You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that cost alone: you bore it with me, dear reader, in the form of two thousand words of bicycle-related self-flagellation.) To recap: I’d found the last singlespeed French freewheel in the world, hooked it up with two spliced-together BMX chains, and replaced the original drop bars with a pair of hipster-ready bullhorns.

I started to commute by bike, a lovely trip through Vancouver’s leafy suburbs and across the Fraser River to Richmond. The weather was uniformly balmy, and over my couple of months of cycling to work I even acquired what might reasonably be called a suntan.

Unfortunately, the bike did not fare so well. In short order, both of the original 27″ wheels were knocked quite badly out of true; the bearings in the last French freewheel in the world gave up shortly afterwards and the pedal bearings followed. To ride the bike was to be assaulted by the scraping of brake pads against wobbling rims and the grinding of shafted ball bearings.

In repairing her, I caved. I drank the hipster Kool-Aid. I took the blue pill. More specifically, I bought deep-V track wheels, blue-striped tyres to match the frame, an indestructible Shimano freewheel, extremely awesome keirin-style pedals, and matching toe clips*. My bike was indistinguishable from a Commercial Drive hipster chariot, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

It was brilliant. For my last six weeks in Vancouver I descended (even further) into the domain of the bike nerd, taking part in a couple of Critical Masses, a couple of rides with the Vancouver Bicycle Club and one Midnight Mass, a small-hours ride around the traffic free city in the company of various bike messengers, fixie riders and sundry other ‘alternative’ types.

Then, of course, came the end of my stay in Vancouver, and I had to decide what to do the bike. Short of lugging it all the way down the west coast of the ‘States, there wasn’t much I could do other than leave it with someone in the city. Monica’s boyfriend Pete, a stand-up type of fellow with a keen cycling glint in his eye, offered to become the bike’s foster carer and so I left it in his capable hands. He has promised to keep ‘er oiled till I return, and I can’t ask for more than that.

* There’s a weird hero-worship within the singlespeed world for Japanese keirin components, which are stamped with the letters ‘NJS’. This says nothing about quality or suitability for purpose, only that they’re unlikely to spontaneously disintegrate, and yet an NJS-branded part will inevitably cost more and inspire a larger degree of singlespeeder lust. Hilariously, my NJS toe-clips were race approved, even if the rest of the bike emphatically was not.

My parents were over for the last week in August and after a few days of sightseeing in Vancouver, we jumped in the toaster and drove to Tsawwassen for a car ferry over to on Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island is just off the mainland, a sort of Skye writ large where Vancouverites go for bracingly active holidays and pastoral walks. We headed first for Sooke, a small harbour town on the southern coast, intending to find a B&B and enjoy a day or two wandering around what we supposed to be a charming little seaside hamlet.

Well, Sooke sucked.

With a Dad nursing a mild hernia and a Mum more inclined towards artistic than outdoor pursuits, we drew a blank: unless one is in possession of a holiday home or a fishing boat, there is precious little to do in Sooke. We milled around the slightly underwhelming museum, were rather more pleasantly whelmed by a tasty slice of cake in Mom’s Café, and, with the rest of the town centre failing to give up anything more interesting than a dingy supermarket and a Masonic lodge, we set off back towards the island’s capital Victoria.

On the way there, though, we caught sight of a road sign for the “Sooke Potholes”. We were intrigued — why would a pothole be worthy of note? — so we turned inland and followed a side road for a few miles into the forest. Sooke was redeemed: the potholes are a series of deep pools which punctuate a clear stream, winding down through the forest and bordered alternately by pebble beaches and sheer rock faces. It was a picturesque little place, with tourists and locals alike swimming and enjoying the scenery. We left in the nick of time, just as the first strum of a badly tuned guitar wafted up with the barbeque smoke from one particular group.

Victoria was entirely different, the sort of colonial capital where the most favoured outdoor activities of yesteryear no doubt revolved around shooting natives and logging ancient forests. (Hell, they’re still doing the latter.) It was just so familiar I couldn’t help but feel at home: in the same way that Vancouver feels like a perfect image of the North American City, Victoria is a miniature Glasgow or Liverpool or London, all spires and stonework and harbour and Empire. The Empress Hotel lords (ladies?) it over the waterfront; the provincial legislative buildings have that characteristically pompous/punctilious Gothic Revival grandeur, and even humble office buildings are finished with solidity and craftsmanship.

