In Search of Toronto

Toronto doesn’t seem to know what it is, or precisely, ‘who’ it is. It’s a Canadian city, Canada’s biggest city, geographically lying below America’s northern states, knocking at the door to come in out of the cold. It’s a part of the Commonwealth, yet inescapably American in everything from sport, music, television, ‘wing nights,’ old people clinging to the imperial system, left hand drive and – let’s be honest – accent. People from northern Manitoba or Newfoundland have what would unmistakeably be called Canadian accents, people from Toronto could easily settle undetected into any number of the states to their immediate south. It is North America’s fifth most populous city, an amalgam of culture and ethnicities that are an example to the world.

The CN Tower lives up to its name and towers above the city, like a giraffe arching its neck to see over Lake Ontario to America and find out what they’re up to. It’s visible from almost anywhere and was my guiding light on many an inebriated saunter home. Beyond that, landmarks are hard to find, or notice. After having lived there for a number of months I looked up exactly what Toronto’s main attractions are and realised I had already seen most of them without knowing their importance.

What I found to be the most interesting feature were the homeless. While the Toronto Tourism Board would understandably be reluctant to list them as an attraction, for me they were the single most fascinating part of the city. They stay outside day and night in conditions only fit for penguins. Air vents on footpaths throughout downtown each night are covered with piles of ragged blankets and a human burrowed underneath. Elsewhere you’ll see them stumbling about, brown paper back in hand, looking for somewhere to curl up and survive. As I shiver beneath my thermals and jacket on my way home to my heated apartment I figure tonight must be it for them, but sure enough, there they are the next day, stubborn as ever, resisting any threats of capitulation. On a corner in the Bloor West Village near where I worked a large, scruffy, grey bearded man looking like Santa’s poor, alcoholic failure of a twin stood outside a liquor store asking for change. Whether in a blizzard, downpour or summer’s oppressive heat he was there, always wearing the same outfit of dirty tracksuit pants and dirty dark jacket. Even when the mercury went so low that it disappeared completely and the streets were empty he would still be there, defiant, like so many others of the super-homeless throughout the city.

Toronto has a rich economy, financial institutions, good schools and universities and boasts Canada’s envied free health care system. Despite its hellishly frozen winters and stifling albeit short summers it constantly ranks as one of the world’s most liveable cities. It’s a place perfect for families and rewards hard workers with promising careers in any desired industry. The public transport runs on time, freeways flow as they should and parklands are large and bountiful. It has everything a major city should have, except for atmosphere or any sense of vibrancy. It may be perfect for raising a family but it’s a disaster for an unmarried twenty-something itching for a night out. Bland is a word that comes to mind. The problem isn’t a lack of bars or pubs, just a lack of people inside. The city hibernates through winter. On Christmas Eve not a venue was open, and the streets were empty but for a few forlorn tourists who’d overestimated Toronto’s potential. It didn’t get much better as winter went on.

I figured a sports bar would be a prime location when the local hockey team was playing. Ice hockey in Canada is as passionate a national pastime as any sport in any country I’ve been to. When the ice briefly melts in summer they use roads and roller blades and use a ball. Males and females both engage, there are junior teams for those who have just learnt to walk and veterans leagues for those whose walking days are numbered. But the sports bars were deserted as well. The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the league title since 1967. They were ordinary this season and hadn’t made the playoffs since 2004. In that time teams from California, Florida and South Carolina have all won the final, states where hockey isn’t a blip on the radar. But what stings of embarrassment even more is that Canada’s biggest city, in an immediate area with over 8 million people, in a city where ice hockey is everything there is only one major team. Just one. In Los Angeles there are two, and most people in Los Angeles couldn’t identify a puck if it whacked the liposuction off their face. I speak to the barman who tells me he knows the Leafs suck, everyone does, but they’re all they’ve got. It’s a fitting acceptance that reflects the city. In other professional sports Toronto latches onto the US leagues with a single baseball and basketball team. Neither is any good, and they find it difficult to attract players who usually opt for the bright lights of American cities as soon as they can. I don’t blame them. Now Toronto is trying to get a professional American football team. I fear the same fate awaits them should it happen. But they’ll be happy just to have a team, another foot in America’s door on their way to integration.

