The Third Best City in the World

The Economist Liveability Ranking of world cities for August 2012 ranks Vancouver third in the world out of a total of 140.  It was edged out by Melbourne, Australia and Vienna, Austria.  (No. 140 was Dhaka, Bangladesh.)  There were no US cities in the top ten.  We only spent one and a half days there, but that was enough time to understand the ranking.  It's beautiful, clean, and has good public transportation.  There are several other liveability rankings based on various criteria, but notably none of them rank any US city in the top ten. So instead of continually repeating the mantra that "we're the greatest country in the world", it might be worthwhile to actually look at the rest of the world and see what we might learn.

We crossed the Strait of Georgia from Nanaimo aboard the MV Queen of Oak Bay, operated by BC Ferries.  This ferry was a big step up from the Coho which brought us to Victoria.  Bigger, much better cafe, nice gift shop, and free internet.  It was sad to have to leave the Living Forest Campground (previous post) but we once again found ourselves pressed for time.  On future camping trips, we have resolved to allow at least twice as much time as we think we might possibly need.

Our first stop on the British Columbia mainland was Grouse Mountain, because it's on the way in to the city from the ferry terminal in Horseshoe Bay.

 I visited Grouse Mountain one night back in the 70's on our way to Whistler and remembered very clearly the highly unusual experience of seeing the lights of Vancouver as we skied.  You can get to the base of the tram on a city bus.  Back in the 70's, there was just a restaurant at the top.  But when we got off the tram on this trip, we found a few more attractions,  such as this:

and this:

There are two grizzly bears living on top of Grouse Mountain, in a 5-acre enclosure surrounded by an electric fence.  They were both brought there as orphaned cubs.  Grizzly cubs usually stay with their mother for several years, and have almost no chance of surviving on their own.  So it was decided to try an experiment where instead of being destroyed (the usual procedure)  the cubs would be placed in the enclosure and food would secretly be scattered in various places.  That way, it was thought, they would learn to forage for food and not to depend on humans.  Then when they grew up they could be released back into the wild with no danger that they would seek out humans for food.  But it was eventually decided that releasing them would be too dangerous because of all the contact they had had with humans, and so they remain.

The next day, being short of time, we decided to take the GrayLine tour, and saw some highpoints of the city:

At the beginning of this trip, we thought we would have time to explore more of British Columbia, but this was not to be.  We headed south out of Vancouver,  back across the border at Blaine WA, stopping for lunch with a high school friend of Cherie's in Seattle, and then pushing on to Portland and a second visit to the Jantzen Beach RV park.