Leonie, an attractive young redhead with a captivating smile and habit of flicking her hair out of her eyes at every opportunity for no particular reason, seems to have occupied most of my attention since leaving Edmonton. Can't imagine why. She's been travelling the world for the last ten years and seems to be so well versed in what to do everywhere I'm going that I was thinking of asking her the best way to get to Mars. Also, she seems to have turned me into some form of salivating ape, giggling uncontrollably at everything she says and giving the evil eye to anyone else who enters a fifty yard radius around her - and believe me, that's not an easy thing to do on a train. Also with us on the trip is Reggie, a black guy who, despite being fifty-four years old, goes everywhere with his hair in dreadlocks and spends most of the day dancing along the corridors of the train with a walkman strapped to the side of his head. He promises us, quite sincerely, that when he gets to Toronto tomorrow he is going to immediately hit the town and "check out all the happening grooves with some hot chicks" - whatever that means. I don't think he's altogether noticed that it's not the seventies any more, to be honest, but this is not a complaint - in many ways, I often wish it was still the seventies myself. When he arrives in Toronto, I really hope they see him coming. Between Leonie, Reggie, myself, a woman by the name of Chantelle and her daughter Caroline, we seem to have formed a small inseparable group and have taken control of the most sought after section of the observation car. We pass our time exchanging travel stories, playing games, cooing at the scenery every few minutes and telling anyone looking for a seat where they can stick it. I can't imagine a more relaxed train journey - it's certainly a far cry from rush hour on the London Underground, where any attempt to engage another passenger in conversation would either result in the person looking at you as though you had just asked if you could put your hand on their thigh, being told to eff off, or getting knifed. Depends on the area of London, of course.

The Canadian stopped again at Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, and we were all chucked off once again while a team of cleaners swept through the carriages on the assumption that we were all a bunch of pigs who had been throwing empty food wrappers all over the floor since Edmonton. I really can't imagine you'd see this sort of dedication to duty on a British Rail train back in the UK, and not just because British Rail doesn't exist any more. Back home, you're usually lucky if you can find a seat on a train which isn't encrusted with hardened chewing gum - so I'm sure the concept of throwing everybody out at each station to put a cleaning crew on board would have them choking on their fat bonus cheques. Winnipeg Station was a hulking great place full of echoing corridors and platforms which didn't seem to know where to end, and the elaborate ceilings and art deco effects everywhere I turned led me to believe that they had definitely been trying to outdo the rest of the country when they built it. This was particularly strange, as the part of the city in which the station was situated didn't seem particularly busy when we arrived, and had more of a small town feel to it, so I came away from Winnipeg with the distinct impression that it was a small town with a railway station the size of Grand Central in New York. If we had had more time to look around, I'm sure I would've found the place to be more like the cities of Australia: relaxed, laid back, full of parks and open land rather than high rise buildings and pollution, but in our limited time we had to be quite selective about what we did - especially since making our way along the platform and getting out of the station took far longer than should be allowed.

Outside, a short walk took us to Forks Market, which seems to be Winnipeg's major destination for eating and shopping on a relaxed scale, where everything is laid out on stalls and visitors wander around picking things up, tutting and scratching their chins for a while and putting them down again without actually buying anything. Forks Market is the sort of place you would wish to find in any city, a place where you can get away from the hustle and bustle of the town centre and relax at a riverside cafe or explore the maze of indoor stalls selling local handicrafts and fresh food. Many cities I've been to boast about having redeveloped their waterfront area, but usually what this means is that they've thrown together a few high class wine bars and stuck some ridiculously overpriced apartments on top, thus pricing everyone out of the market and making the whole area inaccessible to anyone who can't afford to buy a yacht with a single weeks salary. London is full of high class waterfront developments, every one of them full of classy boutiques selling designer clothes beyond the reach of anyone's budget, and Europe also seems to have something of a penchant for this type of development, so it's nice to see a city which has developed its waterfront area to be accessible to all with cafes, fountains surrounded by outdoor seating, a cinema, parks and gardens, and an indoor market. It isn't really that difficult, is it?

Inside the market itself, where large sections seemed to be enclosed within atmospheric rooms with brick arches and walls like something out of a crypt, there seemed to be a bit of a theme going on. Many of the traders were peddling new age goods, and stalls were filled with thousands of brightly coloured minerals, light coming in from the high glass ceiling passing through the many hanging crystals on display to create colourful dancing lights which covered every wall. Leonie and I had made our way in, perhaps foolishly, through the food market and were already loaded up with bags of exotic chocolates and locally produced fruit jellies when we came across Chantelle looking through the handicraft stalls with delight while her daughter Caroline tugged at her arm impatiently. She looked so stressed out that we instantly offered to take the girl off her hands for a while and show her around the candy section, which meant that by the time we had been pulled around all the confectionary stalls all over again, there wasn't much time left to do any shopping of our own. Right in the middle of the market, there was an unbelievably large stall selling every conceivable flavour of fudge you could imagine, from chocolate to mango and lime. On instructions from Caroline as to what was yummy and what was eurrggh, we loaded up paper bags with unlikely flavours and met up with Chantelle to return her daughter while we still had a little money left. On the way back, we bumped into Reggie in the music section, his head swinging from side to side as he listened to the invisible music in his head while flicking through the albums on offer, totally in a world of his own. We asked him if he was enjoying himself, to which he replied that everything was groovy and called us dudes.

The stall of something called the "Prairie Rubber Stamp Company" fascinated Caroline. Here, our small group watched a woman smear glue onto small pieces of paper, sticking them down onto a canvas while sprinkling copious amounts of coloured glitter around for effect. In the best traditions of Rolf Harris and his paintings which only seem to take shape at the last minute, we stood for quite a while staring at the random mess of jagged pieces of paper gathering on the canvas, turning our heads from one side to the other in an attempt to work out what she was doing, before suddenly and quite unexpectedly a beautiful coloured unicorn in a field full of horses just leapt out of the page and we couldn't understand why we hadn't seen it before. It was really quite incredible, and I could instantly feel Chantelle's eyes lifting heavenwards as she imagined her daughter spending the next few weeks squirting glue and throwing small randomly shaped pieces of paper all over the living room! When the lady had finished her masterpiece and placed it for all to see in a frame to one side of the stall, she handed all her tools over to Caroline so she could have a go. We all stood back and looked on with admiration as the little girl took her time and created a work of art which looked almost, but not quite, like a large pile of coloured paper stuck to a canvas with glue. This was then duly framed, handed over, and Caroline spent the rest of the day going around showing everybody how artistically talented she was. This was then duly framed, handed over, and Caroline spent the rest of the day going around showing everybody how artistically talented she was. With the benefit of hindsight, I really should've asked the lady on the stall what any of this had to do with rubber stamps...

Forks Market was so completely engrossing that we almost missed the train, which would've been a rather major disaster since the next one wouldn't be along for three days - although, to be fair, from the limited experience we had been given of Winnipeg, I could think of far worse places to get stranded. We had totally forgotten how confusing Union Station was, or how much repair work seemed to be taking place within its walls at the moment, meaning that getting to any of the platforms meant taking detours along other platforms, and we only just managed to clamber back on board The Canadian before it began to move away. Back in the observation car, we were more than a little surprised to find that none of our stuff had been moved and that the place was empty - luckily, Canadians are so addicted to coffee that most of them were still downstairs queuing up for Cappuccinos from the drinks machine before even thinking about looking for somewhere to sit down.

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.