Travel writing
Take the snow train
(first rights available)
By Cinda Chavich
(JASPER, AB) - The train is swaying along through Alberta parkland when they come into view.
Like a magnet, the travelers on board are drawn out of their sleeping compartments and away from their lunches, up into the glass-domed observation car. Video cams roll and kids pose for pictures as the only cross-Canada passenger train rises up towards the Rocky Mountains.
It's a rare way for most to people to catch their first glimpse of this classic Canadian scene, but we are taking our time, riding the Snow Train to Jasper, the latest way to travel for a skiing holiday. You can hop on anywhere along VIA Rail's transcontinental route, but we picked up the train in Winnipeg last night just before supper, and we'll be in the historic Jasper station before they've cleared away our lunch.
It's not a new way to access this isolated national park but it's one that makes sense for travelers who have time to slow down and appreciate this historic and stress-free style of transportation. While the rest of the world speeds up, the train will ease you out of any station in the country and into a relaxing holiday odyssey, a great way to slow down and reconnect with your family before you arrive at your destination.
With today's airport congestion and security slow downs, the train offers a safe and less stressful alternative to flying. And it won't cost you much time on the slopes, get on in Toronto at 9 a.m. Friday, and you'll be skiing Sunday afternoon in Jasper. You can even catch up on your sleep for a day before you strap on the boards.
Until recently, the train was the only way to get into Jasper, if you weren't going to take the four-hour drive from Edmonton or five-hour cruise from Calgary by car. If you're really intent on flying, or would like to save time on the return trip - Peace Air runs daily commuter flights into this sleepy little ski town.
But arriving by train is far more romantic, and it fits with the laid back atmosphere that you'll find in Jasper. Years of relative isolation has allowed Jasper to remain a unique Rocky Mountain resort town, a community where tourism and small town life still co-exist. Unlike Banff, a mere 60 minutes from Calgary International Airport and the bedroom community to several large downhill ski resorts like Sunshine, Norquay and Lake Louise, Jasper, and it's Marmot Basin ski resort, is a destination that takes more time and effort to reach, especially in winter.
top of page
While the Icefields Parkway from Banff is one of the world's most spectacular scenic drives, the nearly 300 km route can experience severe high altitude weather and frequent winter road closures. There are no services along the route between November and March, and the speed limit is 90 km/hour in all seasons. Even in a rented car, nearly all visitors embarking on a ski holiday from Calgary never travel further than Lake Louise.
In fact, Jasper has always been a challenge to reach. The wild mountain lands north of Lake Louise to Jasper were the last to be explored - until 1940, when the Banff-Jasper highway was finally opened, only mountain guides and a few stalwart travelers set out on the three-week journey on horseback. It was a remote destination for those who loved solitude, and it still is.
Pulling into the station on the VIA Rail Canadian today, or flying into the tiny airstrip at nearby Hinton, the contrast between Jasper and it's busier sister ski towns is obvious. There are hotels and motels along the main street, restaurants and gift stores, but with less of the expensive glitz and glam of Banff or Whistler.
There are no taxis, tour guides and, in winter, only the odd bus tour. Jasperites like to brag that they don't even have a single street light.
You're likely to see local kids coming home from school and old friends stopping to chat along the street instead of the usual crush of tourists. And if you talk to the shop keepers, you'll probably find someone who's lived here for generations, or at least longer than the usual seasonal hotel worker - who will take time to tell you all about the place.
Papa George's, the casual restaurant in the circa 1925 Astoria Hotel, is a case in point. George Andrew, grandson of "Papa George" Andrew who first owned this hotel, is the third generation of this Greek family to live in Jasper. And he'll wax eloquent about how the three Andrew brothers abandoned their jobs aboard Greek ships more than 75 years ago to explore Canada, and eventually run restaurants and hotels in this mountain town.
