Ocean-to-Ocean, Part 10

The ultimate destination of this Ocean-to-Ocean trip, which started in Southampton six weeks ago, is the small town of Tofino, right on the Pacific Coast of Vancouver Island. It’s not the most westerly point in Canada; that would be the border between the Yukon and Alaska, but it is a popular spot for tourists and unofficially lies at the western end of the Trans-Canada Highway. Officially, it ends in Victoria but the Queen Charlotte Islands also lay claim to the title.

Travelling into the town, you pass through the Pacific Rim National Park which covers about 20 miles of coastline plus numerous outlying islands, bays and inlets stretching many miles beyond that. Tofino itself is a nice little place with around 2,500 permanent residents, vastly more during the peak season when all the hotels, motels and campgrounds fill up with visitors. There are no end of restaurants (as you’d expect, seafood is a local speciality), along with shops selling souvenirs and local arts & crafts.
In addition to shopping, there are several tour operators offering boat trips for whale-watching or visits to nearby islands. Those wishing to travel further afield for camping or fishing expeditions can do so via float-plane operators that are based in the harbour.

With limited time remaining, I settled on exploring the main part of the National Park. The most impressive part was Long Beach – not the one in California but, at 10 miles, still half as long as its namesake and a lot less busy. It seemed to be a surfing Mecca with “surfer dudes” in hippy-style camper vans occupying the car parks from early morning to late evening.
For those of us who aren’t very buoyant and prefer to remain on Terra Firma there were plenty of peninsulas and rocky outcrops to scramble around on.

[Insert YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/NU3UQ2H8IeM]

Further south on the peninsula lies the town of Ucluelet (pronounced you-clue-let), another pretty little place geared to tourism, which marks the start and endpoint of a loop trail which winds around the rocky coastline in a forest of tall cedar trees. This coast has been the site of numerous shipwrecks over the years, many of which are detailed in the local visitor centre with the remains of some of them still being visible among the jagged rocks.

While Tofino may have been the furthest point west on my journey, I wasn’t going to take a float plane all the way back to Heathrow, so the adventure still has a couple more days to go.
The capital of British Columbia is not Vancouver, as one might expect, but the old Colonial city of Victoria, named after HRH King Charles’s 3x great-granny. It grew substantially during the Gold Rush era and has since sprawled outwards, constrained only by the geography. As the capital, it is home to the very grand-looking BC Parliament building and other Government offices.

One of the public sector unions was on strike during my visit – there were little groups of protesters waddling up & down the footpaths waving banners demanding more pay. Thankfully, whichever service they were on strike from didn’t affect my visit in any way. Following a spot of last-minute shopping for presents and souvenirs, plus a bite to eat at the amusingly named Good Ovening restaurant, it was time to retire to my hotel overlooking the harbour to pack my bags ready for the long journey back home.

The first leg of the flight from Victoria Airport to Calgary was scheduled to depart late morning, so there was no huge rush to start what would be a very long day of travel. Half an hour’s drive through downtown Victoria and up the motorway took me to the rent-a-car return. With another 1,086 km added to the 8,033 km covered by the first rental, that made a total of 5,666 miles by road since leaving Toronto a few weeks previously, more than the 4,800 miles that I’d be flying over the next 16 hours or so.

YYJ, as they call it, is a small regional airport handling only short-haul flights, so there are no big parking garages or long corridors through which to drag heavy cases. Ignoring the instructions to use the self-check-in machines I wandered up to a lady at the desk who cheerfully attached the requisite sticky labels and tags to my bags and directed me through the fast and efficient security screening. No fancy lounges here, just a few gates, a coffee shop, nik-nak shop and lots of places to sit down.
The incoming aircraft arrived on-time – a Boeing 737 Max 9 – the first time I have been on one of those. It was only a short flight, but the elderly lady sitting next to me was interested to hear about my journey and had a very cute & well-behaved little puppy in a bag, which kept us both entertained.

Calgary airport was very much bigger and provided an opportunity to increase my day’s step count traipsing between the domestic and international terminals then a bit more wandering around trying to find where Westjet had hidden their lounge, not helped by all the construction hoardings which had obscured some of the signage. It was quite busy but I found a comfy chair to sit in for the five hour layover, not-reading GP comments on my laptop and occasionally scanning a QR code on the table which resulted in food and cocoa being delivered shortly thereafter.

The long-haul flight back to Heathrow in a 787-900 dragged on, as they always do – I can never sleep on planes, even in the comfy end, but at least the wi-fi worked a lot more reliably than on many other transatlantic flights that I’ve taken in the past. The food was OK, flight-attendants friendly, seat was fine, and this one even had an extra remote control thingy to play with that let me change the dimming on the plane windows, which kept me amused for a while.
Arrival into Heathrow T4 was uneventful, the e-passport gates actually worked properly and within 30 minutes I was sitting in a taxi heading back home down the M4. Even the cabbie was cheerful.

All-in-all it was an and extremely enjoyable trip, during which pretty much everything went to plan and the weather remained dry & sunny for most of the time.

So where to next time?  A few options rattling around in my head:
– Scandinavia, possibly start with a “northern lights and fjords” cruise but I also quite fancy a road trip there, and maybe an excursion up to Svalbard.
– Iceland and Greenland, possibly via the Smyril Line ferry from northern Denmark which also stops in the Faroe Islands along the way.
– Panama Canal followed by a cruise up the Inside Passage of Alaska.
– A south-to-north from either California or Florida up to Tuktoyaktuk up on the Arctic Ocean.
– Newfoundland. My only visits there to date have been brief and unplanned, due to aeroplanes breaking down mid-Atlantic, but I liked what I saw.

Suggestions on those or other destinations from our group of very well-travelled Puffins will be gratefully received. I always think that planning these trips is all part of the fun!

Hopefully you haven’t all been too bored looking at my holiday photos for the last ten weeks. If anyone wants a more detailed “Postcard from” relating to any of the places that I visited then let me know and I’ll rummage through my vast collection of photos sometime between now and Christmas.
 

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