The choice of Ottawa as capital city of Canada has always been something of a mystery to me. For a start, it certainly isn't the biggest city in the country by a long way - in terms of metropolitan population, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver all have districts larger than anything Ottawa has to offer. The 2006 census puts the population of the city at around 800,000 - only around a third of the population of nearby Toronto at 2.5 million, which probably explains why I had decided to base myself in Toronto for the last few days and to make just a brief stop in Ottawa on the way towards French Canada. For some reason, tours of the Parliament buildings were not running when I turned up. Instead, the tour bus which was taking me to Quebec parked by the side of the road in a place in which it was clearly illegal to do so, while the passengers held up the traffic quite spectacularly as we piled off to stand in front of the parliament building and look at it, not quite sure what we were supposed to do next. The thing is, Ottawa looks as thought it may well be quite a nice place to spend a few relaxed hours. As is often the case with capital cities outside the UK, it appears to be filled with parkland, winding riverside walks and grassy leaf lined boulevards leading up to impressive buildings in which people get paid altogether too much money to do altogether not enough work. Not surprising, then, that the city employs around fifty thousand people during it's annual spring cleaning festival during April every year just to go around ensuring that everything is ship shape in a city voted online as the second greenest city in Canada (the first being Calgary, which apparently also gets heralded by many as the greenest city in the world - mainly, I suspect, by people from Calgary). I'm assuming that they must actually make some sort of effort to keep the city clean for the rest of the year too, although they don't mention this - if not, I would strongly suggest making your trip to Ottawa during April!

Outside the Parliament building is quite the oddest fountain I've ever seen in my life. Dubbed the Centennial Flame because it was placed there to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Canadian Federation back in 1967, it's one of those landmarks which you can't quite believe, even after rubbing your eyes a couple of times and walking around it twice. It's not that the Centennial Flame, or the Fontaine du Parlement as people who seem to forget that we're not in French Canada yet insist on calling it, is particularly large or spectacular. You wouldn't know it from photographs regularly posted around the internet by bemused tourists, which all seem to have been taken from an inch away with a wide angle lens and make the fountain appear to be approximately the same size as the Parliament building behind it, but the Centennial Fountain is actually quite small and unimpressive unless you take the time to go and have a look at it - at least, compared to some of the large fountains I've seen elsewhere. It's only when you actually go up and have a good look that you start scratching your head and pointing, much to the amusement of locals who probably gather regularly in the area purely to study the looks on tourist's faces.

Each Canadian province which existed in 1967 is represented by its coat of arms placed on one face of the dodecagon and raised up from the surface so that the water flows underneath. The water pours from a central bowl which is filled to the brim, bubbles over the edge and pours down the sides of the twelve sided fountain - but, attractive as all this is, it isn't what makes the coaches stop and draws tourists over to scratch their heads in puzzlement. You see, the central bowl from which all the water is bubbling up and pouring out, is on fire - and quite spectacularly so. This combination of fire and water is intended to symbolise the unity of French and English Canada, but all it actually does it get people scrambling for their science textbooks to see if they can work out how these giant flames could be leaping quite boldly from a bowl of bubbling water. Watching people trying to work it out is a little like seeing someone trying to get their heads around those giant floating taps you saw everywhere a few years back, with water endlessly pouring out of them. I find it quite ironic to learn that the Centennial Flame isn't, in fact, eternal - it quite regularly goes out when it rains and has to be relit. The designers have created a magnificent work of art which displays a perfect balance between the elements of fire and water, and yet nobody thought to protect it from the rain.

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 today's date.