‘We are going to win everything!’ says the reporter from CTV, who’s also a local skiing champion. We’re having breakfast in Vancouver’s Shangri-La hotel, discussing the run-up to the Olympic Winter Games while I wolf down the best eggs Benedict I’ve ever had.
Outside, the air is ice-fresh, the snowy mountains glorious, the high-rise city centre all neat lines of glinting glass, Canadian flags fluttering against an azure sky. There’s no false modesty here — about their city or their chances. Indeed there’s a definite whiff of all-round Vancouverite victory.
Coddled between the Pacific coastline and a crescent of mountains, Vancouver is a healthy sort of place with Stanley Park — a 1,000-acre forest full of runners – at its heart. Swimming in the Pacific in the morning and skiing in the afternoon is famously feasible, but not a combination recommended at this time of year.
Built on a grid system, the city is easy to navigate on foot, bike, bus, trolley car or SkyTrain once you find your bearings. The downtown area with Burrard Inlet to the north and False Creek to the south is a patchwork of contrasting neighbourhoods and so the high-rise architecture ends abruptly in an explosion of red and gold when you reach Chinatown, with its stalls selling delicacies like dried lizards and fish heads.
Vancouver has a certain Pacific Rim sophistication, but its two historic districts, Gastown and Yaletown, signs of its history as rougher, tougher frontier town, are close to the surface. Gastown is named after the British adventurer, Captain Jack Deighton, nicknamed Gassy Jack because of his propensity to talk. In 1867, Deighton described the nearby Burrard Inlet as ‘a lonesome place… surrounded by Indians. I care not to look outdoors after dark. There was a friend of mine found with his head cut in two. The Indian was caught and hanged.’
The advent of the railway made the area an important refuelling point during the late 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush. Itinerant workers slept under the ‘skids’, the greased ramps used by the mill for hauling the timber up and down gradients, and what was by now known as Gastown continued to be Vancouver’s Skid Row throughout much of the 20th century.
Now Gastown is two streets (Water and Cordova) a few blocks long of industrial buildings regenerated into apartments, galleries and boutiques specialising in local designers (see Dream and Obakki) while shoe designer John Fluevog’s clients include the White Stripes and Madonna.
Nightlife can be a little grungy but for the sublime, try Diamond for cocktails and Salt for dinner. Yaletown, running down to False Creek, is sleeker, more affluent, its residents described by a local as ‘good-looking dinks [dual income no kids] wearing black and drinking lattes’. The dinks have replaced the rail workers who extended the Canadian Pacific Railway to Vancouver 120 years ago, and the brick warehouses that lined the tracks of what’s now Hamilton and Mainland Streets have a new lease of life as lofts, jazz venues and restaurants. The number of expensive interior-design stores, achingly pricey boutiques (Basquiat among them) and niche stores such as Barking Babies (‘lifestyles for the hip and canine’) say life here is good, even for dogs.
