After the events of the previous post, we got back on Friday night from our trip all over the BC mainland, and the rest of the trip was almost entirely on Vancouver Island. Saturday we just spent relaxing, I think we made Japanese-curry-in-a-box for dinner. Played some videogames (Tales of Arise is very on my to-play list!). Caught up with internet friends. I don’t remember what else right now, so it must have been properly chill. I think we went to buy beer? Tharash wanted to check out the local breweries so we bought three cans at the liquor store. Tharash picked two based on recommendations from the store worker, and I picked one based entirely on the label art which was pretty. We split all of them and drank one a day.

Sunday was a big day, we went whale watching! So we walked down to Fisherman’s Wharf, saw the houseboats and all the brightly painted unique designs, and got on our tour boat along with a large group of teenagers from… I think it was Brazil? A lot of them weren’t dressed for cold sea air, so I hope they were okay. The first part was spent just getting out away from shore, and the boat went very fast. When it slowed down again, somewhere halfway to Port Angeles, we were invited up to the bridge along with the only other two people who weren’t with the teenage tour group. We saw orcas from up there! The whale watching tours all talk to each other about where the animals are, and there are laws against getting closer than 200m, so there was a ring of boats around the whales, who were just chilling out – they didn’t breach or anything. It was also interesting for me to see the Olympic Mountains more close than normal. Unfortunately, after a little time up there, I started to feel seasick. The crew had some nice ginger chewy candies, and I had my water, but it didn’t stop me from actually being seasick off the back. I spent most of the rest of the trip half-napping on the back benches to avoid feeling any more sick. Tharash didn’t get sick at all because he is much more used to being on the water, and he had a very good time with his camera.

But the boat went on to see a pair of humpbacks, and they were having fun! They were slapping their tails on the water, over and over again. And then we went over to Race Rocks to see a whole bunch of sea lions! And we even might have caught a glimpse of a pair of elephant seals, but they just looked like sleepy blobs so it was hard to tell that they were seals and not rocks.

I was very glad to get back to land, and we spent some time resting in the park before walking back – past Symphony Splash, which was playing on the legislature lawn, and the music was really nice and tempting me to stay and listen – but we went to YuaBistro for dinner, which is a… like, Japanese fusion restaurant? Avant-garde sushi? It was really unusual but it was delicious! And we managed to eat everything except like 5 pieces of sushi which I took home and ate later.

Monday we went to the Museum! It was a much shorter visit than usual, because they only have the Natural History exhibit up right now, and a small exhibit about displaced Japanese Canadians during WWII. Even the Natural History exhibit has been revamped since I last went there like 15 years ago – not the main dioramas, of course, but the in-between stuff. After we scoured the gift shop for interesting things – like a book about Haida legends written by Bill Reid – we went for a further walk down to Beacon Hill Park. The north end of the park is the manicured part, of course, but it was really nice to see the ducks and a whole lot of turtles on a log, and a couple herons! There was also a whole tree of upset crows, so we respectfully stayed away from them.

We walked down to see the tallest totem pole, and then crossed Dallas Road to have a look at the beach there. Someone was kite-surfing all up and down that bay. It looked fun and scary. Then we headed back up Cook Street, stopping in at a little indie bookstore called Books and Shenanigans. I bought a whole bunch of cards that I thought might be fun for friends, and a book that made me crack up with just the back cover so I bought it: The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America.

On Tuesday, we went to the art gallery with my parents. There was not a lot of Emily Carr on display, which I found a bit disappointing. Apparently she’s problematic now? There was a nice display of traditional Chinese fans brought to Victoria historically, or contemporary interpretations of traditional fans, but besides that most of the other exhibits weren’t really that interesting to me either. My parents took the scenic route to take us all back to their house, including stopping at the look-out point in Oak Bay, which was nice. We had grilled salmon for dinner, a different recipe than last time Tharash was here.

