Calgary a hot spot for bookworms and beer drinkers
The Islands of Tahiti were on the 52 Places list largely because of their new accessibility — more flights, cheaper accommodation options — so I wanted to put that to the test, too, flying in from New Zealand and out to Los Angeles.
Rangiroa, it turned out, was a hard place to leave, not for lack of flights. I started each morning on the deck of the family’s house I was staying at, an openair bungalow facing a lagoon. After coffee, I’d swim in the glass-still lagoon. Then I’d dive in the Tiputa Pass, where visibility sometimes exceeded 21 meters. Turtles, sharks, dolphins and a kaleidoscope of fish followed the currents as they shifted throughout the day, in and out of the lagoon.
One morning, I joined a day trip to the Blue Lagoon, not to be confused with Iceland’s immensely popular geothermal spring of the same name. Rangiroa’s Blue Lagoon is more than an hour’s boat ride away from the main island, across the lagoon to an isolated cluster of sandbars and tiny specks of land called motus. At stops along the way, we put on snorkeling masks, jumped in and drifted with the current over dense coral reefs. Once we got to our destination, we walked between the motus, small blacktip reef sharks swirling around our ankles in hundredstrong schools. Under towering palms, we ate raw fish tossed in coconut milk and shared tallboys of Hinano beer.
Visiting the motus around the Blue Lagoon, I found myself disoriented. Circles of blue, different shades but all of them vibrant and glowing in the sun, extended in every direction. Palm trees served as the only landmarks until they all began to look the same. But the locals I was with seemed to know every grain of sand and every rock perfectly shaped for splitting open a young coconut.
“It’s too loud here,” our guide Gigi, a barrel-chested man with long curly hair, said. “When we like to get away from Rangiroa, we go way further out by boat — for two weeks at a time.”
If Rangiroa was all about the water — the island is just12 kilometres long and 91 meters wide — Moorea, my next stop, was about the land. Even staying in the overwater bungalows of a four-star resort (with five-star prices), I found myself drawn to the tree-covered mountains that rose rapidly from the sea. As a shroud of clouds descended over the horizon, I walked out of the resort, crossed the street and rented a motorbike.
A single main road wraps around Moorea like a bracelet. Over the course of an afternoon I drove the entire way around, taking detours up to viewpoints over the misty valley below and at roadside “snacks,” makeshift restaurants where I had some of the best meals on the islands. Throughout, I caught glimpses of daily life away from where the tourists roast under the afternoon sun: teenagers with fighting roosters tucked under their arms; families packing into grand churches that stood out of the lush jungle.
And then there was Tahiti. Though the word “Tahiti” is used as a catch-all term for the archipelago, Tahiti proper is hardly visited except as a stopover to other more conventionally picturesque islands. I spent a day driving the perimeter of that island, too, stopping to watch kids surf along blacksand beaches with the confidence of adult pros. But I felt most drawn to the capital, Papeete. Bustling and not conventionally beautiful, full of people and stories and locals-only secrets to discover with just a little more time, it’s the kind of place I’ve learned to love most of all this year.
More than oil and ice Calgary as the last stop of my yearlong trip had, by the final stretch of my journey, taken on the qualities of an inside joke. Friends in the know messaged me on Instagram, reminding me that the hot sun and turquoise water wouldn’t last: “Get ready for your fall from grace: winter in Calgary,” they said. Like a goose with an inverted compass, I travelled north — far north — as the winter solstice approached.
I was greeted by a chinook, a warm, dry wind that hits the city off the nearby Rockies, bringing scattered moments of solace to long, brutal winters. For close to a week, temperatures hovered around a relatively balmy 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Calgary is an oil and gas town; the “I love pipelines” bumper stickers on hulking pickup trucks are a constant reminder of that. The slump in oil prices has hit Calgary hard, though it can be difficult to tell. Downtown still sparkles, but many of the innovative skyscrapers are struggling with high vacancy rates.
Meanwhile, laid-off oil workers have turned hobbies into new professions: There are more than 50 microbreweries in the city, the majority of which opened in the last five years. There’s something for everyone, from the casual party atmosphere of Cold Garden, where beer drinkers and their dogs mingle in a space that looks like a hoarder’s dream, to the ’80s-throwback vibe of Eighty-Eight, a tribute to the Calgary Winter Olympics, to the more staid Establishment Brewing, which specializes in refined, less crowd-pleasing sours.
The downturn has hit the city’s food scene hard, too, but there are still surprises to be had, like at the tiny Bar Von Der Fels, where innovative plates like mouth-watering chunks of crab over a bed of Hasselback potatoes are churned out of a kitchen so small it wouldn’t be out of place in a Manhattan apartment.
And then there’s the reason Calgary was on the 52 Places list at all. Can a library change the face of a neighbourhood? An entire city? That seems to be the challenge taken up by the Calgary Central Library, a stunning building at the gateway to the city’s developing East Village neighbourhood. A collaboration between the global architectural powerhouse Snohetta and the Canadian firm Dialog, the building is a stunning oval of snowflake-shaped windows and arching wood, welcoming pedestrians from multiple directions. It blends into the existing urban environment seamlessly; the light rail transit line that runs through it remained open throughout the four-year construction.
But it is most remarkable inside. Curving wood inspired by the shape of the clouds during Chinooks serves as its skeleton and a sloping walkway separates the floors, which get progressively quieter as you ascend. Murals pay tribute to the local Indigenous population and programming includes lessons in Indigenous languages and history that, I was told, fill up so fast even library employees can’t register in time.
The first of many times I encountered the gleaming jewel box of the library was on a long walk. I started in the Kensington neighbourhood, a charming cluster of cottagelike homes, cosy pubs and independent shops that abuts the Bow River. I made my way through Prince’s Island Park, a quiet oasis smack in the middle of the city, and into downtown Calgary, where I looked up at twisting skyscrapers that spoke to more lucrative years. I walked past the library and the undulating Studio Bell building and into the East Village, a neighbourhood in the early days of a major growth spurt. I ended in Inglewood, where I sampled three side-by-side breweries and shopped for records.