9. Vancouver & the Sunshine Coast.

Vancouver has the reputation of being one of the best cities globally to live in. Two and a half million people call this greater metropolitan sprawl home; it's certainly got its attractions, with a thriving cultural scene, waterfront locations, city beaches for swimming, great green spaces, progressive politics with a large lgbtq community and a stunning mountainous backdrop provided there's no smoke haze to impair visibility. However, the city has slipped in the rankings from first to sixth since 2011, according to the Economist's 'global liveability index'. Support and enthusiasm for higher density neighbourhoods, especially downtown high-rise, (they pioneered the 'ecodensifying' model of urban planning here), has waned with increasing negative associations, from real estate and rent costs to social isolation and, at times, high bacterial levels in the bay.

Early August, I spent a busy week there with my sister Helen, on her way home to Australia after a conference in Boston, good to catch up with her. Our highlights ... the anthropology museum with its collection of Haida and other coastal community artefacts, huge carved house poles, canoes, steamed bentwood boxes, masks, all made from the 'tree of life', the western red cedar. The art gallery, with vivid paintings by Emily Carr, mainly cedars and the coastal rainforest in post-impressionist style; also a great exhibition called 'Cabin Fever' tracing the evolution of the cabin in north America from the early settlers and Thoreau through to the 'cabin porn' of today ... (see cabinporn.com, also thousandhuts.org for news on hutting from Reforesting Scotland). Chinatown, the third largest in north America, with the only classical garden outside of China, a beautifully crafted and mindful space reflecting Daoist principles; and tasty eating places of course.

Then there's Stanley Park, which has to be one of the finest urban green spaces in the world, including old-growth forest, a 9km walk/cycleway along the seawall and beaches to swim from. We caught a good music and arts festival in the well-heeled West Van district. And the botanical gardens ... always worth checking them out. On the negative side, the traffic inevitably; and skid row, don't think I've ever seen so many homeless folk, apparently with an average life expectancy of three years, shocking ... and never seen anyone openly shooting up on the street before.

I met up with John Bass, the brother of a new friend from earlier in the trip. John is associate professor at the University of BC, in the architecture and landscape architecture department. He's been working a great deal with indigenous communities, and found himself getting involved with issues around land and treaty rights, education and capacity building, and the whole reconciliation process. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modelled on the South African process, has attempted to redress the injustice and traumas of the residential school system, only finally disbanded in the 1990's. Their report was published in 2015 and lists 94 calls to action. The current Liberal PM, Justin Trudeau, was elected saying implementation would be his priority. John believes it's a positive step forward, better than has happened in the US, but how long does it take to come to terms with cultural genocide?

After Helen departed I had two weeks until my partner Pam's arrival. I wanted to head for the Cariboo-Chilcotin area ... John had put me in touch with an indigenous leader who told me about two forthcoming gatherings I'd be welcome to attend; and the area of the proposed Dasiqox Tribal Park looked stunning (see video on dasiqox.org). After some hesitation about another 1600 km round trip I decided to go for it, and set off in heavy traffic east out of Vancouver. At Hope I turned north to follow the Fraser river, suddenly the road was quieter, and my heart lifted when once again there were bear-proof bins in the pullins. The river, the longest in BC, from the Rockies to Vancouver, is one of the best for salmon in the world, supporting all five Pacific species; it must have been an open fishing day as the banks were busy along one stretch. However, as in Scotland there were growing concerns with coastal salmon farms and I read of an ongoing campaign against a new open-net proposal in the local paper. (Open-net farms subsequently banned in BC in 2019).

The canyon becomes spectacular further north as the river has cut down 300-600m through the glacial deposits and bedrock of the interior plateau, leaving precipitous, barely vegetated slopes.

I stopped early evening at Lytton to fuel up, both myself and the car; the town is one of the hottest and driest places in BC, and has an interesting mix of First Nations and Chinese folk. The skies had been pretty smoky since leaving Vancouver, with growing numbers of wildfires across BC, and now looked dark and even more ominous as I drove on. Sure enough, after weeks of hot temperatures, the storm broke with heavy rain, turning torrential. I'd noticed earlier how some of those glacial deposits above the road were just loose rock and earth, and when I started aquaplaning and then running into mud and debris I decided it was time to turn around. I'd passed a gas station a few kilometres back, with a big parking lot where a couple of trucks and rv's had parked up, so headed back to spend the night there.

