Travelling Hopefully - Millions of Gallons of Water

The town of Niagara Falls, NY is best approached at night.  That way you can avoid seeing it.  There is a casino in town which doesn't dominate the skyline, rather it is the skyline.  Nothing else is so tall, so new or so possessed of electric light.  Despite the presence of a world class tourist attraction literally on its doorstep Niagara Falls is another decayed old industrial town like Cleveland.  However while Cleveland is coming back fighting Niagara Falls seems to have thrown in the towel several decades ago.

About a third of the buildings, commercial and residential, are abandoned and seem to have been simply left to rot.  The sidewalks are so uneven that walking along them made me seasick and the town appears to be populated largely by squirrels and stray cats.  Which is odd as you might expect one or the other but not both.  Such life and activity as does exist sits cheek by jowl with the decay.  I exhibited a little concern at being out on the streets at night but my host reassured me that I was reasonably safe.  Even so the subtext seemed to be that the inhabitants of Niagara Falls are simply not proactive enough to indulge in violent crime.  According to my host the city doesn't actually gain a lot of revenue from the falls.  Since it's a state park I presume the money goes to the state of New York instead.  If I were the mayor of Niagara Falls getting my town a slice of that revenue would be my first priority.  Judging by the signage however the first priority of most of the mayors of Niagara Falls is to get a street named after them.

My hosts live in a lovely mid nineteenth century house which they bought in a near derelict condition for pocket change and are slowly doing up.  My room was one of the done up bits as was the bathroom which was accessed by means of a latch on a wall unit which swung the whole thing away giving access to an otherwise hidden room.  For somebody who read an unhealthy number of Enid Blyton books when he was a child this was just too good to be true.  Even better the house was within walking distance of the only open restaurant that didn't serve its food in takeaway bags.  There was a Korean restaurant but it had a big sign on the wall saying "Beware of the dog!"  I wasn't sure whether this was a security warning or an indication that the dish of the day was off but either way I decided not to risk it.

So after that cheerful hatchet job on the town of Niagara Falls what about the falls themselves?  They are as advertised, one of the natural wonders of the world and well worth travelling to much worse places than this in order to see them.  They are magnificent.  I took the Maid of the Mists boat ride which takes you right up to the base of the falls past some very concussed looking seagulls.  This enables you to get a look at a semi circle of water essentially pouring right off a cliff in front of you.  It also enables you to get very wet.  For further near drowning experiences you can do the Cave of Mists walking tour.  It's very atmospheric as long as you don't mind an atmosphere so full of water that it's difficult to breathe.  Essentially you stand at the base of the American Falls while Mother Nature throws a river at you.  Rain ponchos are provided for both trips with the result that I spent a lot of the day struggling into and out of luridly coloured sheets of plastic.  The colours are to help them find your body if you fall in.  With a current running at 50km/h you're unlikely to be able to swim for it.

Wait a minute!  Did I say seagulls?  Indeed I did.  Anywhere there is water and people you will find seagulls.  If you spat in the desert you would be surrounded by seagulls demanding chips.  The seagulls at Niagara Falls seem a little stunned.  It's one thing to fly over or float on water.  It's quite another to be hit in the head by several million litres of the stuff travelling at 9.8 metres per second squared.  Most of the seagulls were bobbing dazedly about on the surface of the river wondering what the hell just hit them.  They were barely capable of lumbering out of the way of the Maid of the Mists as it approached (and believe me we weren't travelling that fast) as it approached.  For seagulls at least visiting Niagara Falls must be a bruising experience.