Vancouver Island frequently gets tagged by magazines as the “Best North American Island,” so of course this is a plot of land that has plenty of claims to fame. (It’s also been named as the “best place to live in Canada.”)
A year ago this time I was making plans to tour the great Northwest, traveling by train from Portland to Banff and seeing Western Canada through the Eyes of a Child . We finished up this family adventure on Vancouver Island. Unfortunately we only got to see a small patch of it. You would need a month there to really traverse what is the “largest island off the North American west coast.” That may sound like a qualified superlative, but it’s roughly the size of the Netherlands or Taiwan, so not too shabby. It’s sparsely populated though, a wilderness paradise where half the population lives in the not-so-large city of Victoria. So what tops the charts here?
Della Falls, in Strathcona Provincial Park , is Canada’s highest waterfall, at 440 metres (1,452 feet). It is also one of the ten highest waterfalls in the world.
Nitinat Lake is the top windsurfing destination in North America. No wind in the morning, but then it comes on like a wall, hitting 25 to 30 knots. There’s a kiteboarding school there if you want to learn how to get airborne. Great videos on their site too.
Nanaimo is home to the world’s largest upright artificial reef. It was created when the Cape Breton, a decommissioned navy ship, was sunk in 2001 near the Saskatchewan, a navy-class destroyer.
Vancouver Island is witness to the longest migration of any mammal in the world. Every year between early February and late April more than 18,000 Grey Whales pass the west coast shore of Vancouver Island, on their way from Mexico to Alaska.
The Strathcona Hotel in Victoria claims to have “the world’s only rooftop beach volleyball courts.” I didn’t go there, but I’ll take their word for it.
I did have the meal of a lifetime at Spinnaker’s though, which is “Canada’s oldest brewpub.” This is a slow food paradise, with beer brewed on site, wine from British Colombia, and meals made with ingredients mostly sourced from within B.C. (including herbs grown in the garden). They’ll set up a beer and food pairing, a wine and food pairing, or if you really want to get decadent—both at once! (Yeah, I didn’t think that would work either, but amazingly it did.)
Find out more:
Tourism Vancouver Island
Tourism Victoria
And here’s a video shot from the (noisy) propeller seaplane ride from Victoria to the Vancouver City harbour, on Harbour Air .
