I got up at 7.30, pulled on some clothes and hurried up to the top deck. A blast of cold wind hit me as I forced open the heavy wooden door and it snapped shut behind me. What greeted me was the very welcome sight of North America. To the right of the ship were jagged peaks, a mountain chain in the United States sprinkled in places with snow, to the left, similar green mountains of Vancouver Island, Canada. I felt some considerable relief to see us slipping through this strait, the Pacific at last behind me. I tried to take some photos, and there would have been some good photos too as we soon passed by even bigger, snowier mountains, but unfortunately I managed to break my camera in the process. As I smacked the lens, trying and failing to bring it back to life, I desperately hoped this unfortunate incident was simply a last cruel memory from this cursed cruise, rather than a harbinger of things to come in North America.

It was a beautiful sunny day as the ship manoeuvred into position alongside the dock in Victoria. This was not the end of the cruise, we would spend a day here and then sail the relatively short distance to Vancouver overnight, but it was still magnificent to see us arriving finally in Canada. In the sunshine the green trees and bare rock of the landscape surrounding Victoria, and the sight of two harbour seals bobbing in the water close to us promised much for my journey ahead in this country. I had already spent quite a long time in Canada before, five years ago, during my first long bicycle trip, and I was excited to be back.

I got off the ship as soon as I could, and elected to leave my bicycle behind and walk for twenty minutes or so into the down-town area. It was such a strange feeling to be back, and to walk along streets that I'd never been on before that were somehow so familiar, being as they were, so characteristically Canadian. This country was also the scene of some fairly dramatic moments in my life, and it was interesting to have some of those thoughts returning now, mingling with the melodrama of my current circumstances.

At some point as I reached the down-town, the harbour area with a hundred yachts and ferries in it and the 'desperately-trying-too-hard-to-look-European' legislature building overlooking it I reached a significant personal milestone. For the first time in my life I had completed a full circumnavigation of planet Earth. On my first long bicycle journey I had headed west from the UK, and I'd got as far as Victoria, before turning back east. Now I was back in Victoria having gone all the way around. It was a personal goal that I'd held since the day I was first old enough to look at my parents' atlas, at long last achieved, and interestingly exactly six years to the day after I started my first journey from London. Sadly I hadn't done it all by bicycle and boats; after leaving Victoria the first time I'd cycled down to Mexico, flown to Cuba, the Bahamas, and then, bizarrely, from the Bahamas to Toronto. But it was still a circumnavigation.

The circumnavigation probably would have felt more significant had Victoria felt more familiar, but as it was I could barely remember having ever been here before. I also had other things on my mind, and so I headed for the library to use the wifi. Now you might not expect that, having just got off from a cruise that was such an absolutely terrible, horrifying, unenjoyable experience, the first thing I would do would be to try and book another cruise. That is the logic of a masochistic madman, obviously. And yet, what choice did I have? I had made a promise to the girl that I loved that I would get back to Europe as quickly as possible (**by bicycle and boat) and the simple reality was that the quickest way was by cruise ship, or global ferries as I by now came to think of them. In actual fact that is all I was thinking of this one as – a ferry – a means to an end, a means to a Dea. So from now on, to keep things simple, I think I'll just refer to it as a ferry.

The “ferry” that I had already seen before, scheduled to depart from Montreal in September and arrive in Liverpool two weeks later remained the only one that I could find leaving from Canada that would work, although it appeared very close to being sold-out. In any case, this was far from ideal, because it was five months away, which was quite a long time. I'd kind of already told Dea that I was sure I could be back in about three months, that there was certain to be another boat, and that was a risky promise I really felt I should do my very best to keep. I frantically researched other options, and came across one. The Queen Mary II, a very grand name for a ferry, appeared to be sailing back-and-forth across the Atlantic from New York to Southampton, England, repeatedly, all summer. It practically was a ferry! Of course there was one rather major flaw in my hopes to be on board the Queen Mary II – New York being in the United States of America, a region of the world that was, at least officially, off-limits to me so long as I had an Iranian stamp in my passport. I also didn't have a month to spare to wait around for a new passport to be issued. But there was still some hope – I had already been let into Hawaii, and I had been issued a visa-waiver. Although it looked like this had been given a special stamp indicating that I was a cruise-ship passenger, I hoped it still might be enough to get me across the border. So I had my new plan. Once in Vancouver I would cycle immediately south. If the States let me in, I'd book the “ferry” from New York in July and cycle there. If they didn't, I'd hopefully still have time to book the Montreal “ferry” for September, and go for that one instead.

