Calgary

It is true that I usually write this blog in the first person present tense, the idea is to give the reader a sense of being with me on my travels. This post will just not work that way as the events are so clearly in the past, so I’ll do a more traditional story telling mode, first person past tense. This year is just not turning out the way I had hoped, between a bathroom reno that frankly did not go well thanks to a bad contractor decision, and being frantically busy at work, I’m writing a whole lot less than I should and riding the KLR only a fraction as much as I want to. It is now at the beginning of official summer and I don’t think I’ve done more than 2000 kilometers this year so far, bloody disgrace. The weather has also played its part with the arrival of summer this year in a peak-a-boo, now you see it now you don’t fashion. Snow in the middle of May and morning temperatures below 5 degrees Celsius in the middle of June.

Token motorcycle for this post (Gasoline Alley Calgary)

A few Sundays back is a case in point, I had signed up to do the Cannonball Ironbutt 500, which is a 500 mile ride to be completed in twelve hours. This sounds like an easy feat and in a car is not a particularly heavy drive, but on a motorcycle it is quite grueling as you don’t have time to take many breaks and to rest much, hence the name ‘Ironbutt’, motorcycle seats are generally rather uncomfortable. Anyway, the day dawned and I was up at the fart-of-sparrow to get to the starting point by 7 a.m. It was about 5 degrees centigrade when I left home and the weather was expecting to reach a balmy 18 degrees (feels like 14, or something like that), with 60 km/h gusty winds. Not entirely motorcycling weather at its best. I’m not just a fair weather biker, but I do ride for enjoyment and in normal circumstances I would not be staring of a day’s ride on a day like this, of course if I was already on a trip I’d take the rough with the smooth. In any event I set off manfully after inserting the lining back into the mesh jacket, double socking and donning the full rain gear outfit – rain gear is not just for keeping out rain, but is very effective at keeping a chap warm. I think it was the windiest conditions I have ridden in, at least on the KLR, the Boulevard was a lot heavier machine so probably handled wind better. Even before reaching my starting point, I had a few underwear soiling moments when a gust of wind took me from one lane to another on the motorway. This became a bit of a theme for the day especially when one was riding north or south and through open county. Forest areas were less difficult as the trees shielded me from the wind to some extent, but a lot of the route was on motorways and main roads, which tend to go through farming areas with little forest cover. No excuses offered, I have no point to prove, I bailed less than half way after a particularly wild gust of wind nearly popped me onto the soft shoulder with potentially fatal results. As it is wisely said, he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Instead of battling high winds and busy traffic, I took the little roads less travelled by and wound my way home exploring dirt roads, even had time to stop at a really nice (sheltered from the wind) spot and enjoy the lunch I had packed of store bought grilled chicken, boiled eggs and homemade mayonnaise, washed down with a tin of sugar free Red Bull.

I see that I have gotten a little off subject as this post is titled ‘Calgary’. There was no motorcycling involved in this trip, but it was a pretty interesting week nonetheless. Calgary, outside of the annual stampede event, is not usually considered much of a tourist destination, so you may be wondering what on earth I was doing there in the middle of May, and without a motorcycle to boot. The irresistible attraction to this immovable object was a chance to meet-up with my youngest sister, citizen and resident of Australia these past couple of decades. My siblings and I are true participants of the great white South African diaspora, we each literally live in a different corner of the globe – North America, China, Australia and South Africa, like the British Empire, the sun is always shining on one of us. Tamra, my youngest sib, and Liam, my nephew, were in Calgary for Liam to compete in an international wrestling meet, where he was representing Australia as a junior (under 21, I think that means). The young man has talent and took the Gold Medal – three fights that each lasted not much more than the blink of an eye. The interesting thing about this sport was the number of female participants, in my fuddy-duddy old fashion way I had somehow assumed that this was an all-male

sport. Lady wrestling was something done in nightclubs in large tubs of mud for the edification and financial fleecing of oversexed men. Clearly I was wrong and in this completion at least, there were as many female bouts as male and not much difference in technique between the sexes.

