I'm typing this on my phone on a Greyhound coach

bound for Whistler, a little fearful of taking out my shiny new Mac laptop. I'm not worried about being mugged - this bus is, as with everything Canadian, exactly like its American counterpart only much nicer - I'm just worried that I'd disappear in a puff of bourgeois smoke if I did so.

We arrived in Vancouver on Friday night, creeping through streets clogged with commuters making their way both into and out of the city centre. I can only imagine that people don't so much commute into town and then leave at night as just redistribute themselves around greater Vancouver. Crossing the Granville Bridge, innumerable skyscraping apartment blocks and hotels loomed out of the fog, delineating the curve of the False Creek waterway that bounds the southeast side of the downtown island. It was quite a sight: the giant, vertical neon signs for cinemas, bars and hotels set against the modern(ist) tower blocks is probably the most striking night skyline I've seen outside of Vegas.

We arrived at our hotel on Granville Street, dragged our gear to our room and spent a quiet, drowsy night in the hotel. Ash was still fearsomely jetlagged and I was reduced to tears of gratitude to be able to avoid yet another gargantuan meal. ("May I have the bill before my digestive system fails, please? Thank you.") We channel-hopped through charmingly amateur local cable stations until sleep overtook us.

On Saturday we roamed around the downtown island area. Yaletown (the streets around the hotel) put me in mind of Memphis: back alleys with canopies of telephone wires, rundown shops and rooming hotels looking like the last resting place of many a faded rock star. While Memphis had a slightly unnerving air (I think it was the constant feeling of impending mugging), Yaletown felt lived in - well loved instead of abandoned. In the downtown proper we ate breakfast in the camp splendour of Bellagio's café, then carried on to Stanley Park. "It's amazing," a number of present and past Vancouverites had told us, "it's totally like a park right in the middle of a city." They were not wrong. It was a pleasant enough walk, and had some diverting touches like a set of totem poles and a fantastic whale statue outside the aquarium, but it wasn't enough to keep us and we headed home.

That evening we met up with Christina, a uni friend of Ash's turned to the dark side to become a lawyer, over the bridge in Kitsilano. Kits (ah, how gauche) is a mostly affluent, mostly bohemian neighbourhood with a series of SF-style streets sloping steeply down to False Creek, and consists entirely of maternity shops and minimalist restaurants. We ate in one of the latter (and my God, lawyers don't half love to talk about law) and then walked back past an entire block of the former to get drunk in Christina's flat.

The next day we met up with Christina again, along with Rowand, another of Ash's uni friends, in the Elbow Room Café. Apparently this place is renowned for unfriendly service: “the waiters dish it out and love it if you answer back!" enthused Christina. I was utterly cynical as to why the hell anyone would want to ever go to such a place.

It was awesome. If Bellagio's was possessed of a camp splendour, then this place was splendidly camp. The waiters weren't evil, just joyously mouthy: they good-naturedly ribbed you if you took more than five minutes to decide on what to eat, berated requests for coffee refills with directions to the percolator and if you didn't clear your plate, you were…encouraged to make a donation to the Loving Spoonful charity. Top stuff!

So this, now, is our second attempt to get to Whistler. Yesterday, in the queue to buy bus tickets, a security guard apologetically announced that a rockslide had blocked the Sea to Sky highway. We sighed, hailed the same taxi that had brought us to the bus station and headed back to our hotel for an extra night.

Today's bus is currently sitting immobile in a line of cars stretching over the next blind summit as we wait for the debris from an accident between a logging truck and a (thankfully empty) tour bus to be cleared off the road. We've already been forced to stop in Squamish (a sort of 'gateway to the hills' place, unfortunately more evocative of Aviemore than Bourg St. Maurice) for an hour or so, and have been in this queue for a couple more hours. This is the road that's supposed to carry all the traffic to the 2010 Winter Olympics! Anyway, with a bit of luck we'll be on the slopes tomorrow and things will be looking up.