Blue, blue, blue are all my clothes

...blue, blue, blue is everything I see:

Morraine Lake

Actually I wanted to write a new blog post during my Christmas holidays, but unfortunately I got sick on the 24th and didn't write anything. Well, here it is: Belated Merry Christmas to everyone and a Happy New Year.

I had a very nice Christmas with Terry's family and I'm very happy with my gifts: books :), an air pump, and tea that helped me a lot with my cold.

As promised, this blog post features lakes in all shades of blue and green. One of the important destinations according to our Lonely Planet guidebook was Lake Louise. Lake Louise is not just any lake, but a particularly photogenic lake that everyone wants to see, which is why you can never find a parking space. After the third round, not around the parking lot, but around the area where the lake was, we were still told by the parking attendants that there were no available parking spaces, so we gave up. We then took a tour bus converted from a school bus to Lake Louise and it was actually much more relaxing, if you ignore the 1000 tourists..

Tourists..Yeah. The guy on the far right was also German :D

Snow!! In September!

I found the lake itself a bit unspectacular, which could be because all the lakes in Canada have a beautiful color. I'm just spoiled when it comes to lakes, but it could also be because of the weather and the fact that my scarf was stolen from the little hut we hiked to. So it was raining, it was snowing! When we reached the top and then some nasty tourist stole my scarf too...

Well, at least the view of the lake from above was much more interesting, as the color looked completely different and reminded me more of a chemistry experiment than a tourist magnet in the Canadian Rockies:

Same lake, just from above

Right in Lake Louise, which felt like it consisted of 3 hotels and 5 tourist shops, of course there was no space left on the huge campground, so we had to drive to a more remote place. At least there was a shelter for cooking and we parked close to the toilets so we wouldn't have to walk too far at night, because you always have to be afraid that a bear jumps out of the bushes.

Fog and shelter

After our adventure to Lake Louise, I asked for a shower and we went to the only hostel in Lake Louise. If you don't stay there as a guest, you can shower as a sad camper for $5 once or even twice in a row..

The YHA Hostel

However, if you ask to do laundry, they only show you the laundry room and don't check if you might also take a shower. The next time we washed our laundry and took a shower without paying $5. Still, a hot shower after a cold, rainy day for $5 is still better than no shower at all.

Afterwards, we drove to Morraine Lake (yeah, I know, we could have just looked at something else :D) and looked at another beautiful lake. But this time it was really amazing, because the panorama in the background with the snowy mountains and the clouds made everything look very mystical, which is why I had the idea for this photo:

There were so many posing photos that I really wondered what people do with all these photos: 'Here I am in front of the lake, here I am in front of the mountain, here I am with my food..' Some of the pictures I actually only took as reminders so that I now know what I have to write, as everything happened a while ago and I can look at the date on the photo to make sure I don't tell you any nonsense. But yes, I also have photos with me and mountains and lakes. Some are quite good:

And because Morraine Lake wasn't enough yet, we also visited Emerald Lake afterwards. But then it was really enough and we didn't see any more blue lakes for a while.

too stupid! so much rain.

However, I had read about the rainforest in the Great Bear Rainforest on the west coast of British Columbia and wanted to go there for a short time. So we drove from Banff all the way across the country to Bella Coola. If you're thinking, well, Banff is at the border of Alberta and British Columbia, so it can't be too far to Bella Coola on the coast...uh...yes, it is! Google Maps estimates a driving time of 16 hours and 30 minutes!!!

For comparison: That's about the same as driving from Berlin to Barcelona by car.

We did it anyway! We stayed overnight in the Walmart parking lot in Kamloops and then arrived at Riske Creek and spent the night at a lodge in the backyard.

This strange structure is a normal flat log cabin with a piece of church on top. No idea why..

To our surprise, we encountered 2 black bears on our return trip and I'll tell you about this event now, because it was so funny:

He's looking at us

And here he goes towards the cows. We then heard a lot of excited mooing and saw cows running in all directions :D (No cows were harmed)

We continued driving towards Bella Coola and at every stop and tourist information, we were told how bad and steep and just terrible the road down to Bella Coola is. Not that there were many stops, we hardly saw any tourists or people between Riske Creek and Bella Coola.

This horrible steep road is a 43km unpaved dirt road with gradients of up to 18% at some points. But if you have a good car with all-wheel drive and a good driver, it's not so bad. The locals call the road down to Bella Coola from the valley just 'the Hill' and there are even t-shirts saying 'I survived the hill'...

The sign with 'Freedom Road' is unfortunately a bit overgrown, but it exists!

Well, I found the story the road has much more interesting. The road is also called 'The Freedom Road' because before 1950 there was no road connecting Bella Coola to the interior or the nearest village, Anahim Lake. All groceries and other goods had to be transported by sea. The government refused to build a road and engineers said it was 'impossible', so the residents of Bella Coola took matters into their own hands and financed several bulldozers to dig the road from both sides. They hoped that they would meet in the middle at some point. It took a year for the bulldozers to meet and in late 1952 there was finally a road. If you want to read more about it, you can read this article: https://globalnews.ca/news/2696374/the-hill-the-story-behind-one-of-bcs-most-treacherous-roads-and-the-locals-who-built-it/

I particularly liked this comment from one of the helpers:

'Gurr said he would often hide behind trees to protect himself from the blasts.

“I remember one time, a large boulder came through the air and hit the tree above me. There were [tree] limbs and debris everywhere, but they didn’t hurt me,” he said.”'

So when we were about to tackle the road, it started snowing heavily and the snow stayed on the ground. So we tried to wait a bit, because the visibility was just too poor. Lea said she wouldn't drive down the super mega extremely dangerous path in this weather and with snow/fog. But in the end, we did drive and listened to many great songs along the way, like 'Hit the Road Jack' and 'Highway to Hell' :D

Did I mention how steep it goes down on the side?

You can see so much...

That's it for this blog post. We arrived safely at the bottom and got a nice surprise in the valley. I'll tell you about that and the Canadian rainforest next time :)

See you soon!

The Lea

*Bonus material

The holy grail: Nutella!

Cooking in the rain...Yeah

More posing :D

The musicians of Banff ;)

The landscape was so beautiful, it simply blew us away :D

Must have grown like that naturally :D

This was hanging at the nice little restaurant where we took a break. Everyone who worked there was from Germany?! One from Zwickau and 2 Swabians :D In the middle of nowhere..