We ate breakfast in the Blue Fox café — an establishment whose reputation has attained Elbow Room-like dimensions, and which boasted a half-hour queue at 10am on a Sunday — and then split up for a bit of sightseeing. I wandered round the harbour, past the Empress and into the museum, where I ambled around happily for a couple of hours. I’ve developed a bit of a nostalgic liking for museums, especially those ambitious edifices which try to compress the world into a few floors of cultural artefacts. The old Royal Museum on Chambers Street is a prime example, as was this one: new exhibits with touchscreens and animatronics stand proudly next to faded wooden cases of moth-eaten taxidermy, but the children being led around by harrassed grandparents seem to like them all equally.

Some of the old-school displays of First Nation art and anthropology were brought into sharp focus when I got talking to a portly old security guard. Genially enquiring where I was from, “Scotland” was all he needed to hear. Obviously a little giddy talking to a son of the old country, he went off on a nostalgic rant about how selfless the Brits had been to invade, plunder, and “improve” the situations of any number of third-world states over the centuries, and how much of a shame it was that we seemed to have given up on it lately. I politely took my leave after a blow-by-blow account of his naval career during the ’60s started hinting at his exploits in brothels across the South Pacific. He might have been a relic, but at least he was in the right place.

I bought a coffee from a kiosk just outside the main entrance and settled down in a little sunken garden in the shadow of the adjoining BC archives, got my book out, and read. It was a most pleasant interlude.

We caught the ferry back to the mainland through a brilliant afternoon of blue skies and coastlines alternately black with shadow and white with snow. Vancouver Island wasn’t so bad.

I had one last night out with some of the guys from the office, meeting up with Monica, Pete, Gillian et al in an Italian restaurant called Campagnolo sited daringly close to the edge of Vancouver’s notorious downtown east side. Presented with a couple of other choices, I had vociferously pushed for Campagnolo because of its cycling connotations; come the night itself, I could only appreciate the irony as I found the nearest place I could lock up my bike was the flimsy wire fence around a vacant lot out of sight of the restaurant. And this in an area where the police receive 46% more calls than the Vancouver average.

The restaurant itself managed to be warm, welcoming and trendy at the same time. We ordered some wine and opted to share from set menu. “I found a review of this place which complained about the smallness of the portions,” I mentioned. “I hope it’s okay!”

I needn’t have worried. I was getting tunnel vision by the third course of five. By dessert my digestive tract was audibly creaking, and coffee was ordered in a desperate attempt to kick-start our failing metabolisms. By the end of the meal everyone was sated, drunk and happy (discounting the occasional declaration of gastric distress, that is) and it had been a tremendous evening.

I said my goodbyes, wheeled the bike over to the seawall path, and cycled carefully home. I couldn’t have asked for a better final night out.

I’d been down to the dive shop the day before to to pick up my gear. I chose the wetsuit option; a drysuit would have been dryer and warmer but, according to our instructor Landon, drysuit newbies have a tendency to uncontrollably shoot feet first toward the surface, as the air in the suit bubbles towards their ankles. I had no particular desire to die such an ignominious death, leaving a corpse with exploded lungs and zeppelin ankles bobbing flippers up in the bay, so I chose instead to suffer the peculiarly acrid smell of sweat, salt water and sloughed-off skin which only a rental wetsuit can provide.

We arrived at Whytecliffe Park around 8, lugging our cylinders down to the shore and following Landon up onto a cliff overlooking the bay as he pointed out useful landmarks. It was a lovely place, a tiny green cove with a pebbled beach and dramatic cliff-sides backed by an unbroken line of trees. It was cool but warming up, and by the time we’d all squeezed into our wetsuits and BCDs, I was sweating like a hot person in a thick wetsuit and couldn’t wait to get into the allegedly arctic water.

Shane, our group’s assigned instructor, had us wade into the water and help each other get our fins on. We walked in gingerly over the slimy rocks, the water seeping in over the tops of our boots and then creeping up inside our suits. Happily, the 14mm of neoprene which had brought me to the edge of hyperthermia on the beach kept things nice and temperate in the chilly water, and we all bobbed comfortably just off shore with our BCDs inflated to keep us upright.

All, that is, except my buddy Amanda. (Who am I kidding? I don’t remember her name at all, but I’m pretty sure it had an ‘A’ in it. I’m a bad person.) Amanda flopped and floundered around in shallower water, trying to sit on the rocks to put on her fins and being constantly buffetted by the gentle waves. “Go in deeper!” Shane shouted.

“I can’t get my fins on!” she replied.

“I know,” he told her. “Go in deeper so you float!”

Eventually Amanda floated out to join us. I’d managed to pull on my own fins on by this point, and I helped her get hers on. “Did you try these on before?” I asked. “They seem a bit loose.”

“Yah, it’s fine, it’s fine. I tried them on earlier.”

(A beat.)