Up the street at Jasper Camera and Gift it's the same story, generations of locals who've made Jasper home. This book, curio and camera store is in an historic 1925 building too, like the pretty field-stone Jasper Municipal Library, housed in the original 1926 RCMP barracks, and other post-card perfect shops along the main drag, Connaught Drive. Even the big totem pole is vintage Canadianna, erected next to the train tracks for viewing by rail passengers, it was carved by Haida artist Simeon Stiltae and shipped here by steamship and train from the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1919.
If you pop into the equally historic Parks Canada information centre (circa. 1913 and directly opposite the grand old 1925 train station), you can get a copy of A Walk in the Past by local author Merna Forster, an inexpensive little picture book that offers an inventory of the town's original buildings and some great insights into local history while you wander.
The Jasper townsite parallels the CNR rail yards and that's another reason for its existence here. Many of the locals who aren't in the tourist trade are railroaders and can tell you tales of the original roundhouse and the big Mountain Type steam engines that hauled freight and passengers through these parts for a century. Locomotive 6015, one of those relics that was retired in 1960, sits on display near the central station.
There isn't a lot of fancy dining or rowdy night life in Jasper but there are plenty of places for a good meal, a beer next to a roaring fire or a family-style evening. Bars like the Atha-B Pub in the old Athabasca Hotel can be packed with partiers on weekends, but you are just as likely to find a one-man-band belting out oldies in a hotel lounge or a classical violinist playing in the dining room.
For an elegant wilderness retreat with the finest gourmet restaurants and most lavish historic cabins you'll find anywhere, the Jasper Park Lodge (JPL) is a destination resort, a few kilometres out of town on the shore of pretty Lac Beauvert. They call it the "Grand Canadian Lodge Experience", and with amenities that have lured guests like Bill Gates, Bing Crosby, the Rockefeller family and Sir Anthony Hopkins, that's probably an apt descriptor.
Yet despite the inherent opulence of this gorgeous getaway, like everything in this isolated part of the national park system, JPL has a distinctively relaxed ambiance.
Even Marmot Basin, the only downhill ski resort in Jasper National Park, is on the low-key side. It's a compact, user-friendly mountain with more than 50 runs in 1,000 acres, but there are no line-ups and as much beginner, intermediate and double diamond expert terrain you could want.
top of page
There are also friendly local hosts who will tour you around the slopes and tell you anything you want to know about the area while you're speeding skyward on the quad chair, and a three-tiered parking lot that lets you ski right to your car at the end of the day. Lift tickets are cheaper than at bigger resorts and beginners can rent parabolic skis and have a two-hour lesson, all for the price of a $44 daily ski pass. Another bonus is the newly-renovated chalets at both the base and mid-mountain, and a restaurant run by the chefs at JPL, taking the food up a notch from the usual ski-resort fare. This year there's a new lift, too, to take you into terrain that was once only accessible by die-hards who hiked up to the best snow.
With more than 10,000 square kilometers of spectacular mountain landscape, Jasper National Park is the largest Canadian Rocky Mountain park. It's one of the best places to see wildlife, deer and elk are routinely spotted in town along with resident black bears, and a wonderful area for climbing, hiking and back country skiing.
Like many places in this country, in the early days, the only way to get to the wilds of Jasper, Alberta, was by train. You can still get on the train almost anywhere in the country, and end up here at Mile 235, a whistle stop away from the wilderness.
If you're like many of the people I met in this quiet community, you may never leave.
Getting there:
For Snow Train packages including your train tickets, ski lifts and accommodation in a variety of hotels (from historic Jasper Park Lodge to the family-friendly Lobstick Lodge) go to the snow train website, www.snowtraintojasper.com. Prices will vary with accommodation and train costs, depending on distance and whether you go economy with a berth or bed down in a comfortable bedroom with private bath (www.viarail.ca).
If you take the Canadian for any significant distance (or plan a cross-Canada trip) consider taking along the Trans-Canada Rail Guide by Melissa Graham, a compact little guide book that offers mile-by-mile notes on the entire 6358-km route from coast to coast.
