The Pearl of the Rockies

After our stay in Winnipeg, we had to find a way to get into the Rockies, but getting around in Canada is notoriously difficult if you don’t want to fly. So we indulged ourselves on the luxurious Canadian train from Winnipeg to Edmonton and took a bus from there after a short night to Calgary and then to Banff. Therefore, we can't report much about either city. Calgary appears a bit more modern and welcomed us with a tropical street carnival that was out of season. The exact background remains unclear to us, but we gratefully accepted the welcome parade with nods.

The journey on the Canadian was again very pleasant; we had conversations with very kind and somewhat so-so friendly fellows. Other than that, everything has been said about the Canadian.

The most famous places in the Rockies are Banff and Jasper with their respective national parks. Tragically, Jasper fell victim to devastating wildfires this year – a disaster for nature and people. For us, this meant traveling not from Edmonton to Jasper but from Calgary to Banff.

When coming by bus from Calgary, the landscape changes very quickly. The bus's engine struggles up the incline, and the prairie fields gradually give way to forests, with vast pastures of happy cattle remaining as the last sign of agriculture for a while.

Even during the bus ride, we had a highlight of our trip: Thanks to Mrs. Waas's keen attention, we seemed to be the only ones on the bus who saw a large bear cub rushing along the sidewalk next to the road, so we only got a very pixelated and blurred photo of a bear's backside.

Banff itself is a splendidly dressed holiday resort. The population mainly consists of people who work in tourism, making it extremely difficult for locals to find a craftsman or even construction workers who could build new hotels a bit further from Banff.

The streets are strikingly clean, the backdrops are magnificent, and there are no vacancies. There are public benches everywhere (some even with gas-fired campfires outside of the wildfire season), free water dispensers, and garbage bins secured against bears.

The numerous shops invite all those who can afford it to shop and indulge. Visible homelessness is absent in Banff, unlike other Canadian cities. Here, the world seems to be in order; there is a lovely library, a boy sells homemade lemonade in the evenings in front of his parents' property, and we saw a white-tailed deer grazing largely undisturbed on the ornamental plants of a front yard.

To save our heavily strained travel budget, we chose the Samesun hostel, where Mrs. Waas stayed in an eight-bed female dormitory and Mr. Ärmel in an eight-bed male dormitory. The 16-bed version was already sold out...

Despite the cramped conditions, we are pleased to have stayed at Samesun. Naturally, there are points of friction in such a place, but the dedicated staff at the front desk (especially Cassie, who played booking Tetris for us successfully) and the cozy pub on the ground floor with live music and pub quizzes made Samesun an experience. In these cramped circumstances, one quickly comes into contact with people from Hong Kong and Reunion, whom one would never normally meet.

But alongside everything we write here about Banff, it is clear that nature is the most important aspect in and around Banff. Our mountain hikes, the walk along the artsy trail by the Bow Falls (known from