Another lovely transit day. Left Kamloops around 10am, with pretty much our only objective for the day being to get to Vancouver in one piece to catch our flight out of Canada.

Oh, and of course to stop in Chilliwack along the way.

Actually, apart from the name, it’s pretty well rather dull. We had lunch there, and that’s about it.

Got a little lost finding Vancouver International due to lack of clear bloody signage.. and ended up in North Vancouver, which is about 10km to the wrong side of Vancouver downtown. Slogged our way back through the traffic, but still made it with plenty of time to spare.

Jumped through all the usual hoops at the airport, and copped the 18 hours on a 767. On the upside I managed to read Hannibal Rising and the last Harry Potter book on the plance. Bafflingly anticlimactic and vaguely satisfying respectively.

We lost Thursday entirely, and landed at 7am on Friday. We’re back.

Hope the blog and photos were somewhat entertaining….

Nothing much to report. We drove the 430-ish km from Jasper to Kamloops, stopping only for lunch at a random Dairy Queen in the middle of nowhere (I’ll always have a place at the DQ…).

Today was spent exploring the area around Jasper. First on the list was to visit yet more lakes! Surely we’ve had enough of lakes for the time being, no matter how pretty they are, you might ask? Well, it turns out I can handle pretty lakes for a while yet…. We had to stop by Lake Annette, in honour of one of our bestest buds who is named Annette (we also visited Annette Island when we stopped by Metlakatla in Alaska).

Passing by Lake Edith as we drove around Lake Annette, it was time to head on down the road to Maligne Lake, some 40-odd km away. Maligne Lake is the largest naturally forming lake in the Canadian rockies (Lake Minnewanka was artificially dammed). We went past Medicine Lake as we did so - that lake is occasionally drained naturally at certain parts of the year.. No problems today, it was full and blue.

We stopped at Maligne Canyon, which was brilliant. It was created by the Maligne river (which comes, eventually from Maligne Lake), and is 50m deep in some parts! It would be cool to go back in winter, because you can actually walk on the canyon floor, over the frozen river.

At Maligne Lake, we went on a boat tour out to Spirit Island and back, unfortunately the sun was in the wrong spot when we went, making it quite difficult to get good photos of that beautiful spot.

Heading back into town, we stopped in Jasper proper for a little while to kill some time by visiting the very small but also quite interesting wildlife museum, and to buy way too much chocolate.

We then headed up to Whistlers Mountain (so called because of the hoary marmots who live up there, who tend to whistle when alarmed) to go on the Jasper Tramway which brings you up about 1000m almost to the summit of Whistlers Mountain. We went probably a third of the way to the actual summit before the rain forced us to turn around - it was steep and slippery even in good conditions, and I didn’t fancy trying to get back down safely if it got even wetter.

Dinner at the restaurant before taking the tramway back down and driving back to our hotel. Tomorrow we officially start heading back to Vancouver to catch our flight home to Sydney!

Today’s photos here

It’s always nice waking up to a beautiful view, and there are few places I’ve stayed with a view comparable to the one we got this morning. While Jay went on the lakeside walk, I took the opportunity to get a few extra minutes of sleep! The long, activity-packed days are finally catching up with me I think.

Checking out of the Chateau, we headed up the Icefields Parkway for the 230km drive to Jasper. Sounds nice and quick and easy, if we weren’t planning on stopping frequently to check things out, that is!

Icefields Parkway is named thusly because of the numerous ice-capped mountains and glaciers on its western side, and is renown as being one of the most scenic highways in the world. We stop for a closer look at Crowfoot Glacier, just after leaving Lake Louise. I’m always fascinated by glaciers, especially the ones just sitting on top of mountains. Hooray for landslides?

Our first “proper” stop of the day is Peyto Lake. I know I keep bleating on about how stunning the lakes are here, but this one is truly, honestly magnificent. A short hike (10 minutes, but steep as hell) brings you to a lookout where you can see the brilliantly green lake, AND the glacier that feeds it.

Next up is the obligatory Icefield Centre, right next to the Columbia Icefield. We book tickets on the Brewster Sno-coaches that take you right out onto the Athabasca Glacier. Of course, it is cold, windy and raining, so it’s suitably brisk! Very cool, even if the slippery conditions and rain made it exceedingly hard to get any good pics. At least I didn’t step into a big watery hole like Jay did.

We visit a couple of waterfalls just to round off the trip. Both Sunwapta Falls and Athabasca Falls are very close to their respective car parks, so they are very easy to access. Unfortunately, this also means they are usually crawling with bloody tourists. Extra hard to set up for waterfall shots with a tripod…..

Just a few km before getting to Jasper, we finally get our first wildlife sighting on the parkway (we had already seen a couple of white-tailed deer on the Bow Valley Parkway when driving to Johnston Canyon). I noticed a car slowing down and doing a U-turn, remembering that the parkway is largely one lane only each way. As I was wondering just what the hell he was up to, I just caught a glimpse of a bear starting to cross the road as I went past. Not sure which type, but I think it was a black bear.

