Vancouver

Vancouver is for people who want a city with the wilderness left in: mountains at the northern city limits, the Pacific off English Bay, and a thousand acres of rainforest a five-minute walk from the downtown towers. It is also, quietly, one of North America's great Asian cities, with a Cantonese food culture to rival Hong Kong sitting inside a British-Columbian frame. Come for the outdoors; stay for the dim sum.

When to go

May to September is the season, and it really is. The rest of the year Vancouver lives up to its Raincouver nickname. Over half the year's rainfall lands between October and March, and even residents grumble through it. Summer is dry, mild, and long. July and August are the peak with highs in the low 20s and almost no rain; sunset doesn't kill the daylight until 9 p.m. in June. The shoulder months around the peak, May and September, are the same weather with shorter queues. Outside the summer the city becomes a different proposition: skiing twenty minutes from downtown at Cypress or Grouse, the rainforest at its most rainforest, and a serious indoor food and gallery scene that the summer crowds fly past.

What it's actually like

Vancouver runs on the contrast between its outdoor postcard and the city actually under it. Stanley Park's nine-kilometre seawall is the single best urban walk in Canada: a flat sea-level loop around a thousand acres of rainforest, with the North Shore Mountains across the harbour to the right and the high-rise downtown to the left. The downtown peninsula is the towers; Gastown, where the city was founded in 1886, has the cobbles and the cocktail bars; Yaletown is the converted-warehouse waterfront; Granville Island under the bridge is the public market and the craft beer. Across False Creek, Kitsilano is the West Coast laid-back beachy version.

One honest caveat: the Downtown Eastside, six blocks east of the cruise terminal, is where the city's opioid and housing crisis sits in plain view. It is not dangerous to walk through, but it is confronting, and it is closer to the tourist core than the marketing admits.

The neighbourhood you want

The West End. Residential, walking distance to Stanley Park, the seawall, English Bay and the city centre; hotels and apartments here price noticeably below Yaletown for the same accessibility. Gastown is the atmosphere alternative with the trade-off of weekend nightlife noise. Yaletown is the upscale waterfront if budget isn't the question. Avoid Downtown Eastside-adjacent listings even if the address looks central.

Don't miss

Dim sum in Richmond, twenty-five minutes south on the Canada Line. Vancouver's Cantonese kitchens (Chef Tony, Sea Harbour, Golden Paramount, half a dozen others) are the equal of anything you will eat in Hong Kong, the product of forty years of immigration that has made Richmond functionally a Cantonese city in its own right. Book ahead for weekend mornings. The Richmond Night Market on the same line, Friday through Sunday from late April to mid-October, runs 7 p.m. to midnight and pulls more than a million people a season through its rows of hot pot, dumplings, fried squid and mango sticky rice. Eat slowly. The food is the strongest argument for the city, and the easiest one to miss if you stay on the downtown peninsula.