Final reflections and credits - better late than never

So I arrived home in August, it's now January (!) and I'm only just tying up my travel blog with this last post (and retrospectively adding photos to previous posts), even though I've always been fully intent on doing so. After the many thousands of words I comfortably(ish) banged out while travelling, this possibly says a lot about the contrast between my 'real', professional, busy life in London (not that I claim to be the best time manager) and the travelling lifestyle. I suppose on the positive side it's given these reflections on travelling plenty of time to mellow and mature... :-)


In statistical terms: I probably flew in excess of 30,000 miles (yes, I do feel guilty about the carbon), I visited 14 countries on 4 continents, and stayed in over 40 different cities (not to mention rural India and the Jordanian desert too). I spent around £8,000 all in, lived out of 1 rucksack for the 5 months. I had sexual encounters with around 15 different guys in 10 different countries (not something I've drawn a great deal of attention to on this blog till now, but hey it's part of being a solo traveller). l was ill 3 times but experienced 0 real crises (was I lucky? Maybe).


I met a huge range of people, many of whom were kinds of people that I'd never meet during my 'normal' life in London. I learnt a lot from them - all sorts of random facts, knowledge, recommendations and so on about their parts of the world, but more importantly different attitudes and perspectives. Most of them I will never see again - the rather sad fact is that friendships on the road tend to be transient - but a few I certainly intend make sure I do see again.


I hadn't been back long at all before it started to feel that my trip happened a long time ago, and perhaps that it was some sort of dream. That's probably a function of how easily and quickly your 'normal' life envelops you again, especially when it's quite well rooted and routine-driven like mind is. That's been where my photographs, this blog, and the contacts that I made on the trip, really prove their value. But having said that, I don't think I'll ever really forget what I've done - for example people have been surprised at just how effortlessly I still rattle off my full itinerary now when my trip comes up in conversation and I'm asked. The only bit of that where I struggle with the details is my two weeks in India when I joined an organised group tour, i.e. the only bit I didn't plan myself. Like I would have expected, this suggests the real value of having done my own thing that I fully planned and arranged myself.


Although the last stretch of my trip (Toronto, Montreal, Stockholm Pride and Finland) was possibly the most enjoyable stretch overall of the entire trip, I was just about ready to come home when I did. It barely needs to be said that I'd had the time of my life - and more on that to follow. But five months is a long time to exist without routine, structure and specific purpose, especially when you're travelling solo which inevitably does entail lots of time alone. It wasn't an especially long time for a travelling 'sabbatical', and definitely wasn't a long time at all for a genuine round-the-world trip, but I've few regrets about not making it longer. I guess I knew myself well enough to judge that - and if anyone reading this is planning anything similar, they should make their own judgment of the optimum duration.


Travelling alone is challenging at times. It partially depends on your temperament - if you're someone who can walk into any bar, any lounge, and immediately be life and soul of the party, you've got it made that way. That isn't entirely me though and in truth I didn't feel entirely at home in every hostel I stayed in. However, the complete freedom of travelling alone and being accountable to nothing and no one, and being able to follow your own tastes and curiosities 100% without compromise, is incredibly liberating. I've talked about the Couchsurfing website - it definitely made a huge positive difference to my trip, and although it does suck up time to try to secure hosts and make connections through it (sometimes tricky to manage to say the least if you don't have your own laptop with you, one reason why I eventually bought a netbook during my trip), and I did have one pretty dodgy Couchsurfing experience, it's well well worth it overall. This is especially because you can hand-pick exactly who you contact based on their profile information - and with hindsight I should have used it more than I did.


I touched on this a few posts ago, but backpacking on a shoestring isn't a physically relaxing thing to do. Sleeping in bunk beds in usually cramped and sometimes noisy hostel dorms, or crashing with friends/couchsurfers in very varying degrees of comfort, sees to that. So too does the lack of private indoor space, plus the amount of time spent on planes and coaches, time with my 20kg rucksack on my back, and the huge amount of walking done more or less daily in the name of sightseeing (and sometimes of saving transport fares). 


My itinerary was definitely intense and ambitious. When I told my itinerary to somebody who served me somewhere in London shortly before I went away, their reaction was, "You're going to be so tired at the end of that!" They weren't entirely wrong about that, and now that I've seen so much in my first "big trip", any future lengthy trips I might make will probably be a little less geographically ambitious. However, this tiredness was only a specific, short-term physical tiredness. Mentally, I've come back very refreshed, thinking a lot more clearly about various different things, and generally feeling that my coping resources are substantially greater. Without a doubt, all the things I've had to deal with while travelling, and the sense of achievement at pulling it all off, have left a long-lasting sense that my less-than-extreme, materially comfortable and well rooted day-to-day existence in London isn't something I need to allow myself to get chronically stressed or anxious about.


I think it's also made me less risk-averse, something that one of my long-standing friends in London picked up on very quickly in my first week home. Certainly I see living abroad at some point in the future, most likely in either Sweden, Canada or Australia, as a very tangible option now. I believe it's scientifically well proven that the sense of having options is a huge contributor to mental wellbeing - and gaining the sense that there are places other than the UK where I could potentially base myself is definitely doing that for me. Between arriving home and eventually writing this last post, I've been through a process at work where I was at real risk of being made redundant; thankfully I've come through it OK, but during the times when I was inevitably wondering what I would do if I didn't, with very bleak re-employment prospects due to the meltdown in UK public sector funding, the awareness that any redundancy settlement would probably make it viable in principle for me to emigrate to Canada or Australia had made me feel significantly better.



Whether or not I ever do that, and there are good reasons why I might well not, there's little doubting that wanderlust is an incurable lifelong condition. :-) That's what I'd been told by friends who've done a lot of travelling, and I totally understand now what they meant. Generally the idea of rooting myself permanently in London and focusing solely on one career is by no means the only idea I now have. But watch this space over the next few years. It's not a great secret that my finances require a lot of rebuilding after this trip and that limits my options for a while... And at the time of writing my career is now going better than I could ever have anticipated. So there are priorities to choose between. But really, that sense of options is a great one to have.


Backpacking around the world is also an amazing reality check about complexity and clutter in your own life. There are at least two dimensions to this. Living very successfully out of a single rucksack for five months really made me question whether I need to have so much stuff in my London home - particularly so many clothes. Within my first week back when I had to unbox all my possessions back home, I'd earmarked a substantial quantity of stuff to go straight to local charity shops because it just seemed unnecessary and counter-productive to keep it, in a way I'd not consciously felt before the trip. And more fundamentally, seeing glimpses of lifestyles in Asia, particularly in rural India, has to make any intelligent self-aware person question their own middle-class Western lifestyle to some extent on a philosophical and/or spiritual level. People in Indian villages, and Thai monks, have minimal material possessions and they work fearfully hard too, but they seem happy and unstressed. The questions and comparisons with our own supposedly more advanced lifestyles is obvious. Okay, so I wouldn't be able to point to any concrete changes that this 'insight' has led to in my life as yet, and I'm not suggesting I will be able to any time soon, but any conception I've had of the Western treadmill consumerist lifestyle being the only option in life is, I do believe, now reduced permanently.


