Volume 6: Pete in Canada Part 17. Beaver Las Canada. 1 Continent, 2 Blokes, Infinite Weird Sh*t
Day 40 – Banff to Revelstoke
This morning Brad and I had the pleasant experience of being apart from each other for a few hours as he went into town for supplies and I slept in. 40 days on the road together with a mate who isn’t a playboy bunny; you just need to spend some time apart for the sake of the relationship.
As we headed off today we said a final farewell to the Rockies and it’s over abundance of emerald lakes as we made a slow trek towards Vancouver where I would be flying out of Canada in 12 days time. Along the way we stopped at Takakkaw Falls (an indigenous word meaning “he who did not turn off tap”) and an extended stop over at Kicking Horse for yet more misinformation on this tour. We were keen to see a bear, Kicking Horse had a bear refuge, so it was a mutually beneficial situation. To get to the bear refuge you need to take the enclosed comfort of the Gondola or the exposed to the elements chairlift. The person selling the tickets to the bear refuge informed us the Gondola was not in service, and that we’d need to take the chairlift. We didn’t think much of it at the time, but it wasn’t until we’d got to the bear refuge and watched the Gondola pass over overhead, with people in the Gondolas, that we thought we’d been fed another dish of misinformation. As we talked of this oddity, of an out of service Gondola which seemed very much in service, a Canadian overheard us and said he’d caught the Gondola up to the bear refuge. Somewhat baffled by this state of affairs, I put it down to the mafia now moving into the chairlift game (10 minutes before we arrived) and were now trying to muscle out the competition of the Gondola.
Anyway, the main thing was we were now at the bear refuge for the daily tour education requirement. A young lass working at the refuge took us on an informative walk around the fence of the refuge. The bear in the refuge was named Bo and he had come to live here after his mother was shot on the side of the road. He’d originally moved in with his brother, but unfortunately his brother died from a twisted bowel whilst he was hibernating. Hibernation is a fascinating thing. The bears don’t do number 1’s or 2’s for months, with uric acid used as a source of protein. It adds new meaning to the saying “take the piss”, but in the case of bears it’s “Take the piss…and use it to stay alive”. Bo’s homelands were now the 22 acre refuge, whereas in the wild it would it would be closer to 100’s to 1000’s of square kilometres. He also has to put up with some annoying neighbours in some noisy Ravens who heckle him from the trees, but he gets them back by chasing them from tree to tree, shaking the tree like a lost hiker until the Ravens are forced to find a new tree. Bo marks his territory by rubbing his ass on trees and using his claws to scratch out “Bo was here”. Bo isn’t overly keen on the perfume our tour guide wears, as he’s been known to charge the fence whenever she gets close to him. Apparently he doesn’t do it to other refuge staff, so it’s probably time she switched her perfume (no doubt “Angry bear for women” by Calvin Klein).
Highly educated about bears, we took the CHAIRLIFT back down to the car park and were back on the road again. We reached our stop for the night, Revelstoke, in fading light and set about looking for accommodation. We drove through the town before seeing a sign pointing towards a nearby campsite. As we were now out of the National Park this campsite was privately run, something made all the more easier to identify by the minigolf course and volleyball court. Not something you traditionally see in a National Park campsite. As we got checked into the campsite, the owner passed comment on how tired I looked, so Brad did the top bloke thing and headed into town to get some food for the night, while I chilled out and tried to get the campsite fire started. All the wood we’d been given was the equivalent of about half a tree wide, with no small stuff for kindling, it was exceptionally hard to start the fire. A nearby camper in his you beaut RV noticed I was having trouble and offered me his axe whist dropping the phrase “Right on” no fewer than 15 times. Me, being someone who has tried to avoid manual labour all my life, was not an expert axemen. A fact made the more obvious as the wood flew at all sorts of angles, somehow missing my eyes on a number of occasions and avoiding my crutch and adding new meaning to the term “I’ve got wood”. By the time Brad got back I had a nice fire started and the chicken wings cooked on that fire tasted extra special. We had a few tinnies to bring my drinking streak up to 40 straight days, before heading off to sleep for an early night. This was initially challenging as I’d set my tent on a small gradient which gave me a rolling sensation anytime I switched sides. I eventually conquered the logistical challenges associated with trying to sleep on the hill and was soon on my way to a long sleep.
Day 41 – Revelstoke to Kamloops
As we packed up our tents today Brad got talking to “Mr Right on” from next door and how Brad intended to work in Canada for the next year. Mrs Right on was soon involved in the conversation before giving Brad a phone number for someone to contact to work in the remote oil fields in Alberta. Whilst the jobs on the remote oil fields paid well, Brad was in Canada more for the experience of being in Canada so I don’t think the idea floated his boat. Besides, his late night experience in Toronto where some gay guy tried to pick him up meant he could always pimp his ass for money (not something I think that crossed his mind, only putting it in this tour diary to see what reaction it gets when he reads it).