It was the right decision, the rain continued heavy most of the night. Next morning in the cafe at the gas station there were a good few of us who'd parked up scratching our heads waiting for news on the road, together with some locals chewing it all over. Apparently a big fire in 2017 had made the situation more serious with loss of topsoil. The road was blocked by landslides at several places in the Cache Creek area, wasn't cleared for two days and they're still looking for one woman whose car got swept away in the floods. The storm had broken over much of BC and lightning strikes had ignited many new fires. There were now over 1600 areas burning in BC, with fire crews drafted in from the US, Mexico and New Zealand, and a few days later the government declared a state of emergency. With rumours of fires in the area I was heading for, and the prospect of a long detour to get there, I decided to call it a day and turned south again.

I took a different route, rejoined the Fraser river, detouring via Lillooet and then south down the 'Sea to Sky' highway, all the way to Whistler and the Garibaldi Provincial Park. Now the rivers were laden with mud flowing swollen beneath a leaden sky. Supposedly a stunning route, I saw nothing given the smoke haze. I picked up a young guy hitching, from Quebec, bumming around; another new age evangelist he lost me in a broken english monologue on unified physics (see resonance.is).

Whistler on a late Sunday afternoon was throbbing with the annual Crankworx mountain bike event, bikes and gear everywhere. I got something to eat and took myself off to camp at the Cedar Grove trailhead a few miles out of town on Cougar Mountain; in the morning I hiked up to visit the grove, another small patch of stunning cedars up to 3m in diameter, saved by campaigners from the logging of the 60's and 70's. Then back into town for some brunch. I felt upset to hear that even Glacier was now burning, the area around Lake Macdonald where I’d spent some days …‘It’s hard to imagine a more on-the-nose metaphor for the devastating impacts of climate change than watching a glacier park burn’ ... one comment online.

A great deal was spent on Whistler for the 2010 winter olympics, it's laid out in an Alpine style, pedestrian friendly with attractive plazas and green spaces. Along with Squamish down the road, you can try just about any outdoor activity you can think of here, from sky diving to jet boating, and everything in between; for myself I settled on a visit to the Audain Art Museum. A great collection of both historic and contemporary First Nations works, including a Dali-esque Haida work titled 'Clearcut to the last old tree'; and more paintings by Emily Carr, including a couple of Arbutus trees and many of her indigenous people scenes. So many good galleries on my trip I'd become

something of a buff.

With the smoke limiting views I wasn't inspired to do any hiking in Garibaldi. I'd heard good things about the Sunshine Coast, so I retreated there for about ten days. Just a fifty minute ferry ride from Vancouver, with many crossings a day, it's a popular place to live and busy with visitors at this time of year. I'd sent a couple of hasty emails via workaway.com, the volunteering website which I'd been using on my trip, and stayed firstly with Courtney a musician who'd inherited his parents’ luxury beachfront home on a quiet stretch of coast, along the Ocean Esplanade. He was working to turn the place into a wellness centre so that he could get back to music.

Did some odd jobs there, together with Max who was visiting from Germany. Ive perhaps led a sheltered life when it comes to the latest in domestic appliances, as I've never before come across the inbuilt vacuum system; plugging the hose into a wall socket, one in each room, would turn the system on, and the dust and dirt ended up in some unknown destination. Courtney's dad had worked on restoring cars and parked up in the garage was an old MG Midget, in British racing green, and a pink convertible Porsche. His father had also been a wine connoisseur and on my birthday Courtney kindly produced a fine bottle of claret from the cellar.

There were massive amounts of timber washed up on the stony beach, including a huge cedar stump, 2m in diameter, that had landed the right way up after a storm in 2003 and is now something of a landmark. The shore was lined with blackberry bushes, Himalayan apparently, but with the most abundant and tastiest fruit I've come across in quite a while, very good after a swim at hazy sunset time.