“I’ve lost a flipper! Where is it?” she wailed.

Shane, who had joined us by this time, stuck his face in the water, dropped out of sight for a second, and then resurfaced with the offending fin. “Tighten it,” he said through gritted teeth. I yanked the strap down as hard as I could, and we swam out to our dive float to do our various surface skills, towing each other to simulate ‘tired divers’, taking off and refitting our scuba gear, orally inflating our BCDs (pre-flight safety presentations do have a use after all) and so on. Shane gave us the thumbs-down and, one by one, we held up our inflator hoses, breathed out and deflated our BCDs to slide down into the murky water.

The change from above to below the surface is, for lack of a better word, mental. Everything changes the moment you submerge: the world contracts from the open air to a claustrophobic sphere of murkiness. The sound of wind and waves is replaced only by the hissing intake and bubbling exhalation of your breath. Your ears immediately start to complain of the increasing pressure. The sides of the mask intrude on your vision so that your field of view is impaired. I had the oddest feeling that my awareness of my body had retreated from my weightless limbs and now resided solely in my head, drawn there by the sensory shock of the cold water on my exposed face, the pressure in my ears and the comforting pocket of air in my mask.

It was a just little more intense than the swimming pool.

The sea in Malta had been clear and blue; here it was so green and opaque I felt like I could almost see the tiny particles of algae and plankton which gave it its colour. My mask fogged up almost instantly. I breathed in and out rapidly, the bubbles rushing past my ears; I descended hand over hand down the float’s orange anchor line and equalised each time my hand was free. I peered down through the condensation in my mask to try to pick out the bottom, and periodically I looked up to see the light at the surface grow fainter and the flippered legs of the other divers recede as I dropped along the cable. The bottom loomed up at about fifteen or twenty feet and I settled on my knees, sending a cloud of silt, and tried to relax. The sand and rocks beneath my knees afforded the situation a bit of solidity, and everything seemed a little less spacey and disconnected. Our instructors had talked about how it was possible to become disorientated in the deep ocean, where sometimes neither the bottom or the surface is visible, and even after this laughably shallow descent I could see how it could happen.

I tipped my mask down to swill some water around it; I tilted it back and exhaled to clear it, and took a look around.

And I couldn’t see anything. Flurries of silt were sent up anew each time another diver settled onto the bottom, and even as it cleared the water still presented a greenish wall not more than ten or fifteen feet off. The surface wasn’t visible as such, but there was a vaguely perceptible gradient to the brightness of the light above our heads. I sent Amanda an ‘OK’ sign, and she signed a twitchy ‘OK’ back. Details of our little orb of visibility became apparent. A few multi-armed sea stars, coloured a dusty orange (I suspect before we arrived they’d been simply ‘orange’), were scattered around. Little crabs danced sideways away from us. Tiny silver fish darted around. We’d arrived.

We went through the skills familiar from the pool sessions: dropping regulators; removing and replacing masks; sharing air with a buddy, and the rest. Things went remarkably smoothly for most of us. Amanda, cursed, perhaps, with birdlike hollow bones, had a tendency to float upwards slowly but uncontrollably, grabbing at whoever was nearest (me, mostly) to arrest her ascent. Of course, because the rest of us had more or less managed to achieve neutral buoyancy, the net result was for both of us to float off, Amanda clawing at her supposed saviour while I frantically tried to dump air out of my BCD and swim back down. Given that bad shit can happen on uncontrolled, panicked ascents — principally, one’s lungs can explode — I was less than happy about this. There is unfortunately not a standard hand signal for “Get to fuck.”

Anyway, we finished off our exercises and Shane motioned for us to follow him. We lurched off like a school of drunk turtles and made a short circuit of the bay, taking in a few more starfish and crabs, and then ascended with upraised arms and plinking ears to meet up by the buoy. “Nice work everyone,” said Shane. “No flippers lost?”

We finned to shore, struggled to our feet and staggered up the beach as the water drained out of our boots. One dive down, three to go. So stay tuned for parts 2, 3 and 4 of this diving epic — 4,000 more words about gripping undersea adventures!

(A beat.)

I kid, I kid. I wouldn’t put you through that. And besides, I still have an entire road trip’s worth of entries left to write about the west coast of the USA.

The rest of the weekend was pretty straightforward: another dive on Saturday afternoon (almost a replay of the first, down to Amanda losing a flipper on the way back to shore) and two more on Sunday and we were qualified Open Water divers. Simple as that!

I was shattered. And August still wasn’t over yet.

I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had been going on through August, and he’d mentioned that nearby Burnaby sported a fully enclosed velodrome. “I’ve been meaning to organise some beginners’ track lessons there, but we’ve always been one person short. Would you be interested?”

