Canada

Brixton 2am, Friday. I don’t know how many shots I’ve done. A random man as drunk as I am is enjoying listening to my plans to ride from Alaska to Argentina and I’m drunkenly enjoying talking about it in a nonchalant way, smoking a cigarette. He says, “So are you planning to fly into the US without a return ticket?” I answer yeah sure, why not.

28 hours and a brutal vomit-filled hangover that must be something close to alcohol poisoning later, and it’s 6am on the day of my flight to Alaska. Everything is planned - I have a place to stay in Anchorage (bike fanatic with workshop), several viewings lined up and a route to the Arctic Circle in my sights - but the memory from Friday night rears its head and I realise that I may not have not done my research.

Simply, in order to enter the US with an ESTA, you need a return ticket and once you are there you cannot cross borders in the way I am planning to. I do not have a return ticket and my plans are my plans. Minor panic ensues but options present themselves:

- Try to get into Alaska without one (potential cost - trip ended before it begins)
- Buy a return ticket but don’t use it (potential cost - price of flight and potential that US border dwarfs don’t let me through into Canada or back into the mainland US from Canada)
- Buy a ticket to Vancouver where James, a school friend, lives and figure everything out from there (cost - price of flight, not going to Alaska)

I call up Iceland Air. They won’t let me on the plane without a return ticket. On balance I decide not to risk it and buy a ticket to Vancouver for £500. End up in business class somehow and James meets me at the airport after an easy 10 hours. But it’s day 1 and the neat Alaska to Argentina narrative is already broken. This is a shame - Alaska would have been epic, but in a way it frees me - somehow I feel that if I start in Canada, I can end up anywhere the road takes me.

Downtown Vancouver

I have a bike in 5 days. It’s a Kawasaki KLR650 from 2010 with 27000km on the clock and a terrible paint job that’s only going to get worse as the splattered bugs peel off the top level of black paint to reveal the fluorescent snot green below. But it starts first time and seems to be in fine condition for $3200 Canadian (£2000), though I know nothing of bikes. I was expecting to pay at least $4000 so I’ve got some room for repairs.

Man, head in box, sees eclipse

$500 off the bat in a nearby motorcycle shop where they can evidently spy an easy target a mile away and they take me for an unnecessary ride but change some things that need changing. Their sales technique feels polished and manipulative, but I respect them for it in a resentful kind of way. I spend $1000 dollars on gear (helmet, jacket, boots, gloves and a dry bag to strap to the back of the bike). The discount is apparently $800 but I leave somehow feeling used. I realise that they are not the salesmen I thought they were - they let me know that they think they won.

What surprises me the most about this first week is just how materialistic the beginning of my escape from modern life is. My whole being is consumed with quickly amassing all the objects required to take me down the Americas and it feels like a lot. But, by Friday, I have everything I need and am ready to set off on my ascetic adventure Saturday AM.

This is a good thing, Vancouver itself is actually quite underwhelming. It’s surrounded by absolutely incredible scenery on every side but is something of a cultural wasteland. There is a reason it is known as no-fun-couver. Also, the homelessness and opioid epidemic is stark against the London-esq house prices, polished downtown businessmen and coiffered, coffee-shop camping hipsters. It’s somewhere to base yourself for exploration, the perfect start to a journey but not really a destination in itself.

Some cars, some people, some mountains

The first morning on the bike is rigid and terrifying. I pull onto a highway leaving Vancouver and there are vehicles flying around me at 90kph. I pull straight off at the next junction, 200 metres later. Quite enough highway for the moment. I take the side roads until I have no choice but to rejoin the highway to Whistler.

The speed limit is 90kph but I’m not going over 80. It’s a relief as car, caravans, winnebagos and HGVs overtake me because when they’re hugging my back tyre it feels like they’ll punt me off the side of the road. I do not feel prepared and can’t take in the scenery which by all accounts is mesmerising. I’ll have to see it one day.

A coffee in Whistler and a stop at a town fair in Pemberton where all the locals have got the bonnets of their classic cars open and the engines on display and I feel like I’m in North America. Or more accurately I feel like I’m in the USA, which I’m not, but at least I don’t feel like I’m in London or Auckland or Sydney which I certainly did in Vancouver.

