| Victoria,
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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