If you want to fly in or fly out, contact Peace Air about their new scheduled service from Calgary and Edmonton to Jasper in a nine-passenger Pilatus prop jet. Fares include ground transportation to Jasper hotels from the Hinton airport provided by the Jasper Park Lodge. Call 780-624-3060 or go to www.peaceair.com then call the lodge about transfers.
Staying there:
The Jasper Inn has standard rooms for budget travelers or more elegant Maligne Suites complete with wet bar and jacuzzi tubs (1-800-661-1933 or www.jasperinn.com). The Lobstick Lodge, has rooms with eat-in kitchen and separate bedrooms that are perfect for families (1-888-852-7737). For luxury accommodation, the Jasper Park Lodge has a variety of rooms, suites and historic cabins (1-800-465-7547)
Playing there:
Ice fishing, dog sledding, heli-skiing, ice climbing – Jasper has it all. For a spectacular half-day trip spend $35 for a guided walk into Maligne Canyon in winter where you can walk along the riverbed among frozen waterfalls and limestone canyons (call Overlander Trekking and Tours at 780-852-4056). For details on skiing at Marmot Basin, go to www.skimarmot.com
An awakening walk in chinatown
(appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail)
By CINDA CHAVICH
(VANCOUVER) - It's 9 a.m. on a chilly Sunday morning and Vancouver's Chinatown is just beginning to shake off the remnants of another Saturday night.
Around the edges of this bustling centre of Asian commerce, there's a strip of poverty and street life, slowly being uncovered by the new day.
The taxi brakes to avoid a collision with a loaded shopping cart, being commandeered by its owner down the centre of a steep deserted street like a speeding go cart. Around the gated doorways facing Pender and Main, homeless men begin retreating from the neighborhood, while Asian shopkeepers start to stack their wares along the city sidewalks.
It's all part of the transition that this east end neighborhood goes through on any given morning. Soon the awnings will be unfurled and, like the recent renewal of Beijing, the various shades of grey will be replaced with a cacophony of colour and conversation.
Chinatown is at the heart of Vancouver's Asian community and Vancouver is ground zero when it comes to Chinese culture in Canada. The first stop on the original migration route across the Pacific, the west coast has long been a popular destination for Asian immigrants.
Today, 30 per cent of Vancouver households are Chinese-speaking. Vancouver's Chinatown is the largest in Canada and it's expected that it will soon surpass San Francisco's Asian neighborhood as the largest Chinese community outside
of the Far East.
top of page
With Eastern culture and sensibilities now fused into all aspects of modern Canadian life, from herbal medicine and acupuncture to Asian fusion foods and the feng shui-style simplicity of modern interiors, a trip to Chinatown feeds more than a need for your favourite late-night take out. It is truly a slice of southeast Asia, a place to immerse yourself in a fascinating foreign culture without leaving home.
Whether it's dim sum, duty free shopping or an electronic Chinese/English dictionary, you will find it here. Still, food is what a walking tour through Chinatown is all about.
You might well be jostling with shoppers in the market streets of Hong Kong as you make your way along East Pender to Gore, vegetable sellers line the south side of the street where the midday sun won't hit the boxes of fresh vegetables that spill out of the little storefronts. There are fish stores where you can choose a live tilapia or crystal crab from the bubbling tanks, dried Chinese sausages and hams strung up in butcher shops like lanterns, and herbalists with big apothecary jars filled with shark's fin for soup, jet black hair moss and gnarled roots of expensive ginseng.
Today, the first Sunday of the Year of the Snake, the old neighborhood draws huge crowds of visitors and shoppers for parades and celebrations, fathers hoisting kids on high to see the musicians and lion dancers pass along the street and mothers picking through piles of lucky mandarins, instinctively bouncing the loose-skinned fruits in their hands to find the weightiest specimens.
There is a lot to see in the eight square blocks that make up Chinatown in Vancouver, an area that is now protected as an historic site.
