Whether you’re on a bicycle or not, you want it to be sunny, not too moist and reasonably warm. Just what we’ve had the last eight months. Arriving here in Canada two months ago, everybody was telling us about the non-present summer, the rain, the snow, the bad and cold weather in general.

Well, I don’t know what Canadians call a summer, but for me, 25°C, sunny, miniskirts and long days, means summer. Weather report for the last 2500 km on the road: Sunny with light tail winds…some people have been telling us we’ve been lucky, but I guess it’s just us, our karma or whatever. Lets call it smart planning, meaning you go where the sun shines, beer flows like wine and beautiful women like cyclists. ;)

Sometimes, the plan doesn’t work. And this was actually about the first time it didn’t. We were going west; it was past midday, and ahead of us an overwhelming blackness over the road. Yes, a thunderstorm was closing in on us, or us closing in on it. Either way, the sun still shining on us, we knew what was coming. Five minutes later and boom. We could already hear and see the lightning up on the hills around us. We stopped, cars going the opposite direction were soaking wet, wipers still running.

Luckily, just across the road, was a recreational vehicle spare parts shop, with rv’s lined up in the front yard. We went inside and then came the rain, with lightning and hale. Obviously, we weren’t going to buy any spare parts for any rv, dressed as cyclist, still wearing our helmets, so the store keeper understood our situation, herself also being a cyclist, with actually some touring history. We exchanged some stories during the pouring rain, and as the rain didn’t seem to stop, she actually offered us one of their rv’s to stay the night in. (Second night in a row in a camper van, the first night is another another story.)

There we were, with a hard roof on top of us, preparing dinner, a very Canadian dish: Kraft dinner. Basically macaroni with cheese, very cheap, not very delicious. Later on, we rigged our laptop and speakers into movie mode, crawled inside our sleeping bags and watched Matrix. It felt surreal, just like we had taken the red pill back in time, when we left home. But as opposite to the reality in the movie, our real world is still more beautiful than the matrix. Lets keep it that way.

Canada is a bear country, that’s what everyone – and everything is telling us. Store your food high above ground, buy bear spray, wear bear bells and just be afraid of bears at all times. Of course coming from Finland (about 1000 bears) we thought that we know what it is to live in symbiosis with bears.

The two main types of bears in Canada are the black bear and the grizzly bear. Black bears are more numerous, but they are the less dangerous ones too, almost not at all dangerous. To give you an example, while camping on one yard in southern British Columbia our host said that don’t put your  tent right next to the cherry tree, because the local black bear usually comes to climb the tree and eat the cherries during the night. The bear awareness became instantly a bit more real compared to the facts we have learned at school. We had hard time falling a sleep that night.

The grizzlies are the big and mighty ones with claws 10cm long. That is the familiar type of bear we have also in Finland (or brown bear, which grizzly is also). The only thing is that they are bigger and not as “tame” as their European cousins. A finnish “grizzly” can grow to about 300-400kg, their canadian partner to 600kg. And the theory is, according to a canadian veterinarian, that european bears have been living with a lot of people for such a long time that the most dangerous individuals have been killed causing some kind of (un)natural selection wiping the most hazardous ones out of the game.

Well we didn’t buy bear spray. We thought that at that moment when you are encountered with an aggressive grizzly trying to kill you, getting the spray out, arming it, and spraying it somewhere else than on your own face was such a situation we didn’t believe is going to happen – so far so good.

Food was something we started to store somewhere else than under our pillows. Luckily most of the campgrounds have a specific food storage to hide your food from wild life. But not every campground. That’s why we also almost lost our ortlieb dry bag filled with our food and cooking gear. One night we woke up just to realize that our carefully secured food bag (behind a pile of firewood) was confiscated by an enthusiastic ranger thinking that our dirty bag was garbage. With empty stomachs and angry minds we made few calls and luckily we got our food bag back after a few days.

It is hard to travel anywhere without locals warning you about all the dangers lurking behind the corner. With a bicycle the constant “danger” is traffic and narrow shoulders. In New Zealand, the land of non existing shoulders we didn’t have any problems with traffic, and even in Alberta people were warning about the same things. You have to put everything in perspective, in Alberta the average shoulder is as wide as a finnish freeway, so when its “only” 1 meter wide, it’s a possible threat to your life.

It’s sometimes hard to get the facts straight and filter the real threats and dangers  when you get all kinds of good advice from all kinds of people. I guess the best way is to learn it by yourself, hopefully not the hard way.

We see signs posting we are in bear/cougar/wolf country everywhere. People tell us stories about wildlife taking over during the night. A campground got temporarily closed, because a cougar ate a few dogs there. Stay inside during the dark hours!  No we didn’t, we went out on a night ride.

