Results tagged “bestplaces”

Back in November, I published a couple of posts about my favourite places that I've visited around North America. I haven't traveled especially extensively around the rest of the world (I've never been to any part of Asia, Africa, or South America, for instance), but I have seen some of it, including a few amazing things, mostly in Italy, but also in a few other places. In rough order of when I visited them, here's my last batch of favourite places:

• There are vast and impressive underground rapid-transit systems in many cities around the globe, but the London Underground (a.k.a. "The Tube") was the first. It was also the first to use electric trains, has more stations than any other, and includes more track than any but Shanghai's. The Tube has been around so long there are dozens of abandoned stations, some many decades out of use. It also inspired one of the world's truly great maps, and even several typefaces. Personally, on my one visit to London in 1985, it simply amazed me how easy (though disorienting) it was to be in one place, descend under the city, take a train, and end up somewhere else.
  
  
• Moscow's Red Square really is something. Outlasting both the czars and the Blosheviks, it has been the city's hub, from which the spokes of Moscow's roads emanate, for more than 500 years, centuries before the Soviets put Lenin's Tomb on one side. I visited not long after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the U.S.S.R. (again in 1985), so Red Square was still the hub of world Communism. But standing in it, despite the indelible images of huge military parades in my mind, it transcended such a narrow focus. The fantasy onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, the imposing facade of the GUM department store, the Kremlin wall—history mashed itself together while I stood in the gigantic cobbled space of the Square itself. There was no doubt: I was in Russia, dammit, and it was a genuine, historic place, not simply the domain of Red Scare boogeymen.
  
  
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  My school group took an overnight train 400 miles from Moscow to St. Petersburg (still known as Leningrad at the time). That city is as close as I've ever come to my maternal grandparents' home country of Finland. My key memory of Leningrad is really the bone-chilling winter wind across the Neva River, but the place that made the biggest impression was the Hermitage Museum, which encompasses six huge buildings along the riverbank, and contains the largest collection of paintings in the world. It is the stereotype of what you think of as a classical museum: room after ornate room of sculptures, pictures, jewelry, antiquities, and more, stretching beyond your ability to comprehend. We had merely part of the day to see a fraction of the Hermitage, and I was a somewhat-skittish teenager, so I didn't pay as close attention as I should have. Still, I haven't forgotten it.
  
  
• The most peculiar thing about Rome is that you can be walking down a modern, bustling city street, like you might see in any city, then turn a corner and confront any number of huge ancient marvels, right there in the middle of everything. The Pantheon is one of those. First you see the ranks of stone columns holding up the entranceway. Then, go inside and you stand under what is still the world's largest unsupported concrete dome, constructed in honour of the bustling throng of ancient Greco-Roman gods, and lit by daylight streaming through the central oculus at the apex. It is a masterpiece of architecture and engineering, still astonishing for its beauty and symmetry: the crown of the roof, for instance, is 58 m above the floor, and the dome is exactly the same diameter. It would be an amazing achievement to build today; the Romans made it almost 2000 years ago.
  
  
• If you want evidence that the Dark Ages really were a stagnant time, go across town in Rome to the buildings of the Vatican. It took a millennium and a half for architecture and art to surpass the achievements of the Roman Empire, so these magnificent structures are mere youngsters compared to the Pantheon or the Colosseum. Michelangelo painted the dome of the Sistine Chapel 500 years ago, and the dome of St. Peter's Basilica was finished even more recently, in 1590. St. Peter's itself is awe-inspiring, but also overwrought: every interior surface is festooned with gold, marble, reliefs, sculptures, relics, tombs, and intricate tile work. However, I was able to walk up the many, many steps to the top of the dome (still the world's tallest) and look out over the magnificent city—well worth the climb. And despite seeing it long before the most recent restoration, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the wall featuring Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" were still mind-blowing—especially knowing some background about their controversies, then and now.
  