Like the gnarled bonsai trees in the nearby classical Chinese garden, Chinatown's roots stretch into the last century, a neighborhood which was once home to Chinese immigrants who came first to the Fraser Valley gold rush of the 1850s, and then to build the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. It is where many in the city's current Chinese community grew up, a closely-knit neighborhood where kids learned Chinese calligraphy at school and extended families spent evenings attending live Chinese operas or playing mah-jong in the back rooms of local restaurants.
You may not hear the click of those ivory mah-jong tiles anymore, or see many female opera singers in dramatic white pancake makeup , but you can walk by some of the turn-of-the-century buildings where all of that early Chinese Canadian culture unfolded.
The Wing Sang building, at 51-67 East Pender, is the oldest building in Chinatown - constructed over several years, beginning in 1889, by prominent merchant Yip Sang.
Down the street at 8 West Pender, the smallest building, at six feet wide it is the narrowest in the world according to Ripley's Believe it or Not, was built in 1912 by Chang Toy. He put up the slim structure , which is now home to an insurance company, in a kind of taxpayer protest, after the city expropriated all but a small strip of his land to widen the street.
The turquoise facade of the Chinese Benevolent Association, with its recessed wrought iron balconies, is a fine example of 1909 vintage Oriental architecture. Chinese benevolent groups like this one were formed to support early immigrants from specific regions or clans, and this building once was home to a special Chinese hospital.
In the three-story Chinese Freemasons Building (1 West Pender), the secret Freemasons society raised funds for revolutionaries in China and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, who led the overthrow of the oppressive Ching Dynasty in 1911, was reported to have stayed here during his trips to Vancouver.
At one time every Chinese-Canadian citizen who arrived in Vancouver lived in this area, which many say was like a small unilingual Asian village in the centre of the city. Today, Chinatown suffers slightly from its east end location, sandwiched as it is along one of the rougher strips of Hastings Street. It's safe enough for daytime shopping but not as comfortable on the fringes or after dark.
Part of this daytime-nighttime dichotomy is because most of the city's Asian community now lives elsewhere , in neighborhoods like tony Kerrisdale or suburban Coquitlam. Other areas, like Burnaby and Richmond, have new Asian supermarkets and shopping malls to serve shoppers, but the historic streets of Chinatown remain the community's cultural core.
The Chinese Cultural Centre is here, as is the museum and archives, housed in a new building designed in Ming Dynasty style with it's sweeping tiled roofline. A tranquil classical Chinese garden, the first ever constructed outside China – sits inside a tall wall, its translucent jade pools, gentle streams and carefully-placed plants offering an orderly antidote to the urban landscape beyond.
Still, the old neighborhood remains a lively centre of commerce, and both Chinese and non-Chinese crowd the streets here to shop and eat.
top of page
Where else could you buy the ingredients for bird's nest soup (at $194 an ounce) or select the crimson wolf berries, dried sea horses, reishi mushrooms and coiled dried snakes for a herbal remedy? Shops like Nutra Trading Co. that specialize in preserved and dried foods have boxes of roots and seeds stacked in the street, the aromas of salted oysters and mussels for a special congee distinct in the air.
The vegetable markets offer the kind of exotic Asian fruits and vegetables you won't even find in gourmet groceries - the citrusy mangosteen, russet-coloured banana blossoms and spiny green man cheong or loofa squash. There are pea sprouts and shoots, slim baby leeks and white chives for seafood dishes, fresh bamboo shoots and shiny, segmented stems of towering sugar cane sprouting from big buckets, the freshest Asian ingredients anywhere.
Some shops specialize in meat. Others only do fish. While a butcher obliges one customer with a lean pork roast or a container of mahogany-coloured barbecued duck, others choose a loop of dried lop cheong sausage or a flattened piece of preserved and dried duck to serve over rice.
Fish markets like Pender Seafood display a fresh catch of flat grey flounder, avocado and black striped China Rockfish and live crab, set on their backs with their pinchers grasping at the cool morning air. Nearby at the Pine House Bread and Cake Shop, a woman stands behind a single burner on the sidewalk, steaming bundles of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and serving breakfast bites like egg tarts and Chinese donuts.