So what were my favourite bits? The question everyone asks... I've thought about this a little bit, although not too much, and here are my rather unscientific and subject-to-change attempts at ranking my top memories...


Top 10 new cities visited
1. Vancouver
2. Melbourne
3. Sydney
4. Tel Aviv
5. Turku, Finland
6. Toronto
7. Singapore
8. Tokyo
9. San Francisco
10. Montreal


Top 15 sights

1. Taj Mahal

2. The Rocky Mountains

3. The geysers at Rotorua, New Zealand 

4. Niagara Falls

5. Petra

6. Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep temple, near Chiang Mai

7. The Old City walls, Jerusalem

8. Sydney Harbour

9. The Hong Kong skyline

10. The incredible hillside urban sprawl in Amman

11. The Roman ruins of Jerash, Jordan

12. The idyllic tropical beach at Langkawi, Malaysia

13. The rolling tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia
14. Daily life in Old Delhi
15. Stanley Park, Vancouver


Top 20 experiences
1. The elephant sanctuary near Chiang Mai, Thailand
2. Camel riding in the desert near Pushkar, India
3. Floating in the Dead Sea
4. Camping overnight in the remote desert at Wadi Rum, southern Jordan
5. Chatting to a real Buddhist monk in Chiang Mai
6. The holiday romances (one in particular)
7. Festival-hopping in the Montreal summer
8. The incredible welcome from locals in Amman
9. Seeing a geisha show in Kyoto
10. Paddling on the beach at Tel Aviv under a full moon at 4am with my Couchsurfing host Ilya
11. Taking a sauna with my Finnish friends in Helsinki
12. The Amman gay scene
13. Climbing Grouse Mountain, outside Vancouver
14. The Melodifestivalen final at Stockholm Globe Arena 
15. Going jogging in Central Park, NYC
16. Eating delicious Middle Eastern food, especially Jewish food
17. The random craziness of Eurovision weekend in Sydney 
18. A real Maori show in Rotorua, New Zealand
19. Hanging out by the riverside on a looooong summer evening in Turku, Finland
20. The extraordinary Internet cafes in Tokyo

And lastly, the people I want to thank... Most of whom will probably never read this, but still I don't feel I can have blogged so extensively without finishing like this. [Deep breath] Thanks to everyone who gave me itinerary advice, particularly Frederico and Rishi, but most of all Rob for being an inspiration and an ever-willing crutch. Thanks to everyone who gave me an amazing send-off at my leaving do at Keston Lodge. Thanks to Leyton and Karl for being so lovely in Stockholm, thanks (and, er, sorry) to Phillip there, and to Chris J, Rob and Alasdair for putting up with me as a roommate at the Archipelago. Thanks to Gerben from the Netherlands, Ivars from Latvia and Demian from Germany for the company on day trips in and around Amman, thanks to the Virginian who wanted to remain anonymous for encouraging me to discover more of gay Amman (!), and thanks to the boys on the Amman gay scene for the hilarious and unforgettable couple of evenings. Thanks to the Couchsurfing meet posse in Jerusalem, my wonderful Couchsurfing hosts in Tel Aviv, Kobi and Ilya, and to Paulo for the good times and the Portugese lessons. :) Thanks to everyone in the Intrepid group in India but particularly Justin and Michelle from Oregon, and Sally. Thanks to Pinder from Canada for the company in Bangkok and thanks to Amchar for the good time (I should have spent longer with you). Thanks to the lovely Saffers Luca, Maggie and Kim in Chiang Mai. Thanks a lot to Marian for the company and conversation in Langkawi. Thanks to Amy and Ross from Scotland for helping to prevent me having a nervous breakdown during the terrifying minibus journey to the Cameron Highlands. Thanks to Piotr and SJ for the chats in KL, to Henry for having the nerve to, er, get talking to me there and the nice time that followed, to CSer Edward for the fascinating tour, and to Dexter for getting in touch and meeting up with me. Thanks to Thanks to Varun for everything in Singapore, and to Das... I'll never look at a Burger King outlet in the same way again! Thanks to Sho in Tokyo, bless you and I hope it was a good memory for you. Thanks to Ghassan and Theo for being wonderful Couchsurfing hosts in Sydney, thanks to Alvin, Luther and William for hooking up with me (and to Geraldo for putting me in touch with William), and definitely thanks to 'Loopy' Lou and everyone else who contributed to the ridiculousness of Eurovision weekend in Sydney. Huge thanks to Kaarina and to Lyndal for both being kind enough to offer me crash space in Melbourne. Thanks to Rob and Dushyan for being prepared to spend so much of their two-week holiday in Sydney and Melbourne with me - you can't beat close friends at the end of the day. Thanks to Michael for agreeing to meet me as a complete random for lunch in Wellington (and to Anna for putting us in touch), thanks to the British guy who tolerated me waking him up in the morning and then lent me his ski jacket when I was freezing in Rotorua, and thanks to Thang for hosting me in Auckland. Thanks to Patrick from Switzerland for the company in San Fran and for appearing not to mind me getting him and his friend thrown out of a bar there. Massive thanks to Troy for hosting me in Vancouver, and also from Vancouver one special set of thanks I've actually been able to amply re-convey before this blog post are for Jon. :) Thanks a lot to Christian and Sophia in NYC for the random memories, and thanks to Kjedil from Norway for the company on the scene. Thanks to Richard, the Dutch guy I spent an evening with in Washington DC. Huge thanks to Rishi for everything in Toronto (better late than never actually meeting you in person... worth the wait!), to Brandon for being a really generous city guide and then host, and thanks to Kevin for meeting up. Big thanks to Ghislain in Montreal for giving up your time so generously to show me the city, and to you and Genevieve for taking me out on my birthday. And thanks to David for being an amazing CS host in Montreal, the night out and the lovely walkabout, the birthday pancakes and giving me possibly the most comfortable stay of my entire trip! Thanks to Joe for everything back in Stockholm, thanks to the rest of the schlager posse again for the awesome Pride memories, and definitely thanks to Dennis (puss och kram). Thanks to Annu and Eini for being wonderful hosts in Turku, to Eini's friends for embracing me so warmly and speaking English all night solely for me at their party, and to Anna P for suggesting hooking up at such short notice and really showing me the Finnish summer evening spirit. Thanks to Anna L for meeting up again in Helsinki, and massive thanks to Jenny and to Jani for the hosting, the picnic, the sauna, the clubbing at DTM, and everything else in Helsinki - what an amazing way to finish. And what an amazing five months.


