Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Canada Trip Day 22: Trans-Canada Highway passing Golden & Roger Pass

4 July 2010 - Thought I'd take my mind completely off what has occupied me all day today by some travel writing.

Yes, all throughout our coach ride from Banff to Kamloops, I was clicking my camera away. It must have been a nuisance to be in the coach with me because my modest camera gives a loud mechanical click which can keep a person from taking a nice, cosy coach nap. Despite the rain and the voluminous, grey clouds that keep persisting over Rockies, the landscape was still too beautiful for me to even bat an eyelid.

Having been to countries with beautiful mountains and lakes and forests, I was eager to see and feel what's different about them. Here in the Rockies, I thought of the First Nations, how they managed to live with the forest. Just made me think about the cartoons, Pocahontas and Brother Bear and the brilliant book, The Last of the Mohicans.

Seeing the railway flashed imaginations of recently learned history of the fur trade and cooperation from the First Nations to help the early European traders and settlers. It is sad in a way because the First Nations is a disappearing culture, much advanced than the situation in Tibet. While the view is very much scenic, everything around is urban and there is no sign of anything that resonate the spirit of the place, nor of the people which once breathe together with the forest, as I did feel with Tibet.

Trans-Canada Railway

Drizzling; wide river with lots of sediments

Houses on the other side of the bank

Turquoise river water in the Rockies reminds me of Tibet

Pine tree covered mountain slopes

Trees dying from pine beetles infestation

Mist settling over the pine trees

Cut section of the mountain to make way for roads

Tiny streams of water oozing out of soil

Tiny waterfalls

In-coach documentary on controlled avalanches for safer road use

Abandoned lodge in the middle of nowhere

Some sort of undergrowth covering the rocky slopes

Our Brewster coach driven by our wonderful, charismatic guide

Cycling in the Rockies

Motor biker waiting for the lights to turn green

A little patch of glacier amidst the lush green

Shrubs and pine trees completely covering the floor, forming a sea of green

More sea of cottony and prickly greens

Thick fog hovering over green mountain slopes with a trail of waterfall

Light mist over green slopes

Two streams flowing down the mountain

Picture of another stream

Still taking picture of streams through a grilled vent of a road tunnel

Huge signboard for Koa Campground


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