Wednesday was time for more driving! I had not been north of the Malahat since I moved to Victoria the first time in 2006-ish, and I’d actually never driven the Island Highway on my own, so this was something I was looking forward to. The highway gets really confusing around Nanaimo, despite all the signs, but I managed to get around it and to the highway out to the Pacific coast. We stopped in Cathedral Grove, which was overflowing with tourists, parking was terrible (though I wonder if improving it would only facilitate induced demand…). A walkway through the forest has been added since the last time I was there, though there isn’t a good way to cross the highway which would be very beneficial for both tourists and traffic. There is one part by the river on the north side that doesn’t have a walkway. The south side has the Biggest Tree, but there were so many people lined up to take pictures of it that we decided to skip it, and instead I took a picture of Tharash with a Random Less Big But Still Big Tree. There were a LOT of impressively large trees, although for some reason I was expecting them to be even bigger? Wider around, if not taller, they were plenty tall enough. Many of them are over 800 years old. That’s older than the European explorers coming to North America. That’s crazy to think about. There were many information signs about the temperate rainforest ecosystem, such as ‘nurse trees’ – dead trees that baby trees grow on top of, taking their nutrients from the body of the tree beneath them. Or how long it takes these forests to assume their final form – hundreds of years, so the old growth logging needs to stop yesterday. Or a couple decades ago.

Then we continued to the coast, having lunch at a picnic table at the Port Alberni visitor’s centre. The weather was, for the first time on the whole trip, cloudy, and as we got closer to the coast it actually rained. They were rebuilding an extensive part of the highway near Ucluelet, so we had to wait for like 20 minutes, but that’s all right. We only drove, I dunno, like 4 hours if you add it all up? Which is a lot less than we were doing across the mainland with those 10-hours-on-the-road days. We then went to the trail at Kwisitis Visitor Centre, though the centre itself was closed, but we walked along reading the First Nations info signs and being amazed at how different the coastal forest is from Cathedral Grove is different from the forest in the Rockies. The coastal forest is very… untidy. It’s so damp that ferns regularly grow on high tree branches, and the trees wither so easily – maybe from the salt from the sea? The boardwalk was very damp, and fungus and moss eat the ends of the boards. It makes it look quite fairy-tastic, but also raises slight concerns about its structural integrity. There were several replaced boards here and there. The tide coming in on the beaches was exciting, though I was a bit disappointed by the tidepools being a lot more barren than tidepools on more sheltered parts of the island. Lots of dead crab shells.

After that we headed north until we came to one of the tourist resorts, which had the Surfside Grill which we wanted to eat at. I had chowder, and Tharash had the halibut fish and chips. It was pretty good, the fish and chips were great but my stomach doesn’t like battered fried fish for some reason; never has, which is why I went for the chowder. It wasn’t drowning in dill like the last time I had chowder which I think was Helsinki in 2019 where they just dumped an entire handful of dill on top, but I’m starting to think chowder in general just isn’t as interesting as it smells. People were heading out to go surfing in wetsuits. Then we drove into Tofino and went to the very end of the last road, where the hostel is. After checking in, we went down to a dock to take some pictures of the mountains in the fading light. The hostel was great and if we’d been spending more time at Long Beach, it would have been lovely to stay there. It was clean and the beds were comfy; the bunk bed had a single-size bed on top, perfect for Tharash who is used to that, and a double-size bed on the bottom, perfect for me who is used to that. XD

The morning of the next day, we went to Tonquin Beach where there were these neat coves in the rock of the shore. The weather was clear and sunny again that day. We went souvenir shopping at a couple First Nations shops (we’d gone to the beach mostly to kill time until the shops opened), and then went to explore more trails in the national park. We went up Radar Hill, which had a nice view of the mountains north of Tofino. We went to Combers Beach to eat lunch, and there was a Steller’s Jay hopping around right by the parking lot. I wanted to go to Combers Beach because the view of the Pacific was blocked by Wickaninnish Island from Tonquin Beach. But here it was completely open.

Finally, we did both the loops of the Rainforest Trail, both of which have relatively new-looking boardwalks. The south side was interesting and all, the other tourists there with us were very friendly (there was one family with a very honest little girl who when asked if she liked the trees, was like “nah”, haha). The north side was even better, there was an entire troupe of ravens talking to each other (video link), and some of them made “boop boop” (video link) sounds just like Fable the Raven on Youtube! That was a great walk.

