First day in Vancouver that has been sunny, and apparently 9 degrees c outside! Tropical! We are going out for another tour, this time in the sun (it has been drizzling since we arrived).
We walked down to Stanley Park, through the christmas park, and then walked around the sea wall.
It must have been about 20km by the time we got home, but it was pretty fun. Lots of pretty views, of the different parts of Vancouver, and the mountains behind. At one point we saw otters, which made me very excited (I had spent much of the day on San Juan looking out for these little guys). There were three of them, and we saw them first swimming. They would dive down, their little tails sticking up in the air until they disappeared. They surfaced, and swam to the nearest rock, where they proceeded to place their crab on the rock, and then eat it. All of it. Didn’t take long, and they didn’t seem to care about the shells or the fact that the crabs were still alive. They also fought each other over the crabs, and one was just rubbing himself on the weed on the rock. Maybe he wanted to smell like crab. At the time I thought they were sea otters, but after meeting sea otters at the aquarium, I deicided they were river otters, as they didn’t seem big enough for sea otters. ALso, they got out of the water a lot.
There were heaps of large ships waiting in the harbour, perhaps for the right time to come in? I counted at least 10 just waiting. The sun was low in the sky, nearly setting at about 4pm, and we finished our walk and made our way back to the hostel.
After a quick nap and dinner, we joined a couple of the other hostellers to go out to the christmas market, but that unfortunately had a line that stretched (literally) halfway around the block, so we went back to the park instead. At the park, we got to visit the Christmas area, where they had a squillion lights, scenes and decorations set up, and they had a cute little xmas train, that takes you on a 10min ride around a track, through even more squillion lights and scenes. It was so bright, and very very pretty… if I had to compare it to anything… In Rotorua on Xmas eve, we would get the list of houses participating in the christmas lights trail, and we would drive around and visit them all. That was pretty cool. This was like all those houses, plus every other house decorated in Rotorua, all in one small area. They even had a 6m tall reindeer. Hot chocolate and apple juice and gingerbread and all sorts. ‘
Dale and Becca 