You’re damn skippy I was interested.

I turned up at the track after work on Friday, parked the car and pushed through the revolving doors*. The wooden track takes up the centre of the dome, leaving enough space at one side for changing rooms, offices and the like, but the corridor narrows down to barely a shoulder-width as it curves at the end. I followed voices along the curve under the eaves of the track, passing racks and racks of track bikes locked up under the banked corner, to find Pete, Monica and John already being fitted for their rental bikes. We were all kitted out in hilariously overcompensatory cycling clothing, and we were all shitting ourselves.

Claire, our instructor for the evening, picked out a bike for each of us — incredibly light Treks like this — and we wheeled them out through an underpass and into the centre of the track.

This was going to be scary.

The track is 200m long (too short for the Olympics, apparently) and is banked at 47° at each end. It’s the steepest track in North America, and if you don’t cycle at something like 30km/h around the corners then you fall off. It’s as simple as that. There were a few riders up there already, caning round and round to an astonishing cacophony of noises: tyres hummed over the lacquered wood, and the track creaked and groaned as the riders flew over it.

Claire explained the markings on the track to us: the côte d’azur, or ‘on-ramp’ at the bottom; just above it, the metre-wide sprinter’s lane bordered by a pair of red and black lines, and the blue stayer’s line about halfway further up. It seemed impossibly distant. “That’s where you wait during the Madison,” she told us. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you up there — and a bit higher — before the end of the night.”

We had a few laps of the côte d’azur to get used to our brakeless, fixed-gear bikes. The rationale here is that if track bikes did have brakes, all it would take is one twitchy rider in the pack to brake suddenly and there would be a massive pile-up. The consequence is that slowing down is much, much harder; you have to let your legs continue to move with the pedals but apply a bit of pressure as they come up from bottom dead centre. It’s possible to just lock your legs up, but do it with enough determination and the still-rotating pedals will catapult you up and over the handlebars†. I came close a couple of times.

After that we were encouraged up onto the straights, then back to the côte d’azur for the corners and eventually, once we felt we had enough speed, up onto the track for the whole lap. The sensation is exhilarating, and mortifying. With ten or twelve beginners on the track, our speeds were all over the place: some riders were caning round as if to the velodrome born; others were creeping around with tyres squeaking in protest at the lack of speed in the corners. Claire had explained some track racing etiquette — call out “Stick!” as you approach someone to overtake, or let them know whether you’re passing them on the inside or outside, for example — and rounding a corner was terrifying mixture of wall-of-death speed and dodgem manoeuvering. “Stick!” I’d yell. “Jesus — stick!” as a laggard ambled round in front of me, barely fast enough to keep from sliding off the track. All the while, the more gung ho riders shot by with an airy whoosh and occasionally a whoop of glee.

We went on to experiment with pace lines, where a team of four cyclists circle the track in single file, the front rider each lap peeling off to the back of the pack. We yo-yo’d forward and back like a horizontal slinky; no brakes might prevent sudden stops but it doesn’t make it any easier to keep a constant speed. After that, Claire led the entire gaggle up to the top of the track for a flying 200 metres, where you hurtle down to the sprinter’s lane by the infield for a flying lap. These were exercising enough, but finally we moved onto Madison drills.

The Madison is a slightly bizarre race between teams of two riders: one rider rests above the blue stayer’s line, cycling slowly to conserve their energy, while the other races around the sprinter’s lane at the bottom. When the pair swap over, the racing rider transfers some of his momentum to his teammate by linking hands and slinging him forward. We weren’t going to try this (most of us were still astonished by every lap we managed to complete without injury or mishap), but we were going to get part of the way there. First, Claire told us, “You’re going to be riding with your hands in the drops. No using the flat bits on top. Take one hand off the bars on the straights, then put it back on for the corners. When you’re happy with that, try riding an entire lap with just one hand. Then do the same with the other.”

Okay, okay, we nodded.

“And then, you’re going to pair up. One rider is going to stay on the black line” — as in, the 2-inch-wide strip of black tape at the top of the metre-wide sprinter’s lane — “and the other has the whole of the sprinter’s lane to move around in. The second rider will stay slightly behind the first, and rest their right hand on the first rider’s back. For one whole lap.”

I know this doesn’t sound difficult. Reading it now, it sounds like a piece of cake. But on that track, where the illusion of a smooth surface at a distance was replaced by a rippling, creaking, tramlining mass of wooden boards, and where the 47° banking had you almost more horizontal than vertical in the turns, it seemed like an impossibility. The riders in each pair would have to speed up and slow down respectively in the corners to make up for the different radii of their turns; the outside rider had to quite literally toe the line with as little deviation as possible, and the inside rider had the awful task of making it round the track one-handed at 20 miles per hour just to avoid falling over by default.

