Canada

My only reason for stopping at Winnipeg was that it is roughly half way between Vancouver and Toronto. I had basically done nothing to find out what it might offer, although of course I know it is the capital of Manitoba, so would not be one of those blink and you miss it sort of places - that would be a terrible way to spend four days between trains. At one place we stopped, the most lively place was the fire-station - someone had obviously left the lights on when they went to bed. The banner proclaiming some event which happened in this town in 2007 was still up.

My first impressions of Winnipeg were not great: the train station is on Main Street, and Portage and Broadway are the two major streets running off Main. I was staying on Maryland, which ran between them a bit over a kilometre away from Main, so it seemed logical to do a circuit - up Broadway and back along Portage. That is a very uninspiring walk: small sad shopping malls, dejected commercial buildings, a near deserted Bay department store, old and run down flats with just a few bright lights. I thought that maybe spending four days here would prove to be a big mistake: that was compounded by chasing up a highly reputed burger and finding it to be one of the worst I have ever eaten; dry, with a very odd flavour and texture. I described it to Tara that it was as if they'd taken a meat patty and tried to make it look and taste vegetarian - she laughed at the idea that I would have even gone to this place.

The thing is that my walk there opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe there were some good things to see in Winnipeg: by the time I left town, I'd had a fabulous time. So what I'm going to do is collate the various things I did and saw into a single circuit. My street, to be fair, was a bit sketchy - I had a homeless person outside my house congratulate me on finding a place to live, there were various people shouting at each other, sometimes at no-one at all. One block over, on Sherbrook Street, everything changed. First stop for me is the Winnipeg institution, Stellas, a bakery and cafe where I had an enormous breakfast of chorizo, egg, hash, peppers and toast - there was no way I could finish. Their bakery products are in cafes all over town: delicious chocolate croissants are my predominant memory. Just a bit down the street, I noticed some gentlemen in Victorian garb with old-fashioned bicycles, including a pennyfarthing - it was the Tweed ride, where the dress code was

newsboy caps, vests, knickers, pantaloons, cardigans and bow ties. Pipes, monocles, mutton-chop sideburns and handlebar moustaches are also a nice touch. Ladies will look sweet upon their bike seats in full-length skirts, high-necked blouses and flapper-style hats, perhaps twirling a parasol.

Tweed Ride assemblage

They were outside Thom Barger's cafe - a very minimalist look but good coffee.

Thom Barger's

One evening, they had the Sherbrook Street/Broadway intersection blocked off for the Sherbrook Street Festival - a stage was set up, and I spent a great hour or so listening to the Nathan Music Company, which is actually a band, a good one, they even featured a theremin for a couple of songs. There are five members in the band, but I could never get them all in the frame. They don't use the term in their self-description, but they could be called post-western, as they reference the normal tropes of western music and then say society has moved on, become much more urban (stripmalls rather than smoky saloons). Although there was a pretty big crowd and they were giving free t-shirts to the best dancer, they only had one taker, a tiny wee tot of a two year old girl.

Nathan Music Company

Nathan Music Company

Nathan Music Company

Nathan Music Company

Dancing Tot

Mural

About a kilometre from home Sherbrook Street crosses the Assiniboine River, and things get a bit posh. The river loops, and the south bank had been a single estate owned by a fellow called Munson who built a grand mansion there. The land itself has become a city park, and a very pleasant spot it is, but there have been quite a few grand houses built along this stretch of the river in the meantime.

Munson Park

Munson Park

Corydon Avenue, the location of my bad burger experience, is actually where most of the city's cool cafes and bars are, including a couple of good burger places. I stopped a couple of times at another minimalist case, the You and Me. I have no idea what the customers are doing in one of these shots.

Corydon Avenue

You and Me Cafe

You and Me Cafe

You and Me Cafe

There are about three blocks of interest, then it is time to go up Osborne, which has its own collection of interesting shops, cafes, good burger outlets and the like. If you're not distracted by them, there's another decent cafe back on Broadway, the Fyxx, which has really nice staff. A short detour from here will get you to the four storey Winnipeg Library Place (i.e. its central library), which has done something rather neat. It has a staircase going from the ground to the top in one run - to the left is the library collection, to the right a series of stepped study spaces. I spent a day working in one of these.

