Having settled nicely into my lovely plush king sized bed last night, I was awoken rudely a couple of hours later by a cacophony of bells from the corridor. Getting up and dressing as quickly as possible, I poked my head around the door and was greeted with the sight of most of the other hotel residents sticking their heads out of their respective doors:

"Is it a fire?"

"Dunno, can you smell burning?"

"Can't tell. I've got a cold. Can you smell burning?"

"I can't smell anything. Think it's a false alarm?"

…and so on. I would wager that more people die in fires over here simply because they can't make up their mind whether to put their socks on or not.

While everybody else went down in the elevator, I used the stairs on the basis that this is what it said I should do on signs positioned at regular intervals along the corridor. In the lobby, a group of people were arguing with the manager about whether there was a fire or not, and whether it was acceptable to ask them to go outside into the cold in their dressing gowns. Outside, somebody in authority was arguing with the crew of a fire engine about pretty much the same thing. It was chaos. In the end, and after every other idea had been exhausted, somebody suggested that it might be a good idea to go inside and see if there actually was a fire anywhere, and that the person to do this was probably one of the people on the fire engine. This seemed like a fair suggestion, and someone vanished inside with a hose only to return a short while later without so much as a singed eyebrow to tell us all that it was safe to go back in. And that was my first night in Toronto.

The main road here - Yonge Street - has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest street in the world at an unbelievable one thousand, one hundred and seventy miles in length. Yes, you did read that right, and I'll excuse you if you just want to have a bit of a sit down while you take it in. To put this in perspective, the distance From Lands End at one end of the United Kingdom to John O'Groats at the other is only 870 miles. 1,170 miles would get you from the southern end of California, almost to the Canadian Border. This really is a quite staggering distance, even on a continent known for its eagerness to make everything bigger and better than everyone else. Now I know what you're thinking, especially if you've read my book "Kerosene Lamp Gone b***** Up" in which I complain about the Australians claim that Mount Isa is the largest city on Earth even though I felt as though I could walk across it in five minutes - you're probably thinking that the Canadians have simply picked two distant points on either side of a vast desert for which only one direct route exists, and called this direct route a road just so that they could claim it as the longest in the world - but, just for a change, there is actually substance in Toronto's claim. First of all, and I do realise that this statement will take a lot of people by surprise, it's important to remember that Canada is the second largest country on the planet. There you go, I told you it would take you by surprise. Russia is the largest, Canada is second and the United States and China regularly fight over third place as is tradition. So it isn't really surprising that the longest road in the world should turn up in such a large country - Yonge Street starts in Toronto and winds its way at a quite leisurely pace through the mountains and around the lakes to a place with the particularly gloomy and uninviting name of Rainy River on the border of Minnesota. Of course, for most of the way it is just a paved highway - essentially a motorway - so it's not as though anybody is expected to walk it's length with a shopping bag or anything, which is probably just as well. Actually, Toronto has something of an obsession with claiming to have the largest things in the world, and recently they seem to have had a hard time hanging on to them. A few years ago, the city was also known as the home of the tallest man made structure in the world, the CN Tower, but that honour has now been taken from them by the Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Even the status of Yonge Street as the longest street in the world is currently disputed by many people with no sense of adventure due to it's connection to Highway 11 which makes up part of its length and the fact that many of the original parts of the road, which snaked through villages and around beautiful lakes up in the mountains, are now side roads and dirt trails which lead to nowhere. I would suggest that these people should probably stop complaining about things and just let Toronto keep one of its claims to fame intact.

I took a trip to the top of the CN Tower, which is certainly mightily impressive even if it isn't technically the tallest man made structure in the world any more. Many people, including those who wrote much of the literature I picked up at the tower itself, like to claim that the tower was once the tallest building in the world, which isn't technically true. Most people - by which I mean most of the people who generally have nothing better to do than sit around in offices thinking of ways to mess with people's heads - agree that the definition of a "building" is a man made structure whose main purpose is for human habitation, such as an office block or apartment complex. In fact, it seems to be so difficult for anyone to decide what constitutes the word "tall" or "building" in these days when huge structures are being constructed all the time that many people have simply given up. Depending on whether you include spires and masts as part of the calculation, whether you stop counting at the highest habitable floor, whether you take your measurements to the top of the structure without including masts or spires of any type, or whether you include spires but not masts, the tallest building in the world could currently be listed as any of the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan (tallest to the top of its spires), the Shanghai World Finance Centre (tallest to the top of the roof), or the Willis Tower (Formerly known as Sears Tower and the tallest to the top of its masts, in Chicago). I suppose the next thing somebody will do is remove all confusion by building something that wins in every category. The CN Tower has never been the tallest building in the world because it is primarily a communications tower. The Burj Dubai, at the time of writing (August 2009), although undisputed as the tallest man made structure, hasn't made it into any of the tallest buildings categories because it is not actually finished and only finished structures can be classified as buildings under the rules.

