My friend's got three kidneys.

From Toronto, the bus ride to Niagara Falls is actually only two hours. There are lots of ways to get there, you can pay for any number of tours etc etc. We opted for the cheap way, left our hostel in the morning and headed to the Greyhound station with all of hour stuff. Sarah had no faith that we would arrive on time, but with a few shouts of "MUSH" from me we arrived with two minutes to spare. Having planned on storing our stuff in lockers at the Toronto Greyhound station, we didn't have enough time, so we legged it to the bus and had our un-friendly driver begrudgingly allow us on the bus. Poor guy really. My bag is nearly 30kg and he had to load in ito the hold. Sucker. That's what you get for being a miserable bastard if you ask me. I better look out. Although we slept for more or less the entire bus ride there, we woke up in time to see the "whirlpool" out the bus window and started getting excited.

Want to go to USA? Take this bridge

Now, to be perfectly honest, I was skeptical about going to this place. Being so close to the US border I was prepared for the ignorance army and loud voices declaring "WOW, HARV YOUUU EVERRR SEEN ANYTHANG LIAKE THAT MAVIS WHOOOOOWWEEEEEE!!!". It was going to end up that I was not surprised. The falls themseves are impressive, sure. What the photos don't show though are what was directly behind us, including, but not limited to: Casinos, Planet Hollywood (possibly the most rude building in the landscape), any number of giant hotels and general unpleasant tourist traps. Now, I don't want to be one of those "Holier than though art" backpackers who thinks they're the bees knees cause they've been somewhere that doesn't have a McDonalds, but the city-scape really did take away from the natural beauty of the falls. It was rather amusing to see all the lemmings in their ponchos go out on the boats into the mist, and the scale of the falls compared to the boats was INSANE, but we didn't make it out onto the water. Looked too dangerous for me. Sarah was encouraging me, which means that there was probably a high risk of death anyways.

The really secret Garden

We had our lunch in the park and got harrassed by local seagulls, but that was alright. Heading to the whirlpool for a closer look found us stopping and looking at some Artisant glass blowing thing. Sarah was impressed, but to be honest I was bored. They just kept rolling it backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Not much blowing involved really. The Niagara whirlpool was an anti-climax. To say the least. If you have the time, don't waste it by going there.

Montreal Next WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

written by

haveyouseenmypassport on June 25, 2007 from Niagara Falls, Canada

from the travel blog: pre-trip... Trip

tagged Niagara

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Tom, you take some sensational photos, either you are a genius or you have a good camera...

written by jeannie polson on June 25, 2007

These photos look like post cards. Are they really yours or did you take them from other websites?

written by Robert on July 14, 2009

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