Luckily for my dwindling budget at this point, Dad and I have a family friend who happens to live in Vancouver and he has very kindly offered to give me somewhere to stay while I'm in town. On my last night in Seattle, therefore, I phoned ahead and made sure that everything was still okay, and rang the local bus and train information hotline to find out which bus would take me across the Canadian border. I'm not sure why, but for some reason I had imagined that this would take quite a bit of arranging - after all, I was crossing a border and as anyone will tell you, getting from the US to Canada is always much more of a pain than it is getting from Canada to the US. The Canadian customs have never been ones to shirk their responsibilities and are known for doing things by the book, dotting every I and crossing every T, looking at you suspiciously and only allowing you into their country if you can sing the national anthem backwards while standing on your head.

There is a sort of on-again off-again love affair going on between the US and Canada, and anyone wanting to cross into the Canadian part of the continent is often subjected to the most intense interrogation. The latest development, as of 2008, is that Canada has now started getting ridiculously fussy about certain types of mail getting into the country - to such an extent that they have started seizing packages at the border and demanding large processing fees before they'll release them on to their destination. There are now countries, of which England is one, where the clerk behind the counter will actually sigh deeply whenever you take a package to the Post Office to be sent to Canada, handing you endless special Canadian customs forms to fill in so that you can write a detailed essay about the contents, price, purpose, colour, smell and shape of anything you might be sending there. They will then warn you not to expect it to get to its destination anytime soon and advise you that you'd be quicker to stick it in a suitcase and deliver it yourself. I've known people who have sent a perfectly ordinary parcel to Canada for a birthday present and found themselves faced with a processing fee larger than the cost of the gift itself. Some online shops have even started refusing to deliver to Canada - things are getting out of hand.

Having said all that, I have to confess that my latest experience of getting into Canada was not as bad as I had expected. I was surprised to find, to start with, that there was actually a public bus which ran from a stop right outside my hotel in Seattle to the bus station in Vancouver. I don't know why I had supposed there wouldn't be an inter-country bus - perhaps I thought that the operators wouldn't want to run a service that might be held up for hours because one of the passengers had lost his passport - but it turned out to be a very convenient way of getting to Vancouver. It seems that this journey must be more popular than I had imagined, although I can see more reason why someone would want to leave Seattle to be among the Canadian mountains and forests rather than around the other way, which might be why they are so protective of the border. At customs, an official got on board and walked along looking at our passports, and then changed his mind about the procedure and demanded that we all get off and line up inside the building anyway. Our driver was required to unload all the luggage from the bus and put it through a scanner, and spent much of the time we were inside breaking his back putting it all back into the luggage compartment again. You obviously need to really love your job to be a cross-border bus driver in the US. The line went slowly, with the official at the front peering myopically at every detail of everybody's face as they reached him, scrutinising their passports and rubbing the paper as though expecting the ink to come off on his fingers. This was still, believe it or not, a less stressful experience than my crossing into Canada some years ago on the other side of the country - which was perhaps a little strange as I was riding on a public bus this time as opposed to being part of an organised tour group full of spotty teenagers with their parents and little old ladies who would've taken at least half an hour to beat up a fly. Perhaps somebody has told them that tour groups are hotbeds of terrorist activity and that a group of suicide grannies are going around with napalm in their handbags.

The man at the customs desk appeared to be randomly selecting people for further scrutiny, and was telling every second or third person to go into a special glass room off to one side, which seemed to me to be gloriously insecure in that it had an exit out onto the car park on the Canadian side of the border. This door was standing invitingly open as though to say "Go on then, punk. Just try it and see how far you get". Needless to say, I was chosen for further interrogation, so I went into the room and sat down for a while with various fellow passengers wondering what was going to happen to me and if the bus was going to leave me there. After the last person had made their way to the front of the queue and been subjected to the eagle eye of Mr Customs, all the officials just got up and went off to god knows where and those of us sitting in the glass room were left on our own wondering what was happening.

Perhaps they had forgotten that they wanted to talk to us. Anyway, a few minutes later the driver of our bus put his head around the door and said "Right, everybody back on the bus" - so we filed out, got back on board and headed into Canada. After all that hassle, I don't even have a stamp in my passport to prove that I've entered the country. We never did find out whether we'd been forgotten - I've always had visions of a big burly customs officer wearing rubber gloves and with a sparkle in his eye walking into that empty glass room a few minutes after we'd gone and saying "Right, who let them all walk out this time?"