Liam takes Gold

The event was held inside an enormous indoor stadium on Calgary University campus, originally built for the speed skating events for the 1988 Winter Olympics. The venue was big enough to host two other tournaments at the same time, Judo and Taekwondo. By midday on Sunday the competitive part of the wresting was done and the athletes retired to wherever athletes retire to in order to rest and recuperate for the week ahead, which was a training camp. Tamra and I decided to head downtown to check out the Devonian Gardens. After about an hour delay getting the campus security to look after a dog locked in a car (see http://not-so-easy-rider.blogspot.ca/2016/05/a-hole-of-week.html) we made our way, courtesy of my Tom Tom GPS, to the center of the city where the Devonian Gardens are to be found. These gardens occupy the top floor of a downtown shopping mall, flourishing under a glass hothouse. On that day the air-conditioning was probably working hard to cool the place down, but I

guess in the middle of winter - Calgary gets pretty bloody cold, not for nothing do cars around here have block heaters – they probably need to push a bit of heat. Now for anyone that hasn’t been to Calgary, the city is obsessed with paleontology, there are dinosaur motifs everywhere. Of course the Devonian period was way before any dinosaurs walked the earth, but it still all fits in with the general image of Calgary. I presume the intension is to have plants growing that would have not been strangers to this particular epoch. From my perspective they really succeed in creating a fascinating urban park that is completely unexpected. I would imagine that coming here in February to get away from the icy winter outside must be a truly wonderful thing for residents of Calgary – the Devonian was apparently a comparatively warm epoch.  

We had lunch at a fast foods sushi place in the gardens, which was pretty decent for a fast food joint, and it served seaweed salad, a dish that has become a favorite for me. After lunch we took a walk through downtown Calgary, this really is a delightful little city. It’s on a completely manageable scale, but has all the sophistication of art, museums, restaurants, bars, squares and fountains, a small China town, street performers and so on that you can wish for.

Downtown Calgary

It reminds me in some way of Edinburgh, vastly different in antiquity, but similar in spirit, both of these cities layer grittiness and urban sophistication in a similar way.  Our walk took us to the Bow River where it looked like half of the city center residents were out walking and enjoying the sunny weather, nice.

Back at the hotel we made a supper of ham, cheese, coleslaw, avocado and hummus, Scotch for me and wine for Tamra. We shared a hotel room, something we probably had not done in forty years, but it seemed to work out fine, I felt no discomfort with the arrangement and neither, it appeared, did she. The room is billed as a suite, which I guess it is as we had a very basic kitchenette and a couch, in addition to two queen size beds, bathroom of course. It was enough and we spent many happy hours catching up, sitting on that couch. And we had an awful lot of catching up to do, we have led very different lives. Tamra has managed to achieve a domesticity coupled with career success that is nothing short of enviable.

Monday morning after a breakfast of microwave bacon and scrambled eggs we headed off to the Badlands of Drumheller and the Royal Tyrrell Museum. This is a good 150 kilometers from Calgary and the source of the paleontology theme referred to earlier. I stupidly decided when we reached Drumheller that I should turn off the GPS as I had an excellent idea where to go to find the museum, so we got to

travel an additional 30 kilometers on the entirely wrong road. Luckily we were in no actual hurry to be anywhere and at least Tamra got to see a herd of bison, farmed like cows, but bison nonetheless. Memo to me, the GPS knows the route, I don’t. Actually now that I am thinking about this I really should get a GPS for my motorcycle, though that would spoil all the fun I have getting horribly lost and seeing things I would otherwise not see.

The Badlands of Drumheller are interesting, reminiscent of all those western movies of my youth, and the photo comics of my army days – poes bookies for my South African readers, ‘Ryter in Swart’ esv. The badlands are of course the very reason that the museum exists, the erosion exposed the dinosaur fossils that have made this area world famous for, well dinosaur fossils.