If there is a quintessential Toronto franchise it is the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), the state run liquor retailer of Ontario, with a monopoly as the only liquor seller in the province which allows it to set prices high to discourage excessive alcohol consumption. Many LCBOs will shut by 9 pm, so if your party runs out of alcohol you’ll have to go to a bar, which also has to buy their beverages from the LCBO, and will likely shut at midnight or 1 am or even earlier if it isn’t busy enough, which is likely. It’s very Torontonian. Drinking and fun is allowed, as long as it is government regulated and doesn’t go too far. And as long as you’re eating while you do it. Provincial law says that pubs and bars must serve food while open, so when entering an establishment at midnight looking to run amuck on the dance floor with a number of other drunk retards you’ll instead be given a menu and shown to a table among the throng of other occupied tables as you wonder how you ended up at a restaurant when you thought you’d walked into a bar. It’s an effective mood killer. I’m bad enough at approaching females in public, it’s a lot harder when they’re in the middle of a poutine (Canada’s national dish of fries covered with cheese and gravy, originating in Quebec, not Toronto). I’m not saying that enjoyment is completely reliant on alcohol, but unless you’re North Korea, nobody really party’s without it. Compare this with Quebec, with its lax alcohol laws, plethora of discount liquor stores all competing with each other and a lower drinking age limit and it’s not hard to choose where you’d rather spend a buck’s weekend. Tim Horton’s, by contrast – the famous Canadian fast food chain opened by a hockey player – is open all night. So while you can’t escape the overnight chill with a beer in a bar, you can find a donut and coffee whenever you want.

You could try a club, but they’re as pretentious and selective as anywhere else in the world, clones of Miami, where prima donnas dress like they’re in South Beach, short skirts, heavy makeup and Bacardi Breezer in hand dancing to the latest L’il Wayne song while wannabe gangsters grind from behind, thumbs in jean pockets with Ed Hardy t-shirt exposed and eyes hiding behind sunglasses under a flat-brimmed NY hat. All with delusions that they’re somewhere fashionable and important and better than what it is. I’d rather be in the fridge outside.

The cold is quite impressive. Coming from a warm climate I found it incredible that somewhere on Earth could get that cold and even more astounding was that millions of people lived there and had done so for centuries. Initially it was the French who arrived first in 1750, but they only lasted nine years before abandoning the land. Then, during the eighteenth century, before central heating and boilers and underground malls, people began to settle into what is now Toronto, and lived through the winters which can ice piss as it hits the ground. Infants were born and survived, enough food was stored and rationed, enough fires were lit to provide the warmth to make it through and eventually a city was built. I’m amazed they didn’t just pack up and head home as soon as the first wind chill threatened to tear off their faces and leave the land to the natives who knew no better. It’s a wind chill that sent me into shops I had no business being in just to regain feeling in my bones. Torontonians have a staunch resistance to the cold that is admirable. As a society they seem to embrace it, they came up with ice-hockey for example, but more than one individual told me how much they hate the cold. A Canadian hating the cold is like a worm hating dirt. They’re built for it and it’s their only option. There is no Florida or Queensland or Spanish coast to escape to. Toronto is as close to the equator as a Canada goes.

With winter nearing its end I walk out of my basement apartment, avoid a few icy puddles formed from all the melting snow and look at the roasted ducks hanging in the windows and try to work out what the picture writing means. I live in Chinatown. In a short walk to Kensington Market there is reggae music blaring out of bong shop windows while aging punks drink on the street and laugh at a child fall off a bike. An Indian drives me to Little Portugal where a Brazilian serves me a beer that I drink with two Irish labourers. I could go to Greektown, or Little Italy, but they’ll probably shut at 1 am anyway. It’s hockey play-off time so I decide to give it a chance, expecting to be flooded with options, but all you can see is UFC posters everywhere, big screens inside being watched by juiced up, neckless wonders in a trend that is sweeping the city, although I haven’t been here long, maybe it’s permanent. I know it’s the first night in four months that the city has actually had a buzz about it. The definitive month of the national sports season is in full swing, but this is Toronto, and it’s taken a couple of guys beating each other up on TV to get people out and about. Perhaps a world class event will visit soon. Montreal – Canada’s second biggest city and capital of Quebec – has a Grand Prix fixture and International Comedy Festival. Out west, Calgary has the famous Calgary stampede. Toronto has Canada’s only ceramic art museum.