We checked into the Lobstick Lodge and got dinner before settling in for a quiet night.

Today’s photos here

Another long day. After 3 nights at the one hotel in Banff, we loaded up the car and headed North-West towards Lake Louise. Driving right past it though, we headed into Yoho National Park for a quick diversion to visit Emerald Lake. Despite the light rain, it was pretty easy going, and we got there fairly quickly.

We took a short hike to Hamilton Falls (disappointing) before coming back to the Emerald Lake carpark to check out the lake itself. Surprise, surprise, it was quite pretty.

Next stop is Moraine Lake, which is just a few kilometres from Lake Louise. It is accessed via a road that is only open in Summer. This one was crammed full of tourist buses and cars, but it was not hard to see why - the water is a brilliant blue/green, and it is just an awesome sight.

Back up the seasonal road, and around the corner, and there she is - the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise. This whole trip was basically built around the one night at this hotel with its magnificent backdrop. So it was a little disappointing that our room wasn’t ready yet (well we were there early, around noon!!), but no matter, we headed back out on the other side of the highway to the Lake Louise Ski Area. No, not to ski down grassy banks, but to go up the Lake Louise Gondola.

It was up there that we finally caught our first glimpse of that famous lake, with Victoria Glacier in the background. Suitably lunched and gondola’ed, we headed back and rushed up to our lakeview room.

Take a good look below folks. Yes, that is the actual view from our hotel room!

It was still only around 3pm, so we went on one of the many hikes you can get to from the hotel, a walk up to Lake Agnes. Many many exhausting steps later, we get up there (passing Mirror Lake in the process). Over 380m of elevation!! Those uphill hikes always feel a hell of a lot better coming back down….

Dinner was amazingly expensive, but also incredibly good - well, we’re staying in a posh hotel, and paying posh hotel prices for the honour of doing so.. why not cap it off with a posh hotel dinner?

Today’s photos here

Today we decided to go back out to Lake Minnewanka. They run 1.5 hour boat tours to the end of the lake and back. Now, before you wonder if it was good value, Lake Minnewanka is actually apparently the largest lake (albeit man made) in Banff National Park. The boat actually does take 45 minutes to get out there!

We got some great commentary on the way out there, and got to see yet more pretty scenery - it appears that you just cannot go anywhere in the Canadian Rockies that ISN’T pretty. It’s amazing how just about all the water in these parts is a brilliant blue-green colour, due to the way light reflects off the glacial sediment suspended in the water.

After hopping off the boat, we headed about 30 minutes towards Lake Louise to visit Johnston Canyon. We’d gotten good press about this destination from our good friend Mike, and the lady at the Banff Info Centre recommended it as well.

I’m pleased to say that I am happy to highly recommend it too!! The hike to see the Lower Falls and Upper Falls didn’t take much more than 2.5 or so hours, even with frequent photo stops - much better than the hike I piked out on yesterday!! Very easy trail to follow, with plenty of boardwalks and railings.

The drive to Johnston Canyon is beautiful as expected, and the hike scenery was outstanding, even considering the region’s lofty standards when it comes to pretty. I’d dragged my tripod all the way from Sydney, through Vancouver and Alaska, and now it was being put to good use as there was plenty of water along the trail.

Still being eaten alive by the mozzies despite piling on the insect repellent.

Today’s photos here

We were spending 3 nights in Banff, so we had plenty of time to explore. First stop was the famous Banff Gondola, which takes you to the top of Sulphur Mountain. Feeling frisky, I decided that we’d take the hiking trail to the top of the mountain and ride the gondola back down. After all, we managed to hike to the top of Cradle Mountain in January, so how hard can it be?

Turns out, it only took about 50m of elevation before the mountain thoroughly defeated us and I proceeded to decide that maybe I’d like to take the gondola up AND down after all. I must have been a hell of a lot fitter in January, that was at the start of the trip, not 3 weeks in, and this one has just a teensy bit of extra elevation (you have to climb 700m!!!!!).

The 8 minute gondola ride up was a godsend. Looking back down as we travelled up, I guess I probably would have died before managing to hike all the way up - either from exhaustion or from being eaten alive by the massive, very hungry mosquitoes. We spent close to a couple of hours up at the summit, taking the 1km boardwalk trail to the weather station, then grabbing food before taking the gondola back down.

Our next stop was the just as famous Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. It really is an awesome building (really, a collection of buildings) - a majestic castle sitting on a hill next to Bow Falls. Wandered around the lobby, took some photos and then racked off quicksmart. The place felt quite expensive indeed, and I hope the experience is just as grand at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in a couple of days, when we are paying guests, and not gawking tourists!

