Surprises and home truths

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This was published 13 years ago

Surprises and home truths

On reflection ... the Toronto skyline on Lake Ontario.

On reflection ... the Toronto skyline on Lake Ontario.Credit: Sean Caffrey/Lonely Planet

Everything old is new again when Samantha Selinger-Morris returns to her home town of Toronto.

Returning home, as anyone who's ever done the morning-after walk will tell you, can be uncomfortable. Painful even, if home happens to be in another country and you've claimed for years that your adopted city is its poor relative in every way.

What if you discover after 13 years abroad that your home town isn't all that you remembered?

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Toronto, in my case, is often dismissed as an also-ran. The largest city in Canada, they say, used to have the tallest free-standing building in the world (the rocket-shaped CN Tower), before a building in Dubai took over three years ago. It's a town so lacking a unique physical and cultural stamp that it's the go-to location for filmmakers seeking a cheap stand-in for any other North American metropolis.

But this is my first chance to visit Toronto as a tourist and do all the things I've wanted to do but haven't because a) when they were at my disposal I couldn't be arsed, and b) the logistics were too complicated when I visited with young children.

The best-case scenario is that I'll reconnect with a town I feel intimately tied to but strangely divorced from. Worst-case scenario, I'll discover that everything they say about my country is true: that it's so bland, as comedian Mike Myers once put it, if it had a flavour it'd be celery.

Solo activity No.1: night kayaking on the city's harbour front, on the lip of Lake Ontario, just south of the downtown centre. It's the kind of thing that locals (at least, non-kayaking locals) never think to do on account of the dismal, long-held belief that the lake's water quality is so poor that taking a dip might mean risking chromosomal damage. (When I was growing up, beach closures due to unsafe levels of bacteria in the water were common.)

Immediately after my kayak slips off the dock and into the water at dusk, though, I can't believe this is the body of water that once gave me the heebie-jeebies. Our flotilla of eight kayaks, each with a small illuminated red pylon strapped on the front to enable visibility after dark, glides along black water so calm, it's as though we're moving on a slick sheet of glass. I smell clean air, rather than trash. (The city, it turns out, installed a new water treatment plant a few years ago.)

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Two hours of paddling in and around the marshes that surround a tiny cluster of islands just offshore, the skyline ahead a wall of twinkling lights, gives me that serene feeling I used to have at summer camp of being blissfully removed from chores, traffic and responsibility.

I want to know whether the owner of the Harbourfront Kayak and Canoe Centre, Dave Corrigan, agrees with the renowned historian, Pierre Berton, who famously said: ''A true Canadian is one who can make love in a canoe without tipping''? ''I can't say I agree with him, no, but you can have a lot of fun in a canoe,'' Corrigan says, shifting in his kayak uncomfortably.

Some things, clearly, haven't changed (that is, we're still proper).

But, the next day, walking around the Distillery District, formerly the site of the world's largest whisky factory, it's clear other things have. What was a dead-end industrial area when I was a child is now a beautifully faded enclave of cafes, shops and galleries with serious culinary finds. Soma Chocolatemaker sells cashews ''tumbled'' in chai-infused milk chocolate. A Parisian-style cafe in an 1895-era pump house, Balzac's Coffee Roasters serves cappuccinos blessedly spared of the troughs of milk favoured by other local cafes.

And have the walking trails always been here? They stretch from the Port Lands, a once-abandoned area by the waterfront to the popular Beaches area further east, taking me through tall grasslands and tiny unpopulated beaches.

Still, it isn't cheesy enough for me.

Spending more than a decade out of the country has made me desperate for the sort of Canadiana that makes locals want to barf, so I head to a restaurant on Queen Street in the city's west called The Beaver. I expect hockey pennants and maple-syrup jugs the size of my head. Instead, I discover hip nirvana: a dark alley of a restaurant surely ripped from Tom Waits's dreams. Sitting on the tiny brick patio out back, beneath paper lanterns, I peruse a menu bearing Canadian staples: maple butter tarts and baked macaroni and cheese. Is this odd mix of hipster Canadiana (an oxymoron when I last lived here) a sign of newfound pride?