  
• What? Three Italian domes in a row? Okay, I know it's a bit ridiculous, but each has its place in history, and its own appeal. The Piazza del Duomo (a.k.a. The Duomo) in Florence is probably the prettiest from the outside, with the dome's distinctive white marble sides and red top matched by its bell tower. The dome was created by Brunelleschi, the tower in part by Giotto. Together they were the nucleus of the Renaissance beginning in the 1300s, where artists finally figured out how to paint with realistic perspective by rendering the buildings of the Duomo on canvas. In my brief school tour of Italy in 1986, the historic centre of Florence—with red tile roofs as far as the eye can see, surrounded by Tuscan hills—was my favourite part.
  
  
• The Leaning Tower of Pisa has always leaned. In fact, if there hadn't been a hundred-year war-driven interruption in its construction (which let the soil settle), it likely would have collapsed before it was finished, so flawed was its original design and placement. And if the tower were entirely leveled out, it would still curve a little to one side, because its floors were constructed asymmetrically in the 13th century to try to compensate for the tilt. However, it no longer leans as much as it used to, and it's no longer tilting further all the time: restoration and counterweighting completed in 2001 have stopped it. But when I visited, it was still moving, and leaning about as far as it ever did—about 5.5°. My friends and I scaled the steps to the top, which I believe you're now allowed to do again. It's worth doing, because the tower is such a cliché on so many badly-painted walls of cheap Italian restaurants and pizza joints around the world. But it's real, and yes it does lean like that.
  
  
• Our last stop in Italy might be the most amazing: the City of Venice. How did it ever get built, a whole city that seems afloat, but is instead inundated by design (though the Venetians of the past didn't count on rising sea levels), and that even today houses 60,000 people living on deep-driven piles on the surface of the sea? The old city is Europe's largest car-free area—unique, beautiful, filled with fabulous architecture, art, museums, restaurants, stores, bridges, cobbled walking streets, and canals, of course. (It can be smelly too.) I was heavily overcharged for a simple Coke in the Piazza San Marco, ostensibly for the tunes played by live musicians between outdoor tables at our restaurant. But I didn't care. There is no place else like it.
  
  
• Let's cross several oceans and continents to the other side of the globe. I've never been to Sydney, Australia—I merely stopped over at the airport on the way to and from the Melbourne Music Festival with my band in 1995. Yet the city left a lasting impression because of the aerial view I had of Sydney Harbour, the largest natural harbour in the world. As we descended, I marveled at the intricate convolutions of the submerged valleys that form Port Jackson, and suddenly the worldwide beach-going reputation of Sydneysiders made sense. I wanted to come back and see the place from ground level, but I never did.
  
  
• My final favourite place on this list is more prosaic than the rest, and rather newer. Unless you know about it while driving by, you might not necessarily notice the Esplanade Hotel (a.k.a. The Espy), across from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. But it is the oldest continuously operating live music venue in the country, originally built in 1878. Numerous attempts to redevelop the site have met with furious protests from residents of the city, because The Espy is legendary. In 1995, my band The Flu took out a loan to fly to Australia to be part of the Melbourne Music Festival, and The Espy was one venue we played, as well as seeing several other acts there during the month we were in town. I recall it as a building where I've had some of the most fun in my life. If The Flu had become the international pop-rock phenomenon we were trying to be, I would identify this as the place where that really got started. Since it didn't happen, I think of The Espy as the place where that could have gotten started.

Had I been to more places around the world in my life, I'm sure this list and its two predecessors would be different. But these are the places I have seen, and liked. If you choose to go to any of them, perhaps you will too.

Here's a second blog post about some of the places I've been that I recommend—some natural, some artificial, in rough order from nearest to farthest from my house. Go back to read part 1 or check out part 3 if you like.

• My wife introduced me to Cannon Beach, Oregon in the 1990s. Near the northwest tip of that state's famous Pacific coast, it's a somewhat pricey tourist town for a good reason, with a long, stunning sandy beach punctuated by offshore seastacks and the imposing monolith of Haystack Rock. We've taken the kids there on family summer vacations four times since they were born, starting when our younger daughter was only a few months old. From Vancouver, we can reach it in a day by car, either via Portland or via the Columbia River and Astoria—in many ways it's easier to get there than to the also-wonderful Long Beach near Tofino on Vancouver Island, since there's no ferry and better roads. I hope we can visit Cannon Beach at least once more, like we did Tofino last year.
  