Osborne Street

Central library

What simply cannot be missed is the State Legislature and its grounds. It is open to the public to go in and wander around until 8:00 in the evening - I found various Ministerial doors, but never that of the Premier, just that of his Deputy. On my visit, there was quite a lot of singing - a local operatic group was rehearsing Cosi fan Tutti, which it will be performing on the Legislature's staircase.

Manitoba Legislature

Steps into Manitoba Legislature

Manitoba Legislature - Side view

Manitoba Legislature

Interior of Dome, Manitoba Legislature

Interior, Manitoba Legislature

Deputy Premier

Corridors of Power

Opera in the Parliament

Outside, there are various statues - Queen Victoria, the Famous Five (a group of five women, led by Nellie McClung) who fought for the right of women to be members of the Legislature.

Queen Vic

Famous/Valiant Five

Bison inside Manitoba Legislature

There is more, but I think I'll do another post.

After dropping the car off and meandering around Seattle, where I had some great Thai food in, of all places, a mall and stayed a final night, I caught the Amtrak Cascades up to Vancouver. The weather was dull and turned to rain before we got to Vancouver, but even on a nice day I doubt that the trip up the coast would have been very impressive, whichsurprised me as this trip has a bit of a reputation.

View from train: Pacific Coast

View from train: Pacific Coast

View from train: Pacific Coast

The train was confortble and had decent wifi, so instead of being blown away by the sights, I did some reading and used the wifi. In Vancouver, I took a final walk around, did some work in the library and was on the Via Rail train with what I thought was plenty of time to spare. I was a little surprised when it seemed to be leaving half an hour early - turns out, it was just pulling up the track a bit so it could back on to the long line of sleeper cars. There were just the two cars with seats (even allowing a pair of seats for every passenger, there were still spares) a snack car, followed by two restaurant cars then at least a dozen sleeper cars - most, I understand, occupied by tour groups. I figured that the stretch to Toronto would be too long to do in one hit, so chose to get off in Winnipeg - two nights later.

Pacific Central Station, Vancouver

Pacific Central Station, Vancouver

Pacific Central Station, Vancouver

Via Rail Train

Via Rail Train

The enforced stillness on the train was great for unwinding - I finally started in on a book again that I had first began reading last November - Lawrence Durell's The Alexandria Quartet. As might be expected, it is a four part novel set in Alexandria, written in the 1950's and 60's but set before and during WWII. The first novel, Justine, documents the narrator's greatlove with one Justine, but it is hardly a straight-forward narrative. There is an underlying text, written by Justine's first husband to document their love, there are bits of other texts read by the narrator and some of his flights of fancy together with the contemporary story. In addition, there are pieces inserted from real author's - an Alexandrian poet Constantin Cavafy for example - and a real evocation of the city itself. It did get a bit confusing keeping these threads straight in my head, but there were so many fabulous passages of writing I had to carry on. In the second novel, the narrator has sent his manuscript to a mate to read: it has come back heavily annotated and with some important revelations, and so this is the second version of the first novel. One of Durrell's notions was the contingent nature of reality.

For light relief, I had all five series of Breaking Bad on my laptop, although I'm rationing myself to no more than one episode a day.

Of course, the train provided its own pleasures - the snack bar for a decent beer at most times of the day and night, the dining car when the demands of the sleeper car passengers allowed those of us in steerage to buy a meal there (I managed three),

Restaurant Car

my fellow passengers and, most of all, the world passing by outside. At breakfast on the first morning, I was seated with a couple from Regina, Saskatchewen: she was not the friendliest but he always took the time to chat when we met each other. I spent a lot of time in the dome - the snack car was on two levels, with the upper level being almost entirely walled and roofed in glass - and it was very social up there. I even commandeered one of the tables as a very scenic office, as there was not a whole lot of variation in the scenery and there was a French passenger who was leaping up to take a photo whenever there was something to be seen: as long as I kept my eye on her, which was not exactly painful, I had warning of things to see.







The train heads north to Jasper, where we actually stopped for a couple of hours (intentionally) - time to walk around the very small town centre a couple of times, stock up on food from the wee supermarket, get a very strong coffee from the cafe/laundromat/internet cafe and buy dinner from the Mexican cafe (which provided an odd, pasta-based Mexican dish which was very tasty. Once back at the train, it didn't exactly leave on time:once on the way, it is a slight bump up to Edmonton and then down through vast Saskatchewen to Winnipeg. It is practically all forest, apart from the lakes and mountains. Edmonton was a particularly aggravating stop - we were told we could get off to stretch our legs for 10 minutes and hustled back on to the train. We did leave. Three times - going across the bridge and then back to the station. Third time was not the trick - we then sat in the station for an hour. There was talk among the train crew that someone was in the car park, trying to jump the train, a blacktop was on its way - I hope that was not what held us up.