From the sublime to the surreal, the second workaway contact was with Dave who was organising an anti-logging camp in the nearby forest on the slopes of Mt Elphinstone, and I'd arranged to head up there and join them for a few days. Dave is the archetypal hippie, lanky, bearded, stoned and with a front tooth missing, possibly from the last action when he'd chained himself to a harvester and fifteen of them had got arrested. There was only one other guy there, Tim, and together they were slowly setting things up for the next season of logging when others would arrive. The camp was basic, and then some ... the first evening I managed to cook up some food in the single pot, lentils and rice of course, but then had to find a stick to eat with. After that I catered for myself. The camp was in the middle of a clearcut area, perhaps fifteen years old, with dense young tree growth, mainly Douglas fir, thicket stage up to 7 or 8 metres high. It was difficult to move around in there with old stumps, fallen trees, felled limbs and brash, plus the undergrowth, but they'd made a few paths through and over, often walking on a network of logs or limbs above the ground like squirrels.

There was a creek nearby just within the older growth forest, cooler there, and that's where I camped. A massive fallen trunk across the creek provided a bridge to my tent; I walked the length of that tree, a Douglas, which had been 60m tall ... I was surrounded by these firs some over 1m in diameter, and then smaller cedar and hemlock. There had been some logging many years ago, massive stumps still rotting away, charred by an ancient fire. An orange sun shone through the smoke haze. The priority seemed to be cultivating the weed plants (see * below), then tending to small veggie plots and then odd jobs; one day I helped put up a new teepee!

Otherwise I explored the forest, seeing a bear one day, and read David Suzuki's 'Tree: A Life Story' which Helen had given me for my birthday, and which appropriately features the Douglas fir. One evening the call of the pileated woodpecker, yaffler like but higher pitched, it's a crow sized bird with an archaeopteryx shaped head and scarlet cap; it was taunting a kestrel that perhaps had a late brood in a nearby fir. A surreal few days but I have to admire Dave for his commitment to what he believes in, and his mantra 'activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet'. What would the world be like without non-violent direct action?

I arranged to meet for lunch with Ross Muirhead of Elphinstone Logging Focus, at the Gumboot Cafe, a great hangout in nearby Roberts Creek. The 'political wing' of the campaign, they're taking a more conventional approach to opposing the logging here, including organising recent ecological surveys. (See loggingfocus.org). It turns out that the 4000 ha area of the Forest is the best remaining drier Douglas fir/hemlock site on the whole Sunshine Coast and was mostly saved from earlier logging because of a fire in the 1860's. The BC government have agreed to designate three areas as a Provincial Park, a total of 140ha, but ELF are pushing for a minimum 1500ha to be protected. I was struck by how there doesn't seem to be a single government agency that works for conservation in BC, nor statutory designations for sites like we have back home.

Ross had brought along an elderly friend, Rick O'Neill, a wildlife cameraman of some repute, he's specialized in grizzlies, getting to know the less aggressive animals over a period of years in the area where he worked. He's been fighting for conservation for decades and I have to say our discussion became somewhat gloomy for a time, including more about salmon farming, and Ross saying that the good environmental reputation of Canada is a myth.

The Sunshine Coast is another area of arts and culture where every second resident seems to be a healer. Before I left I spent a day at Smuggler Cove, indeed a snug inlet on the rocky coast, where past cargo included Chinese labourers trying to get to the USA after work on the Canadian Pacific railway was completed in the late 19th century, and then rum during the US prohibition years. The coastal forest is a little different and I was particularly taken with the Arbutus trees, the Pacific madrone, which straggle up as an understorey ... glossy evergreen leaves and cinnamon brown/red bark that peels away in the summer to reveal a lighter tan beneath, very characterful. We have a related species, the strawberry tree, in SW Europe, with small outlier populations in the west of Ireland.

* Marijuana was about to be legalised across Canada on October 17th, which was the day I would fly home, shucks. It was reckoned that the market would be worth CAN$20 billion by 2020 and there was a lot of investment and takeover jostling going on, including rumours that the Diageo group would be developing a cannabis infused drinks industry; adverts in the press for cannabis industry conferences were fronted by be-suited execs. Currently in BC the legislation was a little hazy but recreational use has been accepted for some time, with dispensaries open on the streets and the whiff of a spliff widespread. The BC industry was worth an estimated $6 billion p.a.