I wonder when I might be able to do it all again...?! :-)

Finishing in Finland

I made my way from Stockholm to Finland by overnight ferry. Although it's not quick, it's a very popular mode of transport between the two countries. For starters it's cheap - especially if like me you don't book a cabin. It's still comfortable enough without a cabin as some airplane-style seating is available, but with much more space to spread out and recline than on a plane. And then of course you can wander freely, take in the view on deck (including the stunning Stockholm archipelago - if I ever win the Lottery, my first purchase would be one of the many thousands of summer holiday homes on islands in the archipelago), have proper meals in the restaurant or canteen, use your laptop with free wi-fi and charging points, and so on. I'm never going to be the biggest fan of air travel, so I rather relished this in comparison. The ferries are apparently also famous for raucous debauchery, although to be honest I saw minimal evidence of that (probably the relatively short crossing to Turku on a Monday night isn't peak party time). The other reason for the popularity of the ferries is that duty-free shopping is available. If that sounds strange, it's because they always make an intermediate stop in the Åland Islands, which are part of Finland but largely autonomous and granted concessions in their EU membership terms - including the continuation of duty free. One way and another, I'd recommend the ferry to anyone wanting to do a trip taking in both Sweden and Finland.

Turku isn't exactly a name that's likely to roll off the tongues of most Brits as a familiar tourism destination (or familiar place full stop, come to that) - but that's quite a shame really because it's genuinely lovely. I think pretty much anyone who came here in summer would agree. and I don't think this is just my bias towards Scandinavia talking. The population is only a couple of hundred thousand - Finland is an expansive land containing only 5 million people after all - and Turku is the... well, it's more polite not to apply the label of either "second city" or "third city" because Turku is forever locked in a ferocious rivalry with the city of Tampere, to which it's a very similar size. I went to Tampere last summer and while it was nice, I definitely prefer Turku. Anyway, while you wouldn't exactly imagine you're in a mega-metropolis and you don't seem to have to walk very far to find a deserted street, on summer evenings at least there's quite a buzz to be found along the highly picturesque river in the city centre. As well as nice riverside restaurants, there are a number of large moored boats whose decks function as public bars - some of them with live music and an edgy feel. You also have rather endearing authentic wooden houses dotted around the city. There are some lovely historic buildings in Vanha Suurtori, the old town square, and the nearby Cathedral was consecrated in 1300 (albeit it's been through several rebuildings since). Additionally there's a large open-air museum in the main concentrated area of wooden housing that has survived fires down the ages, where you can watch various traditional industries operating, such as sewing, barrel-making, pottery, printing presses and so on - described by Lonely Planet as Finland's best museum. And there's a huge castle dating from the 13th Century, one of the most charming I've come across and, like Turku in general seemingly, less than flooded with other tourists (quite refreshing and novel after some of the earlier stops on my travels!). I also managed an easy and very pleasant day trip to the smallish town of Rauma, Finland's largest preserved wooden town and a World Heritage Site.

Turku Castle 

I was going to be couchsurfing for the whole of my week in Finland, but without actually needing to log back into the Couchsurfing website at all. My lovely host in Helsinki on my previous visit last year, Jenny, had very kindly not only offered to host me again, but had also put me in direct contact with her friend in Turku, Annu, who was looking to dip a first toe into the whole couchsurfing thing. When Annu realised after this was arranged that she was actually going to be out of town after my first night, without being asked (which I wouldn't have dreamed of doing) she found one of her local friends Eini to put me up instead for my remaining two nights. By my reckoning that made Eini a friend of a friend of a friend - how's that for degrees of separation? It all worked out beautifully, as so often with Couchsurfing. I also got an invite to a house party for Eini's fellow students (none of them all that much younger than me, because the length of university courses in Finland is much more flexible and it's common to mix part-time studying with part-time paid work), and ended up that night in a student bar drinking shots of an apparently notoriously lethal Finnish concoction that tasted like aniseed cough syrup. The best bit was, the whole smallish group seemed perfectly happy to mostly speak English all night solely for my benefit; when I mentioned how good of them this was, they said, "No no, we are grateful for the opportunity to practise our English"! It's been a tad shaming a number of times on my trip to be a native speaker of the world's global language, getting away with being essentially monoglot when in countries like Finland pretty much everyone speaks English well as a second language. That night I also got some more of the "I love your accent!" that I seem to get more in Finland than anywhere else I've travelled...

The Finnish people are probably a little infamous for having particular difficulty with depression during their long, dark, cold winters - but on the flipside it sounds like they go a bit crazy during their lovely daylight-saturated summers. I was told that they are pretty much always outdoors on summer evenings - drinking outside in bars (although Finns have the reputation of drinking a lot in winter as a way of coping, apparently they drink even more in summer), going to open-air theatres that seem to be commonplace, or just enjoying the copious parkland that's to be found in Turku in particular. I was absolutely astounded, when Annu took me for an evening walk incorporating a couple of said parks, to see a small group of young casually dressed Finns drinking beer from cans while playing... croquet! Apparently croquet is a popular Finnish summertime park pursuit, usually a very casual one. It was news to me that croquet is played anywhere outside the British Commonwealth, let alone in a casual way by young people. 

In one of the parks, Annu and I thought we saw a few brown leaves on one of the trees - while autumn certainly arruives earlier in Scandinavia than further south, in the first week of August this was surprising to us both. When I mentioned this to Anna when we met the next day, she froze and stared at me with a real horror in her eyes, saying, "No don't say that, autumn can't be coming already!!" And I thought I dislike the end of summer in the UK...

In Turku and in Helsinki, all street names and many other signs are in both Finnish and Swedish. Finland is officially a bilingual country, and there is a substantial Swedish-speaking population across much of the west of the country and in Helsinki, with their own schools, cultural centres, cinemas and so on. The status of Swedish is often contentious among the Finnish-speaking majority; they are forced to learn Swedish at school, but many resent being made to spend this time they perceive they could be devoting to a "more useful" language instead. Seemingly may Finns are not keen to use the Swedish they have learnt (although in customer service jobs in places like Turku they're expected to be prepared to), and one of my Swedish friends in Stockholm who's visited Helsinki a number of times told me that he considers it more "polite" to speak English there. The difficulty is probably connected with the fact that it's because Sweden was the former colonial power in Finland (before Russia that is) that Swedish ever took root there. However opinions amongst Finnish-speaking Finns do seem to vary, as a debate on the subject of whether they should learn Swedish broke out at the house party I attended, with one guy arguing strongly that they should.

