Toronto → Kamloops by train
I chose to take the train back to BC in part to help complete the journey. My cycle tour abruptly vaulted south into the US last year, so now i am closing the loop. The train from Toronto to Vancouver takes 4 days. It mostly travels along the northern CN line across Canada - apparently a more picturesque route than the CP line which mostly parallels the Trans Canada Highway. On this northern route there are very few settlements. The rails just cut straight through the wilderness. There is nothing for hundreds of miles around. This is even more of a backcountry route than cycling gravel would be.
It started straight out of Toronto, heading north through so-called "cottage country", the land of lakes and creeks where reasonably well-to-do city dwellers keep a second home, a place where they can go fishing and boating and snowmobiling. Already there it feels like you are on the edge of nowhere. The train hurtles through clouds of dragonflies. Clouds! The whole area is a vast, flat expanse of trees with irregular protrusions of granite and gashes of dark water sprinkled in between. Even the most luxurious cottages look desperate and alone.
Once you're north of Sudbury, that's pretty much it for human development. All you see next to the rails is ragged powerlines, tipped over or sunken deep into the surrounding swamp. It's an inhospitable country. Even the trees seem strangled by the blackness of the water. I don't know if the 250,000-odd lakes drain anywhere. They seem more like ancient puddles of melted snow, pockmarking the landscape. You can't hike it - too wet. You can't canoe it - too dry. It's what i imagine hell to look like. Cold, damp, insect-infested. Suffocating undergrowth. Jagged rocks. Pools of thick, stygian ooze. A place of despair.
I fell asleep before nightfall and woke with the sun. The landscape had not changed. We were over a thousand kilometers into the journey and still barely half way across Ontario. Sleeping in economy seats is extremely uncomfortable. Every angle or position there is something rigid and sharp to leave you waking up in pain. And yet... and yet... Something about traveling across this wilderness helps me to get more in touch with my identity as a Canadian, whatever exactly that means. Aside from the handful of multicultural cities where most of the people live, Canada is also this. This... nothingness. And although the Canadian Shield is not my preferred type of nothingness, it is linked deeply to the birth of the colony and the history of the peoples who were here before. It's part of what it means to be Canadian, so i'm glad i have the chance to experience it.
-o-
As i was typing the last segment a group of raucous American anglers got on the train. We stopped in literally the middle of nowhere, a place with no roads, just some cabins on the lake and a marked stop by the side of the tracks - not even a platform. So this is where those fishing retreats are that people south of the border like to run away to. Thankfully the coughing, hacking, barely-masked gaggle of asshats decided to move up to the dome car after harassing the staff here in economy.
I still haven't visited the dome car, but if it's anything like Amtrak, it's really not much different to economy, view-wise. Worse, in fact, because people are drunk and chattering and you're constantly worried about the security of your stuff back at your seat. I'm happier in this car with just a few solo travelers like me and the odd family - a mom and her kid, a group of Mennonites, quiet commuters one and all.
We're coming up to Sioux Lookout in an hour or two, which presumably will have a brief spot of 4G internet, then on to Winnipeg where there is a crew change and a couple hours for a cleaning team to come through. And after that, the prairies - the northern half, which i've never seen. I hope they'll be a little drier and wider than this soggy wasteland, but who knows?
-o-
We must have spent hours sided out overnight. One of the strange things about taking passenger trains in Canada and the US is that the tracks are all owned by freight companies, and they route their own kilometers-long intermodal snakes ahead of these meager public transport routes that only carry tourists and rural folks who happen to live along the line. Delays of hours or even days are inevitable.
Last night we rolled into Winnipeg. We had about an hour to get off and walk around, so i took advantage of being able to escape the freezing cold air conditioning and feel some real sun and air on my skin. I got a roti from the touristy food court near the station, then walked down to the river to eat it away from the unmasked hordes. But the path i walked last year is gone. The banks are slick with mud, recovering from the spring flood, and all the waterside trails remain sunk, somewhere beneath the rapids.
The train sat around for another hour in the station before getting rolling. It was pitch black out on the prairie, but it was still epic - red lights from a radio tower flashing in the distance, lightning cracking through distant clouds. Such a big, big sky. It's beautiful.
