Julian Worker Travel – A few ideas for your next trip in every direction

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

I found an interesting modern sculpture in the same block as the Victoria Police HQ. To me, the sculpture looks like people either stopping a column falling over or supporting the column. I wondered whether it was a metaphor for the role the police believe they have within society. Along Caledonia Avenue is the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre where the Victoria Royals play Ice Hockey.

Close by is the Gate of Harmonious Interest that marks the entrance to Victoria’s Chinatown, the second oldest in North America after San Francisco. Once a ghetto for newcomers, Chinatown is now a heritage area centred on Fisgard Street with restaurants and lanterns on lamp posts. On one side of this street is Dragon Alley, and on the other the more famous Fan Tan Alley, the narrowest street in Canada–only ninety centimetres wide at its narrowest. Both are worth investigating for their shops. I went along Fan Tan Alley away from Fisgard Street and arrived on Pandora Avenue. I turned right to look at the Johnson Street bridge, Canada’s largest single-leaf bascule bridge. There have been four bridges spanning the narrows between the Inner Harbour and the Upper Harbour with the latest bridge built between 2013 and 2018. The bridge has a three-lane roadway, a pedestrian walkway on the south side, and a multi-use pathway on the north side.

On the opposite side of Pandora Avenue is the Market Square, a restored 19th-century courtyard surrounded by three floors of heritage shops, restaurants, and offices. Heading towards the Inner Harbour, I came across the galleries and sidewalk restaurants in Bastion Square, and Munro’s books where I found items of interest to buy including a wonderful selection of cards. Soon I was back at the Empress Hotel.

In September 2020, opposite the hotel was a statue of Captain James Cook. Cook was here because he sailed through this area during his round the world voyages. I noted with interest that both Captain Bligh – he of Mutiny on the Bounty fame – and George Vancouver served under Cook during his third and final voyage. Bligh was on HMS Resolution and Vancouver was on HMS Discovery.

In September 2021, Captain Cook was gone.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

If you’re staying in the centre, then it’s best to take the metro out to the Olympic Park and Botanical Garden. The nearest stop to the park is Viau and Pie-IX is the nearest to the gardens. At the park, the Biodome houses five different natural environments under its gigantic dome: Antarctica, Rainforest, woodlands, aquatic life in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and the Atlantic coastline. There’s not just vegetation and birds but larger animals too, such as capybaras, monkeys, and sloths, although anyone who spots a sloth should get a gold medal. They blend in perfectly with the vegetation and aren’t noted for moving quickly.

Next door to The Biodome is the Planetarium with its exciting exhibits on the cosmos. It’s impossible to miss the Montreal Tower hovering over the Olympic Stadium, where the 1976 Olympics took place. At a 165-metres high and at a 45-degree angle, this tower is the world’s tallest inclined structure, although the bilevel cable car going to the top wasn’t carrying passengers when I was there. The Aquatic Centre is also part of the stadium complex and has six swimming pools plus diving towers. Place Nadia Comaneci commemorates the Romanian gymnast who scored the first perfect ten in Olympic gymnastics history on the uneven bars and went on to amass seven such scores during the Games. In the Place, the names of all the athletes competing at the Games are listed along with the Gold Medal winners in each discipline.

The Saputo Stadium, home of the Major Soccer League club CF Montreal, is also close by. Follow the signs across Rue Sherbrooke Est to see the third-largest Botanical Garden in the world. To the left of the ticket office is the greenhouse housing the cacti and succulents. This is in the same area as the gift shop. Entrance to the 75-hectare outdoor garden is to the right of the ticket office. A map is an absolute necessity, so the highlights are easier to find, including the large Chinese garden complete with temple and large plastic animals in the ponds. The arboretum is extensive and you could make a day of it in the gardens as there are plenty of places for a picnic.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

The National Gallery of Canada has a giant spider outside, so you can’t miss it. On the other side of Sussex Drive from the gallery is the Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica. Inside the gallery, Forty-Part Motet is a brilliant sound sculpture by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff  in the Indigenous and Canadian Galleries. This sculpture is a reworking of Spem in Alium, a piece by 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. Forty recorded choir voices play back through forty speakers positioned around the Rideau Street Convent Chapel, full name the Chapel of the Covent of our Lady of the Sacred Heart. The effect of the work on visitors is moving and accentuated by the beautiful interior of the chapel, built in 1887-1888 by priest-architect Georges Bouillon. By walking around the room, the listener hears the song through the different perspectives of the individual singers. This chapel is the only example of its kind in North America from this period to include a Tudor-style, fan-vaulted ceiling. Museum authorities saved this beautiful building from demolition and reconstructed all the 1,123 pieces of its interior architecture inside the museum in 1998. This must have been quite the task. The Indigenous and Canadian Galleries display almost eight hundred paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, silver, and decorative art objects from across Canada, dating from 5,000 years ago to 1967. Recent acquisitions include works by artists such as A.Y. Jackson, Lawren S. Harris, Ruben Komangapik, and Emily Carr.

The sculptures Brillo Soap Pad Boxes by Andy Warhol and Bedroom Ensemble by Claes Oldenburg blur the lines between real life and art. A story told about the boxes is that in 1965 thirty Brillo Soap Pads Boxes intended for a Toronto exhibition were held at Canadian customs, as officials questioned their status as art. The officials contacted Charles Comfort, then director of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) who, by examining a photograph, determined the boxes were not art, but merchandise.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

Close to the Winnipeg Art Gallery is the Manitoba Legislative Building dating from 1920. The surrounding grass and gardens hold some notable sculptures including a memorial to the Ukrainian poet Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814-1861) by the New York sculptor Andrew Daragan and aided by Winnipeg sculptor Roman Kowal. Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker unveiled this sculpture on the west grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building on 9 July 1961. About fifty yards away is another monument, this time to the famous five women I mentioned in Calgary, who, this time, are standing by or seated at a table discussing their plans.