Helsinki was every bit as lovely on this, my second visit, as on my first a year earlier. I would grudgingly accept that it's a city you'll either take to or you won't - staying in a hostel for part of my stay last year, I met two Turkish backpackers who complained of being bored and labelled Helsinki a "half-day city", and if you don't like it then that's not necessarily completely unfair, since essential 'sights' are relatively few. I would say that everyone should see Temppeliaukio Church, a 1960s construction hewn into solid rock, remarkably stylishly and tastefully, with striking natural light and 22km of copper tubing covering the ceiling. And Suomenlinna, a short ferry hop from the city, is an 18th century fortess island fantastic for exploring both military and civilian installations, and taking in the views - its attractions recognised with World Heritage Site
status.

But while overall the city is not quite as dramatic as Stockholm, and considerably smaller too, I've found that it's a city that's exceptionally good to just potter around - especially anywhere near the highly impressive landmark of Senate Square, Esplanad Park, the grand and very characterful railway station and the large square outside, around the open-air Kauppatori (fish market) where you can buy a reindeer burger for lunch, the island of Katajanokka with its imposing, towering cathedral, and the waterline all around the port area including probably my favourite park anywhere, the stunning Kaivopuisto Park. Actually that's quite a lot, I now realise as I write this. Add to that that in summer people are sitting outside eating and/or drinking everywhere, creating a great buzz. Overall the city is compact, stylish, likeable and very welcoming. 

A gay mecca it isn't, but it has one very decent full-time gay club, apparently the largest in Scandinavia, which I liked a lot even before I got to go there on their monthly Eurovision night upstairs. Enough said!

Thanks to Jenny's willingness to act as tour guide, I spent a lot of my time this time by waterfronts well outside the city centre, including one of the main city beaches. While I'm no expert on waterfront scenery of the world - having seen disgracefully little of the coastline of my own country - there is something really bewitching about a number of the waterside views I've seen in Scandinavia. I hope this comes across in my Facebook photos but actually I'm not too sure that it will. There's just a calm, exceptionally pure beauty that exerts a hugely strong emotional pull on me. The beach was busy on this warm sunny Sunday, so it's not just me; the scene was only spoilt slightly by a real haziness and thickness in the air - this was the weekend of the rampant forest fires in western Russia, which were clearly having an impact even this substantial distance away. 

At the coast in Helsinki

After the lovely Sunday afternoon at the beach, also shared with Jenny's friend Jani, Jani had invited us both back to his apartment block for a shared sauna. Saunas are an essential part of life for practically all Finns - they will take a sauna with family and/or friends typically at least weekly, often more. They're always taken completely naked. There are public saunas - although very few of them since virtually everyone has good access to a private sauna in their home or apartment block - and these are gender segregated (I went to one in Tampere last year, certainly a memorable experience). However when at a private sauna with family or friends, mixing of genders is the norm. Undressing, sitting in the sauna naked and showering together with a female friend was certainly an entirely new experience for this Brit - but then really, what should the problem be? The relaxed attitude of Scandinavia towards nudity is surely yet another attribute to be commended. And just in case you were wondering, Finnish saunas are always completely non-sexual environments.

And then the next day it was all over. Time to fly home to London from the typically pleasant and efficient Helsinki Airport, and end my five-month journey and adventure. With very mixed feelings about leaving Scandinavia and generally about coming to the end of my travelling. But rather than try to be philosophical here I'll expand in one further blog post.  

Photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393968&id=61207375&l=73afa19a55

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393971&id=61207375&l=289ed17a7d

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393973&id=61207375&l=79bacf025d 

Stockholm and proud!

So it was back to Europe and back for my seventh visit overall (second on this trip!) to what is still very much my favourite place in the world, Stockholm, for Pride week, which I'd first sampled last year. Yes, it lasts a whole week, with cultural and political events and entertainments all over the city, and four days at the Pride Park. One of the things I most love about it is that it's clearly something in which a large proportion of the whole city's population participates to a greater or lesser extent - my straight male friend in Stockholm has told me it's around one-third of the city. Touchingly, every bus in the city flies rainbow flags at the front all week. 

At the Pride Parade

As far as I've ever been able to tell, homophobia doesn't really exist all that much in Sweden's big cities; straight men seem by and large to construct their sense of masculinity a bit differently to what we expect in the Anglo-Saxon world, so that they're just not threatened by gay men in the way that still isn't uncommon to a greater or lesser (often unspoken) extent even in English cities. Officially gay venues in Stockholm are actually fairly few and far between; there are however a number of mixed 'gay-straight' venues, and I've been told more than once (albeit judgments do seem to vary a bit on this) that in most non-gay venues, it's pretty safe for a gay guy to try coming on to any guy he likes the look of - because if he isn't gay, he'll most likely just quietly let you know and won't be bothered by it at all. If you've paid for a Pride Park ticket for the whole week, you have to keep on all week the distinctive orange wristband they give you. When last year I joked to my straight male friend that my contingent maybe found it just a little uncomfortable to wander round the city all week wearing a garish marker that we're gay, he genuinely didn't seem to understand what I meant - because of (a) the number of straight people that buy tickets too, and (b) the sheer unlikeliness of any homophobia taking place anywhere.

Once again in Stockholm I was able to hook up with fellow schlager fans from London (Joe, Rob, Dushyan and Leyton... and of course Karl who lives here now) - see my March postings from Stockholm for more explanation of the whole schlager thing if you need it. For those who know Leyton, going out partying with him while on holiday is quite an education, hehe (love you chicken!)...

On the Wednesday night, we went to a club called Ambassadeurs which really fitted the stereotype of a gorgeous (and eye-wateringly expensive... 180 SEK [£16] admission anyone?) club full of gorgeous people. If the stereotypical Scandinavian look is even slightly your type (and as I made very clear in my March postings, it is totally my type), whether you like boys or girls, you like me would have been looking around constantly in a dazed state, trying not to actually drool too much. Really, it was quite incredible. In fairness, none of the Stockholm clubs I'm more familiar with (i.e. Paradise/Kolingsborg, Zipper, Patricia) are really like that - i.e. they certainly have more than their fair share of attractive people but overall the crowd feels more normal - making me conclude that a swanky place like Ambassadeurs must be self-selecting. If you're not in the league of the gorgeous people who frequent it, you're going to feel pretty intimidated and down on yourself quite quickly, and probably hence go somewhere else instead. One thing I really did notice however this time in Stockholm is that while blueish eyes are very common amongst Swedes, naturally blond hair is not as common as the stereotype goes - a lot of gay boys (as well as women) are blond only with the help of a bottle. There also seems to be a slightly peculiar hairstyle (to my eyes) very much in fashion amongst Stockholm gay boys at the moment, involving very short cropped back and sides (probably a number 1) but with quite longish hair on top.

Anyway, I digress. The show at Ambassadeurs that night was Miss Transsexual Sweden which overall was surprisingly entertaining and good fun, with a generally high standard of participants warmly received by the packed crowd. The interval act was a certain Eric Saade. Eric is now a major star in Sweden, yet we'd rocked up at the last minute and managed without any trouble whatsoever to watch his performance all of about 4 feet away from the stage - and this is after I'd met him and got a photo, an autograph and a friendly chat with him (and several other stars) in March. I love the fact that Swedish popstars just seem to be far more accessible, open and down-to-earth, and not at all up themselves about their celebrity status, compared to British and American stars.