Out of the blue, after months of snow and frost then weeks of mild rain, it’s July, and the sun is out and it’s hot. A heat so out of character. In a city with heated sidewalks and underground malls, ice-hockey rinks and indoor pools, the heat is an aberration. I visit The Beach, the imaginatively named long stretch of colourless sand on the banks of Lake Ontario that lie empty but for a layer of snow for most of the year, which is suddenly covered with people. Torontonians playing volleyball and soccer, sunbathing and building sandcastles. Nobody is swimming mind you, the water not as it once was after centuries of receiving a major cities waste.

Since arriving in Toronto I’d heard constant praise for Canadian beer. Television commercials, novelty t-shirts, billboards and citizens had all boasted about Molson, Labatt Blue and Moosehead. How Canada’s short-straw of a national climate had blessed them with the world’s best beer that was ‘Made from Canada’ and had the perfect natural resources to produce its national passion. On sampling it on a number of occasions I found nothing wrong with it, the problem was rather that nobody was joining me.

A sunny, warm, spring Sunday afternoon following a numbingly frozen winter seemed the perfect time to hit up The Annex, Toronto’s bar rich student quarter. And it was, if I wanted some solitude. Everyone was out drinking, but they were drinking coffee. Every coffee shop was full. Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, Second Cup and all the independents were brimming, not a seat to be found in the street level patios, while neighbouring beer gardens were deserted. In Toronto, coffee culture is king. It is a society fuelled by the beans in an environment built for it. It took me a few months to realise. Coffee is universal in this world, and in Toronto it is a constant. An addiction. Barely a person walks by without their mittens wrapped around one. Now on this glorious day, a clear, bright, Sunday evening, so rare in months, there were hundreds of people bathing in the weekend sunshine enjoying a coffee. It was a totally foreign concept to me. It’s when I realised I would never fit in. I don’t drink coffee and I never have. I drink beer. And although the commercials on television and presence of bars told me it was a drinking town, the people proved otherwise.

But maybe that’s who Toronto is, a contradiction. Being nobody makes them everybody, and doesn’t paint them with a stereotype. Almost 49% of the population was born outside of Canada, and no single minority dominates that figure. That’s a fusion of cultures that exist in harmony with each other, none dominating the other, or completely cancelling the others out. It gives the city a comfortable, liveable serenity. Toronto is the couch where you want to spend your Sunday nights after a busy weekend, bereft of stimulation or excitement. I left the next week.

My First Thanksgiving

I should have said yes to the ear plugs. It had been a few years since the one and only time I’d fired a gun. Now the ringing in my ears reminded me the blast is a lot louder than on TV. I even forgot where I’d put my beer down as I struggled to regain my equilibrium. Safety first, I’d been told, always put your beer down when you’re handling a weapon. It was time to stop for a moment anyway, I had fired way high and possibly into a distant highway.

My first thanksgiving hadn’t quite been what I had expected so far. I was nervous I’d have to say grace as my adopted family held hands in a circle and discussed what they were thankful for. I’d never said grace before, never even been at a table where it was said. This was another Hollywood exaggeration. By the time we sat down to eat there were already members of the family passed out on the couch, just being coherent was manners enough.

A week earlier I’d been sitting in a hostel in Miami with no commitments and apprehensive about how I would be spending the coming long weekend, so I jumped at the chance to travel with a friend to a farm in Frostproof, Central Florida, and spend the most American of holidays with his family in the citrus farming community named, quite literally, for its resistance to frosting over during a freeze in the 19^th century that ruined the rest of the states crop.