Pete and I paired up and gingerly headed off. A few laps in I could complete a circuit one-handed, staring fixedly at the boards in front of me and pedalling like it was the only thing keeping me from smashing painfully into the blue paint of the côte d’azur, because that’s exactly what it was. A few laps after that I held to the black line as Pete steadied himself in the sprinter’s lane with his hand on my back, and a few laps after that we swapped over and managed a second paired lap, this time with me wobbling along below and slightly behind him, managing to keep my hand planted on his back for one complete lap. We had all the coordination, grace and assurance of newborn calves on an ice rink, but we did it. We came down to the infield sweating with nerves, and, if I remember rightly, actually high-fived each other without even a hint of irony. Claire congratulated us, and we were happy.

I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that velodromes are awesome.

* The pair of fire doors next to the main entrance have a big sign on them: “Do Not Open Both Doors at Once!” I asked Claire the instructor about this and she told me that the ’drome has an air-supported roof — it’s basically a huge balloon which is kept rigid only by fans maintaining positive pressure inside it. Unfortunately, air-supported domes have certain problems, like collapsing when it snows.

† Fixed gear riders on the street get round this by doing a little hop: they lock up their legs as the back wheel comes off the ground and skid to a halt when it lands.

By the time I got to the starting line a mile or so away at Science World, the rain was belting down, and it continued to do so solidly for the next four hours. I met up with Monica & Pete, grabbed a free coffee and waited for our turn to start. We were off! The three of us stuck together for the first few kilometres, but Monica & Pete were only planning to do the 30-kilometre course (Pete had, of course, already cycled 80 kilometres that day before I’d even crawled out of bed) and so I made an effort to speed up and latch onto some semi-serious looking roadies who I presumed were going for the 60k.

The ride went by surprisingly quickly: I crossed the 30k mark thinking I’d done only half that, and my adopted peloton of roadies were dropping off faster than people wearing replica Team Astana kit had any right to do so. “Eat my single gear ratio,” I crowed to myself, although my triumph was short lived as I dropped my water bottle and had to U-turn to pick it up. I passed most of that same group again a few kilometres later and settled down to keep pace with a middle aged guy who seemed to be going at a reasonable rate. We blethered for a bit, out on our own now, and pushed on through the gritty rain.

We heard the finish before we saw it, with lots of volunteers and spectators clapping, whooping and clanging cowbells as people crossed the line. Now having just watched the final few stages of the Tour de France, I couldn’t help but feel the urge to top things off with a little Cav-esque dash to the finish.

“Mind if I go for it?” I nodded at the line to my companion.

“Be my guest!” he replied, and I got up on the pedals for the last hundred metres or so, grunting and gurning across the line in a pale imitation of a sprint finish. One of the clapping ladies shook her head sadly, clearly disappointed by my perversion of this charity ride into a solo TdF reenactment. “Young people today,” I could hear her think. “What a bunch of tools.”

Monica & Pete turned up a few minutes later, Monica having caught a flat tire soon after I’d left them. We wolfed down burgers at the free barbeque as the rain continued and then went our separate ways. By the time I stepped out of the shower at the flat an hour later, it had stopped raining and the sun came out. My sopping clothes were steaming themselves dry in the sun on the balcony.

Thank you all for sponsoring me! It was a great day despite the pouring rain, and doing it for a good cause made it that much more worthwhile.

I’d done a bit of research into the various different dive centres in Vancouver, but to be honest the International Diving Centre’s tagline of “Diving is our middle name” had me pretty much from the word go. Their PADI Open Water course, more or less the default entry-level diver course the world over, ran over two weeks and a final weekend, with six classroom sessions and four i.e. swimming pool dives in the evenings, and then four open sea dives at the end.

The only obstacle in my way was the medical form. A few questions like “Do you or have you previously had any respiratory diseases?” and “Have you had any operations in the last two years?” (for which the answers were “yes” and “hell yes” respectively) threw a spanner in the works and I had to undergo a dive medical. I’d taken and narrowly failed such a test once before in Brisbane, childhood asthma causing me to score 73% in a single spirometry indicator where the reasonable minimum was 75%. This time round I drove over to a doctor in Burnaby, went through all of the same rigmarole and came through with almost all the same results — bigger lung capacity than average (windbag? Moi?) but lower throughput, for lack of a better word — but with a score of 78% in that one crucial indicator.