Mr Eric Saade, up close at Ambassadeurs :)

The main draw for me and my friends at the Pride Park was the Thursday night which is devoted to schlager, and you can rely on a number of big-name acts appearing. This year's selection (for those who are interested) included Shirley Clamp, Nanne Grönvall, Christer Sjögren, Blond (Melodifestivalen winners in 1997 with the fabulous "Bara hon älskar mig"), Jill Johnson, and Björn Skifs in the opening "classic" section; then in the "contemporary" section after the interval, Elin Lanto, Sofia (yawn), Chiara (an unannounced surprise... wearing an enormous dress with rainbow stripes... they say that vertical stripes are slimming but I couldn't say she looked thin!), Sibel, Jenny Silver (no less peculiar than ever and still wearing that glove), Neo, Hanna Lindblad, Linda Pritchard, Didrik Solli-Tangen, Anna Bergendahl (mutter mutter... I still don't rate her, but she got a rapturous reception), Hera Björk (yay!), and as a final big surprise, Lena Meyer-Landrut, the winner for Germany of Eurovision 2010, who I was particularly delighted to see as I felt it had been a very deserving Eurovision winner. We all had a fantastic time as you might expect. There had been a serious amount of rain on Wednesday night into Thursday, which had turned the Pride Park into a bit of a quagmire. I observed to my posse during schlager night that it was just like being at Glastonbury, but I swear it wasn't me that added, "Yes, but with much better music!" The night was topped off with the packed-out "World's Biggest Schlager After-Party" till 4am in an, erm, museum next to the Pride Park - actually a great venue except that they need to sort out better ventilation - with live PAs by Sarah Dawn Finer and the particularly fabulous Linda Bengtzing.

A little damp but very happy during schlager night at the Pride Park

Other acts at the Pride Park on other nights included Hazell Dean (a bit of an old favourite of mine - she's looking very good for her age if I can say that respectfully, and she's still good at what she does, even if there was clearly limited interest from the sparse Swedish crowd), Emilia, Jessica Folcker, Rednex (whose set seemed to last about three hours... YAWN), Sash!, the Vengaboys (YAY! I still can't believe their comeback single is actually called "A Rocket to Uranus"), Darin, Rebound, Therese, Love Generation and Le Kid. Overall pretty stellar for any Europop fan, so we all enjoyed ourselves a lot.

We were out clubbing till stupidly late every night - that's what we do in Stockholm. In Scandinavia in July, that means that you're walking home in broad daylight. I've always loved this, but it does mess up my body clock something chronic - it's difficult to say the least to get to sleep straight after an eyeful of daylight at 4am or 5am. But then, in Stockholm in Pride week in the summer with schlager on top, I don't really need as much sleep as all that to keep going and energised. Oh and by the way, after my bitching in March about Swedish boys, I'd like to put it on the record that I now know there is at least one attractive Swedish gay boy who is incredibly sweet. :-)

If it seems a bit peculiar to the uninitiated that I'm talking about my favourite city in the world and I'm only talking about clubbing and ridiculous music, well I have done pretty much all of Stockholm's sightseeing in my previous six visits. But every time I go, I do still try to get myself to:

• Riddarholmen, possibly my favourite spot in the world to sit and contemplate - it's a tiny island with a massive church and government buildings but no permanent population, but a truly heart-tuggingly stunning view across the water;
• Monteliusvägen, the highest spot in the city on Södermalm, offering fantastic views back over the water across Gamla Stan, Norrmalm and Kungsholmen;
• Gamla Stan, the wonderful medieval old city, the largest preserved one in Europe, complete with narrow streets it's great to let yourself get lost in; and
• the waterfront in the heart of the city all around the Kungsträdgården area - this is where I first really fell in love with the city on my first visit, and that passion hasn't gone away.

Oh, and as I was travelling on from Stockholm to Finland by ferry, I also got another look at the start of the ferry sailing at the incredible beauty of the Stockholm archipelago, a collection of some 24,000 small islands covering the 60km to Stockholm's east in the Baltic Sea. Yes I'm running out of superlatives, but sailing through is captivating, wonderful and bewitching.

 Sunset in the Stockholm Archipelago... Not much matches this. 

Those brief written descriptions aren't going to effectively convey a lot of the city's appeal to me - it's hard to explain really. Do try to look at some decent photos sometime (I didn't take many this time). The ubiquity of water in the city, which is built across some 14 different islands, has a lot to do with it, especially as it gives a sense of calmness and serenity at various points (such as Riddarholmen) even in the centre. The general beauty of the buildings (albeit there are a few real horrors around as well) also has a lot to do with it, as does the general sense of good organisation... and of style. The Swedes are surely the world leaders in interior design (probably a lot to do with the climate... they're not exactly out of doors a lot in the winter) and right up there in the fashion stakes as well (guess which are my favourite international chains for inexpensive furniture and fashion respectively?!). But I guess that leaves a lot of "je ne sais quoi", and beauty in the eye of the beholder - talking to friends and acquaintances who've also visited Stockholm but aren't schlager freaks, I can tell that they generally think it's nice but are surprised that I'm so passionately insistent it's the number one place in the world. Obviously, I can only plead with everyone reading this to come for a long weekend, try to understand a little of what it is I bang on constantly about, and make up your own minds. I do recommend coming in the summer, preferably within six weeks or so either side of midsummer so that you get the magical effect of the long summer evenings when it barely gets dark at all.

Am I rambling on? Probably, but hopefully that in itself at least conveys a little of how I feel. Anyway, with Stockholm coming straight after the wonderful Canada, you could say that I was feeling pretty good with the world when the time came to move on for the final week of my trip to Finland.

Photos (mainly singers and Pride floats, plus some of the archipelago at the end): http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393908&id=61207375&l=f8119f351b

The British national pastime...

Only once in my round-the-world journey did I fly British Airways. Only once in my round-the-world journey did I have any significantly unpleasant experience with the airline. Guess which flight it was?

I feel like I now belong to the club that can join in the British national pastime of bitching about British Airways. I had to queue for an hour and a quarter to check in at Montreal Airport because BA only had two check-in staff. And when trying to disembark at Heathrow Terminal 5 (I was just changing planes in London en route to Stockholm), we must have been left waiting on the plane for a good 15 minutes - because the taxiing spot was next to a section of the terminal building that's still being built, and they didn't have enough buses to ferry us to the distant part of the terminal that is actually open. You could say I wasn't impressed...

Parlez-vous anglais?

After more than six weeks in the rest of North America, getting to Quebec and to Montreal was a little bit strange. It just feels very different here to the rest of the continent, both in terms of the cityscape and the people.


