2114

Thats the number of kilometres driven by me in the last two days. Certainly not a world record, its still a fairly long way. Most of it was through pretty unpopulated areas too. I will admit, I love to drive, but that love comes with a qualification. I love to drive without traffic. Driving in traffic, especially in a city, is simply a maddening adventure.

Here, in the middle north reachs of Canada, there is little traffic, and little of any thing else. Well, there are a whole lot of trees, but not people. Animals abound, although in low population densities. Over the past couple of days I have seen a handful of moose, loads of white tailed deer, a brace of caribou, a couple bison, some coyotes and even a red fox. My hope of seeing a bear before the winter sets in seems a wishful one, and yet again they evaded me.

I was driving largely on the Alaskan Highway, which is a strange name for a road that is mostly not in Alaska. But it is one of the worlds great roads I guess, misleading name or otherwise. It starts in the Town of Dawson Creek (no relation to the TV series) and heads north to Fort St John's, Fort Nelson and on to the Yukon. I have followed it as far as Watson Lake, a town just across the Yukon BC border. This time though I headed to Toad River, a tiny dot on the map in Stone Mountain park, and in argueably the most attractive section of the highway in BC.

While driving, radio listening aside, there is very little to do but think. I got thinking about great roads of the world. Although I have travelled none end to end, I have been on a few. To list some I think are deserving of great roads I have been on

• The great north road, Cape to Cario
• The carreterra austral
• Route 40, Argentina
• The trans-island road, Taiwan
• The Srinagar road

Certainly there are many more, but those ones at least are more known. And it got me to thinking too, what is the classic road of your country, the drive that every citizen who gets the chance should make. Certainly, things like the Carreterra Austral in Chile or Route 40 across the border are of that ilke. I guess the most famous one in South Africa might be the garden route. And Canada must have others than merely the Alaskan highway. But its pretty impressive. You head through wilderness almost untouched for many hours. In most cases, if you left the road and headed north, you are as likely to reach the arctic ocean as you are to find another road. And that is more than 1000km away. Thats a whole lot of bush out there.

I know that many people lament the destruction of the forest and the opening up of the north, but compared to almost everywhere else I have been, there is still true wilderness here, and will be for more than a couple of generations, even with the rapid development. In fact I would say that this wilderness, although altered indirectly by our destruction of this planets climate, will outlive us, virtually untouched. Why, you may ask. Well, simple, aside from sporadic mineral deposits, there is nothing there to make money off. We will scratch a little here and there, but to mother earth, it will be mere scratches, not flesh wounds. The bush will reclaim the efforts in time, and having given up here buried assests, be left alone. It is too cold and too big to be touched for others reasons, and so will be left, like the Vastness of Siberia.

I feel honoured to be able to travel this wilderness at all, and enjoy my brief encounters with the wildlife and the Rockies.