The queue of cars and coaches backed up behind the accident started moving maybe three hours after it had ground to a halt, and we crawled past the rather disturbing wreckage of the crashed coach, pushed off to the side of the road. (I found out later that the driver had been badly hurt but not killed in the accident. It certainly looked pretty serious when we drove past it.)

We were booked into an HI hostel on the other side of Alta Lake and at 10 pm, an hour after the Greyhound had finally arrived, we dragged our gear wearily onto the local shuttle. The driver closed the door and dropped the hammer: we charged off into the snowy darkness, rounded blind bends with abandon and actually skidded to a halt at one point as he completely missed a turning. Fifteen minutes of vehicular lunacy later, the bus deposited us in the middle of frickin’ nowhere. A signpost – I say signpost when really I mean postage stamp – pointed us down a set of stairs apparently chiselled out of the snowbank itself and into impenetrable blackness. Backpacks and boarding bags threatening to up-end us at every step, we slithered down the stairs, past a rickety barn, over a railway line and then a wooden bridge over a stream, and finally came upon the hostel. The place was dead; everyone was either partying until dawn or had already crashed out, so we picked up some sheets rudely woven from yak fur, huddled under them against the cold and passed out more or less instantly.

The next morning I wandered downstairs just after 8 am to find out about shuttles back to the village. The timetable wasn’t so much regular as constipated. There were a scant five buses a day: 8 and 10 am, then 4, 6 and 10 pm, and the only other option was a four-kilometre hike up to the northern tip of the lake and then down into the village. While waiting for the 10 am bus we transferred our gear into the co-ed dorm (we were supposed to have had a private room two nights out of three, but Sunday’s rockslide buggered up our timing), suited up and headed out. We traversed the stream, railway line and stairs up to the road and waited.

And waited, and waited. Some cars and trucks ambled by, the drivers looking curiously at us as if to say, “I didn’t know we allowed carless hippies here.” Eventually the bus turned up and took us into the village at a marvellously sedate pace. Ash had been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days before and decided to spend the day sorting out her ski rental and poking around for alternative accommodation, leaving me to charge off alone up the foggy hill.

Up the wrong foggy hill, as it turned out; I jumped on the nearest gondola and wound up halfway up Blackcomb Mountain instead of Whistler, but I made the best of it and spent the rest of the morning getting back into the swing of things. The conditions were oddly like the spring snow I’ve seen in France: frozen and treacherous in the morning, then thawing up towards the afternoon. Only this time the glorious spring sunshine was nowhere to be seen, and I boarded through a grey day livened up by the occasional zero-visibility fog bank.

In the evening, we picked up Ash’s skis, picked the closest bar and reclined under the warm blast of a patio heater until dinner time rolled around. We spent a small fortune in an excellent tapas bar (my God, the butler steak was incredible) and decided, under the questionable influence of an equally nice bottle of wine, to walk back to the hostel. Our waiter gave us simple instructions to find the Valley Trail that would then take us “straight there, in about twenty minutes”.

How we laughed, when we weren’t listening for bears out there in the dark. Carrying a couple of boxes of still-warm, aromatic leftovers along a deserted forest trail for an hour with sub-zero temperatures rapidly sobering you up arguably isn’t the best night out in Whistler. We eventually found the railway track and sleeper-hopped along it for the last hundred yards to the hostel. As we triumphantly emerged into the common room, one of the last poker-playing die-hards said incredulously, “You do know there are bobcats out there, right?”

Oops.

[To be continued.]

We arrived in Vancouver on Friday night, creeping through streets clogged with commuters making their way both into and out of the city centre. I can only imagine that people don’t so much commute into town and then leave at night as just redistribute themselves around greater Vancouver. Crossing the Granville Bridge, innumerable skyscraping apartment blocks and hotels loomed out of the fog, delineating the curve of the False Creek waterway that bounds the southeast side of the downtown island. It was quite a sight: the giant, vertical neon signs for cinemas, bars and hotels set against the modern(ist) tower blocks is probably the most striking night skyline I’ve seen outside of Vegas.

We arrived at our hotel on Granville Street, dragged our gear to our room and spent a quiet, drowsy night in the hotel. Ash was still fearsomely jetlagged and I was reduced to tears of gratitude to be able to avoid yet another gargantuan meal. (“May I have the bill before my digestive system fails, please? Thank you.”) We channel-hopped through charmingly amateur local cable stations until sleep overtook us.

On Saturday we roamed around the downtown island area. Yaletown (the streets around the hotel) put me in mind of Memphis: back alleys with canopies of telephone wires, rundown shops and rooming hotels looking like the last resting place of many a faded rock star. While Memphis had a slightly unnerving air (I think it was the constant feeling of impending mugging), Yaletown felt lived in – well loved instead of abandoned. In the downtown proper we ate breakfast in the camp splendour of Bellagio’s café, then carried on to Stanley Park. “It’s amazing,” a number of present and past Vancouverites had told us, “it’s totally like a park right in the middle of a city.” They were not wrong. It was a pleasant enough walk, and had some diverting touches like a set of totem poles and a fantastic whale statue outside the aquarium, but it wasn’t enough to keep us and we headed home.

That evening we met up with Christina, a uni friend of Ash’s turned to the dark side to become a lawyer, over the bridge in Kitsilano. Kits (ah, how gauche) is a mostly affluent, mostly bohemian neighbourhood with a series of SF-style streets sloping steeply down to False Creek, and consists entirely of maternity shops and minimalist restaurants. We ate in one of the latter (and my God, lawyers don’t half love to talk about law) and then walked back past an entire block of the former to get drunk in Christina’s flat.

The next day we met up with Christina again, along with Rowand, another of Ash’s uni friends, in the Elbow Room Café. Apparently this place is renowned for unfriendly service: “the waiters dish it out and love it if you answer back!” enthused Christina. I was utterly cynical as to why the hell anyone would want to ever go to such a place.

It was awesome. If Bellagio’s was possessed of a camp splendour, then this place was splendidly camp. The waiters weren’t evil, just joyously mouthy: they good-naturedly ribbed you if you took more than five minutes to decide on what to eat, berated requests for coffee refills with directions to the percolator and if you didn’t clear your plate, you were…encouraged to make a donation to the Loving Spoonful charity. Top stuff!

So this, now, is our second attempt to get to Whistler. Yesterday, in the queue to buy bus tickets, a security guard apologetically announced that a rockslide had blocked the Sea to Sky highway. We sighed, hailed the same taxi that had brought us to the bus station and headed back to our hotel for an extra night.

Today’s bus is currently sitting immobile in a line of cars stretching over the next blind summit as we wait for the debris from an accident between a logging truck and a (thankfully empty) tour bus to be cleared off the road. We’ve already been forced to stop in Squamish (a sort of ‘gateway to the hills’ place, unfortunately more evocative of Aviemore than Bourg St. Maurice) for an hour or so, and have been in this queue for a couple more hours. This is the road that’s supposed to carry all the traffic to the 2010 Winter Olympics! Anyway, with a bit of luck we’ll be on the slopes tomorrow and things will be looking up.