Around the corner on Keefer Street is Hon's Wun-Tun House, the city's largest supplier of fresh Chinese noodles and prepared foods, where you can stop into the retail side for a good selection of frozen dim sum like Shrimp Ha Gow dumplings, potstickers and edamame (green soy beans in the pod), or sit down in the attached noodle house for lunch.
Or visit The Boss bakery and restaurant at 532 Main, a weird sort of Chinese-style coffee shop that's the perfect place to watch people while you're having a Hong Kong-style breakfast. Out front you can shop for sweet and savoury buns or cream cakes, but in the back there are vinyl booths and a hybrid noodle house menu that ranges from sizzling Chinese hot plates and congee to fried spaghetti with cream of tomato sauce and great grilled ham and egg sandwiches or french toast. You can even get a steaming mug of coffee (or Ovaltine or Horlick's) if the mood strikes.
Good cooks looking for great toys love Chinatown, too. For an industrial-strength range hood, Chinese hardware stores offer the city's best selection and they are the place to purchase big woks and electric rice cookers. At Ming Wo, a fourth generation hardware store at 23 East Pender, Fontaine Wong now stocks a wide selection of trendy tableware, good quality knives and cookware at excellent prices.
If Asian-style decorating or art is what you're after, there are shops in Chinatown for every budget. At Bamboo Village (135 East Pender) there are loads of funky and inexpensive bamboo accent pieces, from baskets and bird cages to small tables, chairs and screens.
At Yeu Hua Crafts (173 East Pender) you'll find a more elaborate collection of chinoiserie - from rosewood furniture and massive handpainted vases that tower eight feet tall, to intricately enameled cloisonné pieces, elaborate wood carvings of the Chinese immortals, and beautiful shard boxes that incorporated broken pieces of antique pottery.
A must see is Chicochai Antiques at 539 Columbia St. where Edmand Lei, the largest dealer of antique Chinese jade in the country, has pieces on display as old as 4,000 BC. Lei, whose family has been in the antique business for generations, says, depending on age and provenance, his jade figurines, jewelry, bowls and vases can range in price from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand.
A great way to end your tour of Chinatown is at Ten Ren's Tea and Ginseng Co., where you can select from a variety of green and black teas, purchase a beautiful traditional tea pot or sit down at the elegant rosewood table to experience a traditional tea ceremony. You can ask for a demonstration and sample several teas while you shop.
There's nothing quite like waking up with Chinatown on a weekend walk .You'll find lots to see, experience and eat along the way, and learn a little more about the Far Eastern culture that's become so comfortably fused into modern Canadian life.
Getting there:
Vancouver's Chinatown shops are mainly clustered along Pender and Keefer streets, between Carrall and Main to Gore. It's a $5 cab ride from downtown hotels or take busses #22 or #19. During summer weekends there are night markets between 6 p.m. and midnight on Pender and Keefer, between Main and Gore.
Starting off:
The Chinese Cultural Centre and main China Gate are at 50 East Pender. Enter through the colourful, hand-painted gate (which once stood at the entrance to the China pavilion at Expo '86 in Vancouver) and you will be in the cultural centre, where you can start your tour with an orientation on Chinese-Canadian history by wandering through the displays. The cultural centre also offers guided Chinatown walking tours to the public for $5 (687-0729). For more in depth information, exhibitions and workshops visit the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum and Archives at 555 Columbia St. (687-0282).
Hidden treasure:
After the excitement of noisy crowds bartering for the best piece of barbecue pork, you may need a restful getaway. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden (578 Carrall Street) offers the perfect respite. There are two halves to this garden – the public half which is free and the more elaborate private area (admission: $6.50 for adults, $5 for seniors; $4 for students). The only such replica of a classical Ming Dynasty private garden outside China, it was constructed in 1986 by a team of Chinese craftsmen, entirely by hand without modern tools. Admission to the garden includes a guided tour (by a fascinating volunteer ) and tea.
top of page
|