Once on the road there was some discussion about whether we should drive straight to Kamloops or make a detour and visit Kelowna for a few hours. Brad was pro detour, while I’d forgotten that I was on tour to see as much of Canada as possible and nominated to drive straight to Kamloops. I think the tiredness had started to rule my thoughts, but thankfully that ruler was overrun by a coup led by common sense and we were soon driving towards Kelowna.
The 2 Canadian blokes we had met in Banff on that night we partied with Blakey from “On the buses” where heading for Kelowna to work as fruit pickers. When we got there I would suggest they’d made a good decision. Kelowna was a slow, laid back town with its founders smart enough to realise the benefits of setting up shop next to Okanagan Lake. The locals make good use of the lake with countless boats moored, just waiting for their owners to take them out filled with hookers and drugs. Okay that is something more likely to happen in Monaco, while I get the feeling the locals in this sleepy town were more likely to replace the hookers and drugs with fishing lines and an esky full of beer.
We stopped into a pub called O’Flangan’s to have lunch and a few beers. We both ordered the Mega Meat pizza as Brad said to the barmaid “to keep it easy”. The Mega Meat pizza came with ham, pepperoni and spicy meat, a distant cousin to the pizza’s that actually landed on our table. I’m not sure what the pizza with pineapple, mushroom, pepper and ham is called (most likely “The Mistake”) but these pizzas were certainly not what we ordered. The fact that we were being served by a young woman attractive enough to justify the going out of our way by a few hundred kilometres from Kamloops meant we failed to bring this to the attention of the barmaid, instead choosing to eat “The Mistake Pizza” and be thankfully that it was served by a woman with such magnificent breasts. Breasts: let me go on the record as saying I love them. If a woman with a more than ample breast accidentally launched a nuclear weapon that started WWIII wiping out millions of people I would still find someway to overlook that mistake. So if I can overlook that mistake, I’m certainly not going to have a problem with some hotty getting my pizza order wrong.
We had 2 pints at lunch and as we left O’Flanagans we both released we were somewhat pissed and that we shouldn’t drive. So we killed a few hours checking out the waterside. It was such a beautiful spot it made you want to have a beer by the water and relax and take it in. Unfortunately, the previous 2 pints prevented us from being able to do that.
Sobered up, we begun the longish drive to Kamloops. Kamloops is pretty much a small town that makes it’s living through tourists using it as a resting spot on the way between Vancouver and the Rockies, tonight there would be 2 more tourists following that ethos. We got into Kamloops late in the afternoon and after finding our way through the maze of one way streets eventually found our way to the HI Hostel. The hostel was an old converted courthouse, meaning I’d now been in both a courthouse and jail on this tour as many would’ve tipped before the tour, yet without a conviction for public urination. The rooms were quite large with about 16 bunks in each, with ours coming with the added bonus of some creepy old Canadian bloke with a comb over (only person he was fooling was himself) greeting you on a chair as you entered the room. When he talked it was just illegible mumbles, but with a Canadian accent.
In another moment of good fortune the hostel was having a pub crawl on this night. In a rare moment of bad fortune the only people on the pub crawl were Brad, myself and some goofy looking bastard from New Zealand. He wore kaki shorts and hiking boots and looked like someone who’d just spent a year living in a mountain. His name was Tony, or as his introduced himself “Toe Knee” whilst making the effort to point at his toes and then his knee. I’d known Toe Knee all of 30 seconds, but already I longed for the chance to club him with a baseball bat. He would somehow prove to be more annoying as the night went on, making annoying comparisons and observations about Canada and New Zealand. Stuff like “Vancouver is big” and that “Auckland is a city”. It was only a few years earlier that someone had cut 4 power cords into Auckland leaving it without power for a week. A place is a town and NOT a city when all it takes is some incompetent council worker to cut 4 power cords to leave the place blacked out.
As for the pub crawl, we were led by some 50 something bloke named Brian (I simply referred to him as Gandalf as he led us on the Fellowship of the drinking) who was a nice bloke who seemed to know everyone in town as we bypassed lines at every venue. The first venue was a sports bar where I watched the mighty Cats beat the Demons in an AFL final. It was also there Toe Knee insisted on playing a game called Waterfalls. It wasn’t so much a game, but an act of stupidly wasting good beer. In short, all you did was buy a beer then chant 1, 2, 3 and skull your beer. As this was the first of many venues, I wasn’t about to destroy myself at the start of the marathon that I was hoping this pub crawl was going to be so I only played twice.
