with American tourism way down and businesses needing to cost-cut. Tourism Vancouver alone has laid off 20% of its staff.

News article here.

Not good news with the Winter Olympics in Vancouver only a year away, when all these businesses thought they were going to cash in big time. However, the tourism sector is expected to recover towards the end of the year with the Olympics providing a big boost - see article here.