One of the more notable landmarks passed by the train is Mt Robson, the most prominent and highest mountain in the Rockies. A guy on the train said that it isn't the tallest mountain in Canada (that is Mt Logan) but it climbs the highest from the surrounding terrain. Later on, after all the effort my brother and I had spent trying to see some bear, it was a bit of an anti-climax to see a couple of them wandering past the train tracks.

Mt Robson

Mt Robson

View from train - a BEAR!

Old grain silo, Saskatchewen

There were other hold ups, periods where we had to wait for trains comiing: one guy who works for CNR I got talking tp said there are a couple of trains each way which are two miles (the railway is not metric) long, so cannot be put on sidings.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, the staff were great (they even offered to make phone calls for me), I ate well, I even slept OK in a normal reclining seat. So although we were four hours late into Winnipeg, it really didn't bother me - apart from the fact I was unsure about my accomodation. I was not staying in a hotel, but someone's house through AirBNB - Tara told me she liked to go to bed at 10:30, and here I was arriving after midnight. She was very obliging - although both she and a security guard I encountered did not like my chances of finding dinner, apart from what I could scrounge at the 7-11. What neither of them knew was that a new Chinese restaurant had opened, the Hong Kong Harbour, which stayed open until 2:00. So I was able to get a very pleasant dish - they called it Szechuan beef, but it was more like spicey sweet orange beef - and a beer.

Szechuan Beef, Hong Kong Harbour Restaurant

Again, this could have been an easy drive of 162 miles down a good road, but I had instructions that we had to see a truck and a slip (the latter had me completely befuddled, the former more than a little puzzled) and so we had 260 miles to go, some of it on downright shoddy roads.

I would probably never have heard of Kimberley, let alone visited, had a friend not moved there - her being there was a good enough reason to visit, and we had a good catch up and a sort of degustation menu in a German restaurant which had started life as a Bavarian farmhouse, and was dis-assembled and brought to Kimberley. I normally shy away from degustation menus because (a) I like to know what I am ordering and (b) most seem to involve fussy food that I won't like. The Bavarian Feast was mostly a down to earth meal which I ate happily, except for a salad that may have involved pears, frog nostrils and eye of newt: luckily my companions hoovered it up. All in all, we came close to doing a demolition job on what was a lot of good food.

But it turned out we had quite a good time in Kimberley, apart from the catch up. It is an old mining town where the mine closed and the town has been trying to figure out what to do with itself. It is almost completely surrounded by mountains - in the central area, there is the town centre, which has taken on a sort of German theme, one that later buildings have ignored. But when you stand at one end, it looks quite pretty, and it has the most alarming clock. It is built in the style of a giant cuckoo clock, right in the centre of town. Instead of a cuckoo, however, it has a yodeller who comes out on the hour to do his thing, or whenever puts in a dollar (which we had to do, of course). It must drive the people working nearby barmy - in fact, the sound was turned down for this very reason.

Kimberley BC TC

Kimberley BC TC

As you ascend from the centre, there are miners' houses, many not looking so great, and then as you climb higher, that's where the money is - rich people from other towns like Calgary have built these enormous three storey houses as holiday homes. On one side, there is a ski slope, which almost ends in my friend's house (one of the reasons she is there).

The closed mine is largely off-limits, but they have set up a quaint little train to run into one little part of the mine, where there is a reconstruction of a miner's day. Our guide showed us how to set explosives, how to drop a water pick (not an intended part of the demonstration), and how to drive a wee loader-digger thingey.

Mine Entry @ Kimberley Mine

Mine Guide @ Kimberley Mine

Explosive System @ Kimberley Mine

Digger Shunter Thingey @ Kimberley Mine

Safe Room @ Kimberley Mine

That last room is where the miners would congregate whenever there was a risk of toxic gases in the mine, as they guys did in Chile a few years back for, what, 100 days - we both had Pike River on our mind, wondering if the guys had got into a room like this one, and met their end there. We then went into the powerhouse (it had to compress air for lots of the equipment and provide electricity for the trains) where, when he finally turned up, we had a talk from the former mine manager, who went on to run the whole company. He was pretty impressive (I have no idea how accurate) in what he said about the money spent to clean up after the mine and to provide for the town itself.

