What time is it there?!

Vancouver continues to have very ‘British’ weather, so we opted for one of the ‘hop-on hop-off’ bus tours. So, we can confirm that Elvis doesn’t work down the chipshop, in spite of what Kirsty MacColl might have thought. No, in fact he drives an old fashioned tour bus in Vancouver (see photos for evidence).

First stop was the aquarium in Stanley Park. The park is just on the edge of the downtown area and covers 1000 acres. The aquarium isn’t really very large but we still somehow managed to spend well over 3 hours there. Rather embarrassingly this meant that, after we’d walked to another couple of sights in the park, we missed the last tour bus of the day.

Of course our excuse is that we then got to see some bits of town that we would otherwise have driven straight past. It also allowed us to find a new low price for local internet cafes, a mere £1 an hour, the only slight challenge being that we had to contend with numerous websites defaulting to Chinese rather than English (due to the more usual clientele in the area).

There were two main ‘touristy’ things that we didn’t get to do while we were here. The first was a trip to Whistler. The main reason for missing this was time, but having read several of the tourist leaflets (and since we weren’t going there to ski) it looked like an even more pretentious version of what we’d seen in Banff. I’m sure it’s probably a lovely skiing destination, but on this occasion we decided to skip it.

The other thing we missed out on was a whale-watching trip. This was again partly due to time, but mainly because the weather never really improved for long enough to persuade us to go out to sea! So the whales will have to wait for another time, hopefully we’ll be able to return a little earlier in the year in the future.