  
• Take the Trans-Canada Highway or the Canadian Pacific Railway east from Vancouver, into the Selkirk Mountains, and you reach the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass. Depending on the weather, you might not see much, or you might gasp at the peaks overhead. Whether going by road or rail, you'll pass through tunnels and snowsheds, and by train you'll cross over deep gorges via astonishing bridges. In winter, the pass region features one of the most extensive avalanche control programs in the world, where Canadian military guns blast dangerous snow accumulations off the slopes to prevent deadly slides. Even if you're passing through on the way elsewhere, don't forget to look up.
  
  
• Conversely, if you drive west across the northern U.S. along the I-90 freeway, there is a point in Wyoming where the Interstate veers north, skirting the Rocky Mountain foothills. Near Ranchester, you can leave the I-90 and take Highway 14 west again into those foothills, and then up the steep, imposing escarpment beyond Dayton, where the switchbacks take you from 4000 feet of altitude to 7500 feet over only a few dozen miles of road, between Steamboat Point and Horseshoe Mountain. (Make sure your car can handle it.) From time to time, roadside signs tell you the age and type of rocks you're driving past, and you can stop at occasional pullouts to admire the view of the parched landscape you just climbed out of. When I read those signs in 1991, I noticed something: as my friend Andrew and I drove higher and higher in my parents' borrowed station wagon, the rocks were getting younger. In forming the Rockies and more over tens of millions of years, geological processes have not only thrust up the huge mountain ranges of western North America, in the process they flipped the land over like a continental omelette. Holy crap.
  
  
• Keep following Highway 14 and you'll climb up over 9000 feet above sea level, then down, then up again, along valleys and canyons until eventually you reach the remarkable caldera of Yellowstone National Park. You might feel a bit nervous knowing that you're standing on a potential supervolcano, but you'll also be seeing stuff you don't anywhere else: not only the famous geysers, hot pools, prismatic springs, and ever-changing hydrothermal formations, but also abundant and often fearless wildlife (including bison, bears, moose, elk, cougars, and wolves), and forest ecosystems recovering from recent fires. At night, as at Crater Lake in Oregon, the altitude and distance from cities give you an extraordinary view of the starry sky.
  
  
• I've written before about the appeal of the American Southwest deserts, and their focus is, of course, the Grand Canyon. Some places are less impressive than legend makes them out to be (giant Redwood and Sequoia forests in California, for me, since they're much like groves I can walk to from my house), some are exactly as you might expect (Mount Rushmore, which was pretty much as big as I thought, but no bigger), and some are far more impressive than you can imagine in advance. The Grand Canyon is one of those. Yes, that's a cliché, but because it's true. You won't get an idea of the place until you go, and you should. While you're in the area, visit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in nearby Utah too—wonderful and beautiful in their own way, but not on the same scale.
  
  
• No doubt there are more impressive caves in the world, but one amazing talent of Americans is making natural features accessible to regular people, and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico demonstrates that genius. You can, and should, hike into the massive cavern complex using a reasonably easy paved trail with railings, lighting, and benches to sit and rest. Or you can simply take a high-speed elevator 750 feet down into the Earth from the flat New Mexico desert (parking nearby)—at the bottom there is a restaurant and even a post office where you can mail letters to your friends and family from deep underground. Some of the Big Room is wheelchair accessible. If you did hike down, the elevator makes returning to the surface a breeze. Yet that doesn't detract from the spectacle of the formations, which are enhanced by coloured lights and explanatory plaques. I've been spelunking in less-developed caves, with flashlights and hardhats, and that has its own rewards. But at Carlsbad Caverns, you'll wonder at both the stalactites and the engineering effort that went into making it easy for you to see them.
  