With this new plan I departed the library and decided to walk to Walmart to buy a new camera. This was a pretty stupid idea, because Canada is primarily designed for cars, and Walmart was a considerable distance away from where I was. Still, it was a nice day, and I decided to do it anyway. I was walking in my sandals, of course, and I reasoned I was probably the only person in the whole of Canada not to own a pair of shoes. I thought that a nice claim to fame, except nobody knew about it, so I went into Value Village, a second-hand chain store of impressive size, and purchased some used running shoes for seven dollars. They were very comfortable, which was damn lucky, because I walked for two hours in them to get to Walmart to buy a camera. For a while I didn't think I was going to buy a camera in Walmart because the electronics were on the second floor, and the only way up seemed to be by escalator. They really don't think much about non-lazy people when they design these stores do they? I was about to give up, but then I found the elevators, and I used them to finally reach the electronic section. My long journey appeared to be at an end as I looked at the array of digital cameras. But I didn't know what I wanted, and then it struck me that I didn't want to buy a camera from Walmart, because every time that I used it I'd be reminded of the fact that I'd bought it from Walmart, so I didn't buy a camera in Walmart.

The long walk back was at a much quicker pace as I realised that I was late for a meeting. I'd agreed to meet with Lorraine Nygaard, an active participant on the CGOAB website and a reader of this journal (hi Lorraine, thanks for reading this journal) who happened to be residing in the city that I now found myself in. With everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks I wasn't feeling very much up to socialising, but Lorraine had been so nice over the preceding years, offering words of encouragement sometimes when I needed them most, that I knew it made utmost sense to meet her in person.

We met down by the main harbour, about twenty minutes after we were supposed to. I apologised for my tardiness, and explained what had happened to Dea and we talked and so on. She kindly offered to buy me dinner, but I really didn't feel like going to a restaurant and so we did what I would have done by myself, which was basically wander a bit aimlessly around town. This worked out quite well and we had some nice conversations, about life and love and the universe. We ended up going south through Beacon Hill Park until we came to a viewpoint, from which we could see the row of white mountains across the water in Washington state. I'd cycled there too, five years ago, in another life. Now it was just a really beautiful sight, with a little fog on the water, and those jagged, snowy peaks glowing in the last of the day's sunlight. I think I must have decided then that North America was probably going to be alright. It had been a good idea to meet Lorraine. I felt much better.

I said goodbye to Lorraine just as day turned to night. I was close to the ship now, but decided that instead of getting back on board I would wander back into town. My legs were of course tired from having been walking all day, and yet it was still a much preferable alternative, compared to getting back on that boat. It was only a seven hour sail to Vancouver anyway, and so we weren't departing until midnight. I wandered the streets again, dark now, and reached the lights of down-town, where I found the legislature building now lit up like a Christmas tree. It was cold and I was not appropriately dressed, but I didn't want to go back to the ship, so I sat on a bench in a spot where I could pick up wifi and chatted with Dea online. Despite all the help she was getting now she still wasn't getting very much better. I needed to get back to her soon. But I probably wasn't going to be able to get into the USA to board the New York sailing, I knew that. I continued my research, desperately hoping for another way. And then I found it! On one of the sailings, the Queen Mary II “ferry”, on her way from New York to England, was scheduled to stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on July 26. It would arrive in England six days later, on the 1st of August. In exactly three months. This was my boat! It was perfect. I just had to find a way for them to let me board in Halifax rather than New York. Or stowaway, whatever.