Badlands

The Royal Tyrell Museum is totally worth the admission fee of $18 each, costly though this is.  The exhibits are arranged in geological ages. They illustrate this with globes of the earth, showing how the continents stacked up at that particular age. Starting with the pre-Cambrian, then Cambrian explosion as documented by the Burgess Shale - discovered not that far from here in the Rockies - and taking the visitor right through to, geologically speaking, modern times. Sometimes just skeleton, sometimes fully reconstructed, the exhibits are really well done and for a brief moment I am able to fathom a succinct sequence of epochs and the creatures that played a part in each epoch, but this does not stay with me quite as well as I would like it to.  Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous and so on tend to get a bit mixed up in my mind. This is sad because these were great big swathes of time that I really ought to be a whole lot clearer about. What is a certainty is that this is an absolute must see place, if only to put us in our real place as Johnny-come-latelies that in the greater scheme of things will barely be worth a footnote in the annuals of life on the planet earth. I can compose that footnote for us, ‘Homo sapiens sapiens, so called, but not actually very wise. This species very briefly inhabited the planet for approximately a mere 100 000 years, before going extinct due to its own over consumption and stupidity.’ 

After the tour through the museum we took a short walk on a marked trail through a piece of badlands, part of the museum experience, where we came across some very tame prairie dogs, a species of ground squirrel. Our plump dachshunds at home would love to encounter tame squirrels that don’t have trees to escape into.     

Tame prairie dog

We met up with the young athlete for dinner at a restaurant, carefully chosen for its proximity to the hotel and hence the ability to have a few Scotches and walk home. The restaurant was called ‘Nick’s’ and the theme was 70’s steakhouse, owned and operated by Greeks. I liked it, though the food was not really fantastic, it took me back in time to my youth when eating out was a novel experience and steakhouses were about the pinnacle of culinary experiences. In the large town I grew up in, aside from the handful of small hotels that had dining rooms with set menus and a few roadhouses, there were literally no restaurants, until some Cypriot opened a steakhouse. Here we learned the term À la carte. I recall that ordering a ‘Mixed Grill’ was considered a sophistication of note. I don’t know if mixed grills were on menus anywhere else in the world, but for us this comprised of a feast of grilled sausage, fried steak, lamb chops, bacon or ham, two fried eggs, fried onions, chips, a token slice or two of tomato and several slices of white toast, possibly also fried. It was freaking awesome, if a little fattening.

Tuesday dawned and after a great brekky of microwave bacon, microwave eggs, coleslaw and avocado we headed out to Banff. Now Banff is a bit of an Albertan, if not a Canadian, institution. People talk about Banff as if they have actually lived there, I suspect it lies in the spelling of the town. How do you pronounce it, ‘Banf-f’ or just ‘Banf’, the former is more fun, but I presume the latter is correct. I have been to Banff once before during a business trip to Calgary, the client I was working with took me out there on a Sunday. Banff is situated at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a superb location.  It was the winter when I visited, but even then it was a great experience, indeed the mountains have a stark beauty in winter that is something to be seen. I’ve mentioned before on this blog how much I miss mountains here in flat old Ontario. As we got close to Banff the mountains rose up from the prairie and my heart lifted with them.  

Banff from Sulphur Mountain

Of course I turned off the GPS when I was sure I knew where to turn off the Trans Canadian Highway, and of course I missed it so overshot by about 13 kilometers. Why it took me so long to realize my mistake is a bit of a mystery, but there you are. After my little detour we drove through town heading first for the obligatory trip up Sulphur Mountain on the cable car… see http://banffandbeyond.com/banff-gondola/. Being a little early in the season it wasn’t too crowded and there was not much of line-up (‘queue’ for non-North American readers). I noticed that many of the tourists were retirees, the new nomads driving these enormous RV’s, pains in the ass on the road. Anyway we ended up sharing a gondola with just such a couple on the way up, and later a different, but identical pair on the way down. Pleasant and chatty though they were, my anti-social persona

Boardwalk with back of sister

would have preferred indifferent silence. I’m not sure I’d conclude that a trip up Sulphur mountain is worth it had we had a two-hour line-up as I suspect would happen in high season, but for us it certainly was. Utterly fantastic views and the walk along the boardwalk on the very top of the mountain to the old weather station was quite something. I drank in the Rockies knowing that soon I’d be back in Ontario and would have to be satisfied with the Kawatha ‘Highlands’ which are barely more than a few pimples on the flat face of Ontario.

