Moose Tour part 1 - Vancouver Island
Day 1: Vancouver to Tofino
We took the ferry on Wednesday morning from North Vancouver to Nanaimo, then drove west across the island. Our first stop (after the shop to get food) was at Little Qualicum Falls, where we had lunch and went for a walk to see the falls. It was so beautiful! After that we made a short stop at Sproat Lake to see the petroglyphs there. Nobody knows how old the rock carvings are, but they were there when the first Europeans arrived in the area so are at least two hundred years old. Sproat Lake is really nice, very quiet and peaceful with little gravelly beach areas and it'd be a lovely place to go swimming. It's also where the water bomber plane (used to help put out forest fires) is kept, so we saw that. We made another stop at Wally Creek, just a good place to go walking over the rocks and look at or go in the river, where our driver/guide John went clambering barefoot across the rocks and through the water. None of us were quite adventurous enough to follow him.
Tofino is a fishing village located in the Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I love it. The sea was calm but the cloud was low and it was lightly raining (as had been the case since we stopped at Little Qualicum Falls), but some of the islands were still just visible across the water. The small hostel we stayed in is owned by Moose and has enough beds to accommodate a full tour bus (twelve people including driver) so there were no other travellers there for the two nights we stayed. After a dinner cooked by John on the first night, some of us made the fifteen-minute walk in the rain to the pub at the other end of the village. It was very busy because of karaoke night, but most people in there seemed to be young travellers like us, and we stayed maybe an hour/hour and a half before most of us went back to the hostel.
Day 2: Tofino
Thursday was spent on the wildlife-watching/hot springs trip, with three other people from the group. I loved the two-hour boat trip up the coast, past some of the numerous islands - some were large and had mountains, beaches and forests, some further out were just plain rock. It was so beautiful, even though it was still drizzly and cloudy so not all of them were clearly visible... though I think I preferred it like that, instead of having cloudless sunshine. It all reminded me how much I love the sea. We were lucky and saw a lot of wildlife: bald eagles, sea otters, sea lions, seals, grey whales and orcas! Orcas aren't sighted very often, unlike the greys, so were were very fortunate.
We arrived at the hot springs about 2:30pm, had lunch and went along the boardwalk through the beautiful rainforest to the springs, which took about half an hour. The hot springs was a waterfall and stream with a few pools in, next to the sea, and there were a lot of people. Obviously it was very hot but I did immerse myself up to my shoulders, and like with the sea it wasn't so bad after a few moments - but I did only stay in for a minute or two.
We returned through the rainforest to the boat and set off around 5:30pm. We saw the grey whales again on the way back, in pretty much the same place as they had been before, quite close to shore on one of the large islands. The cloud had lifted a little by then and the mountains on some of the islands were more visible, and I noticed a couple of definite crater shapes, which was cool. We arrived back in Tofino at about 7pm to some hot peppermint tea (yum :)) at the activities centre, returned to the hostel and got ready to go out for dinner. Nowhere had room for all nine of us that had come out, so we split up in the end, although seven of us went to the first place we'd tried anyway but couldn't sit all together. It was a fantastic restaurant that was expensive but worth the money, the food was amazing!
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