Vancouver rising - includes Vancouver travel planner - Vancouver, British Columbia

Sunset, July, 1999 by Beverley Sinclair

Meet a city of breathtaking beauty, home to the planet's loveliest gardens and some of its finest food

In Vancouver, nature is never far away. The North Shore mountains, starkly visible from everywhere in the city, are a reminder of nature's presence, as is the ocean, whose scent often winds its way onto Vancouver streets. It is possible to wake up in a downtown hotel and 15 minutes later be leaning against a gigantic Douglas fir in Pacific Spirit Park. far from the sound of traffic.

And yet, Vancouver is one of the most vibrantly urban places in North America - indeed, in the world. Among the chief cities of the Pacific Rim, Vancouver is a place that blends yin and yang, skyscrapers and green space, past and present.

Vancouver began life in the mid-1800s as a settlement for gold seekers and fur traders. Even then, there was some understanding of the need to temper urban life - such as it was in those days - with nature. One of the first acts of the first council in 1886 was to petition the federal government to designate as parkland the 1,100 acres that is now Stanley Park, which juts into the Pacific Ocean a few minutes from downtown. The mayor of the time, David Oppenheimer, called it a place for residents to "spend some time amid the beauties of nature away from the busy haunts of men." By the end of 1886, the town had 8,000 residents. Their haunts were 23 hotels, nine saloons, a church, and 51 stores.

Things have changed.

Today, Vancouver is one of the world's great port cities, with suburbs sweeping along the Fraser River far to the south and east. Greater Vancouver is home to about 1.9 million people in 20 municipalities, and that population is enormously diverse: Almost half of Vancouver's schoolchildren speak English as a second language.

How to experience this new Vancouver? You can see evidence of it, certainly, in favored tourist spots - Robson Street and downtown. Still, to truly know Vancouver, you need to experience the places that locals love but visitors too often miss.

A stroll along the 15-block seawall walk in West Vancouver, one of Canada's wealthiest communities with some of the country's most architecturally striking houses, gives an indication of how the face of Greater Vancouver is changing. Like many other Vancouver areas, neighborhoods here were named long ago for places in Britain: Dundarave for a Scottish castle, Ambleside for an English village. Today, though, the accents walkers may overhear come from a wide range of countries.

About a third of Greater Vancouver residents were not born in Canada, so it's easy to sample some of the different ethnic worlds that help give this city its vibrancy East of downtown, the Commercial Drive area is the heart of the neighborhood that used to be known as Little Italy. It is no longer solidly Italian but remains the place to go for the best cappuccino in town and for high-quality Italian foodstuffs, from buffalo-milk mozzarella to 50-year-old balsamic vinegar. If your taste runs more to cumin and coriander, head toward Main Street at 49th Avenue and the area known as the Punjabi Market, where women in jewel-colored saris congregate like butterflies.

.In Richmond, a 20-minute drive from downtown Vancouver, Number Three Road houses the most impressive stretch of Chinese shopping in North America. In fact, to go to this area is to experience a reasonable facsimile of modern Hong Kong. The vast majority of recent immigrants to British Columbia came from Hong Kong and China; today, a third of Richmond's 154,700 residents are ethnic Chinese. The cultural influence of this immigration has affected many aspects of life in Vancouver. For example, it is not uncommon for homeowners to consider the principles of feng shui, the ancient Chinese system of design, when planning or decorating a home. And many food critics say Greater Vancouver has the best dim sum in North America, although aficionados undoubtedly have long debates about whether President Seafood Restaurant in Richmond or Floata Seafood Restaurant in downtown Vancouver's Chinatown is the place to find it.

The city's original Chinatown - the third largest[middle dot] Chinatown in North America, after San Francisco's and New York's - remains steeped in the history of the first wave of Chinese[middle dot] immigrants more than a century ago! Some of the buildings retain a foreshortened second story, originally :built to skirt laws that taxed buildings by the number of floors. The sidewalks are filled with shoppers, and the streets are noisy with traffic and the calls of vendors luring browsers into their stores.

But even in the bustle that is Vancouver's Chinatown, it is possible to "spend some time amid the beauties of nature." The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is a place of peace in the middle of the busyness. The Taoist philosophy based on the interplay of yin and yang, female and male, rock and water is made physical here, in this space designed to be a microcosm of nature.

To get a feel for Vancouver's ability to take the old and make it new, head to the Yaletown district downtown. An industrial area at the turn of the century and a warehouse district 10 years ago, Yaletown now seems to reduce everyone's vocabulary of adjectives to trendy and funky. Its brick buildings, most built around 1910, have been transformed into lofts, shops, restaurants, and high-tech businesses. Its center is either the Yaletown Brewing Co. - be sure to try Frank's Nut Brown Ale - or the Roundhouse Community Centre, depending on whether a glass of good microbrew or a refurbished 1888 Canadian Pacific Railway building makes your heart beat harder.