Once back in the valley we headed to town in search of lunch. Banff is surprisingly short on parking space, but we eventually we found a spot and after a short walk through the town center found a nice looking Japanese restaurant where we had an entirely passable meal of Sushi and Sashimi washed down with Japanese beer. During lunch Tamra had mentioned that she had not had much of a sense of the aboriginal history, or even encountered a North American Indian. This is true, there is precious little to remind you that only a few hundred years ago this was all the homeland of Sioux, Blackfoot and so on before Europeans obliterated and dispossessed those that lived on the lands that they wanted. A Google search using my phone managed to find at least one museum dedicated to the Indian people that had lived here, the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum. The building looks like a fort of timber construction; like the ones

a little on the cheesy side exhibit - Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum

you see in old Western movies. It isn’t the greatest of museums and some of the exhibits are rather cheesy, the old fashioned type with poorly made dummies in poses around teepees, still it was interesting and the quite reasonable entrance fee included a small cup of terribly bad coffee in Styrofoam. We were a little disappointed in that we didn’t get a chance to meet with a genuine Indian, the lady that manned the entrance cash point was almost certainly Filipino. Tamra however did pick up some literature on a place called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, more of that later. 

The next day was to be a quiet day, we spent the morning doing housekeeping stuff like laundry, getting up late and lazing about in the suite and sadly I had some work to do. In the afternoon we decided on one short excursion to Gasoline Alley, a motor car museum. Actually we wanted to see Heritage Park, which is a sort of collection of historical buildings, some actually transported from the original spot, others are recreations, but we were a few days too early as the season had not yet started and the park was not open to the public.

Gasoline Alley, part of Heritage Park is open all year round and worth a visit, more so if you are a petrol head. I’m not, but still it was a well spent few hours. The museum has two floors chock full of the largest collection of cars I have ever seen, spanning from the late nineteenth century to cars from the sixties… even has a caravan which I think dates from about the fifties. They were all meticulously and beautifully restored. There was also a collection of gas station pumps going back to the very early days of motoring. On the lower level there was a guide, a retired chap with an interest in motor cars and he gave us the background story about many of the exhibits which made the visit more interesting than it otherwise would have been. The museum does however fall short in one aspect as far as I am concerned, no motorcycles, can you believe it. None unless you count one motorized bicycle, but then I guess I am prejudiced, motorcars I see as a mode of transport, motorcycles are for fun. 

To be fair the museum does give a sense of the time when motoring was more fun and I felt some nostalgia for the golden age of motoring, Route 66, dive-in theaters, road houses, driving through small towns en-route to a holiday destination, motels and so in. This era is often considered to be a North American phenomenon, of course it wasn’t confined to this continent, it was worldwide. I have wonderful memories of our annual holidays, which usually meant a twelve hour, 650 kilometer drive to the Natal coast. The towns we went through as we progressed to the sea are burned into my mind, Heidelberg, Warden, Harrismith, Van Reenen (and over the magnificent Van Reenen’s Pass), Ladysmith, Colenso, Estcourt, Mooiriver, Pietermaritzburg, Pinetown and finally Durban. I loved going through Estcourt as that was when you started to see lots of Indians about the town and you knew you were well inside Natal and the seaside had to be just ahead. I can recall all of the cars we did this trip in, even an old Morris with wooden beading. One year my dad and the four of us siblings did the trip in a Volkswagen Beetle, with luggage for a two-week holiday, my eldest sister, Karen, was a teenager, so you can imagine the luggage issue. Tamra was quite small and being the youngest spent the trip in the little luggage compartment behind the back seat. The two middle children, Tracy and I sat on the back seat squeezed between a heap of suitcases and the side of the car.

