A tale of two cities

Canada.

Only a 10-minute wait at the border. My electronic visa seems to be invisibly there when the guard scans my passport. She asks why we’re visiting, where we’re staying and for how long and then waves us through.

Immediate differences:

The speed limit is in kilometres.

There is an absence of flags on the buildings.

HEDGES.

Houses have hedges.

Big time.

Oh, my. As we drive into Vancouver, it is just a symphony of hedges. Lovely, lush, coniferous hedges. Tight ones of lots of little perpendicular conifers. Fat ones of old, spreading conifers. Immensely tall ones, impeccably trimmed. This is the most hedge-proud city I have ever seen.

The suburban roads are leafy and salubrious.

There is a sense of an old and very comfortable community.

Into the CBD and, oh, that is a bit odd. Lots and lots of high-rise buildings which look the same.

A forest of greenish apartment buildings. Inner-city living. How odd that they look so similar.

Chinese immigrants are here in droves, says Bruce, especially from Hong Kong.

Attention drawn to the foot traffic and, yes, there is a large percentage of Chinese pedestrians.

Indians, too.

No African skin tones to be seen, though.

But the city streets are bustling. Neat, colourful, prosperous.

There are trams and buses and dense Friday afternoon traffic.

It’s an immediately likeable city.

But uh-oh. It has traffic issues, too. We find the traffic radio station and keep informed.

We are heading straight through the city to the north shore where we are booked into the Pinnacle on the Pier, a hotel set right beside the glorious, busy harbour with its cruise ships and cargo boats, tugs and fishing boats and even rafts of timber being chugged across the place. Did I mention seaplanes coming and going all day long? There is a harbour ferry service - so we can whisk in and out of Vancouver proper without having to fret about city parking.

This thing we do the next morning.

It is fabulously convenient. The ferries are capacious and run every 15 minutes. Our plan is to explore the city a bit, ending up in Chinatown for a visit to the Chinese Garden and lunch.

The streets of Vancouver are deserted.

Saturday morning. Everything is shut in this district called Gas Town.

It is weird.

Yesterday this had been the most bustling, prosperous and happening city in the world.

Today it is a wasteland.

And it is a scary wasteland.

The people who are out and about are derelicts, homeless, drug addicts.

There are men sleeping under rugs on the pavements. Lots of sleepers.

Some are hunched up with signs begging for money.

There are groups seeming quite busy with each other. We keep a distance.

There are some noisy ones. Some filthy ones. Some seem completely batshit mad.

No one actually approaches us but we keep our distance. I feel extremely unsettled.

Are these dark streets of lost souls all there is to Vancouver?

We find a little coffee shop and have a stunningly good macchiato while looking at the deros out the window. Apprehensively, we plot our path to Chinatown.

There are more and more street people out there as we walk.

I am comforted to see quite a few police out there, too.

Nonetheless, I notice a lot of zooming, loony, wild-eyed druggies among the busy groups of assorted vagrants. And I actually see drug deals going on, right there, in front of me.

There goes a poor, skinny, lank-haired prostitute in long black boots and little leather skirt, emerging from a grungy bin-filled back alley. She looks as if she is hurrying off with her takings to buy herself a hit.

Even as we reach Chinatown, just crossing the road, beside us arrives a ranting nutter with long bleached hair, yellow sneakers and yellow-striped rain jacket. He is gesticulating constantly and cursing. I shrink close to Bruce and scuttle across the road when the signal changes.

And we step into the Classical Chinese Garden of Dr Sun Yat-Sen.

Serenity. Timeless beauty. Sage philosophy. Aesthetic of ultimate finesse.

It’s as extreme as a contrast can get.

Ancient koi drift among water lilies in luscious green ponds. Maple trees and gingkoes, moss and bamboo…

We join the tour which is just staring. Kaz, a tiny Chinese man of indeterminate antiquity, heavily accented

and with his thick, glossy hair cut into a dramatic bob, regales us with the history and minutiae of the house and garden. We are in the China Maple Hall with its Nan wood pillars, the most precious and endangered wood in the world. A pair of shoes made of Nan would sell for a million dollars. True story, he says.

The courtyard’s wonderful pebble patterns are yin and yang. One of the Koi is called Madonna and she is 150 years old but the record longevity for Koi is 275. These fish are huge but you can’t tell their age by their size. It takes experts microscopically examining their scales for many months.

And thus, amid the absolute beauty of this haven of oriental civilization were our nerves unjangled and our minds nourished.

And, our appetites stimulated.

Out in Chinatown itself, we found a place where the queues told us it must be good. We were given a table and, as mountains of bamboo steamers went by, we had a simple and healthy lunch of beancurd and fish - fuel for returning through dero city to the safety of our hotel.

And it is like dropping into hell. The streets are worse. The loons, junkies, drunks and homeless seem to have multiplied. They ARE the city.

We scurry down a block or two to a street in which tramcars were running and we can see flower baskets on the light poles.

Turn the corner and, what?

Restaurants swarming with people. Tourist buses. Flocks of shoppers and visitors. Bustle and jostle. Smiling affluence. Souvenir shops with inflated prices. Art galleries.

Even the famous Vancouver steam clock being photographed en masse.

We dawdle in a guilty happiness of solvent people.

And then, sidestepping a few more sleeping bodies on the footpaths, take the ferry back to our bright, clean, salubrious “other” Vancouver on the north shore, feeling so sobered by the sad contrasts in status quo in this fine city that we need a drink.