I was tired by the time we sat down to the banquet Mum, sorry ‘Mom’ had worked on since 3 am for the afternoon sit down. I was tired because when the bonfire had run out the previous morning at 5 we had taken the tractor out to collect more firewood, and then I had risen early upon hearing the first gunshots. Now the fire was smouldering and my ears were still ringing as I surveyed the spread of food before me, not sure where to start. I looked around the room at the family that had temporarily taken me in. One was passed out on the couch, one was stoned, one was missing, one rocked gently with eyes shut behind dark aviator sunglasses, another was only eating dessert, Dad was watching his college football team on the television and Mom was inspecting the new machine gun that the youngest boy had just purchased on the internet that looked like it could take down helicopters. It was an educated family, all college educated with professional careers. They weren’t hillbillies, but it seemed at gatherings they got the urge to slap a bit of red on their necks.

Sensing my hesitation to eat Mom put down the weapon and offered to pour me a glass of wine. I looked at my amateur martini in a plastic cup next to my freshly opened beer, evaluated the situation and politely declined.

‘So what do you do for Thanksgiving in Australia?’ a voice asked me.

‘We don’t have Thanksgiving, what’s it for anyway?’

The brother swaying behind the sunglasses gave me an express history lesson. ‘Well, basically, when the first Americans came to America they didn’t know how to store or prepare any of the food here. So they got the Indians to show them how, and after that they killed them. And that’s how we have Thanksgiving.’

It sounded stupid but upon further research wasn’t too far off the mark.

After lunch was finished and I had punched a new hole into my belt we all piled into the pick up trucks to visit a neighbouring farm and celebrate the day with old friends by blasting the crap out of some trees and scattered cattle bones with an arsenal that could start a small army. It was like a taste testing of firearms, an express course for the inexperienced and the perfect prelude to go tenpin bowling.

That night, as the bonfire roared and a brother danced shirtless around a pitchfork to an acoustic Eminem performance I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be. This was part of the America the tourist doesn’t see. The inner sanctum of family togetherness. Yams and pumpkin pie, turkey, excessive drinking, guns and pitchforks. That’s what I was thankful for.

The Ferry To Big Corn Island

There are two small islands off the Carribean coast of Nicaragua called Big Corn Island and Little Corn Island. Neither are shaped like corn, and corn is not noticably abundant whilst there, but one is definitely bigger than the other, so at least in one aspect the name works.

They are located 70 kilometers from the coastal town of Bluefields, which sits virtually alone in eastern Nicaragua, away from the heavily populated west side of the country. This makes the Corn Islands difficult to get to if you are too stingy to fly, which I absolutely was.

Three days after leaving Managua I was waiting to board the boat from The Bluff, the departure point for the islands across the bay from Bluefields. There had been a bus from Managua that more resembled a carnival freak show, then a boat ride down Rio Escondido because Bluefields has no road access. This went smoothly enough, but the speed hump came after being told the boat only left for the islands on Sundays. It was Thursday morning.

Bluefields wasn't a town you needed to spend three days in. Maybe an hour would be too long. The sleepiest of sleepy fishing ports but devoid of any beaches or attractions, Bluefields is rich in lame dogs, garbage littered roads and extreme, dusty heat. My days there were spent squashing cockroaches and unsuccesfully trying to arrange alternative transport to the islands. It was mind-numbing, but miraculously Sunday came and the ferry would soon arrive. I thought surely the worst was now behind me and I would cruise comfortably to the Caribbean paradise, but assumptions can be hazardous in Central America.

The ferry did arrive, but calling it a ferry was a little generous. It was nothing more than a boat. About 20 meters long it was an acceptable size, but the alarming feature was the lack of seats or any obvious passenger space.

'Where do we go?' I asked one of the crew, who listlessly pointed towards the bow, already filled with cargo. Other passengers - local and clearly experienced in this form of travel - were already finding spots amongst the crates so I hurried on to find my own quarters, my very own concrete slab, bang in the middle, for ten hours of rocking atop the waves with no shade under the intense equatorial sun.

Two hours in I was in trouble. Passengers had begun vomiting over the side of the vessel. The rocking was relentless and inconsistent. Some waves were bigger than others, one even joined us in the boat, saturating luggage and belongings. Trying to ignore the conditions I lay flat, hugging my concrete bed with eyes shut trying to forget where I was. A brief glimpse of our surroundings showed blue water, no land in site in any direction, just hours more of rocking and nervously relying on the navigational system that I wasn't really sure existed.

There was some excitement on board when dolphins joined us for a while but standing up was at that moment beyond my skill set so I didn't get to see them. Head down and try to sleep was my only tactic to combat the approaching seasickness. The sun was roasting me so I covered myself with a towel, but under the towel was too hot so a rotation policy kept me busy for a while. Towel on, towel off. I couldn't believe they called it a 'ferry'.

After an eternity I poked my head over the bow and saw a dot of green standing out among the waves. Big Corn Island. Four days after leaving Managua it was there, still a long way off but at least it was there. My illness left me and I felt great again. I was burnt to a crisp, but felt great. I really hoped the islands were worth it.

High Altitude Can Go Fuck Itself

La Paz sits at 3, 650 meters elevation as the highest capital city in the world. Potosi is 4, 090 meters in the sky. Lake Titicaca is apparently the world's highest lake at 3, 811, and if you climb the hill overlooking the lakeside town of Copacabana you’ll be gasping for breath a lot higher up than that. Most of Bolivia is basically in the clouds. It makes it all sound appealing and somewhat romantic, but what they fail to mention is how hard to breathe it is up there.

They’re at similar heights to ski resorts, but ski resorts are in alpine regions, with only fresh snow, trees and clean, crisp air in the immediate environment. Bolivia's cities in the heavens instead provide suffocating exhaust fumes and the smell of fresh garbage being blown about in the strong winds. The extra effort that needs to be made with each breath means an extra intake of pollution into your lungs.

La Paz is an infinite procession of mini-vans roaming the streets and collecting passengers to ferry them around the city. None of them seem to have ever been serviced and black smoke billows from each one as it grunts up and down the steep, narrow streets. Among the vans are larger buses and trucks that also look like they’re from the seventies as eco-friendly vehicles have not yet made it to Bolivia. The fumes go with you when walking up the stepped footpaths, and punch you in the face when going down. The only respite comes from the city block sized town squares, but then you have to dodge the filthy pigeon feathers being blown at you as you stand hunched, hands on knees, panting for air.

Even climbing into a bunk bed, or rolling over as I struggled to sleep would get my heart beating a little faster than it should have been as it searched for oxygen. All over the Andes, through Bolivia to Peru countless tourists suffer from altitude sickness after underestimating its impact and overestimating their own resilience.

Potosi – the highest city in the world, once Latin America’s wealthiest city and home to the Potosi silver mines – was an attack on the senses. A mixture of piss, rotting fruit and dog shit. It had the same wind as deserts have, but this was more than just dust and sand being blown at you as you struggled up the narrow sidewalks.

The reason for visiting Potosi, and the only reason I could imagine anyone would go there, is to tour the silver mines where visitors are given a personal experience of the conditions the miners have to work in. My initial excitement about visiting it was because I had been told tourists could buy dynamite there and set it off in the mines. This didn't happen - the dynamite we purchased was given to a miner who just put it in his pocket - but regardless it was worth the visit, if only for the experience. The streets of Potosi seemed bad, but after ten minutes in the tunnels I couldn’t wait to get back outside. In some sections the temperature rested above 50 degrees Celsius as miners shoveled and transported mountains of loose rock in search of silver that would pay for their shifts of up to 14 hours or more. It was stifling, the dust attacked lungs and the darkness, deep into the mines far away from daylight, took away any sense of day or night. Miners worked whenever they wanted, day or night, it made no difference. The conditions would have been brutal at sea level, the altitude and all the difficulties that come with it just made it cruel.

It made me think of times when I've had to wait a few hours for a bus, or had no hot water in a shower and had a bit of a moan about it thinking 'fuck my life.' After crawling through the tunnels and spending five minutes helping the miners move bags of rubble in the small, dark, hot and stuffy caves, I figured I shouldn't ever complain about anything ever again. Except maybe high altitude.