The May edition of Perceptive Travel has just been published, so you might want to grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and check out the travel stories on offer this month.

Regular contributor Amy Rosen takes us on a trip along the frozen coast of Norway in her article A Technicolor Dream Cruise. I’m not much of a fan of ice, snow, or cold weather but Amy really got me convinced that this would be a great place to explore. Of course, I’d have to take lots of layers, otherwise I’d probably be too cold to enjoy it.

Then it’s off to Italian Alps and a spot of cow fighting with Donald Strachen’s article Where the Queens Come to Fight. Hard to imagine, but it seems that fighting cows is a offbeat sporting passion in the Valle d’Aosta region.  Happily, it’s not a fight to the death.

Beebe Bahram, in The Goddess Still Lives Here takes us to Northwestern Spain to visit places where there are still vestiges of it’s matriarchal past.

And finally, we head over to British Columbia with Pam Mandel (of Nerd’s Eye View fame) to examine Salmon and Red Cedar in the form of fish and totem poles.

Plus there’s the always interesting  book and music reviews to check out.

Happy reading…

Vancouver Island frequently gets tagged by magazines as the “Best North American Island,” so of course this is a plot of land that has plenty of claims to fame. (It’s also been named as the “best place to live in Canada.”)

A year ago this time I was making plans to tour the great Northwest, traveling by train from Portland to Banff and seeing Western Canada through the Eyes of a Child. We finished up this family adventure on Vancouver Island. Unfortunately we only got to see a small patch of it. You would need a month there to really traverse what is the “largest island off the North American west coast.” That may sound like a qualified superlative, but it’s roughly the size of the Netherlands or Taiwan, so not too shabby. It’s sparsely populated though, a wilderness paradise where half the population lives in the not-so-large city of Victoria. So what tops the charts here?

Della Falls, in Strathcona Provincial Park, is Canada’s highest waterfall, at 440 metres (1,452 feet). It is also one of the ten highest waterfalls in the world.

Nitinat Lake is the top windsurfing destination in North America. No wind in the morning, but then it comes on like a wall, hitting 25 to 30 knots. There’s a kiteboarding school there if you want to learn how to get airborne. Great videos on their site too.

Nanaimo is home to the world’s largest upright artificial reef. It was created when the Cape Breton, a decommissioned navy ship, was sunk in 2001 near the Saskatchewan, a navy-class destroyer.

Vancouver Island is witness to the longest migration of any mammal in the world. Every year between early February and late April more than 18,000 Grey Whales pass the west coast shore of Vancouver Island, on their way from Mexico to Alaska.

The Strathcona Hotel in Victoria claims to have “the world’s only rooftop beach volleyball courts.” I didn’t go there, but I’ll take their word for it.

I did have the meal of a lifetime at Spinnaker’s though, which is “Canada’s oldest brewpub.” This is a slow food paradise, with beer brewed on site, wine from British Colombia, and meals made with ingredients mostly sourced from within B.C. (including herbs grown in the garden). They’ll set up a beer and food pairing, a wine and food pairing, or if you really want to get decadent—both at once! (Yeah, I didn’t think that would work either, but amazingly it did.)

Find out more:

Tourism Vancouver Island

Tourism Victoria

And here’s a video shot from the (noisy) propeller seaplane ride from Victoria to the Vancouver City harbour, on Harbour Air.

Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

This time of year puts me in the mood to get outdoors, do a bit of hiking, paddle in the water … or at least thinking of those summertime activities. Warm weather gets me particularly itching to go camping. Raised as I was in pre-Hollywood Montana, when you could still taste a bit of frontier tang on the air, camping was my definition of “family vacation” until I was about 25. People might go to Disneyland or the Caribbean on TV, but in real life families went camping.

Living about an hour from Yellowstone National Park, and with an abundance of Rocky Mountain wilderness all around us, we never had a shortage of places to camp within easy driving distance. But for some reason — probably that wanderlust in my family’s blood — once a year or so we got a hankering to travel a bit further, to head north. With kids packed precariously in the back of a beat-up Suburban (seat belts scavenged from even older cars), my parents drove up to one of their favorite places on earth, Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

With mountains wilder and far craggier than their slightly southern cousins, the Rockies of the Canadian West are manna for the escapist soul. The hikes are steep, the summer evenings cold, the lakes stupendously blue. Lake Louise, pictured above in its usual turquoise shade, attracts between one and two million people a year, despite its seemingly remote location. In high summer, or during peak travel in August, even the semi-strenuous 5-hour hike up around the lake and over the other side of a mountain is a pretty busy thoroughfare.

