Prince Rupert, Canada

Western Canada Mauro and I land in Vancouver after changing planes in Toronto. We arrive in the evening, totally wrecked by the time difference; Tomaso is waiting for us, takes us to a Japanese restaurant, and then off to bed. The next morning, fairly early, Tomaso comes to pick us up at the hotel and the three of us go to the airport, where on an Air Canada Dash 8 we fly to Prince Rupert, a town facing the Pacific Ocean, where we rent a very expensive car to make it back to Vancouver in 5 days. We take a walk in a conifer forest, keeping a good eye out for bears and wolves; the landscape along a classic Canadian river is very beautiful, even though it's cloudy. We set off for the interior the following morning, and before long we find frozen lakes and snow on the mountains.

After hours of driving and some very fine scenery, we come across someone having fun on a snowmobile at the edge of the snowy mountains. That night we sleep in an icy village, inside a pub, after a game of billiards. We try to take a snowmobile tour but no luck, so we carry on, hugging the Rocky Mountains, not far from Banff, a very well-known ski resort. That evening we sleep in another little village where we meet an Italian lumberjack, who tells us some of the adventures he had as a young man when he felled trees, encounters with bears and so on. Trains pass through here hauling materials from the Pacific toward the country's interior to supply the various cities, and they are incredibly long - more than 100 wagons at a time, pulled by three locomotives. At Prince George we swap cars, hand one back and continue with a second, slightly cheaper one, and that night we sleep in Kamloops.

Here the ice on the ground is very slippery and, with me at the wheel, I very nearly have an accident. The following evening we reach Vancouver and Tomaso leaves us, while the two of us carry on to the ski resort of Whistler. Here famous American and Canadian actors keep homes so they can ski in winter; it's a bit like our Madonna di Campiglio. The next day we finally go snowmobiling through the woods with a guide - great fun. In the evening we return to Vancouver and hand back the car. We take the plane, which with a stop in Montreal brings us back to Italy