I woke up barely on the border of Saskatchewan, we had moved so little overnight. The big skies are still there, but the light has shown this stretch of the prairies to be the same depressingly soggy ones that tried my patience in Manitoba and southeast Saskatchewan. They seem to be at least as much bog as plains.
-o-
We sided out for another hour to let a short general manifest train slowly trundle past. When your passenger train is even lower on the priority list than a couple handfuls of random oil cars, grain cars and auto racks pootling from one prairie town to another, kinda sinks in just how little human lives are worth to these companies. And how little the government cares about providing public transport to the people they ostensibly represent. Fortunately i have nowhere to be and i am in no rush. It's much cheaper to sleep on a train that i already paid for than to spend a night in a motel at the other end. But that's another rant.
The prairies are a nice spot to be sided out. They seem more lively than the Canadian Shield. Or maybe you can just see more because the view isn't blocked by millions of useless trees. Families of deer bound across the fields. Little colorful birds hover around and flit from place to place. Even the frigid ponds that tend to bring me down are lifted up by the shiny ducks paddling about. And the wind in the crops makes waves that remind me of the sea. Except this sea is a sea of food. Said it before and i'll say it again - it's so pleasing to be surrounded by expansive fields of grain, bountiful staples from here to the horizon.
The prairies feel comforting to me, even these cold and wet ones up north. They feel like hope and freedom. I want to drink them in while i can. Taiwan has its share of rice paddies, but there is nothing like the vastness out here.
-o-
Saskatoon is fucking freezing.
-o-
This whole parallel is cold as shit. What kind of summer day doesn't even crack 20 degrees? We just crossed into Alberta. It got marginally hillier as we approached the border, and now the trees are back too. But there are roads and farms as well, so it's far from the fierce wilderness of northern Ontario. Feels a bit worst of both worlds to be honest. Definitely different to the clean, windswept barrens in the southern end of the province. Too many hills. You can't really enjoy the landscape.
-o-
Spotted my first cow. Officially in Alberta.
-o-
Waking up in the Rockies, the train was bitterly cold. Although for once it was not because of overzealous air conditioning. It was near-zero outside overnight. Remind me again why people go on bucket list holidays to these mountains? It's fucking freezing. The landscape blocks almost all the sun. It's dark and claustrophobic - and this is still on the eastern/sunrise half of the continental divide! The mountains still have snow on them! Snow! It's nearly July!
They stopped the train for another couple hours in Jasper, but i elected to stay on. It was very chilly outside and the town seemed to consist more of tour buses than of people. There was a Subway and a craft beer place. It looked hideous.
Now we've started rolling again and i'm finding myself a little disappointed at the tempo. After cycling my way across Turtle Island in the other direction, this just feels too fast. It's not that i enjoy the landscape and want to savor it - on the contrary! But regardless of the appreciation i have for a place, it feels wrong to flash by it so quickly, to not give it the attention or respect it deserves.
The Rocky Mountains are huge - as i noted last time i was traveling over them, they're too big to fit in the frame of a cellphone camera. You can't really understand the massiveness until you're standing in a valley with them looming up over you on every side.
But in a different way, i feel like the professional pictures of the region make it seem grander than it actually is. In the sense that postcard photos taken from a helicopter or remote peak show a kind of majesty and serenity that doesn't exist in reality. When you have boots on the ground it's cold and damp and dirty and bug-ridden, a rather uncomfortable place for any human being to have to be.
Of course, part of what makes travel meaningful to me is enduring that discomfort. To feel a shadow of the pain that travelers must've felt hundreds of years ago, before there was a railroad, before Vibram soles and Nano Puff jackets and GPS. That people ever made it through this wilderness is humbling, and inspiring. Although i suppose many didn't make it through at all.
Well, we've just entered BC, so today will be a slow roll back down the western side of the continental divide to my adopted home in Canada - Kamloops. The train station is on a slice of CN land in the middle of the rez, over an hour's walk from town. Depending on my energy level i will try to hike it. Get some blood flowing through my body again. Follow the roads through the arid steppe that i so loved cycling for the year or so i was in town. I'll finally be closing the loop that started almost two years ago.
