So, you’re thinking of four days on a train looking at mountains? Get on board!
Extra-long read – sliced into pages for your health.
Hope you enjoy this carefully curated Canadian experience! Maybe pop the kettle on?
Readers of this blog know I swore off flying in 2019. In 2023, when I discovered my booked train from Paris to Italy could not run as the side of a French mountain had come down after a massive storm, time constraints forced me to fly into the face of climate change. Once broken, my empty promise flew again, and again.
To assuage my guilt this year, 2024, coming back from the UK to Oz once more, I wanted to indulge my urge to travel overland and still get back to Sydney in time for work. I turned to my old friend, The Man in Seat 61 for advice. He came up with crossing Canada with VIA rail. Canada? OKAY!
Logistically, booking the train with VIA Rail took precedence, leaving time on either side of the four day trip for flights to be delayed or cancelled. My journey began when I left Heathrow, England, in mid September 2024 and flew to YYZ. Huh? YYZ? Where’s that?
TORONTO and NIAGRA
There were a lot of surprises in Canada, mainly due to my complete ignorance, and the first surprise was YYZ! How did they get YYZ out of Toronto? TOR? TOT? Nope. YYZ.
The only reason I had to go to Toronto was to catch the train. I had zero expectations and Toronto didn’t care what I thought because they were having a film festival and my friendly hostel was jammed packed full. I didn’t recognise any Big Stars (though apparently someone saw Jamie Lee Curtis – you’ll want to check out the link to see how she behaves on the red carpet) but luckily I did make friends with a Big Fan called Kim. Amazingly, she turned out to be a retired tour guide who gave me some Top Toronto Tourist Tips. (She didn’t tell me about tipping, though.)
Leaving inspiring Kim to her film studies, I took my Tim Horton’s off to explore Toronto.
Toronto is on Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes. It may look like the sea, but this is clear, fresh water and yes, it is used for drinking by Toronto citizens. The only thing I could remember about the Great Lakes was that one caught fire due to pollution. That was Lake Erie, or the rivers that went into it, in 1969. The fires caused such outrage the Environment Protection Agency was created.
Interestingly, although one might think fresh water lakes are not subject to sea levels rising, the Great Lakes system is under threat from climate change. Their levels already fluctuate, with a potential difference of two metres!
Kim, Tourist Guide Emerita, insisted I take a bus tour out of Toronto to see the Niagra Falls. Really? Yes. Really. As a seasoned skeptical tourist I was not looking forward to this trap. I thought I would be underwhelmed by a dreary old waterfall and overwhelmed by greedy commercial entourages sucking on the main attraction. But Kim was persistent so I made the booking.
Thankfully, Kim was right. The Falls themselves are astounding. Seriously. Unmissable. The blue tourists are from the USA, while the red are from Canada. The river below the falls is the meeting of the plastic ponchos. Yellow ponchos see behind the Falls – and having glimpsed someone’s photos of that experience and felt envy, it might be worth visiting AGAIN!
Niagra is a theme park with Fast Food, Haunted Houses, Casinos, Fun Fairs, Sky wheel, you name it, all the nonsense is there for all the family all the time, ranged around these magnificent falls. But. The white streams of power are jaw dropping and gut wrenching and I’m glad to have seen them. The force and plummet are wonderful and perhaps the mist and positive ions really do bring joy.
The process of herding thousands of tourists onto boats and off again is well-trodden and, I don’t know why, maybe Temple Grandin, made me think of slaughter houses. Gentle kind persons stand at exactly the right place to waft a friendly hand to make the school of tourists drift towards the fenced corrals. Hordes of people ambled down the well-worn corridor with no hint of doubt or question, and onto the boat. Alex the guide told us to stick to the right because when the boat turned we’d get the better view and so it came to be.
There were oooohs and aaaaahs and cries of delight as the captain of the ship teased into the driving spray. It was gentle and ferocious at the same time. The boats do a little dance and return all too soon to the shore. Again, we were gently waved on to our meeting point, from there we were guided to a hotel at a high vantage point for our not-much-to-write-home-about lunch – speaking as a veteran vegan, of course. I happened to encounter the manager of the highfalutin hotel in the lift and asked how many lunch covers they expected that day given the bus loads still arriving. He said about five hundred, but before the pandemic it had been three times that. They still hadn’t recovered. For which I am deeply grateful.
We were given time to walk in the gardens opposite the falls. Thank goodness this space was saved for parkland – not filled with garish hotels or casino horror – graceful lawns and curved gardens are bright with cana lilies and even banana trees. There must be some micro-climate environment – whether it was like that before white settlement or whether the hydro-electric scheme has something to do with it someone knows somewhere. Put it in the comments, please.
We visited a cute tourist shopping town called Niagra-on-the-lake where you could go shopping and admire the flower displays. You can miss that if you don’t need shopping. Next stop on the tour was a winery which seemed nice – or ‘ice’. I was sorry my sister wasn’t there to taste the ‘ice wine’ – grapes must be harvested under tightly controlled conditions. These grapes will only grow in three places in the world. https://www.wine-searcher.com/grape-529-vidal Each grape releases only a couple of drops so they have to grow a tremendous amount to get a little bottle of dessert wine.
Meanwhile, the chap next to me at lunch, Iain from Edinburgh, turned out to be going across Canada on the same train. Headed to a cruise ship after that, and a veteran sailor, we could compare notes about ocean going. (Here’s mine.) The tour finished with a quiz to see if we’d been paying attention. At once the bus was filled with alert customers firing up their hands like a game of WackAMole. They really wanted to carry more stuff: mugs and flags and bottles of wine in their tourist luggage? Maybe they had porters? And tipped them? (I don’t want to say anything about tipping in Canada.)
Made my way back to the District Eatery – a cool relaxed bar in the TIFF zone – where I found some delicious food to make up for the fancy hotel bland effort. Go there. You will like it. There was a problem with tipping. I didn’t do it. I believe that’s called ‘stiffing’. Poor server. She was very nice. She didn’t deserve my lack of respect. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
The bus tour was a fact-fountain all the way to Niagra. Toronto used to be called York. Niagra-on-the-Lake used to be the capital city but was destroyed in the war between Britain and America. Canada has a layered history, and I’m going to gloss over it by saying the First Nations survived for thousands of years before French and British colonists arrived in the late fifteenth century to fight everyone. Then Americans battled the Brits and then many more settlers arrived until Federation in 1867. Then the TransContinental Railway begun in 1881 in a bid to bring everyone and their trades together. And it still operates today, hopefully driving the unity that is the Canadian nation. Gordon explains: