Greetings from Canada

Vancouver Island has so much going for it that it hardly seems real.

by Paul Gerald

n retrospect, our first couple of days in British Columbia seem like a trip to several amusement parks. Not that it’s cheap or lame, you understand: It’s just that the scale and variety of things is so whacked that we felt as if it was all created for our entertainment.

First we went to Boat Ride Land. We drove U.S. 101 through Olympic National Park in Washington and then got on a ferry for Canada. We put the Olympic Range on our stern, Vancouver Island on the bow, got some coffee, and grabbed some rail. Mountains and glaciers and calm sea were all around us, and we strained our eyes looking for orcas.

PHOTO BY PAUL GERALD

If The Peabody is Old South, the Empress is Old England.

The boat dropped us off in Britain Land, which calls itself the Inner Harbour of Victoria. There was a tall ship tied to the docks (we missed a festival of tall ships by a week), the customs agents were polite and proper, and 10 seconds off the boat we were looking up at the all-world Empress Hotel.

If The Peabody is the Old South, the Empress is Old England. It was built in 1908 by the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and now it’s always described as being “stately” and “luxurious.” Ivy climbs its brick walls, and flowers cover its grounds. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the rooms are like, since they’re in the $150-$250-per-night range. Maybe on a honeymoon. We were camped at a beautiful park in the suburbs for $11 a night. There was also a very hoity-toity-looking high tea going on, which I mention because somebody out there might find it interesting and affordable. Twenty bucks for tea and biscuits isn’t in my budget.

If you go to British Columbia – and we’ll assume you’re going in the summer – make sure you’re in Victoria for a Saturday night. That way, you can go to Butchart Gardens, which we’ll call Huge-Crazy-Beautiful Garden Land, and see the weekly fireworks show.

“Yeah, yeah,” you’re thinking, “a fireworks show. I’ve seen those.” Well, you haven’t. Most fireworks shows are made up of streaking rockets that blow up in colorful ways. But this show is an entirely different situation, with spinning tops and dancing teacups and bouncing balls and waterfalls, all set perfectly to music. It permanently altered my understanding of fireworks.

Then there are the gardens themselves. What was once a rock quarry is now 50 acres of mind-boggling display, with a million plants in 700 varieties, plus numerous spraying fountains, and at night in the summer it’s all lit up in different colors. It’s big-time romantic.

We went on some walking tours of Victoria, including a stop at the Parliament Building, but soon it was time to head for our real destination, that great collective place out of town called Pacific Northwest Land.

If there is a prettier place than the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest, I wish somebody would let me know. When snow-capped mountains stretch forest-covered arms and river fingers down to long, sandy beaches broken up by rocks and tidal pools, I get giddy.

We stopped in the middle of Vancouver Island at a place called the Cathedral Grove, which we will refer to here as Humongous Tree Land. Again, we go off the scales: What is your mind supposed to do with a cypress tree whose diameter is 15 feet, or a Douglas Fir that’s over 250 feet tall? All you can do is stand amongst them and feel wonder.

We drove to the west coast of the island and Pacific Rim National Park, home of Long Beach Land and Rainforest Land. The park technically has just one beach, but it’s so long that it has several different aspects to it. There’s the sandy part that’s a few miles long and a few hundred feet wide, then there’s the one on a point where the big waves come in and surfers abound. A couple of others have rocks to walk around on, looking for starfish and anemones, or just listening to the waves crash against the cliffs.

We went over to the marina in the little town of Tofino and hired a boat to take us to Mears Island. That’s Rainforest Land, where the saw has never been. We spent three hours walking what was probably two miles around the island. The first half-mile or so was boardwalked; the combination of the size of the trees and the tiny walkway skirting their edges made us feel like hobbits in the Forest of Old.

Then the boardwalk ended and the fun started. The word “trail” is misleading, since we only hit dirt about every third step. The rest of the time we were going over, under, and sometimes through fallen-down trees. At one point we scaled a hundred-foot hill by walking up a notched cypress log. We couldn’t make the end of the trail by our appointed time, but – this being Canada Land – we just scrambled down to the waterline and hailed our boat from there.

Like the rest of the trip, it was so big and beautiful and easy to deal with, it hardly seemed real.