-o-
Heading south again. The valley just here is wide and sun is pouring in. I recognize the wildflowers. We haven't yet reached the yellow grass and sage-flecked hills of home, but it's close. Just a few hundred kilometers.
-o-
I am "home", but i am homeless.
It started straight out of Toronto, heading north through so-called "cottage country", the land of lakes and creeks where reasonably well-to-do city dwellers keep a second home, a place where they can go fishing and boating and snowmobiling. Already there it feels like you are on the edge of nowhere. The train hurtles through clouds of dragonflies. Clouds! The whole area is a vast, flat expanse of trees with irregular protrusions of granite and gashes of dark water sprinkled in between. Even the most luxurious cottages look desperate and alone.
Once you're north of Sudbury, that's pretty much it for human development. All you see next to the rails is ragged powerlines, tipped over or sunken deep into the surrounding swamp. It's an inhospitable country. Even the trees seem strangled by the blackness of the water. I don't know if the 250,000-odd lakes drain anywhere. They seem more like ancient puddles of melted snow, pockmarking the landscape. You can't hike it - too wet. You can't canoe it - too dry. It's what i imagine hell to look like. Cold, damp, insect-infested. Suffocating undergrowth. Jagged rocks. Pools of thick, stygian ooze. A place of despair.
I fell asleep before nightfall and woke with the sun. The landscape had not changed. We were over a thousand kilometers into the journey and still barely half way across Ontario. Sleeping in economy seats is extremely uncomfortable. Every angle or position there is something rigid and sharp to leave you waking up in pain. And yet... and yet... Something about traveling across this wilderness helps me to get more in touch with my identity as a Canadian, whatever exactly that means. Aside from the handful of multicultural cities where most of the people live, Canada is also this. This... nothingness. And although the Canadian Shield is not my preferred type of nothingness, it is linked deeply to the birth of the colony and the history of the peoples who were here before. It's part of what it means to be Canadian, so i'm glad i have the chance to experience it.
-o-
As i was typing the last segment a group of raucous American anglers got on the train. We stopped in literally the middle of nowhere, a place with no roads, just some cabins on the lake and a marked stop by the side of the tracks - not even a platform. So this is where those fishing retreats are that people south of the border like to run away to. Thankfully the coughing, hacking, barely-masked gaggle of asshats decided to move up to the dome car after harassing the staff here in economy.
I still haven't visited the dome car, but if it's anything like Amtrak, it's really not much different to economy, view-wise. Worse, in fact, because people are drunk and chattering and you're constantly worried about the security of your stuff back at your seat. I'm happier in this car with just a few solo travelers like me and the odd family - a mom and her kid, a group of Mennonites, quiet commuters one and all.
We're coming up to Sioux Lookout in an hour or two, which presumably will have a brief spot of 4G internet, then on to Winnipeg where there is a crew change and a couple hours for a cleaning team to come through. And after that, the prairies - the northern half, which i've never seen. I hope they'll be a little drier and wider than this soggy wasteland, but who knows?
-o-
We must have spent hours sided out overnight. One of the strange things about taking passenger trains in Canada and the US is that the tracks are all owned by freight companies, and they route their own kilometers-long intermodal snakes ahead of these meager public transport routes that only carry tourists and rural folks who happen to live along the line. Delays of hours or even days are inevitable.
Last night we rolled into Winnipeg. We had about an hour to get off and walk around, so i took advantage of being able to escape the freezing cold air conditioning and feel some real sun and air on my skin. I got a roti from the touristy food court near the station, then walked down to the river to eat it away from the unmasked hordes. But the path i walked last year is gone. The banks are slick with mud, recovering from the spring flood, and all the waterside trails remain sunk, somewhere beneath the rapids.
The train sat around for another hour in the station before getting rolling. It was pitch black out on the prairie, but it was still epic - red lights from a radio tower flashing in the distance, lightning cracking through distant clouds. Such a big, big sky. It's beautiful.
I woke up barely on the border of Saskatchewan, we had moved so little overnight. The big skies are still there, but the light has shown this stretch of the prairies to be the same depressingly soggy ones that tried my patience in Manitoba and southeast Saskatchewan. They seem to be at least as much bog as plains.