Obviously, Quebec is French-speaking, and you'll rarely see a word of English on signage anywhere in Montreal. The Francophone world is of course well known for being very protective of its language. I'm reliably told that in Quebec this is actually reinforced by laws which make it compulsory for shop staff to greet you in French first, and which specify (this does slightly beggar belief) what percentage smaller the text of any English translation on a sign must be than the original French. The recorded announcements on the Metro pronounce every station name French-style, even the substantial number of names that are obviously of English language origin such as "Monk" and "Atwater". (That does distract you a little from how strangely juddery the Metro is, on the trains which all have, er, rubber tyres.)


And start to wander round the old city in Montreal and you'll be almost immediately struck by just how, well, European it is. There are narrow, pedestrianised alleyways with cafe tables outside the pretty period, very un-North American buildings. Not to mention far more people smoking than anywhere else in Canada (apparently Quebec has been dubbed "Canada's smoking section"). To be fair, downtown does feel much more like the other big Canadian cities in terms of architecture and vibe though, although there are far fewer tall skyscrapers.

Which continent?? 

Montreal seems to have a fairly extraordinary number of festivals, which seem to be a fairly defining feature of city life. With the help of my local friends old and new (made through Couchsurfing), I was able to sample three of them. L'International des Feux Loto-Québec is a fireworks festival that runs throughout the summer - actually not just a festival, but an international competition. A fireworks competition was a new concept to me, but seemingly companies which stage fireworks displays are only too keen to compete against each other. They compete as countries, a different one each Saturday night, and it was the turn of Canada when I was there. As I mentioned in my New York musings, I'm no connoisseur of big fireworks displays, but it was breathtaking, not to mention surely hugely expensive (I didn't work out who was paying), with crowds of many thousands watching from various vantage points - seemingly summer Saturday nights out in Montreal often start by watching the fireworks. And how cool is that??

The Piknic Électronique is another weekly happening through the summer. Like the name suggests, it's a giant Sunday afternoon picnic on one of Montreal's rather attractive islands, with music provided by a string of big-name electro DJs, often from Europe. There is a charge to get in, but you're allowed to bring picnic food in with you. There's a lively, very relaxed and friendly and rather cool vibe (and yes for once, when I mention 'music' and 'cool' approvingly in the same sentence I'm not being tongue-in-cheek or deluded) with a range of electro music from the poppy to the fairly hardcore. Slightly disturbingly, the festival had been temporarily shunted from its usual location in favour of a one-off heavy metal festival on the other island which was being given higher billing (what were they thinking of??), but apparently in its usual larger location there's a designated gay area, and as you'd perhaps expect with electronic music there was definitely a polysexual crowd. It was a great thing to experience and I found myself very impressed with a city that can put things like these on every single weekend through the summer.

The third festival was the month-long Juste Pour Rire Festival, apparently the largest street comedy festival in the world. I saw the huge finale evening, featuring more fireworks, children singing songs from The Sound of Music in French ("Doh Ray Me" translated into French sounds more than a little peculiar...), incredible displays by an acrobatic company dangling high in the air suspended by a huge crane, jugglers on stilts, and a 15-foot tall inflatable green monster with red horns, and his pink girlfriend (I'm afraid their names escape me). It was all a bit peculiar at times but once again huge with a crowd to match, fun and deeply impressive. Seriously, this city knows how to enjoy itself.


One daytime I took a trip out to the Olympic Park used for the 1976 summer games, and did the guided tour. Although the park covers a substantial area with lots of grass, the structures are very, er, concrete - if you didn't know when it was all designed and built you'd probably guess right to within about 5 years. Well, I say "all built", but actually due to drawn-out industrial action during preparation for the Games, they didn't manage to complete the roof or tower until... 1987. This is glossed over somewhat in the official tour! The tower is the most impressive feature, being the tallest angled tower in the world. I found seeing the stadium itself a little underwhelming, since there were two major changes which make it somewhat difficult to imagine as an athletics stadium: (a) it now has a permanent, non-retractable roof, and (b) all the seats were removed from one side of the stadium sometime after the Games to accommodate the belated building of the tower. But still, it's the third Olympic stadium I've seen the inside of (after Helsinki and the old Wembley... Stratford next no doubt) and I can see it becoming a bit of a mission to see more if and when I go to other Olympic host cities. Outside the stadium is a circle of flags honouring all the countries which won gold medals at the Games. Sadly this didn't include Canada (oops... can you just imagine if GB wins nothing in 2012??), but it did include East Germany and the USSR - so there's at least one place in the world where those two flags will continue to fly in perpetuity. It's well known that financially the Montreal Games were a bit of a disaster, with the city only managing to finally pay off its debts in 2006 - better late than never! In trying to plug the financial black hole, someone in the provincial government clearly had a sense of humour, since the main method of raising the revenue was a tax on... tobacco. I found the idea of a sporting event being paid for mostly by smokers quite amusing.

The Olympic Stadium and Tower

The gay scene in Montreal is concentrated on a long (and I mean long) stretch of a single street, Rue Ste-Catherine. The Metro station on this stretch has a rainbow-coloured entrance. That's only the start of the unsubtleness of the area - I think it's the first place I've seen where a number of bathhouses (i.e. gay saunas) are on the main gay strip just dotted around the bars and clubs, and where the signage and pictures on the front of the bathhouses makes extremely clear exactly what they are. Nonetheless the general feel of the area was definitely both lively and friendly. However I was pretty underwhelmed by the club, called Sky, that my host David and his friends took me to on Saturday night, but there are at least three big clubs and word of mouth suggested the others might be better - I got to one of the others, Parking, on the Monday night but it was too empty to make much of a judgment.

My overriding impression of the three major cities in Canada is of cities that have fantastic nature on their doorsteps. I think it's something that I'll now always find a little frustrating about London, the fact that there's very little real nature available in, or anywhere close to, the city. In Montreal there is Mont-Royal, more a hill than a mountain really, but it's a reasonably energetic walk - starting virtually in downtown - up secluded tree-lined paths to get to the top. From the top you get a fairly impressive view over part of the city. Just outside the city, within walking distance from the place of my Couchsurfing host David, are the very attractive Lachine Rapids (Montreal is actually situated on a smallish island) on the St Lawrence River - I could easily have spent at least half a day relaxing in this beautiful, totally secluded area in the hot summer sunshine, and not for the first time I found myself distinctly jealous of city-dwellers who have easy access to such attractive unspoilt nature.

Mont-Royal

Really, I didn't entirely want to leave Canada. That's high praise indeed coming from me considering that I was heading straight from there to Stockholm for Pride week there. I was feeling a strong attachment towards Canada and vowing to myself that I'll be back when resources permit. Lonely Planet says that it's an impossible country to dislike, and I'd have to agree with that. If you've ever been tempted to go, please please do it.