So, with a change in my readings well within a typical experimental margin of error, I was passed as fit to dive.

All told, the class contained about 15 people. We were a varied bunch: one Romanian chap proclaimed that he could already dive, but “without a qualification I can’t rent gear”; a couple of girls studying marine biology and volunteering at Vancouver Aquarium felt they had a better chance of getting a paying job with a dive course under their (weight) belts; a martial artist/bouncer/stag party planner, unsatisfied with his triple-barrelled job description, wanted to expand his horizons, and most of the rest of us were simply dive-curious.

Each evening we’d review a chapter of the Open Water textbook, do a few short quizzes to check we hadn’t entirely missed the points therein, and then head over to a nearby school’s swimming pool for the night’s dive. PADI gets a bit of a hard time* for “dumbing down” the science underpinning scuba diving, but given some of the questions that were raised in the classroom (“Whoa, whoa, whoa. The air gets compressed as you go deeper?”), maybe that’s not a fair criticism.

We had the options of renting a wetsuit for the pool dives, although the head instructor Landon assured us that the pool wasn’t all that cold. God, I wished I’d gone for a wetsuit. Not because the pool was cold — because it was cold after half an hour sitting largely immobile on the bottom — but because my awful, awful T-shirt tan would have been safely hidden under a layer of neoprene. Fully clothed, my limbs had acquired a modest tan and I no longer looked like a greasy-skinned, pallid anorexic; shirt off, my albino torso was revealed in all its terrible glory to the rest of the predictably athletic Vancouverite students. Red might be the first colour of light to be absorbed by the water but sadly nowhere is a swimming pool deep enough for it to matter.

Anyway, we went through a series of exercises during each pool dive, mostly to inculcate a degree of sang-froid when faced with emergencies. We had to deliberately discard and retrieve our regulators, breathe from our buddy’s alternate air source, get used to the feeling when the air runs out (simulated by the instructor turning the valve off), perform simulated emergency ascents, and so forth. We got used to the bulkiness and constriction imposed by our gear, learned how to manage our buoyancy and generally got comfortable underwater.

(To be continued!)

* IDC are essentially a franchise — one of a huge number — who have subscribed to PADI’s particular curriculum and qualification system. I wish I’d read more about PADI, because I now find out that they’ve been criticised for providing courses of dubious thoroughness and for emphasising profits rather than proficiency. I found out while chatting with the instructors that that some of the IDC staff had gone straight from student diver to instructor in one go, doing all of the requisite courses in (if I remember rightly) six months. Granted, they’d now all been teaching for far longer than that and were all able teachers, but that reflects better on them than it does on PADI. Couple that with the informercial flavour of the last chapter of the Open Water textbook, and one does start to wonder.

On the downtown side, the bridge juts out from a lofty cliff and the ascent from there to the crest of the span is short and fairly innocuous. On the north side, though, you’re confronted with a steep, kilometre-long descent which disgorges you onto the shoulder of a busy freeway. We shot down it at ludicrous speed, the river two hundred feet below on the one side and 60 km/h traffic on the other, wheels thudding over the expansion joints and holding on for dear life. Having screwed my bike together myself, I had absolutely no confidence that it was going to hold together. How would it fail, I wondered? Would the bars come off in my hands? Would a brake cable snap? It was an interesting time: tyres humming, wind roaring in my ears, outraged pedestrians backed into the barriers and every clenchable part of my anatomy at maximum clench.

We whipped down onto the freeway shoulder intact, regrouped, and doubled back under the bridge onto the rolling coastal road to Horseshoe Bay. The sun gradually warmed things up, and I was sweating freely into my ludicrous new shorts by the time we careered down an equally terrifying hill into Horseshoe Bay itself. The 40-minute ferry ride to Langdale over on BC’s Sunshine Coast let us decompress a bit, and we set off again at a more sensible pace once we arrived.

The Sunshine Coast is nice little place, a strip of leafy coastline northwest of Vancouver which easily conforms to my “all picturesque scenery must look like the Scottish Highlands” test of aesthetics. It’s on mainland BC but the intervening terrain is too rugged for roads and so it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. According to the guys on the ride, the inhabitants are mostly retirees, farmers, holidaymakers and a few demented Vancouver commuters. We stopped briefly in the town of Gibsons to refill our water bottles — it has a public well dispensing the one-time best drinking water in the world — and also so that I could have a brief, cathartic rant about the obvious lack of a bloody apostrophe.

