Vancouver to Penticton

I return to Vancouver from Whistler and the first thing I do is go to the post office and collect my driver's licence. I am now free to leave Vancouver and I make my plans for the next part of my trip, before Brigitte and I meet up again in the Rockies in about 10 days' time. For now I am travelling by Greyhound bus, so am restricted to where the buses go and their schedules. Getting to grips with this is not so straightforward, but the hours I have spent hours putting various routes into their website are beginning to pay off. To begin with I am going to head east from Vancouver to the Okanagan Valley, which is an area of lakes, with a hot dry climate that allows wine production and fruit growing. And the city of Penticton that I am going to stay in for a few nights has an Elvis competition this weekend, so I will be very excited if I meet Elvises on the street!

So the next day I am back at the main station, this time waiting for my first long-distance bus.

Inside the Main Station in Vancouver

The journey will be 7 hours. I spend the journey finishing my book and writing a long letter to Katie, which is a mixture of a commentary on the journey and random other thoughts. It is almost a real-time minute-by-minute description and will take her the best part of 7 hours to read it. The book I’m reading has been interesting; as most of my random selections made from book exchanges in hostels and camp sites have been. It is almost as if books chose me, rather than the other way around and I have read many things and genre that I would not normally choose at home. I wish I had kept a list of the books I have read, because I have a hopeless memory for authors and titles. Most of my attempts to describe a book I have enjoyed go something like this, ‘I have just read a good book. It was called….. oh I can’t remember. It was by….. oh I can’t remember. It was about…. darn it!’ Anyway, having just finished this one I can tell you about it. It is called, ‘Six Months in Sudan’ and is a memoir of a young Canadian doctor, called James Maskalyk, who volunteered to work for Medecin Sans Frontier in a war-torn village in Sudan. It was quite a challenge for me because of the subject matter – not too much in the way of injuries from the conflict, but a lot of heart-rending stuff about babies dying of malnutrition and measles and women dying in child birth. I was also interested in the format of the book, because it started as his blog and then narrative was added to turn into a book after he got home. That resonates with the eensiest-teensiest glimmer of an idea I have been carrying around with me for some while; but I am almost too shy even to hint at it.

The first part of the journey is not very interesting, just highway and small towns with shopping malls and then flat farm land. The road goes just north of and parallel to the US border. At one point I see a sign that says ‘US border 3km’. Many small Canadian towns look like our retail parks - wide, straight streets; traffic lights; a line of shops around a parking lot (listen to me talking like a local), usually with a Starbucks on each corner.

After a couple of hours the road turns north and travels and as it climbs into a valley the scenery gets quite spectacular. We travel alongside a fast-flowing river and a sign by the side of the road says, 'Chain up area'. This is Highway 1, which is the main trans-Canadian road. It is a 6 lane road (3 in each direction) but we are going through some pretty remote countryside and climbing steeply into rain and mist and before long there are patches of snow by the side of the road and on the hills.

Next the scenery has opens out into a wide valley, with the town of Merritt, sitting there, where we make a short stop. There is some cattle in fields here – the first I have seen in Canada I think. There is so little usable farmland for crops or cattle in the parts of British Columbia that I have seen so far – it is mostly so steep that only trees can be farmed.

Soon we start to go down and down out of the mountains and the mist and now we are in a valley with a huge lake. This is the Okanagan Valley and although it has been raining here, it is obviously generally a much drier climate, as the opposite side of the lake is a more barren hillside and there are dry, scrubby plants at the side of the road.

Okanagan Lake from the Bus

When I get off the bus at the terminal at Penticton I learn something else about bus travel and that is that if you travel by bus on a rainy day, your backpack in the luggage compartment will get wet and anything inside, that is not in waterproof bags will be wet too - such as my pyjamas that I stuffed in at the last minute!

The hostel I am staying in is just a short walk up the road and is in a heritage building, dating from 1912, when it used to be a boarding house. The sign post in the garden has such directions and distances as: Okanagan Lake 1km; US border 60km; Quebec 3412km; London 7209km. This helps me appreciate the vast width of Canada – Quebec is almost halfway to London and that isn’t even as far east as you can go in Canada – Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are further east!

Penticton Hostel

There is a more diverse mix of people staying in this hostel than I experienced in the hostels in Vancouver and Whistler. For sure there are the usual young European travelers, but over the 3 days I am here I also meet a young English guy who is here to pick fruit, who says that standing in a tree picking cherries while the sun comes up is the best job in the world; a man from Quebec who gets amiably drunk on his National Day and sings in French; a guy who has driven his motorbike 2000km from Yukon Territory; a guy who is on leave from working as an electrician in an oil field way up north in Alberta; a woman from Vancouver Island who is here to do a Bowen Technique course and a couple from Vancouver of Chinese origin who are on holiday and have given up their tent for a couple of nights in the hostel because of the rain.

The city of Penticton sits on an area of flat land between two lakes. That afternoon I go for a wander around the town and to the downtown lakefront to get my bearings and see if I can soak up some of the festival atmosphere. As well as the Elvis Festival there is a vintage car festival called ‘Peach City Beach Cruise’. The lakeside setting of the town is beautiful and gorgeous vintage cars are parked all along the promenade.

Lakeside

Lakeside Sculpture

Beach Cruisers

As I wander along I catch snatches of conversations about car-related man-stuff, but here is a picture of a car in my favourite colour!

Turquoise Car

The main Elvis events are going on in the conference centre and the tickets are pretty expensive, but for $2 I go into a park and spend an enjoyable hour watching an Elvis tribute band and the crowd. Unfortunately he is the only Elvis I see in town.

Crowd in the Park

Elvis Tribute

The next day I take a walk out of the city and up to a high point which gives good views over the surrounding countryside and down to the city and its two lakes. Here there are many orchards and I see apples, pears, cherries and peaches growing. There are also a lot of grapes grown here and increasingly the land use is changing from orchards vineyards.

Orchard and Vineyard Country

Me and View of Penticton

As I am walking back to the city I notice a young deer standing totally still in an orchard.

Deer in an Orchard

Back downtown I stop for a cup of tea and sit outside  a cafe listening to a funky group of buskers.

Buskers

Back at the hostel someone asks me if I saw a rattlesnake on the hill. He is not joking. Now I have rattlesnakes, bears and cougars to worry about.

Before I leave Penticton I want to visit the second lake at the south end of the city. As I walk there I pass a sign for a sports club - that is a new one on me. I also snigger in the superior way that those who understand punctuation can, that the club is obviously struggling and has only 1 member.

Penticton Horse Shoe Pitcher’s Club

School Outing at the Beach at Skaha Lake

Down at the lake side the only activity is a school outing on the beach. The children are running around in their bathing suits and having a good time, even though the day is overcast and not very warm. The whole time I have been here everyone has been commenting on the weather. The region is famous for its hot, dry weather, but they have had rain here for weeks and rather than the temperature being in the usual high 30s, it is more like low 20s.

I walk back to town along the river channel which links the two lakes. Apparently the local summer pastime is to float along the 7km or so between the lakes on a rubber ring or other craft. Another sign of the bad weather here is that I haven’t seen anyone doing this.  

Okanagan River Channel