Vancouver, Canada

After twenty hours in transit from Panama we arrived in Vancouver around midnight with no place to stay. We had booked a cheap hotel but then when we called them between flights to check if we could check in at midnight, they kindly informed us that they could not keep the reception open and that we would lose our deposit and be charged for the night anyway. Welcome to Canada! We were sleep deprived zombies when we got there and Alex found an information counter and called a dozen hotels only to find that they were all booked out. Luckily we found the last room in a local hotel that was about ten times out of our tight budget, oh well, at least we didn't sleep in the airport. We slept off our jetlag and made our way into Vancouver city the next day. It was exciting to be in Vancouver city and it was incredibly beautiful. Everything seemed so shiny, polished and pristine. It seemed they must have had an army of cleaners scrubbing the city from head to toe everyday. The air was cool crisp and clean which was a welcome change after Central America. We found a hotel in downtown Vancouver in the worst possible part of town, and we were warned repeatedly not to stay there. After living in Darlinghurst in Sydney a few "colourful" locals wasn't going to scare us too much. We were in for a scare..........Of all the cities we have traveled to we have never seen such an extreme problem with drug addiction. There were hundreds and hundreds of disheveled sunken faced desperate looking people. On the streets around 95% of the people you saw appeared to be homeless, drug addicted or mentally ill. It was in complete contrast to the shiny perfection of the main downtown area. The rest of Vancouver looked like an artists impression, idealised, perfect, clean almost sterile.

After all our experiences in Central America, always hearing about the drug trade it was shocking to see this end point and the human damage associated with this "industry". Ironically we had travelled in some incredibly poor regions but the country where we had been asked for money most often was Canada, how could this be in the midst of such wealth?

We were waiting in Canada for the bike for days, it seemed to have been put on a stand by basis, which is not what we paid for, so we were hanging around Vancouver a lot longer than we wanted to and we were bursting to get out and explore the mountains and get out of the city.