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393841&id=61207375&l=288b820acd

Ottawa

After Toronto, I made a brief one-night stop in Canada's federal capital Ottawa en route to Montreal. Ottawa, like Canberra, is a compromise capital - it was chosen by Queen Victoria largely because it's right on the border between English-speaking Ontario and French-speaking Quebec. However today it's a city of over 800,000 people - bigger than Washington DC and a lot more like a real city too.

It's a bilingual city, where shop staff will greet you "Hello, bonjour" or (slightly amusingly to my ears) "Bonjour, hi". However a French Canadian friend later told me that there is a strong element of keeping up appearances here - the Canadian government is very keen to make its capital look bilingual so this has filtered through into a requirement for tourist-facing jobs, but apparently a lot of the population that tourists won't see barely speak a word of French. There is a substantial French-speaking population, but they mostly don't technically live in Ottawa - if you cross one of the bridges over the river literally 10 or 15 minutes from Downtown, you are into Quebec and the town of Gatineau, which is effectively a suburb of Ottawa (which houses the Museum of Civilisation) but definitely French-speaking.

My accommodation here was unusual to say the least - the Hostelling International premises here are a converted, er, jail, known as the "Jail Hostel". It was a working jail until the early 1970s and reopened as a hostel within a couple of years of the last inmates moving out. My dorm was a cell now housing 6 beds. If that sounds like it might be cramped and uncomfortable, to be honest it is a little bit - lighting, air conditioning and availability of power points all leave a bit to be desired. But for my one-night stay it was a fairly memorable, and bearable, curiosity.

One of the more interesting places I stayed...

My day exploring the city had to start on Parliament Hill. Frankly, one look at the Canadian Parliament building and you're reminded that you're in a former British colony, because the architectural similarities to the Palace of Westminster are considerable - not least the clock tower and the clock face itself. As you might therefore expect it's a pleasant and impressive building, with a very nice large lawn to the front, and with very low-key security you can wander all around the outside of the building which is a nice touch. The contrast with Capitol Hill in the US is quite considerable in terms of architecture and atmosphere. The building is not quite on the overall scale of Westminster (presumably deliberately on the part of the colonial powers?) but it's well worth a lingering look and wander. To the front of the lawn is a fountain marking 100 years of Canada as an united entity, with, er, a flame burning literally in the middle of the water fountain (thanks to very high-powered shots of gas emitted from a pipeline at the surface of the water) - a clever and striking effect I don't think I've ever seen before. With a bit more time in the city I'd probably have taken up the opportunity to go inside the Parliament building for one of the frequent tours.

Parliament Hill

However I was there for the daily 10am changing of the guard, which mostly made me think "how very British"! An extraordinarily large number of soldiers, decked out in red tunics and furry black busbies, march around the (slightly muddy) front lawn to familiar military music from the brass band, and then a lot of them stand around for a long time, occasionally taking peculiar rapid little sidesteps. The whole process was a bit incomprehensible and delightfully absurd, and lasted nearly half an hour, in front of quite a large crowd of tourists.

Ottawa or London??

There are bits and pieces of pleasant enough architecture around the remainder of the city, but the most interesting other man-made structure I found was the Notre-Dame Cathedral, an 1841 structure which catches the eye mainly for its twin spires which are plated with tin and therefore gleam in an unusual and striking way.  

There are numerous national museums in Ottawa; you could spend several days just immersing yourself in them. The one I made time to visit with my single day was the Museum of Civilisation which is a very interesting showcase for the aboriginal population of Canada, complete with information and exhibits relating to the many different peoples that live in various parts of this huge country (including the story of at least one substantial civilisation that tragically died out due to an inability to coexist with European settlers plus vulnerability to deadly European illnesses), huge and rather beautiful wood carvings, and audio examples of the charming folk stories that have been passed down by oral tradition among peoples who've never used writing. Very educative and occasionally moving, and well worth a visit for sure.

At the Museum of Civilisation

In Ottawa I had my first encounter with poutine, which is a staple fast food in Quebec and further afield in Canada. It's simply chips (oh sorry, "French fries") topped with cheese curd and covered with gravy - but it's apparently something that many Canadians abroad get homesick for. Knowing I had to try it at some point, I found an outlet of a rapidly expanding fast-food chain which sells nothing but poutine, with a menu offering various different extra toppings. It's, er, different, a bit messy, and I'm not sure it's something I'd ever start craving however much time I might spend in Canada in future - but it was pretty good.

To be honest, I didn't really manage to take to Ottawa like I have done to Vancouver and Toronto - away from the Parliament Hill area it felt a tad provincial and often not especially attractive, and it was missing that 'je ne sais quoi' vibe for me. I wouldn't advise making this a core stop in a tour round Canada. But if you do have time, especially if you're hungry for some museum action, this might still be a decent place to spend a night or two. For me it was onwards to Montreal.

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393697&id=61207375&l=813df9d3ff

Toronto and Niagara Falls

My last ten days in North America took me back into Canada, on the eastern side this time. And once more I loved it.

Toronto isn't really a conventionally beautiful city, and one of my local friends there told me that it didn't have much of a tourist industry until twenty or thirty years ago. But in my book it was unquestionably a great and supremely comfortable place to walk around, explore and generally hang out.

A significant part of this appeal is because it's a hugely diverse city. In stark contrast to Australia, Canada has long had a diverse population, and the federal government specifically decided around the 1960s that in order to develop and grow it was going to become a "nation of immigrants", attracting people with pretty much open arms to resettle there from all over the world. And it's Toronto, the country's biggest city, which is the biggest hub of this global melangerie, with the second highest proportion of immigrants among all world cities but no one dominant immigrant nationality, and a 911 service offered in 150 languages (really). So you can take it as read that you're not exactly going to want for multicultural eating and shopping options anywhere, or feel out of place whoever you are.

The most famous sight in Toronto is the CN Tower, the world's tallest building for 32 years until something in Dubai (where else?!) overtook it in 2007. It looks much like other monster concrete communications towers you can see in cities such as Berlin, Prague and Stockholm, just taller. And I just wasn't prepared to pay some $23 (£14) just to go up to the observation tower.