Then we headed north and I took the scenic route from Qualicum Beach up through Courtenay to Campbell River. It was so weird for me because I haven’t been through there since I was 16, and everything was really… just on the edge of memory. I’d recognize a place very dimly, but not the things around it (and not because they were necessarily different). So weird. Anyway, we went to a Boston Pizza near our hotel for dinner and maybe ate too much greasy food but I kind of wanted pasta so I got pasta. The hotel we stayed at was the first time on the trip that we both had nice beds, but Tharash ended up not being as comfortable as sleeping on inflatable mattresses on the floor.

The next morning we got up crazy early so we could get on the ferry across to Quadra Island (the hotel breakfast area had a toaster identical to my parents’, which was neat for me). The kayak shop was very close to the terminal. We got in and started repacking our stuff into drybags, and I discovered that mayyyyyybe I should have sandals for going in the water? But I don’t own sandals right now, so all I was able to bring were rainboots. Which I made do with, my yoga pants had enough fabric that water didn’t really get inside even when the water went over the top. Once we had everything packed, and met our fellow kayakers (a couple from Nanaimo, and two older BFFs, and our lovely guide Morgan), we drove across Quadra to the boat launch in a nice warm safe bay. There were three options available: a big two-seater kayak that we nicknamed “the cargo van”, a smaller two-seater kayak, and two single kayaks. The first day we went in the cargo van because it was probably the most similar to our previous experience.

Kayaking on open water was very very different to kayaking in a fjord, and not a good difference for me personally. Across all three days, I got increasingly frustrated at how hard it was to go in a straight direction, and how slow we seemed to go across huge swaths of open water. Kayaks are kind of the pedestrians of the ocean, and with all the other traffic around – including large ferries, and humpback whales who don’t have echolocation and therefore don’t know what’s above them – it was nervewracking and made me want to go as fast as possible, which quickly tired me out. I didn’t want to be last in the line-up like we’d been so often in Norway. So I pushed too hard.

The first day, we paddled north to Read Island (which consistently confused me because I hear “Read” and think “Reid” because I’m a dork). We saw a couple of humpback blows in the distance. We stopped for lunch in a rocky little bay. All the food on the trip was fantastic, prepared by a local Quadra Island catering service, including dairy-free and vegetarian options for people who required it. Lunch was big stacked sandwiches.

We had a pretty hard paddle north after that, though we observed several shellfish farms, some bald eagles, and many houses for rich people; Tharash and I talked about how nice it would be to live in such a location if wi-fi was included. A beautiful house in the middle of this natural scenery, with easy access to the sea for the sailor, big picture windows to bring as much natural light and greenery into the house as possible, and maybe a pipe organ for me… (excuse me while I go play the Sims) Near the end of the day, we slowed up a bit to look at purple starfish just under the waterline on the shore.

Our campsite was on a wooded headland; there were not many flat places to pitch our tents, but we managed. There was a nice big ‘common area’ where Morgan set up the kitchen (she deftly deflected all attempts to help with the cooking the entire trip) and made shrimp tacos. The outhouse wasn’t even in a house, it was just a toilet seat in a secluded corner of the forest with a nice view. Unfortunately for me, I’d used up more energy than I had to give that day, and so after dinner I went and flopped in the tent for the rest of the evening. (The tents were super easy to set up, quite a bit easier than my parents’ 40-year old tent with fibreglass poles which we borrowed for the mainland trip.)

The next day we went in the smaller two-seater, but for the first time since I’ve been in a kayak, I went in the back to steer, and started figuring out how difficult it was, ugh. Today was a bit easier, going back down the opposite side of the channel that we’d been up, looking at even more starfish. Why are they purple? Do they know they’re purple? We stopped for lunch at a small island among the King Islets and had some amazing wraps with fresh tzatziki and hummus, and when we were done, we started seeing seals! Just two at that moment, but they were not the last. They were so cute, with their little sea doggo heads popping out of the water; Janet called them ‘little buddies’. And then launching was a pain because the wind really really wanted to blow us back into the island.