Then on, up the Duffy Lake Road to a nothing village called Lilloeet. This is the stretch that confirms the genius of my plan. Riding a motorbike is actually ridiculously amazing. The tension lifts a little and I sweep and carve through some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable. Lake following lake, steep descents and undulations, perfect blue sky, no potholes and in my mirrors… a three mile line of traffic that can’t overtake me. I’m going at least 10kph slower than the speed limit at all times. If Canadians weren’t so nice they’d be fuming. In hindsight I probably should have pulled over and let them pass.

First night's campsite

I begin to notice something - other motorbike riders keep holding their left hand out at me as they pass on the other side of the road. A biker greeting. Well, well, well. I wonder if I’m not supposed to talk about it… but in my eyes it’s something like the Hindi ‘namaste’ which I think loosely translates to: ’I acknowledge your existence and wish you well’. I like the biker version, though I’m not sure if many bikers would characterise it this way. More importantly, I begin to feel like I’m part of the biker gang and return the greeting. When I’m going in a straight line. Because I can’t take my hand off the handlebars around corners without feeling like I’m going to crash.

There’s a free campsite in Liloeet - nice touch Canada - so I wash briefly in the glacial run off and recline. It’s 4pm and I’ve ridden for many hours. I’m asleep by 8, awake at 6. Ride on.

Sunrise

The next couple of days are spent drifting around. I drop my bike in a comically slow slapstick fashion at a traffic light because my arms are so tired from the riding and someone gets out of his truck to help me pick it up - nice touch Canada, it’s bloody heavy.

I undertake my first bout of off-road adventure at about 3mph to find a lake on top of a mountain. I find the lake, get naked (because that’s obviously what you do when there’s no one at a paradise lake on top of a mountain), get dressed sharpish when a car drives past, decide not to camp there (because, bears…) and head down at 2mph and stay in a hostel.

Something they don’t teach you in motorbike lessons (or maybe they do, I probably should have had some) is if you keep pressure on your back brake for too long you can boil the brake fluid - and the brake disappears. It just stops working because the brake fluid is now a gas. I did this in the middle of nowhere, on the way down the dirt track from my off-road lake adventure. Scared the shit out of me. Luckily it doesn’t stay boiled forever and started working again. Lesson learnt.

Smoke

Then on to wwoofing at Sonja’s house. Wildfires burning nearby lend a strange atmosphere to the place. The view of Vernon, the mountains and the lake that can normally be seen from her balcony is partially obscured. Twice now the sun’s rays have been blocked since my arrival - the partial eclipse (barely noticeably with the naked eye) and the dense smoke from wildfires ripping through the North American continent. My Grandmother’s typically astronomical advice for me the last time that I saw her was that ’the twelfth house sun needs to find its own light.’ The Canadian sun doesn’t seem to be achieving this.

Sonja is a good woman. She tells me her condensed life story over dinner. Married at 19, then separated. Fell in love with her boss and had an affair for 15 years until he tragically died and she was unable to mourn because nobody knew what was going on. Then met Klaus, who she is now married to. He had a lot of money but lost it all. She said, “My husband is a gambler.” And then repeated it as if she was just now letting herself know the truth of it. They have an enormous, cavernous log cabin on the side of a mountain that they’ve been trying to sell for years. She said, “I just wish I was with someone who knew me.” She’s been with Klaus for more than twenty years.

Over the weekend I ride over to Glacier National Park and march up a mountain trail after overshooting the nearest shop by 40kms, going back, and buying 20 individually packaged breakfast bars because I’m afraid that bears will smell out anything else that I buy and eat me. I do not get eaten, though there is a bit of a bear alert while I’m there. Conclusion: minor threat of death, worth it for the scenery.

Glacier National Park

A week spent painting decking, reading Carl Jung and riding around the area in 30+ degree heat. I’m dreaming a lot now. A sense that real maturity is a transcendence of gender bubbles up. I write this in my journal: ‘These times are made for study. There is the peace, the space, the privacy and there are the hours. Use them to further understanding.  This is not a glorified shagaluf holiday. It is a time to renounce the self and find the world - find a truth that rings sweetly in this moment.’ As I write this, it is nice to be reminded.

