The ThunderBlogs

A cruise ship leaving port from Canada Place is a moment of widespread awe for the denizens of downtown Vancouver. On a recent Saturday, people on the lower deck of the roadway lined the low concrete wall at its edge as though looking from at the mouth of a cave, and watched a towering white Coral Princess trundle along the dock and out into Vancouver Harbor like a horizontal skyscraper.

Cars stopped directly beneath “no parking” signs beneath the main street, and men in reflective work vests congregated under the shadows to watch.

At street level, as the Coral Princess slunk further north and began its westward turn to the Strait of Georgia, a second ship, the Zuiderdam, exhaling gray-brown diesel smoke and churning up a modest wake for a 85,000-ton vessel, began shuffling away. The constant rumble of traffic and the sound of sawing at a construction site echoed off the Vancouver Convention Centre, but the people lining the rail, a couple of stories above the water, made almost no noise.

For all the spectacle, the port is, in one regard, one of the least intrusive in the world. Along with only the cruise ports in Seattle and Juneau, Alaska, Vancouver’s port permits ships outfitted with suitable electrical systems to plug into the city’s electric grid while docked, allowing the ships to run on something other than diesel while idling. To date, according to Port Metro Vancouver, only Princess and Holland America have invested in the conversion.

The aim of the measure is to keep the air and water at the sort of quality that would attract onloookers. One, a woman wearing black sneakers without socks and a black T-shirt with the Rolling Stones lips logo, strode to the rail as the Zuiderdam crept out to sea. She plopped her baggy purse atop a placard and whipped out a digital camera to shoot a video.

“I just am walking around doing touristy stuff,” said the woman, Eline Toes, a Dutch national and an urban planner working at the Dutch consulate in Vancouver. “I thought it made a beautiful picture, with the clouds on the mountain.”

As the Zwiderdam turned west, sure enough, the green slopes of Grouse Mountain and the stray clouds that bearded its peak framed the ship and the logo it angled to reveal: Holland America Line.