Four days in Vancouver: mountains at the end of every street

Start on the water, because the arrangement of this city is not obvious from a map. Canada Place sticks out into the harbour under a set of white fabric sails, built as the Canadian pavilion for Expo 86 and now the cruise terminal, and from the end of it you get the inlet, the seaplanes landing, the container port and the mountains behind all in one turn of the head.

Then east into Gastown, the oldest few blocks of the city. The whole of it burned in 1886 and was rebuilt in brick and cast iron immediately, which is why a district founded on a saloon looks like a Victorian warehouse quarter. It is thoroughly tidied up now, the cobbles are a 1970s restoration, and the steam clock everybody photographs was built in 1977. Enjoy it anyway, and eat well while you are there.

Finish above it all. The Lookout on top of the Harbour Centre gives you a full circle over the peninsula and is best about an hour before sunset, when the mountains go pink and the towers light up.

Stanley Park is four hundred hectares of second-growth rainforest on the end of the downtown peninsula, and the seawall path runs the whole way round the outside of it. The full circuit is about ten kilometres, roughly two and a half hours on foot and under an hour on a bike, and it never once leaves the water.

Go anticlockwise from Coal Harbour. Brockton Point comes first, where the totem poles stand: nine of them, carved on Haida Gwaii and Vancouver Island, and the most visited attraction in the province. Then Prospect Point at the northern tip, under the great green bridge across the First Narrows, where the tide runs hard enough to see. Around the western side are the beaches.

Second Beach faces west into English Bay and is where the whole city ends up on a warm evening. There is a heated saltwater pool beside it if the sea is too cold, which it is.

Eat in the West End afterwards. Denman and Robson streets are lined with Japanese and Korean places serving until late and charging very little.

West to the university this morning, half an hour on the 99 bus from downtown, for the Museum of Anthropology. It is the best reason to come to Vancouver that is not made of scenery. Arthur Erickson built it in 1976 as a set of concrete posts and beams echoing a Coast Salish longhouse, with a glass wall at the end so the great carved house posts and totem poles stand in daylight against the sea and the mountains rather than under a spotlight. The Haida work, including Bill Reid's Raven and the First Men, is the centre of it.

The Nitobe garden is a few minutes' walk across the campus and is a proper Japanese stroll garden, laid out in 1960 by a Kyoto designer and regarded as among the most authentic outside Japan. Half an hour is enough, and it is best in April for the cherries or October for the maples.

Come back into town in the afternoon for Chinatown, which is one of the largest in North America and considerably quieter than it was. The Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is the thing to see: a Ming-dynasty scholar's garden built in 1985 and 1986 by fifty-odd craftsmen from Suzhou, using their own materials and no nails, and the first of its kind built outside China.

Stay for dinner. The Vietnamese and Cambodian cooking in these few blocks is the best cheap food in the city.

The last morning stays downtown. The Vancouver Art Gallery lives in the old provincial courthouse on Robson Street and its permanent strength is Emily Carr, who painted the forests and the abandoned village sites of this coast in the 1910s and 1930s in a way nobody had before and few have since. The temporary shows are hit and miss; the Carr rooms are the reason to go.

Coffee first, at one of the places downtown that takes it seriously, and then the Canada Line from Vancouver City Centre station gets you to the airport in twenty-five minutes.