Back to: Nique`s Travel Diary - Index

Hi Everyone, You’ll be pleased to know that this email is really short. So I take a bus from Buffalo airport New York, USA across the border to Niagara Falls, Canada  and is dropped off at the bus station. A room with a few people loitering around, a shop selling chocolate, cigarettes, drinks and magazines, but no one attending the shop, and a ticket officer on the phone behind his window. Bustling place. I ask someone which way is downtown where all the hostels and shops and stuff are and they pointed. They also said there’s a hostel behind Dad’s Diner just down the road. I decided to head for downtown. Walking and walking with my two monsterous packs, I decide to check in at a garage, the only place on the street with an open door. The workshop is empty, but there is a car that someone is obviously in the middle of attending to, so I walk around the premises and find a makeshift office with four older-than-middle-aged blokes having a smoke and talking and laughing, and a dog lying under the table. They ask me where I’m from and where I’m going and all that, and tell me that Dad’s Diner is back the other way, but most of the other stuff is quite a bit further down the way I was going. He let me leave my packs in his office while going to explore this lonely little place I arrived in. About a block and a half from the bus station where I’d just come from I find Dad’s Diner, and behind it, the HI (Hostelling International) Hostel. They had space for one more and put me in a co-ed room with 3 other people in it. The room stunk of sweat and was hot and muggy, even more so than outside. But it was a place to sleep and that’s all I needed. I went back and got my packs from the mechanics and dumped my stuff in my tiny room. There was no one else there. I can’t stay in this stinky room, so I asked for a different room. Much better. Sharing with a Pom and an Australian, both about 20 years old, who are in Canada because they got kicked out of the USA for drinking on a girl scouts camp. The officials in charge of the camp dismissed them and somehow cancelled their visas or something. It’s Friday afternoon, and there are fireworks over the falls at 10pm on a Friday night. I walked along the river, a half hour walk to the falls, and lo and behold, here are all the people. Zillions of them. Hardly any room to move and way to hot for any comfort. So I saw the falls, both the American side, which can be seen from the US and Canada, and the Canadian side which can only be seen from Canada. The falls themselves are very beautiful, but unfortunately the surroundings are all done up for the benefit of the tourists, and detract from the overall environment. The American side of the falls are comparatively quite small, whereas the Canadian side is the huge horse-shoe shaped monster. The falls aren’t that high, roughly 50 metres, but the Canadian falls alone spill approximately 2.5 million litres per second!  Hard to comprehend hey? So I hang around for a few hours taking lots of pictures, watching the coloured light show the shine onto the falls and then watch the very unspectacular fireworks. Not overly exciting. The next day I start off by buying a day pass which includes a bunch of things. The queues everywhere were lengthy. For example when I went to book a session of Journey Behind the Falls at midday, they told me the next available session was at 3:30 in the afternoon. My first adventure was the infamous Maid of the Mist. The little boats that have been taking tourists right under the spray at the base of the horse-shoe falls since 1846. Everyone is issued with a blue raincoat and crammed on the boat. The falls are roaring and you pass the American side and get a bit of spray, but when you reach the horse-shoe falls, you get drenched. The power of the falls is overwhelming and you feel sick thinking about the numerous people that have attempted to ride the falls in a barrel. The water around the base of the falls is covered in a soapy muck. It looks quite revolting, but no one I asked new what it was. Whilst waiting for my Journey Behind the Falls appointment, I took the People Mover bus service to the butterfly farm and the botanical gardens. Didn’t have time to see the gardens, but the butterfly place was okay. First everyone watches a video and they emphasise how fragile butterflies are. It explains, among other things, that if you touch there wings, then it rubs off the little scales on their wings that give them their colour, and hence their camouflage or other means of defence mechanism, and also makes it more difficult for them to fly. Then, after the video, everyone goes into the butterfly farm and all the kids try and get butterflies to land on them and touch their wings. There are some amazingly beautiful butterflies, and some of them are so huge. Each scale on their wings, which make up the powder you get on your finger when you do touch them, each tiny scale is only one colour. That’s how tiny the scale is. Then I went back to the falls for my journey behind them. This was cool. This time everyone gets issued with a yellow raincoat, and you go into down into a corridor of moist, smelly, concrete tunnels, first to a platform right by the side of the falling water, and then right behind the water. Many people toss a penny in to the falls or as close to the edge as they can. There’s really nothing to see, it looks like you’re staring at a white wall, but the sounds and smell, temperature and feeling makes you know you’re somewhere special. It had been fairly overcast all day, but as I was waiting for the People Mover, the sky cleared up into a crystal blue, and this magnificent rainbow came out reflecting on the massive mist spray. You could see the extent of the mist now, because before it had sort of blended into the clouds, but now this perfectly full rainbow dominated the entire horse-shoe area and that few minutes waiting for the bus was probably the highlight of my time at Niagara falls. On my way back to the hostel that evening I stopped off a bit further down the river, away from the falls, a place called Whirlpool Rapids. It’s a pathway you can walk down to the river and watch the water rush past you and splash up at you. There’s a small information centre there too, which tells you about all the dare-devil people who have attempted to ride the falls in a barrel or tightrope walk over them. For obvious reasons, performing or attempting stunts at the falls is now illegal, but earlier in the century it was  not that uncommon. Even women did it, in fact the first person that did it was a woman. One guy carried a stove and pan and utensils over a high wire and cooked himself a scramble egg above the falls before walking off to the other side. Another woman crossed on a high wire with each foot strapped inside a milk bucket. And one poor bastard successfully rode over the falls in a barrel on 4 different occasions and then died after slipping on an orange peel a few years later. That night I jumped on a bus back to Buffalo, New York. The bus, along with hundreds of other drivers were held up, because the bridge we needed to cross to get from one country to the other was closed off, and police and security people were hovering about, and only ambulances, fire trucks and rescue vehicles were allowed to pass. No one was a hundred percent sure what was going on, but from what the officials told the bus driver, and what he passed on to us, was that there was a suicide attempt. Whether that is true or not I don’t know. Half an hour later we were allowed to cross the bridge, and then I hopped on another bus to Buffalo airport. Finally, I had seen the last major tourist attraction that I’d always wanted to see in North America. I’d seen all three attractions this holiday, my third trip to the USA, Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, and Niagara Falls. The only one I really want to return to is Yellowstone, that is somewhere that I’d never get sick of. Ciao for now, Nique