I have to say, it's really quite incredible how quickly the scenery changes as you head north out of Seattle and start to get towards the Canadian border, as long as you don't just get straight on the freeway and travel all the way surrounded by traffic. Obviously, the bus service between Seattle and Vancouver went off the beaten track a little as it had to pick people up from towns along the way, and as soon as we left Seattle and got off the freeway, amazing things started to happen to the landscape - huge mountain ranges began to spring up out of nowhere, peering over the horizon as though they'd been hiding from Seattleites and were now only too pleased to make themselves known to anyone heading for Canada. In the distance, many of the mountains were actually topped with snow, and not long after we'd crossed the border the road along which we were driving began to become part of a forest and the trees quickly moved in to surround us. What only seemed like a short time later, it was as though the real world had fallen by the wayside and we had somehow travelled through the wardrobe into Narnia - our journey was now almost entirely along roads topped by archways formed out of overhanging trees from the woodland on either side of us, the occasional gap in the forest revealing nothing but snow capped mountains against blue skies. It didn't seem as though we were able to drive for more than a mile without crossing a bridge over a raging river. We were suddenly in the Canada you see depicted on television and in magazines - where log cabins replace the brick houses of the US, Mounties salute you from their horses as they stand guard over a babbling brook, and people firmly believe Due South to be a documentary series about a poor Mounted Policeman forced to work down in that place called the USA. I really wish I could say that I was exaggerating. Actually, scratch that - I don't wish that at all.

Just to complete my introduction to Canada, Vancouver managed to create the illusion of being ringed by mountains as we approached. In reality, the city has been built on the shores of the Fraser River and the Strait of Georgia, and is bounded on only one side by the Coast Mountains - but, although it isn't surrounded by mountains, it is impossible to go anywhere downtown without seeing either snow-topped peaks looming over the ends of every side street you look down, or wide expanses of water leading off to the horizon. At the end of one otherwise quite ordinary looking street in the city centre, I suddenly found myself coming out onto a wide paved terrace surrounded by railings which jutted out over the Strait of Georgia. In front of me across the water, stretching up into the sky, were an entire chain of mountains blocking the horizon for as far as I could see in either direction. I've never been anywhere quite like it.

In fact, scratch that again. I've never been anywhere even remotely close to Vancouver. Oh, I've seen places where the population consisted of five humans and a dog living in a field surrounded by lakes and forests, but I've never before seen a large city built in such an idyllic spot. The closest place I could possibly think of would be Queenstown in New Zealand, but even that would be like comparing fire with ice - Queenstown is far more of a small resort town than a city, even if they like to call it one. If you want to live out your life surrounded by snow topped mountains, a mere five minute drive away from forests and lakes and mountain trails, but you can't quite stomach the idea of being separated from the big city, then Vancouver is the place to be. And remember, here, that "big city" by North American standards is far more likely to mean somewhere with a collection of charming cobbled backstreets, quaint traditions and old buildings in tree-lined urban districts than it is back in the UK. It's strange, but you can look at Vancouver from Google Earth or some other satellite mapping application and just see a big spread out city like any other, but when you actually get down to ground level and walk around in the streets themselves, you feel more as though you're in a collection of small urban communities joined together than a big city. I, for one, would love to be able to open my curtains in the morning and see a mountain range topped with snow before setting off for work - especially if, as was the case when my bus arrived here a few days ago, there was a fine mist in the air and the mountains were topped by a huge brightly coloured rainbow.

Clearly, bus schedules suffer from the same problems the world over. Not only was I late getting into Vancouver, but I was late by almost an hour and a half - we'd had to stop quite a few times on the way to pick people up who just didn't seem to be able to wait with their luggage at the correct place when they were supposed to. On top of this, of course, the queue at the border had set us back quite a bit, although you would've thought they'd be used to these sort of delays by now and able to factor them into the journey times, wouldn't you?. I didn't have a mobile phone at the time (this was 1999, after all, so it would've been like carrying a large house brick around), so my only opportunity to phone ahead and let my hosts know that I was running late was from a phone box at one of the stops while a particularly obnoxious passenger was arguing with the driver about the bus company's policy of requiring passengers to load heavy luggage into the hold themselves. I was fully expecting to have to make another call when I arrived at the bus station, but Stuart was waiting for me - spending much of the journey back to the house in the car complaining about the time keeping ability of bus companies. I felt right at home.

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.