  
• Since the jet-travel revolution of the 1960s, Hawaii has been a favourite destination for Vancouverites. In five hours or so, we can go from a wet and cold Vancouver winter to a tropical volcanic Pacific paradise that's still part of our neighbour the U.S.A. Yet I never visited it until 2006, when I was 37 years old. Hawaii includes many wonders, but I missed some of the most spectacular, such as eruptions on the Big Island or the crater of Haleakala—my family and I only saw Oahu, and even there the surf wasn't particularly large on the legendary North Shore. However, Pali Lookout was still something else. We have mountains here in British Columbia, and sometimes crazy winds, but they don't come together like they do at Pali, a cliffside perch overlooking Windward Oahu on the east side of the island. A natural wind tunnel, it is one of the breeziest places I've ever been, yet the blast is warm, not freezing as it would be at home. The nearby sheer mountainsides are unlike anything in my home province, striated as they are by deep tropical erosion gullies and entirely coated in warm-climate vegetation. Despite its precarious spot, Pali Lookout is easy to drive to in a car or tour bus, being just off the Pali Highway.
  
  
• The CN Tower in Toronto was never the tallest artificial thing in the world, but for more than 30 years it was the tallest freestanding structure—one that doesn't need guy wires or the buoyancy of water to keep it up. It's still taller than any occupied building in the Western Hemisphere. Given the rate at which new supertall buildings and towers are now being built, it's unlikely any of them will hold the title for that long. The CN Tower is not an especially pretty thing, especially close up with its vast buttresses of concrete, but it has an Apollo-era Tomorrowland rocket vibe that newer competitors don't emulate. While visiting my parents in Toronto when they lived there, I once went to the bar and ordered a 7-Up, which came in an appropriately tall and skinny glass. From the Sky Pod observation deck you can look out more than 100 miles over the flat expanse of Greater Toronto and across Lake Ontario to the United States. You can also visit the glass floor to look down at the city below your feet, and the outdoor observation deck to feel a high-altitude wind that only birds felt for millennia.
  
  
• I never went inside the Chrysler Building during my one visit to New York City ten years ago, but that's no matter. Its gleaming metal spire with nested arches and triangle windows, Art Deco retro yet still vibrantly modern, "always looks like the future," in the words of Salon's Stephanie Zacharek back in 2002. Thankfully, no one so far has ever considered renaming it either. You can stand near the Empire State Building, like the CN Tower, and look up, saying to yourself, "Man, that's tall." But with the Chrysler Building, night or day, you say, "Man, that's beautiful." I wish Vancouver had even one skyscraper so pretty. Then again, even Manhattan has only the one.

Next time, we'll go overseas.

Given the severity of my cancer, it's unlikely I'll be traveling all that far from now on, no matter how much longer or shorter I live. I have been fortunate enough, however, to have visited a few of the world's spectacular and famous places. Since I live in beautiful and spectacular British Columbia, some of them are quite close by.

This is the first of a series of blog posts about some of the places I've been that I recommend—some natural, some artificial, in rough order from nearest to farthest from my house—see part 2 and part 3. Many are popular tourist attractions and are quite easy to reach for nearly anyone with just a bit of money and time. That's fine by me. They deserve the recognition:

• The Stawamus Chief, a ridiculous sheer cliff face just south of Squamish, is a short drive from Vancouver on the Sea-to-Sky Highway. It's our local El Capitan, and I've never even thought of climbing it, but my wife has hiked up the back side with school groups a few times, and once I rode by its rear base at the start of an adventurous mountain biking trip. The Chief itself is over 700 m (2300 ft) high, a grey granite slab rising almost straight out of the ocean. Even if all you do is stand near the bottom and watch cliff climbers through binoculars, it's worth the trip.
  
  
• The world's longest and highest cable-car gondola isn't in the Alps, but another hour or so north of the Chief, above the ski resort in Whistler. It's the new Peak2Peak Gondola. In the middle of the span between Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, as you cross above Fitzsimmons Creek, you are more than 430 m (1400 ft) above ground. The 10-minute ride is smooth and safe, but no matter your feeling about heights (I love them), somehow the trip still seems more appropriate for a helicopter or a small plane.
  