But that doesn’t affect its heart-stopping beauty, nor does the partway point marked by a tea house. Something akin to beer-and-sausage huts maintained for hardy hikers in the upper reaches of the Alps, Lake Louise’s tea house has got to be one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a lifetime of hiking. Been slogging and sweating for three hours? Cool your feet in a lake — we have plenty — and restore yourself with jasmine tea and a piece of cake before the journey down.

Here in my Hudson Valley home, it’s time to think about gardening and possible summer trips overseas. But in this mountain girl’s heart, the thoughts that preoccupy are of the open road, of chilly mountains, startling glacier-fed lakes, campfires, and waking up at dawn, in a cold tent, the Canadian Rockies brooding overhead.

It’s inevitable that, being writers focused not only travel, but on place, we’ve written a fair bit on this blog about worldwide effects of global warming and climate change, paying particular attention to the melting of Arctic ice. Steve posted recently about the opening of the Northwest Passage, and I wondered about the effect the warming of cold places will have on travel writing. The chilly north has been much on the mind.

So it was with no great surprise that I received my November issue of Toronto-based The Walrus and saw that it was a special issue devoted to the Arctic.

Canada has a particular relationship with the Arctic and its peoples, one that hasn’t always had a pretty history. But the articles in this issue are focused less on Canada’s past use of its natural resources and repressing of indigenous populations than they are on the way Canada is going to have to think about its Arctic lands in the future.

The articles move from memoir to travel to politics to climate change to Canada’s molasses-like approach to developing an Arctic policy. An excellent selection of writers focus particularly on the Inuit populations in the north, their opinions of climate change and what role they will play when Canada turns its ponderous thoughts to previously frozen resources, the Northwest Passage, and the inevitable political battles that will ensue.

It occurs to me as I make my way through a hefty, well-respected magazine devoted entirely to a region that was previously as remote in thought as it was in location, that the coming century will see more than just a rebalance of powers. There will be that in spades, with Russia already staking claim to oil on the North Pole’s floor and the US traipsing its way through the Northwest Passage to flaunt Canada’s inability to claim sovereignty over its waters.

But what we are really seeing is a rebalance in thought. In modern history humankind has only ever thought of our poles as remote and inaccessible. And cold. And adventurous. No longer. Now they are becoming places that we think about — symbols of planetary destruction, sure, but also places in their own rights, destinations and locations that, before, we thought of as only for intrepid explorers and fur-wearing natives. Now those fur-wearing natives are seeing their homes, their lifestyle, their art and their thoughts become part of the world’s mainstream conversation as never before.

The Walrus is currently in the vanguard of this thought shift. Rather than focusing purely on melting polar caps and political battles, this issue gives weight to the Inuit perspective, studying climate change and its effects on Canada from the Inuit point of view. Writers travel from Labrador, to Wales, Alaska (the US’s northernmost town), to Siberia, to Moscow, back to Nunavut and everywhere in between, bringing a comprehensive issue that is one of the most thought-provoking and refreshing magazine issues from anywhere in a very long time. To me, it is a bellweather of the future, an indication of where our politics, art, literature, and, unfortunately, conflicts, will take place in the coming century.

As always, you can sign up for a free ten-day trial of The Walrus by going to the website. This time, however, I recommend ordering this issue if you can. It’s going to be one to keep and refer to for years to come.

Even the dumbest Republican president has to admit that we are in the middle of unprecedented global warming - accelerated, if not caused by our soaring carbon dioxide emissions and use of fossil fuels. As if any proof were needed, 2007 has seen one of the most shocking single events yet brought about by global warming: the shrinking of the polar ice cap to such a level that the fabled North West Passage is now navigable. The passage, which can provide a fast route from Europe and the Americas to Asia, was not expected by scientists to be clear of ice before 2040, but a Canadian research vessel has just completed a complete transit. On board was BBC reporter David Shukman, and you can read his blog here.

Not only is the opening of the North West Passage a chilling indicator of just how far global warming has progressed, but it is already causing conflict between nations, with Canada claiming it as part of it’s territorial waters, and Russia and the USA claiming the right to use it. There have been a number of theories that global warming will push developing nations into conflict over water, territory and food, but it seems that the so-called developed nations are not above a little global warming-induced teritorial spat.

Words & polar bear picture © Steve Davey/stevedavey.com 2007