Canadians are famous for self-deprecation - our most popular prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, once said our main exports were ''hockey players and cold fronts''. Taking his cue, my friends and I always fled to New York or Los Angeles for a dose of ''cool'' culture. Toronto seems full of it now.

Solo activity No. 2: I jump at the chance to go to a pow wow, an annual celebration of indigenous culture held on reservations across the country. Much of what most Canadians, including me, know about native culture is limited to the little we learnt in primary school, including the fact that there are more than 600 recognised ''first nations'' tribes. One, the Iroquois, is responsible for my home town's name, having called it Tkaronto (meaning ''place where trees stand in the water'').

The reservations on which many of the tribes live are plagued with problems similar to Australian outback communities: alcoholism, domestic abuse and high unemployment. Like the stolen generations, thousands were torn from their families and taken to missionary schools with forced Anglicisation policies.

Visiting the largest indigenous community in Canada, the Six Nations Reserve, located between the muddy Grand River and Carolinian forests only 100 kilometres south-west of Toronto, is a revelation. It's a privilege to witness hundreds of performers - from the confederacy of Six Nations tribes (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora) and tribes from all across North America - compete in traditional dances that were once banned to force assimilation.

The sight of technicoloured shawls and elaborate feather head-dresses is dizzying and the dancing women wearing "jingle dresses" - sewn with hundreds of tiny tin tubes to mimic the sound of thunder - create a cacophony that seems to say ''we will never be silenced again''.

Toronto, too, seems bursting with culture. Balzac's Coffee has teamed with the Booker Prize-winning Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, to create a ''bird-friendly'' organic coffee blend, with proceeds going to the Pelee Island Bird Observatory in southern Ontario.

Canada's largest natural history and culture museum, The Royal Ontario Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario have recently undergone impressive refits. The former, a neo-Romanesque building, gained a glass pyramid-like extension from Daniel Libeskind; the latter, a sublime wooden walkway mimicking the shape of a canoe, as part of a $C254 million ($264 million) overhaul by Toronto native Frank Gehry.

When I read, though, that the $100 million Universal Studios film, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, is the first blockbuster to be explicitly set in Toronto, I feel strangely about my town; the way one does when one notices a former lover has gained a six-pack and style. What, now you're hot?

Lucky, then, that I spot a take-away shop in midtown that reminds me it's not all glamour. ''Currito'', says the sign, is the destination for ''the city's best curry burrito''.

So there are others, then? That's a level of cheesiness even I can't handle.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Air Canada has a fare to Toronto from Sydney for about $2250, to Vancouver (14hr), then Toronto (4hr 25min); Melbourne passengers fly Qantas and connect in Sydney. Fare is low-season return including tax.

Things to do

The Beaver Cafe, one of Toronto's top rock'n'roll hang-outs, is at 1192 Queen Street West, phone +1 416 537 2768, see www.beavertoronto.com.

Harbourfront Kayak and Canoe Centre, at 283A Queen's Quay West, runs social group paddles on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights, $C30 ($31), 6.30pm, from June until October, and night kayaking cruises for $C78. See www.paddletoronto.com.

The Grand River ''Champion of Champions'' pow wow is held annually on the fourth weekend of July, at the Six Nations Reserve, Ohsweken, Ontario, 100 kilometres south-west of Toronto.

The Beaches Jazz Tune Up Training Run, in five-kilometre, 10-kilometre and 20-kilometre distances, is held annually in July, starting from Kew Gardens, in the Beaches, see www.canadarunningseries.com/jazz.

The Distillery District is at 55 Mill Street, thedistillerydistrict.com. Balzac's Coffee, building No. 60, phone +1 416 207 1709, www.balzacscoffee.com. Soma Chocolatemaker, building No. 48, phone +1 416 815 7662, see www.somachocolate.com.

The Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West, costs $C19.50 for adults, phone +1 416 979 6648, see www.ago.net.

The Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queens Park, costs $24 for adult, half-price tickets every Friday 4.30-9.30pm, phone +1 416 586 8000, see www.rom.on.ca.

Toronto is filled with ravines and walking trails. Read Great Country Walks Around Toronto (Within reach by public transit), by Elliott Katz (2006).

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