  
• People from Vancouver think we know old-growth temperate rainforests. We have Stanley Park and the North Shore mountains, and dozens more parks and watersheds full of immense trees dripping with moss, right within our metropolitan area. But you need to take a ferry to Nanaimo, drive north to Parksville, and then go inland so you can reach Cathedral Grove. The highway to Port Alberni slices right through it, so like the Chief and the Peak 2 Peak, it's easy to reach. But unlike most of B.C.'s coastal old growth, it's never been cut down for lumber, and is a prime example of a rich rainforest valley bottom. There are firs and cedars and spruces hundreds of years old, larger and taller than anything you'll see without an arduous trip to distant B.C. wilderness, or to California's Sequoia and Redwood preserves. Personally, I think B.C.'s trees are prettier, especially in the snow.
  
  
• Some claim that the world's largest tide pool is on an island at the tip of the Broken Group in Barkley Sound, off the West Coast of Vancouver Island in Pacific Rim National Park. I've seen it, and I don't know if it really is the largest, but regardless, it didn't blow me away. That's because most of it is pretty barren of life, not chock-full of it like so many tide pools in this area. I don't even know exactly what mini-island it's supposed to be on—maybe Wouwer or Howell—but if you find it (you require a boat) and venture to its exposed southwest coast, then instead of looking down, look up to the horizon. Massive basalt sea stacks offshore look like railway cars crushed into the ocean. Waves that have crossed the Pacific explode into them, and you can feel the collisions in your chest, even from far away. And then think about where you're looking: directly south, beyond those sea stacks, there is nothing but Pacific Ocean (no people, no islands) until you reach Antarctica, 9000 miles away. My band wrote a song about it once, in which I called that spot the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
  
  
• It's not easy to watch big planes get built. Military contractors are expectedly secretive, and if you want to visit the Airbus factory in Toulouse, France, you need to confirm in writing at least 45 days in advance, with the waiting list still months long. Plus, you have to find your way to Toulouse. Much easier is a trip to Everett, just north of Seattle, Washington. If it's not the busy summer season, as it wasn't when we went in May last year, you can walk right up to a ticket counter at the Future of Flight museum, and be inside the Boeing Everett Assembly Building in half an hour. You're prohibited from taking photos, or even bringing anything resembling a camera with you, but then you have more attention to turn to the activities within the most voluminous building in the world. The new Boeing 787, the long-haul 777, the transatlantic champion 767, and perhaps the world's greatest aircraft, the Boeing 747, all come together inside this single structure. It is a marvelous testament to what people can do—and it's absolutely goddamn huge to boot.
  
  
• The Cascade Volcanoes are fearsome and beautiful, forming a chain of smoking peaks from B.C. to northern California. My favourite of them, however, is extinct: Crater Lake in southern Oregon, formed from the carcass of Mount Mazama, which erupted so violently a few thousand years ago that it collapsed on itself, leaving a basin to be filled with rain and meltwater (no streams run in or out). At its deepest it reaches nearly 600 m (2000 ft), making it the ninth deepest lake in the world, and by far the clearest. The blue colour of the water is unlike any you'll see anywhere else. The rimside lodge is spectacular. The views from anywhere around the lake are astonishing. And a trip on a tour boat across the lake or onto Wizard Island is remarkable. Because of heavy snowfall, the season is short, but try to make a visit happen.
  
  
• Greater Los Angeles has Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, and Magic Mountain. It has Beverly Hills and the Hollywood sign, as well as the La Brea Tar Pits. It has an unbelievable tangle of freeways, and miles and miles of famous surfing beaches. I do not know if it surpasses Rio de Janeiro for plastic surgeries per capita, but I do know what L.A. has that nothing else does: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), near Pasadena. Open houses happen only once a year, but I was able to take a private tour with my dad (through his connections in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada) almost 30 years ago, around the time JPL was processing data from the Voyager 2 probe as it passed Saturn. JPL is an unassuming place, nothing spectacular to look at. It's an academic campus in the foothills, but it's where people have revealed some of the first close-up images from our solar system. When you hear the names of interstellar probes like Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens, and the Mars rovers, JPL is where they came from, and where they've been piloted and run. Plus the people who work there get to say, "Yes, this is rocket science!"

Next time, a wet windy lookout, the Grand Canyon (of course), and a not-especially-tall building.