My Canadian plan was to get to know the beast I’m riding in relatively safe conditions and see if anything major falls off the bike. Three weeks and 3000km later, when I eventually get ready to leave Canada, both myself and the bike will continue to be in one piece and in good working order, the temperature will have halved and there will have been several inches of snow in Vernon.

Boston Bar Saloon

The labours of Hercules follow a two day ride to Boston Bar punctuated by a bee sting to the chest at 90kph. I am tasked with digging asparagus trenches in boulderous soil (manfully assisted by Fitz, the border collie, who responds to ‘Dig Fitz!’ with excitable digging in exactly the right place); sieving the pebbles out of the dug soil and putting it back into the trenches on top of asparagus (while Fitz waits whining, confused about why I’m undoing his good work); collecting all the cow shit in the fields to make plaster for the walls of a straw bale white elephant roadside shop and cannabis dispensary; shifting a literal tonne of bales into place for said white elephant, only to take them down again; and mixing the shit into a tasty lather and slathering it on the straw bales. A refreshing week's work after two years in an office.

Guapo, the cow

David, whose elephant I’m am helping to construct is a kind man who helps me with a lesson in motorcycle maintenance and continues to dream his way through life in the face of the inevitable difficulties that come with being a small-scale farmer in his sixties. There is a level of magical thinking floating around the place in that he, Liz (his wife), and their friends are clinging on to the hope that some angel investor will come from nowhere and buy them a plot of land to set up an intentional community. It’s a nice dream and my hope is that they can fulfil their ambitions, but there is the awkward spectre of debt hanging around the place.

They have a ‘cash flow problem’ and are doing their best to get themselves out of it. They’re trying to sell their winnebago and pickup. Debt becomes a recurring theme as I travel around. I wonder if it’s a North American thing or if everyone I know in the UK is in debt too. One of their neighbours says, ‘We’re all sitting on mountains of debt, just some of us are more willing to admit it than others.’

On my last night, David and I check out the bike. He says to me, “Do you have a rag?” Meaning a rag with which to clean the oil off your hands while working on the bike. (I didn’t realise I needed a rag.) I say no. He says, “You do now.” Hands me a dirty old flannel and I’m touched. My very first rag. A minor initiation.

I leave them having helped out in a minor way and, feeling well fed and full of the joy of spending nearly all my waking moments outdoors, I carve a path back to Vancouver.

Seaplane comes into land over Victoria

As those who know me might attest, I am a man who enjoys feminine affection once in a while, and by this point it has been some time since this has been available to me, with the countryside being rural and somewhat less populated than cities. While stopping off in Vancouver, I inevitably end up on Tinder and inevitably change my plans at the last minute from a ride to Tofino, across Vancouver Island, to a ride down to Victoria, in the south of the island, where a girl I ‘met’ on Tinder is going to a festival. What can I say, I was hungover and weak.

Fortunately, I get a flat front tyre as I arrive into Victoria. This is fortunate firstly, because I am not speeding at 100kph and, secondly, I am not, as I would have been if my plans hadn’t changed in search of a girl, somewhere deep in the interior of an island the size of England with a body count of 700,000 of which 350,000 are in the city in which I’m arriving - Victoria. Thanks libido.

The ferry crossing

The timing was also fortuitous because the nearest motorbike mechanics is Adrenalin Motorcycles - a cooperative set up by a couple of guys called Scott and Steve who, with their buddies hanging around the place banterously, do their very best to actually help me in every way they possibly can. This place is night and day to the mechanic in Vancouver. They fix up the thing - new inner tube on the front, new tyre on the back and remove a random drill bit from a random piece of the frame - and give me a sense of security in the bike that I’ve chosen. It helps that Scott is one of Canada’s foremost experts when it comes to KLRs.