It was a cold but calm evening in Whistler, the sun giving its final breaths before disappearing behind the snow tipped mountains and our tandem yet to be ridden that day, as we put our spandex on and hit the road. Silence had filled the darkness, and the surrounding forest seemed to close in on us, bit by bit, making the road seam even narrower than it was. The only light source showing us our way, was our headlamps, two of them, mounted on our front bag. Oh yes, and the stars, a field of lights blinking above us, kept our eyes off the road and our minds flying like shooting stars…

It was magical. Most of the ride was downhill, miles of it at a time, with speeds up to 65 km/h. It felt fast in the dark. In the uphills our speed slowed down, and with no wind in our ears, we could hear all the different noises around us; branches suddenly braking, bushes rattling, threes squeaking, us breathing. Looking into the forest, the thing we were expecting to see, was two eyes glaring back at us. they never appeared.

Some happenings and highlights from Canada so far:

-We’ve cycled 1650km in 22 days.

-We had a broken tyre and somehow got it fixed (involved helping old ladies and hitchhiking back and forth).

-We have never experienced so hospital strangers (food, drinks, jacuzzis…)

-Drove around in a 430hp Mustang convertible

- Overnighted in a  rental campervan without having to pay for it.

- Met a finnish former NHL hockey player Mikko Mäkelä, stayed at his place for some time, relaxing. The guy and his family is amazing.

- And a lot more good stuff we’ve come by.

The Kootney pass in southern British Columbia, is Canadas highest year round open mountain pass. The climb up took us almost three hours, but what goes up, comes down, usually fast. So did we!

What if you are travelling on a bike, discovering new places every day, sweating every day, being tired every day, and don’t want to spend money on accommodation? Yeah, you can sleep under bridges and take a dip in a lake to clean off, but that’s not something we get our kicks from. We like comfort, so we use an online hospitality club for touring cyclists called warmshowers and stay with the locals in their homes and use their showers. Ok, not every night we can find a soft bed to sleep on, sometimes only a hard bunk, but for the last month here in Canada, we’ve spent less than a hundred bucks on accommodation and not once have we had to go under the bridge.

How it works is that you have to be a cool, wear tights, have a mustache and ride the tandem… No, but seriously, it’s like any online community, you create your account, tell your story and start poking people on the provided google map with dots all around the world. It’s bloody convenient, and because most of the members are also cyclists, they know what we’re going through and usually the first thing, when arriving to a “warm shower”, we are welcomed by the question: “Do you guys want the cold beer now or after the shower?” You really start think, there are still some nice people around, even if you just hear about the bad ones on the news. I guess most of the hostin members got their hospitality, on their journeys back in the days, and are now paying it forward to fellow pedalers. I/we will do it too. So fellow cyclists, you are welcome to my home at any time and I will provide you with a cold beer, a snack if you like, a warm shower and a little brakfast in the morning, before you hit the road again.

So if you’re not a member of warm showers, sign up now.

A warm shower in Kamploops, BC, also included a three course meal :)

Our biking around Vancouver

Our two weeks in Vancouver has involved a lot of cycling and bike related activity. The relaxed kind of cycling, not in a hurry, don’t have to go anywhere type – sightseeing. We’ve been stopping for coffee and delicacies (even if we already had two lunches), talking to strangers, just to talk to strangers. Every now and then finding a cool spot to do some frame watching and maybe even having a beer or two. Now, we feel like it’s time to move on, get out of the city and off the beaten track – to the wilderness.

As we mentioned earlier, our tandem has been undergoing some repairs. The casette broke in Fiji and we had a bent free wheel body. Finally, today, we got the happy call from Pacific bikes that the parts had arrived and were waiting for assembly. So we walked our bike to the shop, about 5km, one steering the front wheel, the other carrying the back. Yeah, we got some blisters from the carrying, but we had fun doing it, blasting out some rolling stones from our Nokias and getting thumbs ups from strangers. Now our bike is ready and working, waiting in the garage for a kick off start tomorrow morning. Its gonna be Sea to Sky Highway, literally.

The first thing people usually think about us is that – we are gay. And I dont blame them, two young guys on a tandem bicycle with pretty gay pictures on their website. It’s especially complicated with english language – how do we describe ourselves? Are we a tandem couple? Tandem partners? No matter how you put it, it sounds pretty gay. An older guy in New Zealand was also puzzled by our status, we are not old and we are not a couple – “why are we on a tandem?” he asked. He was one of the few who didn’t think us as a couple the first time he saw us.

We have also been, especially in our previous lives, considered as some kind of symbiosis. Ebony and ivory we have been called several times. But brothers – not once before Vancouver. One would think we are nothing like brothers, Jontte looking like a viking king or Jesus, and Nikke looking like a hungarian highway bandit. But a girl working on a hamburger kiosk next to a cool pub in Vancouver had a different approach to it. According to her we look like brothers – same same but different. As she put it, like salt and pepper!