-o-
We sided out for another hour to let a short general manifest train slowly trundle past. When your passenger train is even lower on the priority list than a couple handfuls of random oil cars, grain cars and auto racks pootling from one prairie town to another, kinda sinks in just how little human lives are worth to these companies. And how little the government cares about providing public transport to the people they ostensibly represent. Fortunately i have nowhere to be and i am in no rush. It's much cheaper to sleep on a train that i already paid for than to spend a night in a motel at the other end. But that's another rant.
The prairies are a nice spot to be sided out. They seem more lively than the Canadian Shield. Or maybe you can just see more because the view isn't blocked by millions of useless trees. Families of deer bound across the fields. Little colorful birds hover around and flit from place to place. Even the frigid ponds that tend to bring me down are lifted up by the shiny ducks paddling about. And the wind in the crops makes waves that remind me of the sea. Except this sea is a sea of food. Said it before and i'll say it again - it's so pleasing to be surrounded by expansive fields of grain, bountiful staples from here to the horizon.
The prairies feel comforting to me, even these cold and wet ones up north. They feel like hope and freedom. I want to drink them in while i can. Taiwan has its share of rice paddies, but there is nothing like the vastness out here.
-o-
Saskatoon is fucking freezing.
-o-
This whole parallel is cold as shit. What kind of summer day doesn't even crack 20 degrees? We just crossed into Alberta. It got marginally hillier as we approached the border, and now the trees are back too. But there are roads and farms as well, so it's far from the fierce wilderness of northern Ontario. Feels a bit worst of both worlds to be honest. Definitely different to the clean, windswept barrens in the southern end of the province. Too many hills. You can't really enjoy the landscape.
-o-
Spotted my first cow. Officially in Alberta.
-o-
Waking up in the Rockies, the train was bitterly cold. Although for once it was not because of overzealous air conditioning. It was near-zero outside overnight. Remind me again why people go on bucket list holidays to these mountains? It's fucking freezing. The landscape blocks almost all the sun. It's dark and claustrophobic - and this is still on the eastern/sunrise half of the continental divide! The mountains still have snow on them! Snow! It's nearly July!
They stopped the train for another couple hours in Jasper, but i elected to stay on. It was very chilly outside and the town seemed to consist more of tour buses than of people. There was a Subway and a craft beer place. It looked hideous.
Now we've started rolling again and i'm finding myself a little disappointed at the tempo. After cycling my way across Turtle Island in the other direction, this just feels too fast. It's not that i enjoy the landscape and want to savor it - on the contrary! But regardless of the appreciation i have for a place, it feels wrong to flash by it so quickly, to not give it the attention or respect it deserves.
The Rocky Mountains are huge - as i noted last time i was traveling over them, they're too big to fit in the frame of a cellphone camera. You can't really understand the massiveness until you're standing in a valley with them looming up over you on every side.
But in a different way, i feel like the professional pictures of the region make it seem grander than it actually is. In the sense that postcard photos taken from a helicopter or remote peak show a kind of majesty and serenity that doesn't exist in reality. When you have boots on the ground it's cold and damp and dirty and bug-ridden, a rather uncomfortable place for any human being to have to be.
Of course, part of what makes travel meaningful to me is enduring that discomfort. To feel a shadow of the pain that travelers must've felt hundreds of years ago, before there was a railroad, before Vibram soles and Nano Puff jackets and GPS. That people ever made it through this wilderness is humbling, and inspiring. Although i suppose many didn't make it through at all.
Well, we've just entered BC, so today will be a slow roll back down the western side of the continental divide to my adopted home in Canada - Kamloops. The train station is on a slice of CN land in the middle of the rez, over an hour's walk from town. Depending on my energy level i will try to hike it. Get some blood flowing through my body again. Follow the roads through the arid steppe that i so loved cycling for the year or so i was in town. I'll finally be closing the loop that started almost two years ago.
-o-
Heading south again. The valley just here is wide and sun is pouring in. I recognize the wildflowers. We haven't yet reached the yellow grass and sage-flecked hills of home, but it's close. Just a few hundred kilometers.
-o-
I am "home", but i am homeless.