Northwest Canada

Northern Canada I leave Bologna with Lufthansa for Frankfurt, then for the first time I fly Air Canada; an A340 takes me to Calgary, in the middle of Canada. Here I rent a car and drive along the wide motorways to Banff, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I take a stroll through conifer woods and the Canadian Madonna di Campiglio, then go back to Calgary and look for a motel for the night. The next morning my alarm doesn't go off, and I have a flight to Edmonton. The hotel guy didn't make my phone ring. So I leap up and jump into the car within 2 minutes of being under the sheets, start the engine and, without warming it up, race to the airport; luckily, it being Sunday morning, there's no traffic and the lights are on my side. I hand back the car in record time and just barely make check-in. The flight to Edmonton is on an Air Canada Dash 8, which gets me there in about an hour.

Here a connection with a First Air B737, bound for the northern territories with a stop at Yellowknife, and I carry on to Inuvik, in the far north-west of Canada. Total winter here, the very short days of November and bitter cold. Yet despite it all, crows live here. Polar bears roam around and you have to be careful on foot; each day shortens by 2 minutes, and it's minus 25 degrees - just crossing the road from where I sleep to the pub, I freeze. The water mains aren't buried but run a metre above ground, super-insulated and heated every hundred metres; freezing means burst pipes and no water for the whole village. I get a taxi driven by an Indian - but what's he doing here, I ask him, Delhi is +40 and here it's -40, how does he manage? He answers that he stays in the taxi the whole time with the heating on full blast and survives.

My First Air flight takes me a bit further down, and I stop at Yellowknife, where my brother Vanni is waiting for me, having meanwhile made it all the way there from Italy. I'm happy - a bit of company doesn't hurt. He takes me by taxi to the hotel he chose. We rent a car the next day and go around a bit. We cover about forty km, but we don't see the bison that were marked on the map. We stop at a bar in a village for a coffee and at the next table find an Italian woman who teaches in that town. She tells us they pay her a fortune to stay shut away in that God-forsaken place. We head back to Yellowknife in the dark, and Vanni wants lake fish at the Prospector restaurant, even though it's expensive. Still, a place to remember, out in the middle of nowhere.

The next morning something happens that will imprint this trip on my mind forever - perhaps the most shocking thing that's ever happened to me. For breakfast at the little hotel they give us eggs, bacon and a vegetable I'd never seen, and I, who eat everything, worse than a hyena, have no problem swallowing it. Vanni, across from me, knew that vegetable - it's called "coriander". I had such a reaction of rejection, and I reckon eating warthog droppings would taste like a sweet by comparison. Never, ever again will I eat coriander. That morning Vanni and I take the usual First Air B737 that flies us to Edmonton with a connection to Toronto. We use the stopover day to go as far as Niagara Falls, the second time for me but the first for Vanni. Bye