Vancouver Island & City
11 & 12 April 2024
After clearing Canadian Immigration on Interstate 5, a sign declares: ‘Welcome to British Colombia. The Best Place of Earth’. It might not be the most inventive piece of copywriting, but it gets the intended message across at least.
The ferry across the Straits of Georgia from Tsawassen to Duke Point on Vancouver Island takes two hours, with driving rain the whole way. But the weather appears to be lifting as I ride up the gangplank.
It’s a hundred and thirty miles to Tofino, the only town on the southern shore and low mountains to negotiate. True to form, after three hours, I’m completely sodden for what must be the thirteenth day in a row.
’The Inn at Tough City’ sounds like one of the grisly places in New Mexico or Texas I’ve stayed in but is the polar opposite. A comfortable, boutique hotel and sushi bar, owned by one ‘Crazy Ron’ and decorated in a highly individual style.
Dion takes pity on me and upgrades my room to one overlooking Clayoquot Sound, a collection of small wooded islands in the middle distance and snow-capped peaks to the north.
The late afternoon sun is slanting through the low clouds and quite suddenly, I don’t want to go a yard further, or for that matter, a yard back, such is the tranquil perfection.
This point also represents the furthest I’ll go and with it, a realisation there a fewer days left ahead of this tour than have passed.
After warming up and drinking in the view, I remark to Dion that had I known it was this beautiful, I would have stayed longer. However, I’ve got a room booked and paid for tomorrow so need to get going the next morning.
But my room at the Inn is vacant the next night. Dion offers me a generously discounted rate to offset what I will lose at the Powell River motel if I’d like to stay another night. It’s an easy decision.
I’m pointed toward The Shed pub for a beer and then to The Schooner Restaurant for dinner, which has been going for 75 years. They specialise in locally sourced seafood but with a far from traditional approach.
Oysters Nami are deep-fried and finished with honey, wasabi mayo and tobiko. To follow is Halibut Bawden Bay, an improbable collection of crab, shrimp, Brie and Jack cheeses (yes, you read that correctly), stuffed inside the fish, then roasted and finished with an apple-brandy and green peppercorn sauce.
I couldn’t decide if it sounded absolutely-revolting or completely-delicious. The server told me it had been on the menu since 1978, so must have something going for it. Against the odds, it worked with every element recognisable.
The air and light the next morning are clear and clean like nowhere else I’ve been. On the way to the Rhino Cafe for brunch, I book myself onto a mid-afternoon, whale-watching excursion. It was a perfect afternoon for a boat ride and the two crew members were great fun and supremely knowledgeable.
However, there is a lot more waiting than watching with whales. We do locate two of them, eventually, but I won’t be rushing to repeat the experience.
To find them, each of us four punters has a piece of horizon to scan and call out if we spot one. The whales - sometimes - show their whereabouts by spouting three times every six to ten minutes.
They then up-end themselves, showing a brief, tasteful glimpse of the plume (the tail to non-marine biologists) before they dive back down to suck up a load more plankton. So the idea is that, on the first spouting, everybody looks in that general direction with baited anticipation and cameras at the ready.
This goes on all summer before they head south to Baja and the Gulf of California. They like it there, for the warmer water, and as they then get to make a load of other whales. But 65% of these then get eaten by Orcas (the apex predator) near Monterrey on the return north to feed. So, all in all, not much of a life then…
As these strange, enormous, pre-historic mammals glide by, just below the crystalline ocean surface, I have a singular thought: I know now what the Spanish Coastguards experienced, off the Canary Islands, in November 1991 when they fished the late Robert Maxwell out of the briny,
13 April 2024
Approaching downtown Vancouver from the north means first wrestling with European city, rush-hour levels of congestion over the Lions Gate Bridge, albeit with arresting views of the city.
Over the bridge, the road runs through the quite glorious Stanley Park. A verdant 1,000-acre oasis that abuts the city. It has bike trails, beaches, an aquarium, a miniature railway, a waterpark, the full works and - by the looks of it - where a good chunk of Vancouver’s quite small population of 700,000 spend the weekend.
Once through it, I find my accommodation for the night. A private flat, rented by-the-night, and the only halfway affordable way of being within walking distance of downtown.
My host greets me in the dingy-looking car park at the rear and shows me up to a tiny 5th-floor apartment. The only bedroom is so small, it can’t even accommodate a double bed, so this has to be accessed through a sliding wall panel from the joke living room and cat-concussing kitchen area.
He airily encourages me to use anything I like, pointing out he has thoughtfully left toilet paper. That’s it though; there is absolutely fuck-all else in the way of consumables or creature comforts. The window blinds won’t shut and there is no tea or coffee. Muttering to myself: “When will you learn? You don’t need to do this anymore…”, I exit the building in search of a beer.
I’m actually in quite a nice tree-lined neighbourhood. Albeit a strange one of various multi-occupancy buildings of between three and ten stories and an almost Soviet architectural vernacular. One block north is a street bustling with thirty-somethings, dressed as if on the way back from the gym, cuddling recyclable grocery bags full of organic vegetables and the like, while jabbering on the phone.
In every respect, it has a lot in common with the laughably expensive parts of East London that well-qualified young professionals have colonised. As a group, albeit separated by about 3,500 miles, they tend towards working overly hard. They also earn justifiably high salaries with which they pay off their spiv-landlords’ mortgages, thus remaining both cash-poor and asset-poor themselves.
This is because, of course, spiv-landlords never actually have any money of their own, they have to borrow it all. This makes them highly sensitive to interest rates and therefore both unwilling and unable to provide property in a decent state of repair. For example, some consider themselves absurdly generous for providing shitty accommodation, bog-roll compris, at £100 a night. Other than tonight, I'm not usually affected directly by this phenomenon but, really crap accommodation at giddyingly high prices is just depressing to witness.
The whole area, to within a few blocks of the waterside and financial district, is in the same style. There are some much taller buildings, dwarfing the majority that look like they date from the sixties and seventies, when Vancouver was not the aspirational city it is now.
One plot - maybe thirty yards wide - with a single, two-storey house on it had notice of a planning application. It was for a 57-floor apartment block, with four on each floor. That should take care of somebody’s retirement.
I’m not being fair on Vancouver as one night, in one area of the city, is not enough to form a valid opinion. I had a really good dinner downtown, sat at the bar of The Nightingale on West Hastings Street. It’s in the Michelin guide and reasonably priced. It doesn’t have a star but had I wanted this, there are nine addresses so rated to choose from.
Later, I enjoyed watching ice hockey at the Score pub on Davie Street. The Vancouver Canucks triumphed over the Edmonton Oilers to the noisy delight of a few hundred, deliriously happy locals.
On my way out of the city the following morning, the suburbs looked tidy and prosperous. But they do when you drive out of Manchester on the A6 also.
Having heard and read so much about how fabulous Vancouver is, and how it is continually listed as one of the top cities in the world to live in, I think I was expecting just a little bit more. I don’t know what of, but I'd like to go back and find out what I've missed.