We stopped for lunch at a place called The Gumboot Café. The nearby town, Roberts Creek (named, happily, after a man named Roberts and not the result of some typographical butchery), was once a staunch hippie hangout, and the smell of good old BC weed still filled the air of the patio. We sank a couple of beers and headed home as the sun reached its peak, shaded at times by overhanging trees, but otherwise sweating like bastards at each hill. I crawled into the apartment’s parking garage having done about 80 kilometres over the day, knackered but as smug as hell. Then I emailed Andy Birkett about it, and he told me that he averaged 65 miles per day for three weeks to cycle from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. My smugness evaporated.

Cycling’s an odd sport/hobby/pastime. Although everyone rides together, it’s difficult to chat much because of the need to stay in single file, and the hills inevitably mean that the train gets broken up as the faster and slower riders spread out; then, everyone stops for a break and the pent-up chat just tumbles out. It manages to be competitive and cooperative, personal and social all at the same time. In case my incessant writing about it hasn’t already made it clear, I kind of like it that way.

* This is almost the last Vancouver+cycling related post. I promise.

One afternoon I walked along to the beach at English Bay, taking a book to read but mostly just watching the people go by. To the uniformly tanned, strapping Vancouverites out for a day’s seaside promenade I must have looked like a malnourished heroin addict*: aside from me and a few homeless guys sunbathing fully clothed (I couldn’t help but imagine them soaking up the day’s warmth to carry them through the night like iguanas on a rock), almost everyone out for the day’s seaside promenade was baring their beach-ready bodies and playing frisbee or volleyball or skateboarding in the parking lot. I floundered around sweating a lot and collapsed against a log on the beach. It took me a while to acclimatise.

Eventually, though, I started to get into into the generally outdoors nature of the place. Although the bike wasn’t quite finished (more on that in a future post!), one Saturday I tagged along with a Vancouver Bicycle Club ride down to New Westminster, an apparently leisurely 45-kilometre route following the newly opened Central Valley Greenway along the Skytrain’s Millennium Line. It went surprisingly well: me and another home-brew single speeder kept up fairly well with the hardened touring types, even laying down the law on a hilariously steep hill by deploying the usual single-speed tactic of charging full pelt at the approach to build up momentum and finally panting to the top of the incline barely able to crank the pedals over. When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

New Westminster happened to be hosting its annual ‘2009 Show & Shine’, a sort of concours-type vintage car show taking place on the main drag. I gawked at the Chevelles, ‘Cudas and Ramblers, and was generally a happy car nerd for an hour or so. We ate lunch down on the boardwalk and headed back in the afternoon as the skies turned grey.

Up to this point, I’d been sceptical of the need for ‘proper’ cycling clothing other than a decent jacket to help brave the Scottish winter. However, the ride back convinced me of the absolute necessity for proper cycling shorts with a chamois sewn into them. The internet is curiously silent on the definition of a ‘chamois’ in this context, so here, then, is my contribution to the sum total of human knowledge:

chamois n.

a piece of extra padding often present in cycling shorts, which causes the wearer to assume both the physical appearance and waddling gait of one wearing a nappy

It is, to put it bluntly, a combined ass-, balls- and perineum-protection device which stops the crotchal zone from becoming a raw, angry mess after a few hours spent in the saddle. I promptly bought a pair of lycra shorts thusly equipped and then another pair of more baggy shorts with which to cover up the shame of wearing the first pair. That, my friends, is how I roll.

* Ironically enough, I spent a year or so of my youth sporting a proto-buzz cut and a bomber jacket in emulation of Ewan McGregor’s portayal of Trainspotting‘s Renton, a fictional heroin addict. Unfortunately, having aimed at ‘faux heroin chic’, I hit ‘effete neo-Nazi’ instead.

Thinking that perhaps it was just my sheltered upbringing, I’d had to ask to have the term ‘frolfing’ explained to me beforehand. This marvellously suggestive name is sadly just a contraction of ‘frisbee golfing’, and the game itself is exactly as you might imagine, unless, like me at the time, you’re still trying to imagine what sort of deviant practice might deserve a name like ‘frolfing’. Anyway, we happily frolfed the evening away, leaving our empty beer cans in neat piles beside the tees for Vancouver’s itinerant can collecters*, and as the light faded we headed over to Main Street for some booze ‘n food at The Whip.

It was a good night, made notable by the large number of hipsters sharing the restaurant with us, sporting too-small pork pie hats, painted-on jeans and T-shirts for obscure NY punk bands. Their iron steeds — a polished steel Pista, say, or a dented ’80s Japanese racer with Oury grips hauled right up to the stem — were locked casually to the nearest pole around which a hip-pocket-portable mini U-lock would fit. They were having a grand old time, and incredibly not one of them appeared to be the slightest bit self-conscious. “My God,” I said, “look at them all. They don’t feel an ounce of guilt!” Comparing this to home, where any fashion statement turns ironic pretty much as soon as a second person adopts it, this was a source of great amusement and bemusement to me. Maybe it reflects well on Vancouver, though; without the sneering disapproval that gets meted out to just about any identifiable subculture back in the UK, things feel a little more diverse and a lot more accepting over here. Try riding a shining vintage track bike up Buchanan Street while wearing a too-small pork pie hat and carrying a U-lock wedged prophylactically in the pocket of your painted-on purple jeans and see how far it gets you.

