Toronto, Pantages Hotel and Alt Hotel Toronto Airport
After a bit of playing around with my 8 night itinerary in Canada, I eventually just settled on 4 nights each in Toronto and Vancouver. Originally I’d planned a slightly shorter stay in Toronto and to then fly to Victoria and explore Vancouver Island a tiny bit. But once I did a bit of research into distances, car hire costs and accommodation, Vancouver Island quickly became unviable in anything less than a week, preferably a fortnight.
August is high season in Canada and accommodation in both Toronto and Vancouver was eye-wateringly expensive (upwards of $400 a night for typically beige 4 star chain hotels and often double that for anything with a fifth star). While planning this trip I found that Agoda sometimes had rooms a good 20% cheaper than other sites or booking directly. Pantages Hotel in Toronto was one such place. It’s located right in the centre of downtown, adjacent to Yonge-Dundas Square which is Toronto’s self-proclaimed version of Times Square. In reality it’s a piss-stained square of grimy concrete and a bus shelter surrounded by billboards. It reminded me much more of railway square in Sydney than Times Square in New York.
Yonge-Dundas Square
Piss-stained and grimy kind of sums up my overall impression of Toronto actually. It’s a city without a visual identity. It felt like there had never been any real attempt at urban landscape planning or any sort of aesthetic master plan to give the public spaces of the city any kind of unified look and feel. Maybe that’s why it’s often used as a backdrop to US films, you really could be in just about any city in North America when you’re at street level. Adding to the overall grit of the place - despite its wealth and economic importance to the Canadian economy - it seemed that shops and restaurants also all aimed low when it came to interior design and visual appeal from the sidewalk. Most had grotty windows, often with old Covid era public health signs still stuck up with tape. Sometimes it was hard to tell operating businesses from those that had shut their doors. A bit of windex and a squeegee would go a long way!
View from my 14th floor window
City Hall was one bit of interesting and distinctive architecture, fronted by a very unimaginative square
I did lots of walking, exploring different neighbourhoods and areas of the city - as I generally do when travelling. Given the fact that Toronto doesn’t really have any major tourist attractions, walking the streets is about all there was to do! Granted I could have - and perhaps should have - gone up CN Tower to get a bird’s eye view of the city, but I just usually find places like that a tourist trap. I could have also taken a day trip to Niagara Falls, but given how disney-fied the whole place is, it feels like somewhere one doesn’t really want to go to alone, but instead to go with someone/s to fully embrace the over-hyped commercial absurdity of it all…as well as looking at the falls.
I enjoyed the festive vibe of the Kensington Market area of Toronto. It’s a tiny little hippy enclave between Chinatown and the student district of The Annex. Seeing as I live spitting distance from Nimbin, there was a certain resonance with the colourful streets of Kensington Market and lots of happily, mildly (and of course entirely legally) stoned people wandering about looking at the eclectic shops which still include greengrocers and fishmongers of the market origins of the neighbourhood.
Kensington Market typical streetscape
Cannabis stores are absolutely everywhere and in Toronto they often seemed to be right next door to fast food places - perhaps ideal proximity to grab some takeaway in anticipation of the impending munchies.
One of the more interesting experiences I had in Toronto was visiting a public swimming pool to do some laps. The city council operates quite a number of free outdoor pools in summer as well as a few indoor pools. But on closer inspection of their website, many of those outside “pools” are nothing more than 6 inch deep splash ponds for kids. And of the proper pools, only a couple of them have designated hours of the day for lap swimming, most of the time they are just for wading and lolling about. I took the subway out to High Park which is a beautiful big green space to the west of the city. There’s a pool in High Park which didn’t look at all inviting both in the pictures online and in real life, so my plan was to walk the length of the park from north to south and visit the much larger Sunnyside Gus Ryder pool which is situated right on the shores of Lake Ontario. Well, it was a cultural experience!! There were rules aplenty (no backpacks or shoes allowed poolside, they must be stored in a locker. You must shower thoroughly with soap and hot water before entering the water. And most absurdly, the lanes for lap swimming - within designated hours of the day only - were arranged across the pool which was only about 20m wide. I rolled with it, got into the pool under the watchful gaze of at least 10 patrolling life guards and swam back and forth for 20 minutes or so. It was just nice to be in water and to stretch the muscles a bit. But the whole experience was so very different to popping into your local council or university pool back home! All the other patrons were either kids or grandparents.
