Day 3 - Yaletown and Granville Island

Today's Breakfast of Champions was a "breakfast enchillada"; scrambled eggs, salsa, black beans, corn, spring onions, diced tomatoes, guacamole and cheddar in a tortilla with the ubiquitous potato rosti. It nearly finished me, but again, in this battle of Man v Food, Man won. Sandra had a far healthier-looking yoghurt parfait - I think I might try that tomorrow.

And so out into a Vancouver that was once more damp with drizzle. The city of Vancouver began life just over 150 years ago as a cluster of wooden huts called Granville (or Gastown by its inhabitants). They built the huts out of wood because there are just so many trees here, but when a fire tore through the recently renamed City of Vancouver in 1886, destroying just about everything, they decided to rebuild it using bricks. In those days Vancouver had a population of about 1000. These days the population is approximately 2 million, or just under half the total population of British Columbia.

Until the 1970s, Granville Island was an ugly inner city industrial site, but following extensive redevelopment it is now a labyrinth of converted warehouses, a large public market, and an extensive marina, and it was here that Sandra and I had planned to visit this morning. However the weather was so wet that instead we walked south across the Burrard Bridge to the tagine-shaped Museum of Vancouver and associated H. R. MacMillan Space Centre.

The museum itself is closed on Mondays, but the Space Centre was open. I wasn't expecting much, but it was better than I'd hoped, with one of the only four pieces of Moon rock in the world that the general public can touch, and an actual J2 engine as used on stages 2 and 3 of the Saturn V rocket. Following a practical demonstration on how the different colours with which substances burn can help us determine what distant stars are made of, and a planetarium experience describing the First Nation people's reliance upon the Moon and stars to tell them when to move, when to stay, when to hunt, etc., we moved on to the Vancouver Maritime Museum.

Centre stage here, and rightly so, is the fully restored ship St. Roch. This amazing vessel, captained by the equally amazing Henry Larsen, performed some extraordinary feats; she was the second ship to negotiate the Northwest Passage from east to west, but the first to negotiate it from west to east (and therefore the first to negotiate it both ways). She was also the first ship to fully circumnavigate the North American continent, when she sailed from Nova Scotia through the Panama Canal. To walk upon the deck of that ship, trying to imagine spending two years of my life creeping through ice-packed oceans at almost the very top of the world, was almost impossible. The men who do these things are a breed apart.

By now the weather was much better, so we walked along False Creek (it's not a real creek - the Canadians seem to adopt the Australian approach when it comes to naming things) towards Granville Island. The air was filled with the smell of the sea, and we could see mussels clinging to the rocks on the edge of the creek. Indeed, at one point a crow dropped a mussel from a great height to land on the hard ground before us, trying to crack the shell to get the tasty flesh inside. We walked by the large marina, full of jostling boats, to Granville Island itself, festooned with adverts and posters for the upcoming Canada Day celebrations. There we spent some time looking in the shops, but most especially the wonderful indoor market with its impressive meat and vegetable and fish stalls. I've never seen so much salmon on sale.

Indeed I joked, before we came out here, that our diet would consist mainly of salmon and halibut. Following a short ferry trip across False Creek and a return to our hotel to freshen up, we visited Brix Restaurant (on Homer Street - true!), where Sandra had salmon and I had halibut. It was delicious, if a little pricey.

Tomorrow we pick up our first hire car and head out to Whistler for a day trip. I'm feeling a little nervous about that driving-on-the-right thing, this city seems so busy. But then so did Calgary two years ago, and that worked out okay.