I awoke at 6.00AM and uncurled myself from the seat where I had spent the night, a seat which had cleverly managed to become only a fraction as comfortable as it had been before I had tried to use it as a bed. I already suspected that the observation car would quickly become one of the busiest places on the train, especially as it had been packed even before I got on board yesterday, so I decided to forego breakfast and haul my sorry ass - as they say over here - straight up there while everyone else was asleep. Leaving my bags in a rough pile between the seats and hoping that I could trust my fellow passengers not to walk off with them, I climbed over all the people sleeping on the floor of the carriage and made my way down the train.

Between the carriages and the restaurant car is a small lounge area with coffee making facilities, and from here a narrow flight of steps leads up to the observation bubble. Several people were snoring contentedly on the seats, a few more splayed out on the stairs as though they had fallen asleep while keeping guard against anyone trying to get a peek at the scenery before them. Making myself a cup of coffee, which is a beverage I hadn't even considered until I came to North America and discovered that there was nothing else to drink, I tiptoed up the stairs to be greeted by the most spectacular landscape I've ever seen. I actually considered going downstairs again and rubbing my eyes just to make sure I wasn't still asleep, because the scenery which I found myself surrounded by in the observation car this morning was at least several thousand times better than I could possibly have expected. To say that things had changed from the little trackside huts and fields which I was just able to make out through the darkness last night would be the most incredible understatement. Suddenly, I was glad that the train started its journey overnight - rather than seeing the landscape gradually changing as we headed out of the city and into the mountains, I got to wake up and find myself in another world as though I'd stepped through the wardrobe into Narnia. This was a world of snow and ice, a world of mountains and rivers, a world straight out of the imagination. In the half-light of the new day, the train was speeding through the full splendour of the Canadian Rockies. As I lowered myself into one of the few remaining empty seats in the observation bubble - the others were all occupied by snoring passengers who had been unwilling to vacate their places the night before in case people like me came along to replace them - I didn't quite know how to take it all in. We sped across rickety bridges over fast flowing rivers making their way down from the mountains, we passed through tiny villages full of log cabins which looked as though they'd been somehow extracted from holiday brochures of the Austrian Alps, we stopped at stations serving communities not much bigger than my hand at which there seemed to be no discernable platform and people just boarded and disembarked from the station straight onto the street. It was everything I had wanted it to be, and more. I truly have no words - except, of course, for all the ones I just used.

As the sun started to make itself known over the landscape and more details began to emerge from the darkness, things just got better by the minute. By now, I had been joined by several of my fellow passengers who had finally decided to get up and see what the Canadian Rockies had to offer, and those who had spent the night flat out across the tables of the observation bubble began to join the land of the living.

In a way, I was envious of them for being able to wake up in the middle of this landscape without having to fight their way through crowded carriages of sleeping bodies to get to it - I made my mind up there and then that I wasn't going back to the carriage downstairs except in any emergency: tonight, I shall sleep in the observation car and wake up surrounded by all of this tomorrow morning. There was now an excited chatter in the bubble - people were starting to realise what they had woken up to. People who wouldn't have normally given each other the time of day were keen to talk to everyone in sight about how blown away they were by it all. Occasionally, the trees would give way to a breathtaking vista of gorges and endless lakes of blue, and between the towering, cloud-covered mountains above and the river below, there would sometimes stand a single moose, looking up at us suspiciously as though we might be the only signs of life it had ever seen. For almost the whole day, the Rockies were all around us, and I never once tired of them. People came and went from the observation bubble, but I stayed where I was and just enjoyed the scenery. The man on the intercom announced two sittings for breakfast, but I was too busy watching the sun coming up over the trees. Lunch came and went. The day passed quickly. There really aren't many places remaining on Earth where you genuinely feel that nothing has been touched by man, and I knew I wouldn't be able to afford to come back for quite a while, so I wasn't going anywhere.

If I ever got hungry, I just piled as much stuff as I could onto my seat and raced down to the coffee machine where the staff had kindly supplied biscuits, and if I arrived back a few minutes later and found somebody trying to move my stuff then I really felt as though I might throw a serious wobbly. For most of the day, I was just too busy taking photographs and talking to complete strangers about how stunning it all was to care about anything else.

The only major stop along the route today, or at least the only stop that VIA Rail considers important enough to mark with an extra large dot on the map, was a place with the delightfully intriguing name of Kamloops - or, to be precise, Kamloops North. Quite what a Kam is and why it should need to loop is beyond me, but it certainly wasn't the only bizarre name I saw on a sign as the train either drew into a small town along the way or whizzed through with no intention of stopping. Chilliwack was another one - Oh, how I'd love to live in a town called Chilliwack. What a wonderfully fascinating name for a town that is, no doubt with a particularly boring explanation to go with it which I don't want to know. You usually find, when you travel around and come across places with interesting names, that it's best not to enquire too hard as to the origins of the name in case the explanation destroys much of the mystery of the place. As an example, there's a town in London that I am familiar with by the name of Mogador, which sounds almost exactly like somewhere that would be right at home in the Lord of the Rings - "We must return the ring to Mogador!" - when you go there and find that it's a perfectly ordinary little village with no orcs or goblins in sight, and no sign of Liv Tyler walking around dressed as Arwen and just generally looking too sexy for words, it can only cause disappointment for all concerned.

During the journey, we've passed through or by numerous lakes and mountains which I would really have loved to be able to get off and explore, but of course this would've taken far more planning - especially as the train would only return to pick me up after three days. In particular, we've passed through the Coast Mountains and the Fraser Valley, shot by the Fraser and Coquihalla rivers and their various tributaries which seem to flow through every town and village we passed, and my schedule has denied me the opportunity to disembark and explore any of the numerous national parks along the way. Near the town of Clearwater, for example, the Wells Gray Provincial Park covers an area of nearly five thousand square kilometres and is covered, at least according to Wikipedia, with small volcanoes, lava flows and waterfalls. I know Wikipedia perhaps isn't always known for its accuracy, but it really does sound like a great place to get off and spend a while, doesn't it - as do many of the other places along the way. Perhaps one day, I'll be able to come back and do a more extensive journey - hopping on and off of the train along the way and seeing everything Canada has to offer close up. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I want to pack my bags and set off tomorrow...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.