hotels
For my birthday a couple of days ago we went across to Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island. And a nice enough place it is, too. We looked around the waterfront, had a hotdog, wandered around the BC museum, had a drink or two, went to a lake, and then back on the ferry. Much summer warmth and activity: street artists offering to draw caricatures, Native Americans selling (and carving) artefacts, stalls of one kind or another, people, whale watchers, balloons, face painting...

Victoria's harbour front is dominated by a huge, colonial era hotel, The Empress. Very imposing and impressive, and pretty fancy inside, too, where they were offering "high tea" in the Tea Lounge, drinks in the "Bengal Lounge" and so on.

It reminded us of Raffles, in Singapore. Both are like souped-up versions of the various "terminal hotels" that the railway companies used to build next to stations (the Adelphi, Liverpool; the Midland Grand by St Pancras), which were meant to impress and accommodate passengers whose mode of travel was rather more leisurely and luxurious than is ours today.

We wondered why Auckland didn't seem to have one of these hotels. What other stop-offs for colonial tourists and bureaucrats still have their luxurious watering places? I'd have thought there would be a website out there about this (there is about most things, after all), but the best I can find after a brief searches is a site called Famous Hotels.