We chatted about a big cycling trip Monica and Pete had made recently through the Yukon Territory and into Alaska, and it occurred to me that most of the Vancouverites I’d met up to this point had at least one ‘big’ hobby or outdoor pursuit to their name, if not a whole bundle of them†. Between them, Monica, Pete, Travis and Monica’s friend Jen could reasonably claim to take part in paddling^§, kayaking, hiking, both road and mountain biking, kite surfing, scuba diving, and, of course, frolfing, on a regular basis. Pete in particular does more or less all of these things to an alarming degree of competence (he is, for example, one of only five people in the world qualified to teach diving with sharks), and, like everyone else, he’s horribly fit and healthy looking into the bargain. Most irritating of all, he remains a resolutely likeable chap.

What drove people to be so active? I wanted to know. There must be, I guessed, some yawning pit of emptiness inherent to the British Columbian soul, and the entire population was surely pursing every available activity to avoid their gaze turning inwards to that black, black heart of darkness. (I did actually raise this hypothesis with Jen a few weeks later, and received a predictably bemused response.) Spending a bit of time with the guys that evening, though, blethering away over frisbees and beers in the park and The Whip, I’m forced to reluctantly conclude that your average Vancouverite is a well-adjusted citizen who quite understandably enjoys spending time outdoors in a leafy, scenic city bordered by river and mountain. Occam’s Razor strikes again.

* viz. Vancouver’s growing homeless population. The streets are filled with guys trawling the rubbish bins for discarded drinks cans and bottles, worth 5¢ each at recycling centres.

† If the collective noun for a set of hobbies is not a ‘caboodle’, I want to know why not.

§ Paddling involves single-bladed paddles and open, outrigger canoes. From Jen’s hurried attempts to distance herself from other forms of paddle-based sports, I deduced an implied hierarchy of seniority which goes something like: paddling, kayaking, canoeing and finally Dragon boating, the redheaded stepchild of the paddling fraternity. The same hierarchy in cycling goes: shaven-legged roadies ≥ hairy roadies ≥ mountain bikers ≥ anyone who uses Oury grips.

Vancouver wants to reclaim its streets. It also wants to get high. Often, it combines the two.

One Sunday afternoon after I arrived, Monica from the office invited me to a friend’s barbeque over in Grandview-Woodland, cleverly timed to coincide with Car Free Day on Commercial Drive. The sun was shining, a beer was thrust into my hand almost as soon as I arrived, and chat ensued. It was a good day already, but we pressed on: hot dog and open container in hand, we made our way over to the Drive to take in the sights, winding up in front of a small stage in Grandview Park. We plonked ourselves down on the grass along with a surprising number of people smoking grass, and watched a succession of earnest white people play African music and exhort the audience to “feel the rhythm.”

I will not lie: I did the dance steps along with everyone else. Perhaps I had heatstroke, or maybe I’d passively smoked so much pot that I was experiencing reefer madness. Either way, it was not pretty.

Car Free Day is just one of an endless succession of street festivals and other events which dot Vancouver over the summer months, and I’m pretty sure that most of them are just excuses contrived to legitimize the smoking of copious amounts of weed. Kits, for example, has its Woodstock revival/tribute Summer of Love, where a stretch of West 4^th is closed to traffic, and which I have absolutely no doubt is one massive bong-fest. Critical Mass, a sort of mobile street closure in its own right, builds up a distinctly herbal aroma whenever it brings a bridge or an intersection to a halt. In fact, it occurs to me that if the irate car drivers waiting for the kilometre-long train of cyclists to pass were to light up a fatty as they did so, everyone would be a hell of a lot happier. Even safely off-street events like the the Jazz Festival in David Lam Park get in on the act; I could have sworn I caught the familiar odour of jazz cigarettes wafting over the sagely nodding crowd.

Most recently, the Vancouver Pride parade passed right by my apartment, although I missed that one and can’t speak as to its toking tendencies. Ironically enough, as the parade was going on I was in a pack of mostly lycra-clad cyclists over in Horseshoe Bay being heckled as “gay” by some teenage skateboarders. Thinking about it, they were probably high.