We departed Toronto on ‘The Canadian’ or Train 1 for the 2,795 mile journey to Vancouver. This will take 4 days and 4 nights. Overnight we stayed in the Royal York Hotel, formerly Canadian Pacific Hotel. Such hotels were provided for passengers who had to wait for connecting trains that only ran on a small …
Overnight we crossed New Brunswick to Quebec. After breakfast we followed the south bank of the St. Lawrence and by lunchtime had reached Sainte-Foy. This is the railway station for Quebec City. As a terminus it involved crossing the Quebec Bridge, a smaller version of the Forth Railway Bridge, both backwards and forwards. Before entering …
We departed Halifax Central Station at 13:00 aboard ‘The Ocean’ overnight sleeper train on a 836 mile journey to Montreal. Rain and a heavy sky did little to improve the dour dockland exit from the city. Later we crossed forests, dairy farming areas and one of the heads of the Bay of Fundy. This is …
Peggy’s Cove is the home of Canada’s most photographed lighthouse. The rugged, now wave swept outcrops of granite, are the exposed sections of the primeval continent of Pangea which have been sculptured into formations known as roche-moutonneés, which are similar to the Lofoten Islands of Norway – after all the Vikings did come to this …
We are in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is the country’s largest and busiest port on the Atlantic Coast. Following John Cabot’s finding of the Grand Banks the Portuguese, Spanish and French arrived here from 1502 onwards. Eventually the Portuguese and Spanish pulled out of the cod trade and left it to the French and …
Our latest adventure started here. This place has the second largest natural harbour in the world and the British were drawn here following John Cabot’s explorations in 1497, when sailing from Bristol and encountered cod in vast numbers. By the mid 16th century the cod fishing grounds off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were providing 60% …
This was departure day with time to walk around the city before boarding the Boeing 777 to London. Essentially the plane was pointed towards Paris for 10 hours before we adjusted course for a landing from the east. On this expedition we travelled around 14,500 miles.
This morning we had an early start to enable us to visit the Aquila Game Reserve in the Hex Valley of the Western Cape. The reserve is shielded by mountains from the oceanic weather systems and so is semi-arid, steppe-like savannah with maquis (Mediterranean) vegetation, with sandy soil and frost and heat shattered rocks. Travelling …
At 07:00 our view at wake-up time is very different. Our tour today is of the Winelands of the Cape Region set below the dramatic Hottentots Holland Mountain Range. At Franschhoek, one of the oldest towns in the region, was settled by Huguenots from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. When the Dutch colonised the area, …