Vancouverites aren't much given to introspection -- too much time spent outdoors -- so it's perhaps a bit unfair to expect it of visitors. But if you really want to understand Vancouver, stand at the edge of the Inner Harbour (the Canada Place pavilion makes a good vantage point) and look up past the floatplanes taking off over Stanley Park, around the container terminals, over the tony waterfront high-rises, and then up the steep green slopes of the North Shore mountains to the twin snowy peaks of the Lions. What you've seen -- 90% of it anyway -- is the result of a collaboration, unique in history, between God and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
It was the Almighty -- or Mother Nature (depending on your point of view) -- who raised the Coast Range and then sent a glacier slicing along its foot, simultaneously carving out a deep trench and piling up a tall moraine of rock and sand. When the ice retreated, water from the Pacific flowed in and the moraine became a peninsula, flanked on one side by a deep natural harbor and on the other by a river of glacial meltwater.
Some 10,000 years later, a CPR surveyor came by, took in the peninsula, the harbor, and the river, and decided he'd found the perfect spot for the railway's new Pacific terminus. He kept it quiet, as smart railway men tended to do, until the company had bought up most of the land around town. Then the railway moved in, set up shop, and the city of Vancouver was born.
Working indoors, Vancouverites have all fallen in love with the outside: mountain biking, windsurfing, kayaking, rock climbing, parasailing, snowboarding, and back-country skiing, plus skiing-kayaking, mountain biking-snowboarding, and snowshoeing-paragliding.
The rest of the world has taken notice of the blessed life people in these parts lead. Outside magazine voted it one of the 10 best cities in the world to live in. It's also one of the 10 best to visit, according to Condé Nast Traveler. The World Council of Cities ranked it second only to Geneva for quality of life. And in 2003, the IOC awarded Vancouver the right to host the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Heady stuff, particularly for a spot that less than 20 years ago was routinely derided as the world's biggest mill town.
Eighty-some kilometers (50 miles) across the Strait of Georgia on Vancouver Island, Victoria had for years marketed itself quite successfully as a little bit of England on the North American continent. So successful was the sales job, Victorians soon began to believe it themselves. They began growing elaborate rose gardens, which flourished in the mild Pacific climate, and they cultivated a taste for afternoon tea with jam and scones.
For decades, this continued, until soon it was discovered that not many shared a taste for English cooking, so Victorian restaurants branched out into seafood, ethnic, and fusion. And lately, as visitors have shown more interest in exploring the natural world, Victoria has quietly added whale-watching and mountain-biking trips to its traditional London-style double-decker bus tours. The result, at the dawn of the new millennium, is that Victoria is the only city in the world where you can zoom out on a Zodiac in the morning to see a pod of killer whales, and make it back in time for a lovely afternoon tea.
