the adventures of pinkaholic girl

Whistler

We caught a moose tour bus for one day to the Whistler resort just north of Vancouver (to save ourselves from shopping and spending more money). The drive was very scenic – a bit reminiscent of the sounds in the south of New Zealand.

There was a varied group on the bus, with some bad taste in driving music – an entire powderfinger album, and not one of the good ones! They really need some mix cds in there. We occupied ourselves with musings about our fellow passengers, trying to work out their relationships to one another. (I realise we could have asked them, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fun.) I think our driver was very new, she wasn’t exactly sure where she was going, which didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Lunch was at a rocky outcrop on the highway that overlooked the mountains and rivers far below. It really brought into perspective the scale of the landscape and was spectacular!

When we finally reached Whistler, it really was just like Disneyland. All the buildings were so tidy and painted in cheerful colours with cute alpine trimmings. The village was so very constructed, but still seemed to retain some cuteness, if not much character. Just in case you have a fashion crisis while you’re in whistler, there’s a GAP and Guess clothing stores to keep you trendy. I was actually surprised at the number of shops that were there – it could easily sustain a village of several thousand.

We only had a few hours at the resort, so we opted to take the gondola up to the top which takes an HOUR! A 25 minute gondola ride, a 10-15 minute walk to the start of another lift and another 10-15 minute open chairlift to the top. I had some vertigo problems going up, it was terrible. The view at the top was nice, but probably not worth all the time considering we only had 3 hours. It’s actually above the tree line, so everything starts looking very bare and very dry.

They had whiteboards with listings of bear sightings around the gondola, but we didn’t see any :(

We stopped at a tiny town on the way back to Vancouver. Our tour guide said they used to film X-Files episodes here and I tried to recognise anything from a quick walk around, but nothing sprung to mind. I’ll have to review the episodes again and see if anything stands out.

posted by d @ 2:00 pm