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FLORIDA, USA

USA |

Brochure images of tanning flesh and Mickey Mouse give an inaccurate and incomplete picture of FLORIDA . Although the aptly nicknamed “Sunshine State” is indeed devoted to the tourist trade, it’s also among the least-understood parts of the US. Away from its overexposed resorts lie forests and rivers, deserted strands filled with wildlife, vibrant cities and primeval swamps.

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A Northwest Snapshot

British Columbia | Canada

As you leave the hustle and bustle of cosmopolitan VANCOUVER and cross the Port Mann Bridge, the pastoral Fraser Valley opens up before you. You see a mixture of cityscapes and cows or graceful horses on green meadows.

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JASPER

Alberta | Canada

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Jasper, Alberta, Canada

  • JASPER TOWNSITE *

JASPER ’s small-town feel comes as a relief after the razzmatazz of Banff: its streets still have the windswept, open look of a frontier town and, though the mountains don’t ring it with quite the same majesty as Banff, you’ll probably feel the town better suits its wild surroundings. Situated at the confluence of the Miette and Athabasca rivers, its core centres around just two streets: Connaught Drive , which contains the bus and train terminal, restaurants, motels and park information centre, and – a block to the west – the parallel Patricia Street , lined with more shops, restaurants and the odd hotel. The rest of the central grid consists of homely little houses and the fixtures of small-town life: the post office, library, school and public swimming pool. Apart from the Yellowhead Museum & Archives at 400 Pyramid Rd, with its fur trade and railroad displays (mid-May to early Sept daily 10am-9pm; early Sept to Oct daily 10am-5pm; Nov to mid-May Thurs-Sun 10am-5pm; $3 or donation; tel 852-3013) and a cable car , nothing here even pretends to be a tourist attraction; this is a place to sleep, eat and stock up. If you’re interested in getting to know a little more about the town or park from the locals, contact the Friends of Jasper National Park (tel 852-4767), who offer guided walks between July and August, or pick up Jasper: A Walk in the Past from local bookshops. If you’re still itching for something to do and have a car, a lot of people head 58km northeast of town for a dip in Miette Hot Springs .

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BANFF

Alberta | Canada

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Banff, Alberta, Canada

Banff and Lake Louise have been welcoming international visitors for more than a century. In 1883 the attempts of three Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) workers to stake a claim to the natural hot springs they had discovered bubbling from the base of Sulphur Mountain led to the establishment of Canada’s first national park.
Today, Banff National Park (6,641 square km / 2,564 square miles) is one of four adjoining mountain parks comprising more than 20,235 square km / 7,813 square miles of spectacular Canadian Rocky Mountain landscape. For current visitors, bathing in these same hot springs is but one of many activities offered in Canada’s foremost National Park. When you visit the Banff/Lake Louise area you will see why each year more than 4.5 million visitors come to enjoy the unique feeling of the Canadian Rockies and to experience why the United Nations in 1985 declared our area a “World Heritage Site”.

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SEATTLE

Pacific Northwest | USA

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Seattle, Washington

Curved around the shore of Elliott Bay, with Lake Washington behind and the snowy peak of Mount Rainier hovering faintly in the distance, SEATTLE has a magnificent setting. The insistently modern skyline of glass skyscrapers gleams across the bay, an emblem of three decades of aggressive urban renewal.

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VICTORIA

British Columbia | Canada

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

VICTORIA has a lot to live up to. Leading US travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler has voted it one of the world’s top-ten cities to visit, and world number one for ambience and environment. And it’s not named after a queen and an era for nothing. Victoria has gone to town in serving up lashings of fake Victoriana and chintzy commercialism – tearooms, Union Jacks, bagpipers, pubs and ersatz echoes of empire confront you at every turn. Much of the waterfront area has an undeniably quaint and likeable English feel – “Brighton Pavilion with the Himalayas for a backdrop”, as Kipling remarked – and Victoria has more British-born residents than anywhere in Canada, but its tourist potential is exploited chiefly for American visitors who make the short sea journey from across the border. Despite the seasonal influx, and the sometimes atrociously tacky attractions designed to part tourists from their money, it’s a small, relaxed and pleasantly sophisticated place, worth lingering in if only for its inspirational museum. It’s also rather genteel in parts, something underlined by the number of gardens around the place and some nine hundred hanging baskets that adorn much of the downtown area during the summer. Though often damp, the weather here is extremely mild: Victoria’s meteorological station has the distinction of being the only one in Canada to record a winter in which the temperature never fell below freezing.

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WHISTLER

British Columbia | Canada

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

WHISTLER , 56km beyond Squamish, is Canada’s finest four-season resort, and frequently ranks among most people’s world top-five winter ski resorts. In 1996, for the first time ever, Ski , Snow Country and Skiing magazines were unanimous in voting it North America’s top skiing destination. Skiing and snowboarding are clearly the main activities, but all manner of other winter sports are possible and in summer the lifts keep running to provide supreme highline hiking and other outdoor activities (not to mention North America’s finest summer skiing). Standards are high, and for those raised on the queues and waits at European resorts, the ease with which you can get onto the slopes here will come as a pleasant surprise.

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VANCOUVER

British Columbia | Canada

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

World Class City by many standards. Has been declared for several years in a row as one of the most liveable cities on the globe. Global focus will be on Vancouver and premier ski resort Whistler in 2010.

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SAN FRANCISCO

California | USA

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: San Francisco, California

SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in LA the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. It’s a compact and approachable place, where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue skies and slothful warmth the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.

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HONOLULU

Hawaii | USA

300C FEATURE DESTINATION: Honolulu, Hawaii

Until the Europeans came, HONOLULU was insignificant; soon so many foreign ships were frequenting its waters that it had become Kamehameha’s capital, and it remains the economic center of the island. The city covers a long (if narrow) strip of southern Oahu, but downtown is a manageable size, and a lot quieter than its glamorous image might suggest. The tourist hotels, and most of Honolulu’s hustle, are concentrated among the skyscrapers of very distinct WAIKIKI , a couple of miles east.

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