UBC – Vancouver – Part 2

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Outside, in the area between the museum and the cliff, you will find totem poles of the Kwakiutl, Haida, and Gitxsan people as well as two Haida houses, one for the living and one for the dead. From here you get a good view of the main building of the museum, a unique design if ever there was one. If you like Erickson’s architectural style, you may be interested in visiting the Burnaby Mountain campus of the other major university in Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, whose main buildings were also designed by Erickson.

The Nitobe Memorial Garden is an authentic Japanese tea garden where visitors can stroll past waterfalls, rivers, islands, and mountains. The highlights are the delightfully pruned maples and cherries, and of course all paths lead to the teahouse. The cherry blossoms in April or May and the iris blooms in June are spectacular. The UBC Botanical Gardens and Centre for Plant Research was established in the 1960’s and is a 70-acre coastal forest with plants from temperate regions around the world. For rhododendron fans, the Asian Garden features more than 400 species, while traditional gardeners will enjoy the physic garden for medicinal herbs, which is planted around a sundial in a geometric design. The Food Garden attracts many visitors simply because of the name, and I think some people are genuinely disappointed that it contains espaliered fruit trees and the latest varieties of vegetables. In the autumn a week-long apple tasting festival is held here. The E.H. Lohbruner Alpine Garden is the largest alpine garden in North America. The UBC Rose Garden was completed in 1994 and is on top of an underground car park. On a clear day, you can see the mountains along Howe Sound for miles. From the Rose Garden the campus stretches along tree-lined roads with a pleasing mixture of older and newer buildings. One of these is the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, a beautiful theatre that holds regular concerts of classical music featuring distinguished artists from around the world.

UBC Vancouver

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Surrounded by lush rain forest, the campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) protrudes into the Pacific Ocean. Most of the Point Grey peninsula is given over to the Pacific Spirit Regional Park, an area of Pacific red cedar. Some 34 trails meander for over 50 kilometres through this park. When hiking here, you wouldn’t believe you are only half an hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver. These trails are popular with dog walkers, joggers, and mountain bikers, but their presence won’t detract from the sense of tranquility that prevails. Birdwatchers may see blue herons and will definitely hear woodpeckers hammering away.

The Museum of Anthropology is an Arthur Erickson-designed museum that is located on the cliffs of Point Grey, overlooking English Bay and the North Shore Mountains. It is probably Canada’s most memorable museum, housing one of the world’s finest and most colourful displays of Northwest Coast First Nations art. Inside the soaring glass and concrete structure of the Great Hall, with its 14-metre high windows that allow natural illumination to flood into the interior, you will see the totem poles, feast dishes, and canoes of the Gitxsan, Haida, and Coast Salish peoples amongst others. The museum also features the world’s largest collection of works by acclaimed Haida artist Bill Reid, including his most famous sculpture “The Raven and the First Men”. The award-winning Koerner Gallery within the museum houses a collection of European ceramics unique to North America. The museum also has around 15,000 objects from around the world that are accessible to the public in the Visible Storage Galleries. This is a unique way of displaying artifacts that invites the comparing and contrasting of objects from different cultures around the world, without visitors touching the exhibits, which are held in glass drawers.

Extract from the book – 10 Traveller’s Tales

District 6 Museum

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Back in Cape Town, the most poignant symbol of the apartheid regime is the District 6 museum. District 6 was a vibrant community of Cape Malays, Indians, Blacks, and a few Whites until 11th February 1966, when the apartheid regime declared District Six a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act. By 1982 60,000 people had been relocated to the Cape Flats Township around 15 miles away. Only the churches and mosques remained standing.

A pair of pictures of one street before and after the demolition of the area made me so sad as the destruction is absolute. There’s a tower of street names from the district which were given to the museum by the person whose job it was to collect the signs and throw them into the sea. District 6 was to be erased from the memory. A whites only bench leaves you in no doubt as to who is allowed to sit on it.  On the floor is a map of District 6. People have written the names of the families who lived at certain addresses and what businesses occupied which premises.

Robben Island

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Once on the island everyone has to get on a bus and be escorted around the island before visiting the prison. The most poignant place is the house of Robert Sobukwe the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress. Sobukwe was in solitary confinement and wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone – however he did give secret hand signals to other prisoners when he was outside – he held dirt in his hand and let it trickle through his fingers as a gesture of solidarity. His little yellow house is by the guard-dog kennels. Visitors also see the quarry where the prisoners worked.

Ex-prisoners or ex-wardens conduct the prison tours – they show you Nelson Mandela’s cell, the exercise yard, and the dormitory style accommodation with the daily prison diet written on a board for all to see.

Extract from – Ten Traveller’s Tales

Slave Lodge, Cape Town

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The Slave Lodge was built in 1679, making it the second oldest colonial building in South Africa and was owned by the Dutch East India Company, who maintained a settlement at the Cape and needed the slaves to support its profitable Asian trading operations. It continued to be used until 1834 when slavery was abolished and during these 155 years approximately 9,000 slaves would have lived here..

Slaves were brought to The Cape from most of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean though the four main areas were Indonesia, the Indian sub-continent, Madagascar and Mozambique. The cramped conditions of their passage are outlined in diagrams. Individual slaves are honoured in a column of names.

The Slave Lodge is a place that everyone should visit – in Western minds slavery is associated with the transport of humans across the Atlantic from Africa to North America. This museum will show that a similar trade went on at the same time in the Indian Ocean.

Extract from – Ten Traveller’s Tales

Cape Town

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No matter how many times I gazed at Table Mountain, rested on the Atlantic beaches, or savoured the food at one of the many restaurants at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, I could never really escape the history of Cape Town. Robben Island, the Slave Lodge on Wale Street, and the Bo Kaap district all lead you back to a dark past, a past that adds a certain zest to any visit here. There’s a reason for everything here and this intriguing past makes Cape Town a must-visit city.

Book well in advance for your trip to Robben Island especially in the summer holidays when there can be a wait of two weeks before there’s a free spot. Try and get to the Nelson Mandela Gateway at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront early to board the boat as the best seats are on the top deck with the views of Table Mountain especially eye-catching.

Extract from – Ten Traveller’s Tales

Churches of Riga

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The church of St James in Riga, Latvia, is the seat of the city’s Roman Catholic archbishopric. It occupies an important position opposite Latvia’s Parliament. The first reference to St.James’s Church was in 1226. The first few centuries of its history were uneventful as it served as a local church. Then, after the Reformation the Lutherans took ownership; however, the Counter Reformation saw the church given to the Jesuits in 1582. When the Swedes occupied Riga in the 17th Century it served as the church of the Swedish garrison. Finally, in 1922 the church was given to the Catholic community. The steeple was the only one in Riga that had a bell, named in this case the Bell of Wretched Sinners. History relates how the bell had a bad habit of ringing by itself when any unfaithful wife passed by. This is no longer a problem as the Soviet occupiers melted down the bell for weaponry during WWII. The cathedral is dedicated to Saint James the Greater, but is often referred to by the name St Jacob because Latvian, like many other languages, uses the same name for James and Jacob.

Excerpt from Ten Traveller’s Tales