vacation – auds & ends

Beautiful, windy, coastal Victoria – the capital city of British Columbia, Canada, located on Vancouver Island, is a good hour and a half ferry ride from the BC Ferry terminal in Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay on the island. We left Burnaby at 7:30am, and reached Victoria by 1pm. Though the capital city was our destination, the journey was not time wasted. If anything, the ferry ride remains one of my favourite parts of the short séjour! In fact, the next time I want a cheap cruise in the Strait of Georgia, I’ll be sure to find my way down to Tsawwassen – a return trip is a total of three hours on the water and costs around $35! The busy Tsawwassen ferry terminal is nearly two hours’ worth of transit from North Burnaby, and the ferry ride through the Strait of Georgia, between several smaller, less inhabited islands, is followed by an hour and half long double-decker bus ride that takes you into the Inner Harbour/Downtown area of Victoria, right next to BC’s House of Parliament buildings, infamously known as “The Bird Cages” because of their distinctive architectural shape. The tedium of a long commute is offset by the wonderful views of the passing scenery and seascape that can be found from aboard the open deck of the ferry, and any stress or irritable neck cramps from a claustrophobic bus ride will seem to blow away with the strong, exhilarating breezes that rush against your face as you take up a comfortable position against the deck railing, next to photography aficionados and amateurs enthusiastically snapping away on their precious DSLR cameras, fully equipped with footlong telescopic lenses and neckstraps, lest their cameras decide to make a leap for freedom into the surging blue and white waves.

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There is the oft-heard of opportunity to sight orca whales or dolphins, but I was too busy drinking in the sight of shining (shimmering, splendid!) waters and of the passing hilly or mountainous islands covered thickly with trees and dotted with cottages and sunbathing fishermen, to mind that the only wildlife available to my eyes were seagulls, swooping around our heads, gliding over the water, and blown off course by gusts of wind. Though lacking a fancy camera, I had my trusty iPhone 4S camera to capture these nautical scenes of my short voyage, which I gripped extremely tightly as I leaned out ‘recklessly’ over the railing by a mere (but heart-stopping) two inches.

It was the perfect last weekend of summer getaway – Victoria is bustling with (surprisingly, many French!) tourists, but only in the downtown area. A 10 minute walk away from the Parliament buildings is already sufficient for reaching calmer, seemingly suburban, residential streets, and the word on the street is that Victoria is inhabited with many retirees and peace seeking yogis and self pronounced (pot-smoking) hermits.

Rather than cram tourist activities into our itinerary, my plan was to wander the streets of Victoria, walking as much as possible and simply taking in the sights, almost as locals. (We were stopped once by a harried tourist asking for directions, so I believe we pulled this façade off successfully!) On our first day, we wandered into a bookstore founded by the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature (!!!!), discovered a predominating Irish cultural heritage (which I found intriguing, considering the more prevalent Italian cultural heritage found in Burnaby/Vancouver), sunbathed briefly at a small harbour park, stumbled into a shop selling French specialty food items (olive oils, confiture, foie de gras, pâté spread), dined on mouthwatering sushi, and strolled the tourist congested asphalt walk that bordered the Inner Harbour in the evening, taking us around the Parliament Buildings, which were lit up at night.

The next day, we slept in as late as was possible before the check out time at the inn, and attempted one tourist trap before withdrawing back to our default plan of casually shopping and eating across downtown Victoria. We began by having a late breakfast/early lunch in a pub/restaurant, then tried to visit the house where renowned Canadian artist Emily Carr grew up in, which was down the block from our inn, but unfortunately, it was closed for a special event.

Emily Carr House

So, to cope with the disappointment of having only an outside glimpse of Carr’s childhood home, we decided to go big (or go home, right?), and hiked a good 30 minutes uphill to conduct a self-guided tour of Craigdarroch Castle, the huge Victorian-era home of Robert Dunsmuir, a Scottish-Canadian who made his riches from coal mining and was once the richest man in British Columbia. Built in 1890, this 35 room mansion has been at different times a home, a military hospital, a college, a school board, and a conservatory of music, before becoming a museum. Its name means “rocky oak place” in Gaelic. What was so delightful about meandering through four dim floors of carefully curated and roped off rooms were the parallels that I could draw between the historic evidence before me, and the literary descriptions of the Victorian/Romantics era literature (Jane Austen!) and televised representations of the Edwardian era (Downton Abbey!) that I so adore. One could see Lizzy Bennett reading in the stained glass bay window of the carpeted library, Fanny Price writing in the ornately decorated Dunsmuir family drawing room, a maid in the airy linen closet, or fully liveried footmen serving (and sabotaging each other) at the sideboard in the stately dining room (complete with the original dining table and matching chairs!)

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Leaving the castle at its closing hour in the late afternoon, we were left with a few hours before our schedule departure for Swartz Bay from the same bus stop next to the Parliament buildings downtown, so we made our way back down Antique Row on Fort St., stopping again to look in shops or at interesting visual artifacts along the way. Late lunch was at Fishhook, a delicious new take on the sandwich/tartine, that I had spotted the day before. I had latched onto the menu offerings posted next to the café door, and the tartines did not disappoint (devilled eggs! melted kale! pickled carrot! smoked sable & smoked salmon! herbed mustard! fish chowder! salmon “bacon”! drool worthy! I would eat here all the time if I lived in Victoria). Of course, a meal is not complete without the occasional visit to Marble Slab Creamery for some customizable cones (Key lime with raspberries & graham cracker crumbs!)

Before we knew it, it was time to collect our daypacks from the inn, and make our way to the Parliament lawn, where we sprawled for a quarter of an hour in the grass like we belonged to this breezy, coastal city, reluctant to board the bus to Swartz Bay. We reached the ferry terminal just as the sun was setting, and prepared for a twilight voyage.

Swartz Bay ferry terminal at sunset

The number of returning occupants was low and we were some of the only people who ventured to the front of the passenger deck area in the dark, as the night air was chilly. Nothing could stop me from thrusting my face into the wind though, and we embraced the night time sailing with drawn hoods and hot paper cups of tea. Eventually, we even had a White Spot Pirate Pak for dinner on deck, imagine – eating out of a cardboard boat, while on a boat (and trying to keep the paper boat from being overturned by the wind)! The skies grew progressively darker, and they became littered with more glittering stars than I have ever been able to discern with my astigmatism afflicted eyes in the well-lit city. The surrounding islands melted into the darkness and became part of the sky, part of the water, only distinguishable by distant lights of island homes, which were far and few. Other ferries passed us and we listened with glee to the booming foghorns echoing in response between ferries as we steadily glided towards the mainland.

I knew which direction was towards Vancouver, when I realized that a part of the horizon seemed strangely illuminated and as we got closer and it became brighter, I finally saw the effects of city light pollution for the first time. And though I was happy to be going home, I could not leave the ferry ride – the wind, the islands, the endless stars, without a sense of regret. A day and a half in a city is no time at all, an hour and a half could not have passed more quickly than our return trip home, and leaving nature for urbanity is always unsettling. I’ll be back one day – once I’m home from France, and then I’ll have my lovely little ferry cruise and a longer stay on the island, and perhaps visit all the other smaller islands along the way (and mange some more of those tartines!)

keeping company with the statue of a veteran sailor/soldier

auds & ends

Tag: vacation

haikus from a sunny sand dune in the South

shining, shimmering, splendid…& speechless

just a ferry ride away