The next venue was a genuine red neck bar called Cactus Jack’s, or as the locals called it “CJs”. It was quite a big venue, with 2 floors with a large dance floor for 2 stepping. As we stood on the 2nd floor I noticed 2 stunning women in cowgirl hats standing near the dance floor. The chances of me meeting stunning cowgirls again were unlikely, and as they were standing by the dance floor looking at it longing for someone to dance with, I motioned to Brad I was going in. Like a great wingman, he followed me into battle. Like a giant liability like the French army, To Knee followed us into battle also. Having 2 stepped in Texas only 2 years earlier I was chocked full of confidence with my dancing skills and opened the conversation by asking if the fine young cowgirl named Laylene would like to 2 step. The look of shock followed by fear followed by confusion of being asked to dance by an Australian in a red neck bar consumed so much of her brain power it seemed to take an eternity before the words “No thanks” found their way out of her mouth. I let her know that I had 2 stepped in Texas thinking that would get me over the line. It didn’t, but at least the ice had defrosted enough for the conversation to flow. Brad, not doing his wingman duties didn’t take out her friend, and unfortunately the friend was trapped by Toe Knee. So here I was, doing some of my finest work, slowly defrosting this originally cold hotty, with Brad still in the picture. I do all my best work in 1 on 1 situations, the 2 on 1 has never worked for me. It would prove to be just the case again. As I had now got Laylene starting to open up to me she talked of how she was studying Arts at the local university. Whilst my brain was processing the thought “Yeah, an arts degree. That will come in handy; if you want to work in McDonalds” Brad chimed in with “So what sort of martial arts do you do?”. Til this day I still don’t know whether that was a serious comment or Brad trying to be funny, all I know is Laylene greeted it with a “Is this guy f#$king serious?” look. By now, it was too late anyway. Toe Knee had taken all of 10 minutes to annoy the girlfriend and she motioned to Laylene that she wanted to leave. Damn you Toe Knee! While this was all going on, Brian the sly old fox had done what I had failed to do: he was dancing with a woman he’d just met. Gandalf the old wizard had worked some magic.
From CJs it was on to Players, a place misnamed as I didn’t see any pimped up cars out the front. It was in there that Brad and I went on a suicide mission. The mission was to approach a table full of exceptionally attractive women with a very shady pickup line. Brad said he had the perfect approach so I foolishly followed him in. That pickup line may as well have been sticks of dynamite strapped to his body, either way we both died instantly. When he approached the finest looking woman on the table (mistake 1) and then opened with “We’re looking for the Kamloops zoo, is this the lions den?” (turned out to be mistake 2) she gave him a look of complete and utter disgust. I thought he was line was a pearler considering he’d only just thought of it on the spot, but it didn’t impress the leader of the pride at the table. She fired back with “Is that the best you can do?” to which Brad asked how should he have approached her. She came back with something so inconceivable, she suggested he should open with “Hi my name is…What’s your name?”. I thought fair point and then informed her “Look, I’ll go away and try and draw up some better pick up lines on a whiteboard over there”. She appreciated that, so we left the pride having just been chewed up and spat out by it like a piece of bad tasting meat. As for our fearless approach to meeting members of the fairer sex, this had upset some Canadian soft cock who didn’t have the courage to approach these women. He called Brad aside and said all Aussies are gay, and motioned that we had small balls. I wasn’t privy to this conversation, I only heard about it as I was dragging Brad out of the bar after he pulled the Canadian soft cocks hat off and suggested they continue the conversation outside. At the time of the incident I was talking to Gandalf when I noticed a bouncer heading Brad’s way while a barmaid tried to pull Brad away. I charged across to prevent a bouncer getting over zealous on Brad’s head and told him not to worry about what the soft cock had said as we were out to party not punch on. It was only later I regretted that and wished we’d both kicked the shit out of the Canadian for insulting Australians.
Anyway, it was then onto a club called Rivers at 1:20am for a solid 40 minutes of dancing. Having been shot down by 2 women tonight, I couldn’t believe my luck when some chick came up and started to bump and grind with me on the dance floor. I’d put in huge efforts for no result, now I was doing nothing and getting results. Those results, to my utter confused disbelief, soon came to nothing as she walked off never to be seen again. Man this was a tough night for the Peter Hart ego.
After 2am, we headed back to the hostel. Brad decided it was a great time to do some washing so he did that while I went to sleep. I woke up about half an hour into my sleep needing to remove a few litres from my bladder, so went to the toilet and went and saw how Brad was doing. As the washing machine rooms were on a separate floor to the accommodation we weren’t concerned with waking anyone when we were talking. So you can imagine our surprise when some angry Irishmen popped his head out of the TV room telling us to be quiet as he was trying to sleep. Not thinking much of it, other than that was weird, we kept talking. Once again Shamus O’Angryguts popped his head out from the TV room 5 minutes later and gave us a massive spray. Thinking that was a little uncalled for, and that this bozo could suffer in his jocks as he shouldn’t be sleeping in the TV room anyway, when the washing was finished we grabbed an ironing board put it across the door to lock him in, banged on the door as hard as we possibly could and ran. We laughed hard and long thinking of Shamus O’Angryguts trying to get out of that room. Suffer in your jocks!
It must’ve been after 3am when we finally got to sleep.
Comments