Powerhouse @ Kimberley Mine

Power Generation @ Kimberley Mine

Power Generation @ Kimberley Mine

First IBM product

We all know about IBM and its mainframe, super and personal computers but apparently one of its earliest, if not its first, products was a time clock, for guys to clock in at work - the mine had two of them. Our speaker was most proud of the fact that a lot of the equipment is 100 years old (I think he said the young machine was brought in in 1926) and still functional - he put on a bit of a show, by having a wee boy come over to push the button to get one running.

We had been told about the great sandwiches to be had at Loaf in Fernie, so headed off without lunch to try it out. They may well have great sandwiches, but they obviously don't like Mondays, as they were not open. The museum was - the guy running it was so keen to talk to us, I wondered if we were the first in for the day (I must confess, I eventually ducked around a display cabinet and out the door to avoid him). After a quick snap of the courthouse, I introduced Steve to that Brazillian owned (soon to be Burger King owned) Canadian institution, Tim Hortons. I think he'd have preferred Subway.

Courthouse @ Fernie BC

Sparwood is a big mining town, and it is here I got to see the truck - a Terex 33-19 "Titan" built in 1973. It was a prototype but was actually put to work for nearly 20 years. There are two stories as to why it is the only one made: where we saw it, the story was that they had supply chain problems with getting parts to make any more. On Wikipedia, the story is that the bottom dropped out of the coal market, so it was no longer a viable manufacturing proposition. And what is so special about this truck? For 25 years it was the biggest ever made - it had a payload of 320 tonnes. I know people will be very curious to know what exceeded it - eventually two even bigger Terex's were made, and there's a Caterpillar and a Liebherr but the biggest ever, with the ability to carry nearly 500 tonnes, is the Belaz 75710, from Belarus.

Then it was time for the "slip":

Frank, Alberta

Frank, Alberta

Under those rocks is the town of Frank, Alberta. On 29 April 1903 at 4:10 a.m., when no doubt the inhabitants were sound asleep, the top blew off the Turtle Mountain, and 82 million tonnes of rock piled down the mountain, across a wee valley and crashed into Frank, burying 90 or so people alive. As the pictures show, they are still there. Just down the valley, there is a new town of Frank - not somewhere I'd be too keen to linger.

Carrying on we went through the underwhelming Crowsnest Pass and at Pincher Creek, headed south.

Random Mountain, Alberta

Fields south of Pincher Creek, Alberta

Fields south of Pincher Creek, Alberta

Fields south of Pincher Creek, Alberta

River south of Pincher Creek, Alberta

We found ourselves on a very narrow road which meandered back and forth in the bush - a most unlikely place for a border crossing, and yet, that's where it was, and very casual - "what are you guys up to?" was the one question. Google maps shows that we should have gone out to a town called Browning, but I knew better and took a "short-cut" - it was a shorter road, for sure, but the worst we encountered - badly surfaced, twisty and hilly.

All in all, it was dark when we got to East Glacier, a wee town with a few cafes and hotels on the corner of Glacier National Park where I'd booked us into an antique wooden hostel. We just managed to get into the restaurant for dinner before it closed for fish tacos and huckleberry pie. Tasty.

The internet tried to tell me that the only way from Vancouver to Victoria was by way of a fancy, expensive tour bus. The internet was wrong. I caught a train, two public buses and a ferry and I was in Downtown Victoria, albeit without my luggage.

Victoria Water Taxi

The first story the ferry company tried to tell me was that I needn't worry, my bag was on the fancy tour bus. Nope, that wasn't right. Eventually they confessed that while I was on the ferry from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, my bag had gone on a frolic of its own, and went by ferry to somewhere called Duke Point. 24 hours and another trip out to the ferry terminal and I finally had my bag.

I liked Vancouver, but when I saw Victoria, I was blown away. Yes, it is touristy, but that is because it sits on a very pretty harbour and had great old buildings. Right in the apex of the city it has the British Columbia Parliament (who thought Vancouver was the capital? I did.) and the grand old Fairmont Empress Hotel. I really did mean to go hang out in the verandah bar there, maybe drink a G&T or fancy cocktail, but somehow it never happened. Too late, I also found out there is a public restaurant in the basement of the Parliament, which would have been fun.

