Doing the tourist Thing #1 (Part 1)

So I'm sure that there's infinitely more tourist thing to do, but we used this afternoon to make a good start.

First up, a bike ride around the edge of Stanley Park, which also happens to be the sea wall, and the whole thing is stunning from start to finish. I'd like to say I took pictures at regular intervals so that I could guide you around, but essentially, I got the highlights; inbetween you can just imagine, on one side, lots and lots of trees, in various shades of autumn all looking magnificent, and on the other, sea and beaches covered in artistically placed drift wood to a back drop of shiny looking North (and I think West) Vancouver.

After picking up some bikes from a very nice Scottish guy in the rental shop (no, there are no Canadians in Vancouver - well, maybe one or two, but not very many... In fact it's filled with people like scottish guy, who liked it so much on his first trip (a la student working holiday visa) that he's come back), we headed down past English Bay and the Lost Lagoon (see first blog entry for pics) to get on to the sea wall in the right direction. As a slight aside, I forgot to take a picture of this the other day, but I admire this tree for its (or its owners) tenacity...


Moving on to Stanley Park, easily distacted as we are, we almost instantly stopped to take a look at a copse of Totem poles:
Some of them looking rather fierce (though, me rather less so...):

Others were more colourful:
















I kind of feel that as an anthropologist I should give you some greater insight into the deeper meaning of these particular totem poles, but, um... basically we cycled past them and said 'ooo', so maybe I'll save that for another time...

Around the corner, we came across a woman chillin' (probably quite literally, it was pretty cold) on a rock.
On closer inspection we think she might have been a diver of some sort - looks like she's got flippers and a mask, but since we were restrained to the cyclists bit of the path, and a blue fence got in the way of going to see any kind of explanation on the walkers bit, we're really none the wiser. I just though it was quite cool really!

Moving on round the corner abit you come across the Lions Gate Bridge, which, to be honest, looks a lot like the Golden Gate Bridge, but green. In fact, I maintain that the whole of Vancouver looks/is rather like San Francisco, but a bit flatter... It's more convincing from a distance, but the evil blue fence of doom didn't disappear until we were underneath it, so i didn't manage to take any non-blue-criss-cross picture of the bridge before that...

I thought dad might appreciate the next photo, which appear sporadically along the path when they wanted you to walk and hold your bike:I thought it was kinda cute...


Now to come full circle, I end my tour of Stanley Park back where we started (metaphorically, though not quite literally) with an idiosyncratic tree, which greets you moreorless as you are coming back around the headland to English Bay:Seen in it's full context in the picture underneath to the right:

Having recovered from our chilly but awesome bike ride, me and Nikki, having recovered the feeling in our fingers with a hot chocolate, headed to Granville Island. But more about that next time.

Here endeth the picture show...