Canada 2014: Tofino

Tofino

Tofino is a little town at the west coast of Vancouver Island. To get there, we hired a car in Nanaimo and drove throught the mountains! It was a rather scenic drive with some huge height inclines! 18 % decline and incline is quite a lot for someone who grew up in an area where there is just flat land... 

Fortunately the car was an automatic one which made the driving a lot easier! I had a bit of a laugh when we got the car though. It was labeled as a small car: I didn't find it that small really but I guess to all the other huge cars on the road it was small indeed. Well, it was the right size for us and I wouldn't have wanted to drive a bigger one.

 

On our road to Tofino we stopped at the Little Qualicum Falls. The waterfalls were so pretty! Don't you just love waterfalls? They are quite magical for me... When I was a kid my parents would stop at every single waterfall and at some point I was quite annoyed by it (another one?!) but nowadays I get their fascination with waterfalls.

Tofino is a very small town full of touristy shops. Everything is very expensive (we wished several time we had done some grocery shopping in Nanaimo)... The hostel (Whaler's Point Guesthouse) we stayed in had a nice location but wasn't very good otherwise. It was very loud, the staff had a frat-party mentality and the bathrooms weren't cleaned often enough. Oh and it was very, very expensive. Just to put it in perspective: Our nice hotel right in the middle of Paris in summer cost us less then this hostel... 

We did have a lovely time in Tofino anyway! :-) We took the Hot Spring Tour and the Bear Watching Tour from Jamie's Whaling Station and saw so much wildlife on the tours! Bears, whales, otters... So exciting! The tours weren't cheap but well worth it. Seeing whales was truly magical (so was the happy face of the boyfriend who longed to see whales for some time). 

One evening we got to see four bald eagles at once right in front of our hostel! Wow! For me, this was more exciting than seeing the whales! Eagles are such majestic animals - so sad that some people hunt them!

Of course we spent some time at the beach as well! First we thought about taking surfing lessons but in the end we didn't. The pacific ocean was really cold but nice to walk along. 

Altogether the temperatures weren't high in Tofino (only about 20 ° C) but it was sunny all the time. I prefer cooler temperatures with sun anyway, so the weather was quite alright with me!

Take care

Anne