 The CN Tower

Fortunately, as I've already mentioned, Toronto is a great city to just walk around without spending a cent. Kensington Market is certainly one of the more interesting markets you'll see anywhere. Stretching over a number of narrow streets, it's lively, multicultural and bohemian, with radical bookshops and pot smoking equipment stores, but also nice independent bakers and the like. Within walking distance is an extensive Little Italy, and slightly further from the centre and thus broadly off the tourist trail (thanks Rishi for taking me there) is the Distillery District where beautiful old warehouses have been converted into bars, restaurants, artisan shops and even a small independent theatre - a really, really nice place to explore and hang out for a while. Queen's Park is a very pleasant large park just on the edge of downtown, featuring the very ornate and moderately grand 1893 sandstone provincial legislature building for Ontario. Downtown from the same period and in a not dissimilar style is the also impressive Old City Hall. This has been superseded by City Hall round the corner, designed by a Finnish architect, an award-winning modernist structure opened in 1965. That might give you a clue as to what to expect, but actually as 1960s statement architecture goes I didn't think it was too bad at all. It's two tallish curved towers together forming roughly a circle shape, with a bit over the central lobby that looks remarkably like a white flying saucer, a large artificial lake outside complete with fountains and benches, and a ramp system to get you around the area and also give you vantage points to admire it all. I reckon 1960s concrete looks a lot better with curves than with brutalist edges and sharp angles, and overall it's definitely characterful and probably quite pleasant, with the artificial lake area seeming to be a popular lunch spot.

City Hall

Like in Vancouver, wandering around Toronto's downtown you know you are in North America because of the number of skyscrapers. But you also know you are not in the USA because they are scattered with plenty of relatively low-rise buildings in-between - and I've already commented, probably more than once, about how much of a difference, a positive and human one, this makes to the feel of the city. The skyscrapers also seem to be gleaming steel-and-glass constructions, often kind of attractive, much more than in the American cities I've seen - possibly testament to Canada's first real economic boom coming many decades after the US's.

Like in Vancouver, once you've had enough of the city, there is a fantastic piece of nature virtually on your doorstep. In Toronto this is Toronto Islands. It's worth going just for the ferry trip, because on the water you get a fantastic view back over downtown Toronto. But when you get to the islands, what you have is a very peaceful and pretty unspoilt collection of parkland and beaches, where you could easily stroll for hours or sunbathe all day (as quite a lot of locals seem to). There are some inhabitants who live in charming wooden bungalow huts, but it's all very tightly controlled by the charitable trust who own them all, so thankfully there's been no over-development. One of the beaches is an officially designated 'clothing optional' beach - my Couchsurfing host Brandon who was showing me round (thanks again!) took me there for a brief look, and slightly disturbingly the people who seem to be keenest on taking their clothes off are often those who should definitely keep them on... Anyway, I was amused to see a city council sign at the edge of the beach declaring "Municipal code #608: Clothing is required beyond this point" - amused mostly by the idea that it's specifically written into the municipal code... Nonsense aside, a ferry trip out is a really fantastic way to spend an afternoon and highly recommended if you come here.

The Toronto skyline from Toronto Island

The truly essential thing though to do while in Ontario is to go to Niagara Falls. It's an easy if not exactly cheap day trip from Toronto. And it's truly stunning. Straddling the border between Canada and the USA, there are two parts to the falls - the "bridal gown" falls which run in a straight line on the US side, and the much more breathtaking "horseshoe" falls, shaped as the name would suggest, on the Canadian side. You don't have to spend any money once there to admire the falls from various angles, and you can linger for as long as you want on the path which runs directly adjacent (surprisingly so) to the horseshoe falls. Over one million bathfuls of water course over the edge every single second, which constantly generates large quantities of mist - you can't wander round without getting quite damp, even on a warm sunny day. But you shouldn't really get too bothered by that, because you'll be too busy going 'wow' at the sheer natural power and beauty in evidence. There are several ways that the park authorities part tourists from more of their cash (in fairness, only to channel it back into the upkeep of the park); I did one of these, the Queen of the Mist, a hardy boat which takes you past the bridal gown falls up close and then heads pretty much into the crescent of the horseshoe falls. You're provided with a poncho as standard to avoid getting soaked by the mist. Unsurprisingly the boat is packed but I found it well worth it to get properly up close to the immense fury of the cascading water.

A still picture cannot possibly convey the awesome power...

Unfortunately, in the close vicinity of the falls are also truly ghastly tourist traps of every description - "tacky" does not come close, but fortunately they're concentrated on a street which runs perpendicular, not parallel, to the falls, so you can safely run away screaming and pretty much forget they're there. So mercifully, you don't need to be put off as you can pretty much concentrate on the nature.

The bus tour to Niagara Falls that I booked also featured a stop at the small town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, a deliberately quaint place full of cute colonial 19th Century buildings with traditional awnings housing hat shops, high-end chocolate and cake makers, hotels serving afternoon tea, and so on. They don't allow coaches or other heavy vehicles through the town, so the largest form of transport to be seen was numerous horse-drawn carriages. It's all a little bit artificial, but worth an hour of anyone's time to see a very creditable attempt to preserve a tiny corner of the 19th Century British Empire in Canada (in a real town of 15,000 inhabitants). The tour then concluded with a brief wine tasting stop (the Niagara area is apparently quite prolific wine country, although I'm not sure how many Europeans ever see evidence of that in their restaurants or off-licences), most interesting for the taste of ice wine which is a bit of a local speciality. Think dessert wine and then think sweeter still, and you're pretty much there. They produce it by allowing the grapes to stay on the vine after all the other grapes have been picked some time in the early autumn, until around January by which time the Canadian winter has frozen them solid. They are then picked in the middle of the night, preferably when the temperature is around -15C, and squeezed immediately. The water in the grapes will be entirely frozen, but the sugar won't be - so they get two or three drops of liquid out of each grape. Unsurprisingly this is a costly process, so ice wine is expensive, but what I tasted would certainly be very pleasant as a dessert wine in very small quantities - the bottles are small and I don't think you'd want to drink a load of it. It was mentioned also that overindulging would give you the mother of all hangovers.

Niagara-on-the-Lake

I didn't do that, but I was pretty under the weather for nearly the whole of my stay in Toronto. First I had a nasty cold virus which took an inordinately long time to clear up. Honking and hooting regularly with a tissue to your nose is not a good look, especially in the summer - but I take this as a sign that my body was run down from the various stresses of budget backpacking on my tight itinerary, such as regular long journeys, sharing a range of dorms with dodgy air conditioning, crashing with friends and Couchsurfers in sharply varying degrees of comfort and privacy, often eating less well than usual, unavailability of gym workouts, and a lack of proper solo quiet time. It's a strange anomaly that at the same time as I've been incredibly mentally relaxed, I've almost certainly got a bit physically stressed. I then had some sort of chronic (thankfully not acute) digestive upset - goodness knows where from this time. Given some of the dodgy food and catering facilities I've used over the past four and a half months, I should probably just be grateful that it was the first time it's happened since India. The net result is that although Toronto has a large gay scene - with a Pride the week before I arrived which attracts the small matter of one million (!) participants annually - alas I can't tell you very much about it except that it's clearly big, visible and confident.

In case you haven't got the idea yet, I really liked Toronto, one of those places I just felt at home, and pretty high up the list (yes yes, it's rather a long list now) of places I hope to get back to.

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2393691&id=61207375&l=90bc46830a