Lake Louise

Lake Louise turned out to be one of those places: amazing natural beauty with a block of flats at one end. The setting is breathtaking, but anyone who finds the Fairmont beautiful or inviting is kidding themselves. Deer Lodge might have been small and dated with cramped rooms, but it has a character totally lacking in the pile that dominates so much natural beauty. Chateaux Concrete – blahhhh…

Anyway. Enough of the whinging. We took stock and walked out towards the glacier, without breakfast and especially without coffee. We climbed 6.5 kms and 2500 m to the Six Glaciers Teahouse and arrived to breathtaking views of the Plain or Six Glaciers, only to find that I had forgotten to go to the cash machine and our funds were severely limited. Alas! No coffee.

Wildlife score was high, with a squirrel that tried to search me for food the highlight, but two marmot sightings came close. The view from the top was spectacular, but so were the sheer numbers of people who we passed on the way down, such a contrast to the quiet of the early morning.

We sat in front of the faux chateau, watching the thousands of many nations pass along. One poor boy wandered behind his Arabic patriarch and his veiled female retainers, twirling an open umbrella. Lose the umbrella, kid, I advised: anywhere outside London, a young man with an umbrella is simply advertising his crisis of sexual preference, but he wasn’t even the worst dressed.

Anyway, on to Banff, which is very reminiscent of Queenstown. Cheap Mexican, a local beer in the micro-brewery, and bed.