Day 32-33 - London ON, Toronto

(Second go at writing this - the first entry got simply lost.)

Friday 20 August 2004, ET

Our destination today, London, a city of 300,000 people just 199km away from Toronto or 2 hours by Greyhound, turned out to be a really good choice. It's perched on the forks of the Thames River and has plenty of green areas and parks for walking. In addition, the city's done a great job at preserving many of its old buildings and houses in the forks area near downtown. A newer addition is the Covent Garden Market where we had a very English Canadian meal - eggplant kebab and burek.

I even managed to pick up the new Tea Party album (Seven Circles) two weeks before its Australian release at a store in Dundas Street - while it's not that exciting, you may be happy to know that Bob Rock only got his hands on three tracks.

The weather could have been better - was raining (also experienced by Toronto and Niagara, as we heard later), but not that hard and I find that sort of soft rain atmosphere is excellent for walking around foresty types of areas as it brings out the smells in a big way. I always remember walking around Star Swamp at sunrise back in Perth when the dew really brought out the eucalyptus and you could just breathe it - this is similar, but it's primarily maple and conifers.

Overall I was quite impressed with London and I do intend to be back sometime :)

Saturday 21 August 2004, ET

Today, we tried to pack as much as possible into one day, it being our last in Toronto.

Firstly, we had heard about an eccentric millionaire, rich from the Niagara Falls hydroelectricity scheme in the early 1900s, who built himself a castle on a hill in Toronto. Unfortunately, he ended up bankrupt less than 10 years later, in no small part due to the maintenance required for his castle. We went early but it seems the tourists had discovered it in droves and there was a steep entry price on the castle itself - but the grounds were free, so we wandered those for a bit.

A bit up the road, but away from the tourists, we found another castle - this one, it turned out, was the Casa Loma Stables. Evidently, his horses deserved the best too. I was let in by a caretaker who allowed me to take some closeup photographs. He was keen to point out to me that the guy was the culprit behind the introduction of grey squirrels to Ontario from Britain - not only do they compete with the native black squirrels, but they also hunt and kill them sometimes. In parts of Vancouver, you only actually see grey ones, although the black ones are in abundance in parks and gardens here.

The area around Casa Loma and Dupont/St Clair West seems to be where the wealthy people really live - it looked just like some of the similarly-priced suburbs in Perth I wandered around in early July. I hope the tourist guides don't discover it, though, as it will probably become just as rundown as Yorkville has.

Next stop in our whistlestop tour was the Queens Park area. It is a garden with a very English feel to it, and near a statue of a mounted horseman, we realised we'd walked in on some weird music festival. We quietly shuffled off towards the Ontario Legislature - seeing as we'd seen the BC (Victoria) and AB (Edmonton) ones, we thought we'd compare. The western ones are far more stylish, but this one just oozes grand. (It turns out it was built in the last century after an inconclusive open competition - ultimately one of the adjudicators got the contract amid much protest!)

Enough of the west - we jumped on a subway and went off east to Greektown on Danforth (near Chester station). Before getting there I was expecting it to be very tacky, and was surprised to find it was the sort of place you'd actually find Greek people who speak Greek eating at the local cafes and tavernas. Even the English street names nearby (Logan Ave, Danforth etc) had been translated into Greek on street signs. We tried out some of the local gyros before going up the road a bit to one of the many hidden attractions listed by this site (which I recommend to anyone, even if just for the pictures) - Leaside Bridge, with amazing views over the Don Valley. These amazing views, however, like many other things in Toronto, were framed by a freeway - namely the Don Valley Parkway.

As it was now 4pm, we decided to head off pronto to the CN Tower as we had tickets ($16 each). The tickets saved us a long wait at one counter but didn't save us from the next - between security checks and just plain out waiting, it was 37 minutes until we got to the top. On getting there, it turned out the place was not just crowded but a swarming mass of tourists and very little could be seen. All the good views of downtown had been fenced off and made into a cafe, so you couldn't see them from the observation points. Even the famed glass floor, which turned out to be only a tiny area much smaller than that at the Sky Tower in Auckland, was so covered in people that you'd barely have known it was there. At over twice the price of its Southern Hemisphere rival, I didn't end up concluding I'd gotten value for money. However, I can now say I've stood 346m from the ground on a man-made structure.

After that, we needed to get away from people, and I'd seen the Western Beaches on a map (and the boldts site recommended them too) so we thought we'd go there for the closing hours of the evening and, after 45 sweaty minutes in a streetcar, we were there, just off Lakeshore Blvd near the Humber Bay area. Now, I should make one point clear. These are beaches purely in the sense that they are where land meets water. Most of them are reclaimed land, and none of them could be described as a beach by traditional standards. However, it was a beautiful place to see out our last evening in Toronto, and I got some awesome pictures.

Toronto is very different to what I expected. I guess I expected something more like Melbourne - and indeed, superficially, it bears some resemblance. But it is a big city in all the ways a big city can be. It's cleaner and better organised than, say, Sydney, and it's got its own charms, but you have to look for them. I guess time and more travelling will decide my views on this part of the world.

Last night in English Canada for a few days.