Victoria Harbour

Victoria Harbour

BC Legislature

BC Legislature

Fairmont Empress

Fairmont Empress

Fairmont Empress

When I saw all that Victoria had to offer, I almost regretted not staying right amongst it, but I was happy where I was - I booked a room through Airbnb in a suburb called Fernwood, which had a tiny village centre with a handful of shops, a nice cafe, the Fernwood Inn (where I found myself more than once of an evening soaking up one of their hoppiest brews) and a playhouse.

Fernwood Inn

Belfry Theatre, Fernwood

Every day and evening I'd walk a different way between home and town, and find that there were shops and cafes just randomly dotted throughout the area. One of the best cafes I found through this process is the Parsonage Cafe, roaster of Fernwood coffee and an absolute hive of industry - I sat there one morning eating my breakfast, thinking it was a bit warm, wondering how the three in the tiny kitchen, who were awlays on the move, were coping - pretty sure I wouldn't have. Just down the street, I found its counterpart: Yokas. This is a roastery and honey and chocolate dispensary run by a retired couple from Vancouver - they seemed surprised I wanted not just a cup of coffee but to sit down and drink it. While I was there, the only custom was to buy beans, chocolate and honey and to discuss a big housing development I think they were all opposing. But my fave coffee place in Victoira would have to be Discovery, just because the environment was so ramshackle, a lot like the living room of someone a bit eccentric.

Parsonage Cafe, Fernwood

Parsonage Cafe, Fernwood

Yokas Coffee and Honey

Discovery Coffee

Discovery Coffee

Discovery Coffee

Apart from the harbour area, the part I was most impressed with was Oldtown - the original core of Victoria, with great old buildings, the oldest (and tiniest) Chinatown, interesting murals and shops - I'd say I wandered through this part every day. Market Square was at the centre of it all, and has been renovated. Other old buildings in the area are being done up, not torn down, to be apartments.

Oldtown Victoria

Old Town Victoria

Market Square

Market Square

Swans Hotel

Swans Hotel

Chinatown Victoria

Chinatown Victoria

I went out to University of Victoria one day (I could not use their internet, so went to the public library the rest of the time). Again, I was surprised at the lack of grandeur in their buildings - all pretty functional - but the campus itself was well laid out and had a fabulous central green space, with a fountain, seats, totem pole and the like. I had planned to stay in the area to watch a movie at the local shopping precinct, thinking it would be a lively place to hang out - it was so dull, that the most exciting place was Tim Hortons. So, still haven't seen a movie since I left (apart from on the plane).

U Vic

U Vic

Totem, U Vic

On my first night in town, I went into the bottle shop of the Strathcona Hotel to get some beers in: the person who served me must have spent at least 20 minutes helping me select my half dozen (I ended up taking her advice and buying a local style called Indian Session Ale - hoppy but lowish alcohol). Since you don't tip people who sell you stuff, or those who make it, just those who bring it to you, I decided I owed it to the Strathcona to come back for dinner - their Sticky Wicket was a great place to dine, lots of energy, plenty of good beers on tap and nice food (I dipped my toes for the first time into eating fish tacos). Only a couple of other meals were truly memorable - the burger at Pink Bicycle and, on my last night in town, the great Italian food I had at Fiamo Italian Kitchen. There is a fish and chip shop in a container on the wharf which has a bit of a rep, but when I went past, the queue was so long I couldn't even see the shop. So, I wandered around - there was a dragon boat festival happening, and quite a few musicians busking - including one girl who was much smaller than her instrument, but still seemed to do a good job.

Queue for fish and chips

Finally, since they don't really fit in anywhere else (and indeed, one of them wouldn't even fit the frame on my camera), my last pictures are somewhat opposed to each other - a convent and an armoury.

St Ann's Academy

St Ann's Academy

Bay Street Armoury

Bay Street Armoury

Bay Street Armoury

It has been a while - I have been doing a lot of travelling. In my last post, I concluded with the six hour wait on the tarmac at Manila airport, while they cleared away the other flight which had mis-judged and ran off the runway. I have to say that the crew onboard my Philippines Air plane were exceptional - giving us a snack when it became clear we would not be leaving, sorting out dinner as soon as we levelled off and coping very well with the fact their shift was suddenly six hours longer than expected. I was thinking that if I had been on Air NZ or Qantas, pesky labour laws would have intervened and we'd need a crew change before leaving - I hope PAL suitably looked after our crew.