After my swim, I followed the lakeside walk/cycle trail all the way back to the city centre (about 5km) which was a lovely walk. I Then explored the West Queen West neighbourhood which had a pretty cool character of converted warehouses and textile factories, but still just somehow lacked an energy that similar creative districts often have in other cities.
Perhaps the highlight of Toronto was the excellent Art Gallery of Ontario. With a hefty $30 entry fee, it would want to be good! The permanent collection features lots of Canadian artists of various eras. I was most drawn in by an extensive retrospective exhibition of work by German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.
My accommodation choice, as mentioned, was a hotel called Pantages. My room was fairly freshly renovated and quite spacious. On first impression I quite liked the look of it. But it soon became apparent that it had quite a few annoying niggles. It was advertised as having a washing machine and dryer combo, but apparently the listing on Agoda when I booked it was for a room category they don’t offer now. The room had a kitchenette, but not so much as a glass, a mug or a teaspoon. Just a solitary paper cup next to the American style filter/pod coffee/mudwater maker. No teabags, no kettle. The dimmable bedside lights flickered and strobed unless on the brightest setting, the USB outlet on one side of the bed made a constant high pitched ringing sound unless a cord was plugged in - but it wouldn’t charge my phone. It took me 10 minutes of sleuthing to find the source of the elusive noise and a lucky bit of experimentation to work out it could be easily silenced. I was too tired upon arrival to ask to change rooms, but probably would have the following morning if that annoying sound continued. Not even the jet-engine like aircon could drown it out! Housekeeping was on a request-only basis, the bed was soft and lumpy…you get the picture! All stuff that is fine if you’re staying somewhere for one night and only paying $150 for it. This was over $300 a night for 3 nights (plus tax).
Initially I booked to stay in Toronto for 3 nights but when I changed my plans, adding a 4th night at Pantages would have been at almost double the already too-expensive rate I paid. I also had an 8:30 flight to Vancouver; with Air Canada recommending arriving 2 hours (!!!) prior to departure for domestic flights. So I looked into airport hotels for that fourth night. All the usual suspects were available, Courtyard, Garden Inn, Sheraton, etc. Apart from the (expensive) Sheraton attached to the terminal, they all required shuttle bus access which is usually a real pain, especially when trying to get to the airport for a morning flight. The one exception was Alt Hotel which is at the end of the free inter-terminal skytrain that serves the surrounding airport parking lots. This turned out to be a good choice of hotel. It appeared to be quite new. My room was cleverly designed within its 24sqm footprint and was very comfortable.
Best of all it had airport views, although just of distant tails on the apron, rather than the active runways. The hotel restaurant also did a very decent woodfired pizza for dinner. The only oddity was the bath spout near the floor of the shower that served no apparent purpose other than as an object to bash unsuspecting ankles against. Perhaps when someone ordered a few hundred rooms’ worth of non-refundable bathroom plumbing they were under the misapprehension that bathrooms would be a shower over bath ensemble….
So clearly Toronto didn’t really speak to me on this, my first ever visit and I can’t see myself rushing back. I didn’t really go with particular expectations or that much knowledge of the city. On the other hand I was very much looking forward to my first visit to Vancouver. Read on to see if I vibed with it more than Toronto.
The whole float down the river thing in the centre of the nation’s capital was also blessedly free of nanny state OHS regulations and warnings that would probably make it a finable offence in Australia to enter the river. 
