Canadian

Now I’m officially Canadian we thought it was a good idea for me to find out how big this new country of mine (Mine!) really is. So we waited until a good deal came by and booked a trip on the train to Vancouver.

Alison is used to travelling by train. She does this trip actually for the second time, the first time was when she was a teenager together with her mother. But the last couple of years she has travelled so often between Montreal and Toronto that she collected enough points to almost pay for the train fare of two of us. And our flight back from Vancouver will also be on points. I’ve never travelled on points before and I like it.

Tuesday we left, first with the ‘normal’ train to Toronto where we changed onto the “Canadian“. We are lucky and have a tiny bedroom in the Park car, the special car with a bar and a panoramic observation deck on top that is located at the rear end of the train. Our trip to Vancouver will be more than five thousand kilometre, and it will take more than 4 days. No, that doesn’t make for a good average speed, but the train is old and it runs on tracks that are owned by a freight train company (CN or Canada National) so we have to wait fairly often for the numerous passing and upcoming freight trains, often loaded with hundreds of containers. And it also stops in a couple of places so we can stretch our legs and breath in some fresh air. The photo above is taken in Hornepayne. Google it and you’ll see it is in the middle of nowhere. We’re in general travelling in the middle of nowhere. No mobile phone access for almost 30 hours now, so no twittering and mobile Internet either. I’m having redrawel symptons.

On board are about sixty people (the train is not even half full) of very different backgrounds. We get to meet them when we have breakfast, lunch or supper. So there’s the woman with fear of flying who went to a business trip to Montreal from Vancouver who was now returning home. I didn’t dare to ask if her company was paying for it. And the 14 people from the UK and Ireland that got a “Do Canada in 10 days” package deal including visits to Niagara Falls (with optional helicopter ride), Jasper (dogsledding) and Vancouver. They paid a suprisingly low price, which reminded me of the time I tried to book a flight from Amsterdam to Vancouver with a stop in Montreal. Flights to Vancouver were only 100 euro more than to Montreal, but if you wanted to combine things then the price went up to triple the amount. So I never did it. I might have done a package tour like theirs though since it was quite affordable.

There are also a lot of retirees who, after years of working hard, explore Canada the slow way. Some can hardly bridge the snowy landings between the cars to reach the dining car.
this morning I spoke to a German man who was going to visit his niece in Vancouver and whose command of English was very limited so he was very happy he could speak German with me. In the meantime Alison had a conversation with a native trapper who just got on the train on a whistle stop and was going to the next town to take a plane. But the details of her conversation I unfortunately missed.

As I write this we’re 40 minutes away from Winnipeg, our first civilisation in almost two days. But we’re 3 hours late, caused by those freight trains, so our time in Winnipeg will be cut short to one hour. Not that it matters much, I’ve been there before. After that I’ll be entering new territory. I’ve never been more Western in Canada before. I’ve been to Seattle and the West coast of the US, but never to the Canadian West coast. We’ve another day of rail over the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and then into the Rocky Mountains. We will be pausing our journey for two days in Jasper and then continue on the next train to Vancouver. More soon.