I’ve arrived in my temporary home for the next three months.

The plane left London for Vancouver at about 5.30pm on Wednesday and touched down in Canada a notional hour and a half later. We skimmed over the southern reaches of Iceland a few actual hours into the flight, passing over the crinkled grey-green relief map of the barren coastline, with icebergs dotting the sea off the still-frozen inlets and snow capping the spines of the land which framed them. The ice sheet was just visible as a false horizon of whiteness off to the north.

Wow, I thought.

A few hours later we flew over the Canadian Rockies and I was agog once again. The peaks scrolled by under us, reaching a quarter or even a third of the way up to the 10-kilometre altitude of the plane, with dollops of creamy cloud settled in valleys and bowls two thousand metres up. The scale was incredible. I can’t imagine that flying over the Himalayas could be any more hypnotic. Wow again, I thought.

I got to the hotel without fuss, dumped my bags and buzzed up to the company apartment — quite literally next door to the hotel — to say hello to Dom & Alice. We had a quick drink at a pirate themed bar on the waterfront and afterwards I hit the sack to sleep off eight time zones, three airline meals of indeterminate designation (“Is this lunch? Dinner? Breakfast? All three?”) and two Canadian-sized mini ‘pints’ of Granville Island Pale Ale. I have, as I say, arrived.