I can confirm it.  Canadians are really nice people.   They seem to take great pleasure in brightening up your day for no reason other than the sheer joy of it.  As a small example of this I offer up the Canadian waiter and waitress.  I have never been complimented so much on my food ordering as on our recent trip to the Rockies.   “Perfect.  Great choice”, they say, with not a touch of irony, as I serendipitously discover what is apparently the very best pairing (Caesar’s Salad and Bison Burger say), from a choice of a dozen or so items.  I feel like a Titan of food combining and walk from the restaurant just a tad taller.

They are also stoics, with apparently limitless reservoirs of patience.  We were in Banff waiting for the Greyhound bus that winds between Calgary and Vancouver; standing like Emperor Penguins, huddled together, backs to the wind, taking turns to be the ones on the outside of the Group.  It was -15 degrees and the shelter of the railway station was locked tight against we road users.   The bus was already 1 ½ hours late and there was no indication anywhere of the time of arrival.  A call to Greyhound HQ merely elicited a verbal shrug of the shoulders.   When the bus arrives I am incandescent with rage, to the extent that a 6 cu ft block of ice can be incandescent.  But one of the other penguins, travelling in the opposite direction, gets to the bus driver first.  He finds out his bus is 3 hours late when last heard of and still struggling over the mountains.   Go on, I think.   Curse the evil Greyhound to eternity.  Cast down his works, raze his temples to the ground, sow his fields with salt.  But no.  “OK, better get a hotel” he says cheerily, and tramps off like Captain Oates into the tundra.

What a magnificent part of the world the Canadian Rockies is.   We travelled up from Calgary along the Trans-Canada highway, following the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, thousands of miles of which was carved from the landscape by a combination of Scottish engineers and Chinese labourers between 1881 and 1885.   They finished it 6 years ahead of schedule and it remains a marvel still, redolent with romantic images.   We crossed the Kicking Horse pass, the romance of which was slightly dimmed by my discovery that it was not an ancient Native American name, as I had assumed, but celebrated the kicking of the Scotsman who built the section by his mule.  More prosaic but further evidence of the sagacity of mules, I suppose.     At any one of a myriad level crossings on the side roads you can be held for 20 minutes or more as a train hundreds of trucks long ambles past at walking pace, taking coal to Vancouver.    At least that is less terrifying than the highway.  That is a dance with death by way of a journey.  In driving snow we all tear along at 90kph, rubber necking the less fortunate others, up to their axles in snowdrifts or revolving slowly on their roofs.  Great 16 wheelers fishtail along the opposite carriageway, separated only by a white line and promising oblivion with a single skid.   No wonder the Canadians throw themselves off and down mountains with such abandon.  It is as nothing to the daily commute adrenalin-wise.

The mountains themselves are stunning and illuminated with extraordinary clarity thanks to the dryness of the air and a lack of pollution.   You feel as if you could reach out and touch the slope on the other side of the valley or read a book someone was holding up.   And the snow!  Light and fluffy and so dry you can whisk it off the windscreen with a feather duster in the morning.    Champagne powder, they call it, presumably because it makes you fall down but so cushions you that you lie there giggling feebly when you do.

I must mention the wonderful beer, a sure way to my heart.  From Calgary to Golden, every bar seems to have its own microbrewery and 10 or so beers on draught.  This was a necessary plus in Calgary, which failed to charm, I’m afraid.  Downtown seemed almost like a ghost town with its empty echoing corridors in the air.  But maybe I was just bad tempered at having been denied a carefully planned ice hockey game by the NHL lock out.   

The plethora of beers is one of the more positive aspects of North American consumerism.  Choice is everywhere.   On a trip to a supermarket I stand paralysed before a wall of cream cheese.  Chive flavoured, jalapeño, olive, bacon, you name it, they had it.  “Help”, I silently cry.  “Can I help?”, asks a friendly shop assistant.   “I was looking for plain cream cheese”.  And there it is.   A solitary tub tucked behind a six high stack of garlic and avocado flavour.  I feel slightly ashamed; a disappointing, second-rate shopper, cursed by conservatism.  But not at all.  “Perfect.  Great choice” the assistant says by way of farewell.  I swell slightly.  I am still one of the finest cream cheese selectors of my generation.  I haven’t lost it yet.