Banff - properly!

I was reading the blog I wrote yesterday and thinking I was so off color! It was the after effect of being alone after being surrounded by people all day for four days, and having a lot of fun with them. But I am ok now! Enjoying alone time again - so I am going to make up for it today, how does that sound :)

First a little about Banff (in order to tuck it away in my memory as much as wanting to share it with you. It is a little town situated inside Banff National Park and owned by Parks Canada, which leases land out to various people. But - there are regulations to how big Banff town can get! Isn't that nice.. It is nestled in a valley; the mountains around are not as tall and imposing as the Western Ghats, the max is about 10,000 feet, and Banff is already high so there is not much of a gradient. But as a function of the latitude - there is snow and ice here! So its like a kid made a clay model of a black mountain, after which he/she got careless and dropped random dollops of powdery white paint on it! The last snow was in June (late this year) so its still melting.
So I went on the Minnewanka lake cruise today. An interpretive tour with a very witty guide who kept us enthralled with interesting narratives relating the places we are seeing at that point, history, anecdotes associated with it. These people really take the trouble and go the extra mile to show off their sights! Very pretty lake, brilliant blue and edged by these mountains. One part of the forests surrounding the lake were burnt down in a forest fire; other side intact. The contrast was blinding! Some of the names were interesting First People names and some were named after the first European explorers. So Canada is so young that some people can trace their ancestry to the first colonizers, which is - ahem - two to three generations earlier!

After the lake tour, went to Cave and Basin Historic Site that has the origin of a hot springs inside a cave. You enter the cave's vicinity and start getting lungfuls of sulphur (it is located on sulphur mountain, lol). The water is a different greenish blue as a result. Quite interesting.

The evening was awesome. Went to a performance by the Cornerstone theater; a musical about Canada. Called Oh Canada Eh!, you are supposed to watch out for when they say Eh! and repeat it loudly! I ended up with this huge American group who kind of absorbed me into their 'fold' because I was alone! It was tough being as noisy and enthusiastic as them though! So we were driven down to a nearby town called Canmore for it. The show was a dinner theater - tables set in front of a stage with elaborate settings; the waiters double up as singing/dancing performers. The whole routine encapsulates Canadian history by tracing music from various ages (really old waltz till Shania Twain, who is from Ontario). The waiters dressed appropriately and they sang so beautifully - pure, evocative tone. Everything from lumberjacks to Anne of Green Gables. A lot of comedy thrown in (some French!). Overall highly enjoyable. Though it left me wondering how the hell these people garner all that awesome energy every single day.

The drive itself was really beautiful. Mountains on either side. As we were coming back the land was getting ready for a golden sunset. There was rain and sun for a while simultaneously, resulting in this heavenly rainbow across the snow covered mountain. We were driving straight towards it for most of our trip! It got a little cloudy after a while - smoky wisps of cloud of all colors and shapes' one minute against the dark mountain, and the next against a patch of cobalt blue sky which cropped up suddenly. Oh man, like a parallel universe.

This is what I thought Canada will be like!