Just down the road, we got a couple of glimpses of the aforementioned Bow Falls from viewpoints beside the river before taking a drive through the Banff Springs Golf Course. Now this has to be the golf course with the prettiest view in the world. We even saw a group of elk munching away beside one of the fairways!

Driving just out of Banff, we had a quick stop by Lake Minnewanka and Two Jack Lake before heading back to Banff for dinner and sleep.

Today’s photos here

As it turns out, driving on the right side of the road ISN’T the problem. Remembering to keep to the left side of your lane IS. Kept drifting across when I wasn’t paying attention, as it doesn’t feel “right” until you are positioned towards the right-side of the lane you are in. However, concentration increased somewhat upon viewing an RV that had rolled on the highway……

Relatively pain-free operation getting out of Calgary, and once you are on the highway, you simply drive until you see the Banff exit.

Banff is a lovely little tourist town, but it’s a shame it has quite so many tourists! It also doesn’t help that they are currently digging up pretty much the whole of Banff Avenue, restricting the traffic flow down Banff’s main street to one very slow lane each way.

We check into our hotel, the very comfortable Swiss Village, just after 2pm, so our first priority was finding some food. The Banff downtown area is about 10-15 minutes walk away, so we stroll down to check it out. As mentioned, there’s a great big construction site in the middle of the road there, but it’s not too much hassle if you’re a pedestrian.

Grabbed lunch and window-shopped for a little while, but that got old pretty quickly because downtown Banff is really really tiny. To kill a bit of time, we watched the new Harry Potter movie at the Banff cinemas. Again, tiny, but at least it was a decent sized screen, with surround sound! Good flick too. The longest book, but translated into the shortest movie. This is not necessarily a bad thing as most of the 5th book consisted of Harry whining anyway.

Picked up some bits and pieces from the Safeway for dinner before settling down for a quiet night of picking through all the pamphlets and visitor guides we picked up at the Banff information centre.

Today’s photos here

Horrendous 4:00am wakeup as we had to get to the airport by 5:15 to catch our flight to Calgary (via a 3-hour stopover in Seattle). At the airport, as in Juneau, we are “randomly” selected to undergo extra security checks. This means that in addition to the normal stuff - remove shoes and jacket, remove video cameras and laptops from bags etc etc - we get every single section of our bags searched and tested for explosives, plus we get to be patted down by lovely TSA people wearing rubber gloves (no more than patting down, honest!!).

Basically, if you are not a US citizen, your chances of being randomly selected increase dramatically. It’s a bit tiring, but doesn’t really take that long and it keeps them happy, so what can you do?

After that, we ran into some of our buddies from the Spirit of ‘98! Great to see them, and by all accounts they had a fantastic Denali tour with Cruise West.

I think next time, should there be a next time, we will definitely go with Cruise West for everything. Our land-based Alaska tour was organised through Gray Line, and to be quite honest they simply couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. In the 4 days we were with them:

1) We had to wait almost an hour at Anchorage airport for a bus transfer to our hotel
2) Our bus driver to Denali got lost a couple of times and then didn’t drop us off at our correct hotel.
3) Entirely failed to turn up to send us to the rail depot to catch our train - we only made it there thanks to the great help from the staff at the McKinley Village Lodge
4) Our bus to our Fairbanks hotel didn’t know about us and almost took off without us, and
5) When we got to our hotel room in Fairbanks, one of our suitcases went missing for about an hour as they had sent it to the wrong hotel despite it being labelled identically to the suitcase that WAS delivered to our room properly.

So a word of warning - I think they are mostly used to dealing with large organised tour groups, and as just a couple travelling together, we were frequently overlooked. The hotels, tours and train were great, but the transfers were rubbish.

Another long stopover at Seattle/Tacoma Airport… Maybe some day I’ll actually get to see Seattle! Eventually we find ourselves at Calgary International, and chug on out of there in our rental car, a white Dodge Caliber. Jay got us through the maze of one-way streets in downtown Calgary to our first hotel, the Sandman Hotel. I guess I’ll have a go at this driving on the wrong/right side of the road tomorrow when we head to Banff.

Another photo-free day!

The morning was spent exploring Denali’s downtown area (which took about 10 minutes) and foraging for brunch at the Denali Salmon Bake restaurant/bar. Spent a quiet couple of hours post-processing the Wilderness Tour photos in the hotel lobby before going off to catch the train to Fairbanks.

Our carriage is a fantastic double-decker affair. The top level is the seating, with massive windows that allow great views to the side and top. The bottom level is the dining level, where we enjoyed a reasonable dinner - the food quality was fair, but understandable considering the space available for preparation, and the time constraints.

Quite an enjoyable experience. The scenery leaving Denali was spectacular, as we’ve come to expect. Our car manager was also great - very entertaining and funny. All in all, the train is definitely a great way to travel through Alaska, although slower than a coach, and considerably more expensive.

Overnight at the Westmark Fairbanks, though only for a few hours sleep before having to catch a 7:15am flight.

Today’s photos here