BC: Whistler Stinks of White Privilege

Route 99, more affectionately known as The Sea To Sky Highway, runs from Lillooet through valleys and over mountains to Vancouver. Make no mistake, it is remarkably pretty, especially the section of climb and descent between Lilloet and Pemberton.

Of course, during this section of the drive, rather than giving the scenery its due, Greta and I were both shitting bricks over a developing fuel problem. For the last thirty minutes of our journey - thankfully mostly downhill - we sat on E, needle with nowhere left to go. Crawling into a service station on the other side of the pass, we fuel up, relieved but still a little nerve wracked. Whistler, a further forty minutes away from Pemberton, is reached after dinner and we find accommodation in the old Olympic village, a pretty flash hostel that falls to pieces as far as its air conditioning is concerned. Oh well.

Whistler occupies a strange sort of place in my mind. A sort of ski Mecca, this is where a lot of friends have come to bust a knee before sitting in a hot tub for a winter drinking bloody marys. It wasn't so much a destination for me, but rather a place to go through (with some awesome roads on either side of).

Taking us in for the following two nights were Mel, Jonny, Janet and James. I'd worked with Mel at Inpex years ago and she became a pretty good point of contact for things to do and see, as well as simply putting a roof over our heads for the weekend. In traipsing through the village, the shops as well as just seeing the activities on offer and the people taking them on, one thing is tremendously clear...

... Whistler stinks of white privilege.

Here there are multiple lifestyles on offer but they can all be reduced to one commonality; affluence. Between the hippies, the barefoot yoga girls in notpants, the extreme sports junkies and the girls that deify them, they all seem to have the financial means to excuse themselves from life for regular people. It's utterly bizarre. There's a yoga camp, presumably in the mountains to better facilitate... something nature related. The extreme sport during summer is mountain biking. People ride down the mountain in search of adrenaline. In winter it'd be snowboarding, for much the same result. There are hippies too, pushing alternate lifestyles and green choices, they provide a preposterous and sidesplittingly funny juxtaposition to the consumer dens that their stalls are in front of. There is no cross section of society here. This is high society - in at least three ways - and it forms an exclusive, bizarre group of clubs that seem happy to co-exist, but if you're not one of them, there is no place for you in Whistler.

So much of this place sells itself as outdoors but it's almost impossible to take seriously. It's an outdoor theme park, certainly... but it's so divergent from appreciating nature for what it is, nevermind experiencing any outright wilderness. It's something altogether different... this is simulated nature there to be conquered.

Bet you've never seen this in Whistler before, Browning!