These serendipitous moments of synchronicity are part of the reason that I travel. Things click into place. Immediately after leaving the shop, a guy on a scooter pulls up next to me at a red light and starts a chat, points me in the direction of a nice seaside cafe and I take a moment to chill, take in the day. The ferry crossing from the city through the gulf islands on to Vancouver Island was mind blowing after the tinder dry interior. I wander around the city marvelling at the sense that is choreographed for my enjoyment.

The only downside to the day - I accidentally left enough stuff with James in my hangover that I’m not able to head to the USA until he posts it on to me.

Man with a face on bag

A night in a grotty hostel (where they try to charge you $10 to park on their drive and where parking overnight is free on the street in front of the building) is followed by a morning of sending out a flurry of couchsurf requests. Veronica replies almost immediately and I have a proper place to stay. I ride to her address and a woman I vaguely recognise is in the living room when I go round the back to let myself in.

She introduces herself as Zarja, later mentions New Zealand and I’m sure that we stayed in the same hostel in Wanaka four years ago. I mention it and she confirms. She says, “You’re the one who had the thing with my friend,” and sends a winky smile emoji through the air. Yes I am… Another little moment of synchronicity - these seemingly meaningful coincidences will keep coming and they won’t stop being enjoyable.

Living in the house there are Veronica, her two sons and one of their girlfriends, a family from Dubai, Zarja, guys called Chris and Jordy, Christina, Carmen and another couch surfer called Dario. She is quite the welcoming woman.

We go out drinking and the more I city and the more I drink, the more clear it becomes that I don’t belong in city or with drink in hand.

Marie's home

Veronica puts me in touch with Marie, a Quebecois woman living on Salt Spring Island in a renovated trailer. Salt Spring has more hippies per capita than anywhere else in Canada.  On my first night there she takes me to a night of singing Bajans and Kirtans (mostly Hindi devotional songs) in the nearly constructed temple of a local intentional community. It is cold but the chanting is just what I need - sat in a circle with forty odd strangers, several harmoniums and guitars, a couple of drums and a call and response involving the names of Hindu gods and little else that I can make out, but I sing the noises. It reminds me of India and points me in the direction of an ashram somewhere between Salt Spring and Argentina. A woman comes up to me at the end to talk, I tell her what I’m up to and she says, “Take this blessing with you and pray for protection if you feel like you need it.” And I thank her. The next day, of course, I buy a ukulele.

My uke

Marie’s neighbour, Dennis, is a seventy year old Salt Spring native. He has a collection of classic cars and built the annex to the 1940s caravan that Marie lives in, with an outside shower, deep in woodland, open to the elements. He catches me having a look at my bike (the rear left indicator stopped working) and we end up tightening (which I realise is a one man job) and greasing the chain (which annoyingly, isn’t)  together, checking out his bikes and talking about his time in California as a teenager in the 60s. This keeps happening. Bikes bring bikers together.

Ferries, it seems, are a chance for people to make conversation with you and I meet several people who wish me well on the ferry back to Vancouver Island. They are mostly older men who give me tips on where to go and what to avoid and tell me that they wished that they had done something like what I am doing when they were younger, or are planning to do something similar soon, but with a look in their eyes as if to say, ‘I know I’ll never do it.’

My fortune

Now as I write, I’m waiting for the package from James to arrive before I can head to the US and face down the US border patrol. Luckily my fears of being turned away at the border have been allayed by some clairvoyant cards. Marie instructs me to shuffle them and pick one. The Native American spirit animal I select will predict my fortune. I chose a fawn. A young deer. Hardly the wolf or eagle or panther I’d expected. The ‘fortune’ went on to describe the fawn marching up to the gates to the Spirit Mountain where a terrible monster stood in the way of anyone who tried to enter. The fawn was essentially very nice to the monster until it shrank to the size of a stone and opened the way for ‘all the children to ascend to the Spirit Mountain.’ So coming up, I’m going to break down the US border with kindness and somehow go several steps further than just beating the Trump travel ban by allowing all the children into the US (which I assume is the Spirit Mountain). If this has not been achieved by Friday the 22nd September 2017, I may have misread my fortune…

Next up - running away from the coming cold and on to California!