 

The construction of motorways and malls has brought this era to an end. Now one can drive from Johannesburg to Durban in an air-conditioned steel, glass and plastic bubble listening to perfect quality sound in 5 hours without even having to stop for gas. The towns I knew so well are just signposts on highway exists and if you did go there the businesses that served the travelers are all gone and I suspect the towns have become poorer and probably uglier. The drive-ins and road houses that were the highpoints of entertainment of my childhood are also gone, I mean could you possibly beat a toasted cheese sandwich and lime milkshake at the roadhouse, followed by a spaghetti western at the drive-in? Ah yes, hanging out at the mall, stuffing your face at the food court with plastic food and pounding a smart phone with your finger.

Our last day together arrived all too soon. The weather had turned to cold and rainy, being the prairies snow would have not been entirely out of the question.

We decided to drive the 180 kilometers south to the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump site, which turned out to be a world heritage site and another stunning place to visit in this part of the world, despite its gruesome sounding name. A buffalo jump, I assume that there were many of these in the time before the Europeans arrived on the scene and decimated the buffalo (bison) herds, is a site that naturally forms a funnel between two hills with the narrow part of the funnel ending in a cliff. Before horses and guns this was probably the only way that native Americans could effectively hunt this animal. They would lure, by employing several ruses, a small offshoot of the herd into the catchment area of the funnel, then frighten the animals into a stampede that took then over the cliff, where a group of the hunters would finish then off with clubs and spears. Fairly horrible way to go I suppose, but no worse than getting taken down by a pack of wolves, as it is said, ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’, and in those days’ humans were part of nature. A few successful buffalo hunts in the fall were critical for a band of Indians to make it through the fierce winters here. Pemmican (fire dried, crushed meat and berries mixed with fat) for food, hides for shelters and all sorts of thing and bones for fuel, at least nothing went to waste.

The cliff at the end of the funnel

Blackfoot man explains how his ancestors did not waste any part of hunted animals 

 The facility is really well done and the museum staff are all genuine North America Indians, bit of mixed blood here and there I am sure, but that is the reality of what has happened to the native Americans since the palefaces arrived. It’s been a story of near genocide, mirrored almost everywhere where Europeans have decided to lay claim to territory that was populated by so called primitive societies. Now we bemoan the fact that aboriginals, be they be in the New World, Africa, Polynesia or Australia, have social issues, high levels of alcoholism and type 2 diabetes, conveniently forgetting that we destroyed their social structures, stole their land and in some cases actually hunted them down like vermin. The Head-Smashed-In site is a reminder of the heritage of a people that learned to survive, nay thrive, in a tough place to do so, but which has been lost forever. I think these people once lived well, they had community, their lives had purpose and they had a whole lot more freedom than we enjoy today.

Back in Calgary we met up with Liam for a farewell dinner. I was to fly out at 6 a.m. the next morning, which meant I would be leaving the hotel at well before any early birds have begun to look for worms, and not likely to see the young man and my sister again for some years. We talked, wistfully, of our childhood desire, indeed firmly held belief, that us siblings would all live our lives in walking distance of each other and our children would grow up together in a large extended family. Obviously things did not work out that way, our children all speak with different accents and probably keep in touch because of Facebook more than anything thing else. It is sad in some ways, but in other ways we have all led interesting lives that perhaps we would not have had we all simply stayed in Boksburg where we grew up. Had we lived on the edge of the prairies 300 years ago and drove bison over cliffs for a living, maybe we would have seen our children grow up together, maybe I would swap that life for mine, but we are not given that option.

I miss my sisters, all of them, and the way Tamra and I just ‘clicked’ again after all the years since we have been together made me realize that blood, or at least a shared youth, is thicker than water. I must admit that I like Calgary and surrounds. I have spent a few weeks in this city in the past on business, but this is the first time I have been really able to explore a little. It’s nice, but I don’t want to live here, as mentioned, winter in Calgary is the real deal, it gets waaay colder than a witch’s proverbial.

 I must try to get to Australia sometime, I believe there are some awesome roads to ride a motorcycle on there.