Vancouver Island

This may seem a little strange to those that have to work, but after a while being in Vancouver, we decided that we needed a 'holiday' from our stressful non-working existence in the big smoke. So we strolled about 10 minutes down the road to the harbour and jumped on a sea plane! There was awesome scenery everywhere in the early morning sunlight and Jenai went a little crazy with the camera.

In a quick half hour we were in Victoria, capital of BC and undisputed grey (retiree) capital of Canada. It's a distinctly British looking place, with lots of historical buildings, double decker buses, formal gardens and union jacks flapping in the wind.


Victoria Harbour

While in town we were very excited to watch question time in parliament, where each 'team' bangs on the bench in front of them before and after each speaker. We also spent a fair amount of time walking around the city, finding a couple of nice cafes, some gardens with views all the way to the US, found 'Mile Zero' (the starting point of the Trans Canada Highway), the world's tallest totem pole and generally hanging around the harbour. It's funny we've started to notice that we are probably fairly unusual tourists in that we spend a lot of time just walking around checking out places instead of seeing Imax theatres and pokey museums.

Anyway, we picked up a car and headed to some of the more natural areas of the island. It's a big island, about 450km x 50km. So there's plenty of room for some pretty amazing mountains, lakes, beaches and forests.


The amazing backdrop to Port Alberni, a small town on the island

The drive between the east and west coasts of the island was pretty scenic, passing through jagged snowy mountains, cold climate old-growth rainforests, mirror like lakes and (semi-decent!) windswept beaches. We spent a couple of days exploring the holiday/fishing towns of Tofino and Ucluelet and the nearby Pacific Rim National Park. The area is known as a surfing mecca locally and there was a fair number of crazy tourists learning to surf in wetsuits with hoods. We found some ancient aboriginal rock carvings of killer whales and other animals in one park. We also really enjoyed more rainforests and funnily enough, a bog, complete with 2m thick moss and 200 year old bonsai fir trees. The area is also known for its sunsets, and we caught a couple of good ones while we were there.


Taking in the sunset at Tofino

On the trip back, we stopped in at a salmon hatchery, which was strangely enjoyable. Hard to imagine these tadpole sized creatures turn into 25 kilo fish leaping up whitewater rapids. We kept the visit short though as we had to keep a close eye out for the bears that also enjoy visits.

And to top of off, on the ferry home I spied some killer whales jumping about in the straight between the island and Vancouver.

All in all, a good few days.

All the photos:

Vancouver Island