Wild Vancouver (and its environs)

Tip: When booking a place to stay, figure out what type of neighbourhood the place is in.

Flying into Vancouver was easy as. At least, we didn't hear any complaints from the pilot, and the plane landed fine. No sign of any dragons though.

The Patricia hotel is a grand old building on the top of a rise on the ocean side of Chinatown. It was also the cheapest place to stay that would give us a room to ourselves, and was close to the central city. And it also seems to be a centre of homelessness, prostitution, and drug addiction in Vancouver. Pretty wild.

Thankfully, night falls slowly this far north. No one seemed to notice us, and we were able to make our way through the city, dragging our noisy bags along with us.

(The view from our room)

The next day we visited Lynn Valley. We bought a day ticket for the public transport system, and took the ferry across the harbour, and then a bus into the suburbs and out into the countryside. Very nice place, rather a contrast from the previous setting. They had a suspension bridge:

 and some wildlife:

(That's a waterfall in the background.)

We'd been told to visit Stanley Park, so we did, although I was rather tired and sore at this point, so we didn't explore too deeply. We did find some more wildlife though:

(There may or may not be a squirrel in this picture somewhere. I won't burden you with the picture of the big slug that we saw.)

Lastly, while wandering through Vancouver, we came across this thing, which is all but extinct in Christchurch:

(Yes, that's Christ Church Cathedral, looking a little different from the one in Christchurch.)

Finally, here's a bonus photo of a photo (of sorts) showing the traffic outside our room at the Patricia projected onto the ceiling: