Vancouver

Vancouver is a city most easily described in geography. The mountains begin at the city limits on the north side of the harbour, the Pacific runs out from English Bay on the west, and Stanley Park's thousand acres of temperate rainforest start a five-minute walk from the downtown towers. The city was a railway terminus that turned into a film studio that turned into one of the most expensive housing markets in North America, and a real Asian metropolis sits inside an outwardly British-Columbian frame. The geography is the constant. The rest is being negotiated in real time.

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.

And then there is the Downtown Eastside, six blocks east of the cruise terminal and not on any tourist map, where Vancouver's opioid and housing crises sit in plain public view. British Columbia has lost more than 14,000 people to the toxic drug supply since the public health emergency was declared in 2016, and the visibility is part of the trip whether you go looking for it or not.

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 metro to a small city's worth of Cantonese, Sichuan and Hong Kong kitchens that match anything you'll eat in Hong Kong itself. Chef Tony, Sea Harbour, Golden Paramount; book ahead for weekend mornings. The Richmond Night Market, on No. 3 Road from late April to mid-October, runs 7 p.m. to midnight Friday through Sunday and draws more than a million visitors a season for hot pot, dumplings, mango sticky rice and grilled squid. Bring cash for the stalls. The food in Richmond is one of the strongest arguments for the city and one of the easiest things to get wrong by sticking to downtown.