Our last stop on this journey was Canada. We planned to spend a month with family in Victoria and friends in Vancouver. It was the third time in the last four years that we came here, so we did not expect to discover new adventures. Yet we surprised ourselves by finding many cool activities we had skipped the last times without even knowing it.
This post is about our last stop in British Columbia, Canada.
We have also listed some great, memorable activities that we would recommend. Wildlife you can expect to see when coming to Canada you can find in a different post. Enjoy!
The journey took us almost halfway around the world: We departed in Bangkok at about 5:00am. Movies later – by the way, the new Wes Anderson, Isle of Dogs was nice – we arrived in Vancouver. Unlike the last times with clear blue skies, this time the wildfires had created a sky of haze. Richmond (the neighborhood we stayed in) was covered in smoke.
It took a while to recover from the jetlag that implied being tired during the day and having sudden midnight hungers – just like when you study. Luckily a Tim Hortons was not far away. Many Canadians now had a worse image of my beloved Tim Hortons than before. For us, Tim Hortons is setting the bar in terms of fast food! We are not sponsored by Tim Hortons, our love is unconditional!!!!!! Tim Hortons, if you read this, open a branch in Cologne, please!
Well, back to our story, we stayed the first days in Vancouver visiting friends, hanging out in malls, drinking smoothies, enjoying asian cuisine – yes, vancouver is great for that – and we also went to the beach, the super hippie, semi-nude beach. Probably far more hippie than Goa. 🙂
If you are about to come for the first time to Vancouver, here are some activity inspirations:
- Fly over Canada. This attraction is super expensive and super worth it!
- Stroll through downtown. By the way, it is striking how many homeless there are.
- Hang out at the beaches (in summer).
- Bicycle around Stanley Park.
- Still not tired?! Climb Grouse Mountain. People take it as a challenge to race up and beat their own time.
- Brewery tour in East Vancouver, is nice. They even brew Koelsch. WTF?!
- Oh yeah, the aquarium is pretty nice too.
And there are so many, many more things to do.
But we came here to see the family. We took the ferry to Vancouver Island to visit Britt’s and now also my family. We expected to stay on the couch for a month but it turned out rather busy.
The very first weekend, Britt’s sister headed to a regata and took us sailing on the way to the race. my first impression of this hobby: Saling is nice, especially with beer and people taking care of everything – thank you Becky and Paul – racing is too busy.
After the journey we camped on the shore and watched the regata – so we remained in chill mode. A highlight not too far from our wild campground was: tubing (floating down the river in a tube) on Lake Cowichan.
After spending a few days tubing in Laos (full post here), we could not skip this opportunity in Canada. Highly recommendable for people who just like to float down the river. 🙂
A few days later the air quality turned from the fresh sea / forest breeze into thin smoke. The extreme dry summers each year mean constant wildfire hazzards. Basically there are wildfires every summer but they are each time somewhere else. This time they were close! We even saw one fire in Port Alberni when driving through Vancouver Island on the way to Tofino. Tofino, in the Pacific-Rim-National Park, is actually the only place we know where you do not have bans on camping fires, because in this humid rainforest of vegetation nothing is dry! That means no wildfire hazard. That means camp fires!
One reason more to go to this chill backpackers, surfers and campers mecca.
To get a campsite in Tofino you need to book far ahead or camp far away. Well, we camped far away. In the middle of nowhere, just nature around. Maybe just how Tofino itself used to be once upon a time. So actually not bad at all. Though the campsite we booked last time in Tofino (literally in the forest with ocean view) was not bad neither.
Our campground this time was on native land and it was great! Being so far away from everything it was cheap. The other campers were also a different type of people. The place was less touristy, more authentic. We camped next to a group of fishermen who shared their catch of the day with us and invited us for beer and other pleasures in the evenings. Besides that just sleeping in the forest in the tent and sitting by the campfire gazing the stars relaxes you better than anything else. By the way, never seen so many shooting stars like I have here! Camping in Canada is great!
The only thing is that you want a nice shower after a while, and after a little longer it also becomes a necessity. Here is how to fix that situation, if your campsite does not have nice showers:
Either one can use the showers at the parking lots of the beaches, what we did after surfing. Those were cold! Or one could just swim in a lake, which we did too but it is even colder. Or one could just drive to Ucluelet, a place next to Tofino and use the public swimming pool with showers and sauna. Bingo!
Just another attraction besides the nature and the surfing (probably the main reason we and others come here) are the trails. There are a bunch of great marked trails that lead through the rain forest with giant trees and areas covered completely with moss, even the trees. And there is one trail that is unofficial and that leads to a crashed B52 bomber. Oh yeah, that is something different! The wreck of this massive plane just hangs there in between cliffs and trees. If you are around it is worth a look for sure.
After one week we left the Pacific-Rim-National Park to camp for a couple of days somewhere else. We chose Horn Lake. The main highlight here were the caves. You just need a helmet and a light (both you can get at the entrance and crawl into a bunch of caves either guided or on your own. Pretty awesome and quite different than the other cave tours we know with artificial walkways and illuminated stalactites and stalagmites. No,no, these Horne Lake caves were more like crawling, climbing, squeezing, bumping the head, ripping the trousers. So also a memorable experience!
Our time on Vancouver Island was not just busy. We also had relaxing days with family dinners and couch potatoing. Britt had some bureaucracy things to take care of, I started doing job interviews. We slowly woke up from this six month dream. The life where one just had to worry about what to eat and where to sleep that day and the rest would be just as it comes, was slowly replaced by planning and organizing.
And then our traveling time was over, just like that! We boarded the plane and left Canada. What a journey it has been…