The CN Tower is basically nothing more than a ridiculously large radio and television aerial, albeit one with a restaurant and observation platform built in. Back in the late sixties, Toronto was expanding out of all proportion and at some point somebody pointed out that all the high rise, glass fronted buildings that were springing up all over the place were playing havoc with any sort of radio transmission. In addition, many businesses had dishes attached to their rooftops which enabled signals to be passed to nearby buildings by simply "beaming" the signal across the road. Naturally, as soon as a new high rise building appeared between the transmitter and receiver, this was no longer possible, and it wasn't long before it was simply impossible to get communications signals into the downtown area at all. Somebody suggested that all the aerials and transmitters would have to be lifted high above the buildings on high masts so that they could once again see each other. People thought about this for five minutes and decided it was a stupid idea and would make the city skyline look like something out of a science fiction film, so the next best solution was to build one ridiculously large communications tower which towered so high over the buildings that they would all be able to get a line of sight to it from their rooftops. The CN in CN Tower originally stood for Canadian National, after the Canadian National Railway Company whose brainchild it was - as seems to be fast becoming the case again these days, big companies back in the sixties didn't like the idea of being content with just one line of business, so they would diversify into areas which would often have absolutely nothing to do with their core business. By the time the CN Tower appeared, the Canadian National Railway Company was trading in the hotels business (so that passengers would have somewhere to stay between trips) and the communications business (so that they could entertain them on board), and they were quite keen to see their old railway yards in downtown Toronto redeveloped into a thriving communications hub with the CN Tower at its centre. It didn't quite work out exactly the way they envisioned it, but they did manage to get the CN Tower as the new focus point of the skyline.

Visitors to the CN Tower take the elevator from the lobby to the first observation deck at 1200 feet, and then have to queue up again to join a second elevator up to the Space Deck (now known as the Sky Pod) another 300 feet further up for those who just have to get as high as they possibly can. The observation deck contains a cafe as well as a revolving restaurant, and glass doors lead out onto the observation platform. This consists of a narrow ledge around the outside of the tower, surrounded by windows which begin as normal exterior glazing and taper down at a 45 degree angle to your feet so that you appear to be standing on the very edge of a chasm. Walking around this ledge was probably one of the scariest things I've ever done in my life - although there were, of course, kids up there with no concept of danger who were quite happy to show me up by running round and round the platform at breakneck speeds while their parents held onto the handrail for dear life. One young lady, who clearly hadn't thought the day through particularly well, had flattened herself up against the exterior wall and was staring straight ahead, taking shallow breaths and promising her boyfriend that he would never get to touch her again should he attempt to move her. For those visitors who really need that extra adrenaline rush, the CN Tower is also home to a twenty-four square metre area of glass flooring, three inches thick, on which you can actually stand and look straight down 1200 feet to the exact point where you would normally be meeting the pavement a few seconds later. Now, I know perfectly well that thousands of people - probably tens of thousands - have stood on this glass floor and jumped up and down like a bunch of lunatics, and not one of them has fallen through it to their death, but I still wanted to walk across the glass with my eyes firmly closed while asking someone nearby to tell me when I was on the other side. And yet, in a display of complete illogic, I would love to visit the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand, where you can walk out onto a platform at 700 feet, be tied to a thick elasticised rope and thrown off into nothingness by a smiling New Zealander. You then plummet towards the earth at speeds I don't like to think about, and just at the moment when you are convinced you are about to be splatted all over the pavement, physics kicks in and the elastic rope slows you perfectly to a stop so that your feet land softly on the ground as though you had just jumped off of a brick. This actually sounds like fun, although with my luck the guy who takes hold of you when you arrive at the bottom would probably let me slip between his fingers before I got out of the harness and I'd be twanged back up into the air at several hundred miles an hour to take my place in orbit around the Earth...

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.