We paddled around the south end of Read Island, frequently watched by curious seals, until we came to the bay where we were going to camp. This paddle was the hottest, sunniest part of the whole kayaking trip, and even though we’d put on sunscreen, I was a bit burned at the end of it. My skin is still more brown than usual even after a whole month. The bay was very hot from the sun shining straight into it all day long; the only cool part was a corner on the west side. But everybody else went swimming, that’s one way to deal with the heat! (I don’t like swimming so I did not.) Finding a spot for our tent was tricky. There was a stream coming down next to the path that led uphill, which means… mosquitoes. So we could camp at the top of the hill in the forest where it was cooler, with lots of mosquitoes, or at the bottom of the hill, with maybe fewer mosquitoes but more heat coming off the rocky beach. At first, we camped half-way up the hill with our tent on an incline because we’re… weird, and trying to get a compromise between mosquitoes and temperature. As the evening went on, everything started to cool off, so we moved our tent to the bottom part. It still wasn’t very far from the mosquitoes, but I like to think it was a bit better. The toilet was up at the top of the hill, though, in a place that I would have hated to get to in the middle of the night. Maybe I’m a spoiled city girl, but I kinda feel like you shouldn’t be assaulted by bugs and have to do a little mountain climbing just to pee. Luckily I didn’t have to pee at 3am that night.

Anyway, dinner was chili with almost-cake-sweet cornbread but what really impressed me is that dessert was cupcakes with frosting. How they were still intact is amazing to me. We saw a couple more humpback blows, very far off. Apparently they hang around that area a lot. Tharash stayed up late to take pictures of the stars, but unfortunately his camera ran out of battery after only a couple pictures.

The next morning I woke up early enough to see the entire world pink with pre-dawn glow (like, 6:00am). We also had our closest whale encounter – there was a humpback fooling around just outside our bay (video link).

This day I went in a single kayak, and it was not very fun for me. We had to stay together carefully since we were crossing the main shipping lanes again, and going in a straight line with the wind and the current was extremely discouraging even though I was trying as hard as I could. Everyone else was very encouraging, but I still feel bad for being so useless. I don’t think I should go on kayaking trips anymore unless they’re in very sheltered spots like lakes.

Once we got back to the kayak shop and unpacked, we went to have lunch at the cafe next door, which was related to the catering service that had provided the food for the trip, but they weren’t selling more of those great sandwiches. So we went to the ferry, and once in Campbell River I tried to go directly to the inland highway but somehow I missed it?? Insufficient signage. I had to go back to the coastal route and then take a different road to get to the inland highway, which wasted a lot of time. Then, because it was still rather early in the afternoon, I took some time to visit the town that I grew up in as a kid, and specifically the house that I grew up in.

It was very odd. And a bit funny; I remembered the location of every playground in town, haha. I guess that was important when I was a kid! The church I went to as a kid has a new extension that looks really weird. I totally forgot about the little gorge on Back Road. The fire station near my house has been repainted, and the rec centre has a new wing so the playground next to it had to be moved to the other side of the parking lot. The house that my childhood friends lived in doesn’t seem to have changed at all, but behind my old house, where there used to be a little bit of natural forest, is now a pedestrian pathway. Which is nice and yet the few pine trees that remain in the neighbours’ yard look kind of lonely now without the others that used to be there. I also drove past the mall (which is unrecognizable) and the library (which is now a museum) to the marina, so I could get a picture of the glacier (which does not appear to have changed, thank goodness). The roads were smaller than I remember. And the old sawmill might have been removed from the estuary, but the land it used to sit on hasn’t finished being restored.

The rest of the drive home was very tiring considering how early I got up. I think we got Greek take-out for dinner.

The last day of our visit, we went shopping one last time; Tharash hadn’t found a good gift for his nephews yet, and he needed some smoked salmon for his own consumption. Also on the kayaking trip, there was instant apple cider, and he wanted some of that too! And I had promised to show him what bubble tea was because apparently it’s not as common in Europe, even though I don’t drink bubble tea myself anymore because it upsets my stomach for some reason. He had a brown sugar/green tea with tapioca pearls, and I had a strawberry/cream cheese smoothie. So we took a little while to get to my parents’ house. We had grilled steak and mango stirfry, and my dad gave Tharash advice on how to take pictures of the moon.

Things I learned on this trip overall: mosquitoes are literal demons from hell and will drive me to actual panic, and I should not go on water.

Tharash wants to come see more BC, but we’re going to do at least one trip in Europe next year first so that I can experience civilized infrastructure again. We’re thinking of doing a train trip around Germany! We’ve seen some old forests in North America, so now we’ll see some old forests in Europe, kind of idea. And maybe some castles and cathedrals too. : D