The plan had been to arrive in Vancouver at a civilised time but, thanks to the delay, it was close to midnight before I finally arrived at my hostel, where I received a cheerful welcome. Luckily it was just off the lively Davie Street, so there were plenty of options for a quiet beer and dinner: there were two burger bars virtually opposite each other, each boasting the best burgers in town but since Vera's was the only one actually open, it was definitely the best on the night. One thing I noticed pretty quickly as I wandered around that evening was the smell of weed - a guy I spoke to in a bar said they have a pretty relaxed attitude to it in Vancouver, and I saw several places advertising themselves as medicinal cannabis lounges, yet the same guy said that there is a zero tolerance attitude to a very kiwi experience, drinking beer at the beach. No smoking on beaches is tolerated either.

I spent a week in Vancouver, and enjoyed the city. My main reason for being downtown was to use the magnificent central library. It was so big, enclosed in a circular sheath, that I never got an adequate photo of it. The library itself was squared off, so with the resulting crescent, they made a six story atrium and put in a row of cafes and the like.

I occupied my days and evenings working, hunting for the best coffee shops and food and generally wandering about. In terms of the coffee hunt, oddly enough, my favourite was out at the University of British Columbia - a good strong brew. The campus was otherwise curiously lacking in interest - mainly modern low-rise buildings. I also found that there were many local brews of ginger ale, and while they tasted fairly similar to each other, one stood out for its label.

Each day, I would set off on a different street to get to my destination. Downtown Vancouver is on a small finger of land, a carbuncle if you like, between Vancouver Harbour and English Bay. The quadrant below the hostel was all proper downtown - skyscrapers, offices, department stores,

the library etc - but I spent little time there apart from to work and drink coffee: once I even had the pleasure of catching up with an old friend over a posh sandwich for lunch. I did enjoy Gastown - it is the oldest part of Vancouver, essentially between the train station and the water-front: It has had a checkered past - it bunrt down completely about 20 years after it was first built, they started again and it became the premier commercial district, but was hit hard by the depression so that it was just "cheap beer parlours, flophouse hotels, and loggers hiring halls" and just got worse through until the 1960's, when people started to think "something must be done", and it was. It has been re-vitalised with interesting shops, bars, cafes and food places.

They had something like 51 tap beers at the Lamplighter - I could only really do justice to one of them, and then proceeded down the street for some delicious BBQ brisket at Peckinpah.

The quadrant above the hostel was more residential, and I really enjoyed wandering through those streets - some of the houses were quite grand. At the very end of the finger is the enormous, wooded Stanley Park, which I did visit and I am sure I had photos, but I can't find them. That particular walk took me to the beginning of Denman Street, where I had been told there were good fish and chips. I found them

along with many more casual and cheerful eateries - it was a very pleasant street to walk along, and culminated in a complete surprise: English Bay. Lots of people were there, just hanging, watching each other or the boats or the various performers or the sculptures I now know to be called A-maze-ing Laughter, which are apparently portraits of the artist in states of hysterical laughter (and I just thought they were freaks!).

And then there is Vancouver Harbour - most days I would walk along its edge at some point, but on about the second day I was intrigued to find a very busy sea-plane port - there were always a couple lined up to land, another couple taking off and a couple moving about on the water. They did touristy flights which were quite expensive and limited in what I could do, but I found that over the weekend, they had special fares between Vancouver and various points - Nanaimo (home of the variant of the caramel slice) offered the cheapest option, so I signed on. Now, I hate things like ski-lifts and have been known to have minor panic attacks at the tops of hills, so I wondered how I would react to a tiny 14 seater plane taking off in water: it was absolutely fine.

The last three are of the main street in Nainamo, a hotel and the top of its courthouse. I have to say that I didn't really give it a fair shake of the stick, as I was feeling considerably under the weather - after a coffee and cursory look at the museum, I retreated to the sea-plane port to wait for my plane, then spent most of the afternoon, slumped in a chair in the hostel. Next day, I was fine again and ready for more adventures.