Near to the Union Station is the large railway hotel called the Fort Garry Hotel dating from 1913. Over the road from the hotel is an historic site, Fort Garry, also known as Upper Fort Garry, which was a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. This post was set up in 1822 close to the former site of the North West Company’s Fort Gibraltar which was destroyed in 1816.

Fort Garry was named after Nicholas Garry, deputy governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This post served as the centre of the fur trade within the Red River Colony. In 1826, a severe flood destroyed the fort. HBC rebuilt the fort in 1835 and named it Upper Fort Garry to differentiate it from Lower Fort Garry, 32 km downriver, which was established in 1831. Throughout the mid-to-late 19th century, Upper Fort Garry was central to the administration of the HBC and the surrounding settlement.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

Saskatoon is on the South Saskatchewan River in the Canadian Prairies. There are leafy parks on both sides of the river which make lovely places for a stroll during the day. I walked from the Riversdale area of the city through River Landing, where the Remai Modern Art Gallery is, under the bridges and along the Meewasin Valley trail to Kiwanis Memorial Park and then on to Kinsmen Park.

Riversdale is a lovely area with street art, modern renditions of old travel posters, reinvigorated buildings, a superb second-hand bookshop, and plenty of places to eat and drink for all meals of the day. The art includes musk oxen on 20th Street West, a Spirit of Alliance sculpture on a roundabout at Avenue A South, and the Egg Money sculpture on Sonnenschein Way at Avenue B. This piece is a tribute to Saskatchewan pioneer women. Commissioned by the Saskatoon German Days Committee and created by artists Don and Shirley Begg, it depicts a woman feeding chickens while two children play nearby. On the granite blocks surrounding the bronze sculpture are the names of twenty-four Saskatchewan pioneer women from varying ethnic backgrounds who came to Canada in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The posters from the classical days of luxury travel on the French Riviera are on 20th Street West near the Magic Lantern Roxy Theatre just before Peryton Books, a wonderful used bookstore with plenty of space to walk around and where the staff have labelled the various sections of books clearly. On the opposite side of the street, one block further west, is the unassuming Park Café where you can get a filling breakfast that will last you the entire day. It’s the sort of place where the servers reserve favourite corner tables for people who eat there every Sunday of the year. From here it’s a pleasant stroll down a street full of good-looking houses towards the river and Victoria Park, which has two wonderful sights. You hear the wind chimes on the sculpture, The Coming Spring, before you see its slender curves amongst the trees. Close by is the beautifully decorated Chinese pagoda, with distinctive amber roof tiles and glorious paintings of dragons on the underside of the roof.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

For me, Northwest Territories (NWT) is where the scale and grandeur of Canada hits home. Northwest Territories is 1 million square kilometres bigger than Germany, whose population is over eighty million. The Acasta Gneiss, the world’s oldest rocks–at least those measured by the radiometric dating of zircon crystals–are in NWT to the east of the Great Bear Lake. The gneiss was metamorphosed 3.58 to 4.031 billion years ago (approximately). The Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely in Canada (Superior and Huron straddle the Canada–US border) and the eighth largest lake in the world (if you accept the Caspian Sea is the largest). The shoreline of the Great Bear Lake measures 2700 kilometres. This is a harsh part of the world as the Great Bear Lake can freeze from November to July, all 31,153 km² of it – that’s an area bigger than Belgium.

I visited Yellowknife, the capital of the NWT, which is about three hundred kilometres south of the Great Bear Lake. Flying to Yellowknife from Whitehorse convinced me that Canada has as many lakes as the rest of the world combined. Yellowknife is on the Great Slave Lake, the tenth largest lake in the world. It’s also worth mentioning that if you draw a line due north of Yellowknife to the Arctic Ocean in neighbouring Nunavut, the line doesn’t cross a single road. That’s a distance of six hundred kilometres.

As with Whitehorse, from the airport it was a ten-minute ride into the centre of the city, where I saw four six- and seven-storey high-rise buildings. There is one major crossroads in the centre of the city from where you can get to all the places you want to go. There are no mountains or even hills to speak of, although the road down to the older part of the city by the Great Slave Lake is steep and misshapen.

This is an extract from my newest book called

9 Canadian Cities: Victoria to Montreal via Whitehorse and Yellowknife

The Old Log Church Museum (OLCM) collects material connected with or related to the history of the Anglican church in the Yukon. That history goes back to 1861 — fully 35 years before they discovered gold in the Klondike. The Old Log Church Museum’s mission is to stimulate interest in that history and in the significant role the church played in the Yukon for over 150 years. The permanent collection of the OLCM has over 4500 objects, which range from archival materials to ecclesiastical vestments and artifacts. Just as fascinating are the stories they tell of the pioneers, like that of Isaac O. Stringer, a bishop of the Yukon for 26 years.

Even today people refer to him as “the Bishop who ate his boots.” Bishop Stringer and a missionary worker, Charles Johnson, got stranded in 1909 when an early winter storm froze the river they were following by canoe. They were travelling from Fort McPherson to Dawson City, between two of the bishop’s dioceses. They spent 51 days trudging through the wilderness before getting back to civilization. Nearing starvation during the ordeal, the two men boiled their sealskin and walrus skin boots to suck the nutrients from their shoes.