Australians flock to Whistler to zoom down its slopes, but if you thought the landscape was magnificent from the ground, imagine taking it all in from the sky. In winter the Ziptrek Eagle Tour whisks adventurers across five lines in a setting of frosted pines, with soaring mountains as a backdrop and a marshmallow terrain below. In summer it’s all babbling brooks and green as far as the eye can see. If the old-growth rainforest in Fitzsimmons Valley wasn’t enough to make this trip unforgettable, hurtling 30 storeys down the tour’s new 730-metre line is sure to do it. The three-hour escapade ends right in Whistler Village, so hit the hills once you’re done or head straight to a bar for après.
Watch Canada’s wildly diverse landscape materialise before your eyes from the comfort of a cosy train car, as you journey across the world’s second largest country. You’ll take in Canada’s five most southern provinces – British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario – as you travel from east to west (or vice versa) on board The Canadian. From the buzzing harbourside metropolis of Vancouver through the heart of the rugged Canadian Rockies and onto the multicultural mecca of Toronto, this epic journey encompasses many of the natural, urban, cultural and historical contrasts that make Canada such a beguiling nation to visit.
Those that opt for the full transcontinental shebang will roll a whopping 4,466 kilometres across the country, spending four nights and three days aboard. That leaves plenty of time to sample the local Canadian fare served up in the dining car while admiring the scenery. And should you tire of the landscapes rolling by (unlikely), then there are plenty of wine tastings and musical performances to keep you entertained.
Ever wondered what it would be like to follow in the footsteps of the Klondike stampeders? Well this is your chance to live like it’s the 1890s and do exactly that. Travelling over 100 kilometres north from Skagway, Alaska, today you will wind up in two countries, crossing from the USA into Canada’s Yukon territory and back again.
Unlike the prospectors of yesteryear you will thankfully not be attempting the treacherous mountain passes ill-equipped and by foot. Instead, my friend, you will watch the glaciers and gorges roll by your cosy train carriage window, before taking a lunch break at the scenic gold rush town of Bennett. You’ll also break from the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad to take a quick detour to the famed Klondike Highway.
Head south from Calgary, through the rangelands of Cowboy Country to where the plains meet the foothills, and you’ll find a place steeped in First Nations history. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that tells the story of the hunting practice of the native people of the North American plains – a technique used for the best part of 6000 years. Local indigenous people had such a great understanding of the region’s topography and bison behaviour that they were able to hunt bison by stampeding them over a cliff, before carving up their carcasses ready to be butchered.
Once you’ve taken in all that the UNESCO site has to offer, there’s still plenty more to see in this neck of the woods. The historic town of Fort Macleod, founded as a Northwest Mounted Police barracks in 1892, is a quaint place to get a feel for the old west. While back in Calgary you can explore Canada’s largest living history museum, Heritage Park, which escorts you from the present day back into the 19th and 20th centuries. Inside there’s Gasoline Alley Museum, where a cornucopia of vintage vehicles are on show; the Conklin Lakeview Amusements Antique Midway, with its old-fashioned Ferris wheels and carousels; and a rather kitsch historical village where you can chat to costumed characters.
Exclusive access to one of the most pristine wilderness areas in the world you say? We’re in. The remoteness of Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge means you can witness the beauty and brutality of Mother Nature up close on a Hudson Bay Odyssey tour, for there’s no other human presence within 160 kilometres.
As the name suggests, this lodge is set in the very heart of polar bear country. Your daily excursions around the Cape Tatnam Wildlife Management Area that surrounds the lodge will not only bring you (safely) face to face with polar bears, but also with wolves and black bears. It’s the unique convergence of eco-systems – whereboreal forest meets the Subarctic beside the coastal waters of the Hudson Bay – in Manitoba that allows so much local flora and fauna to flourish.
Lauded as one of the most beautiful of its kind in the world, the Buchart Gardens in Victoria is a must-do on any trip to British Columbia. Established in the early 1900s, the attraction is still owned by the same family – current owner and managing director Robin-Lee Clarke is the great-granddaughter of the founding couple. And the floral show is pretty impressive: each year over a million bedding plants in some 900 varieties offer uninterrupted bloom from March through October.
Upgrade your ride home – and make the most of the coast – by taking a floatplane back from Vancouver Island to the city. The 35-minute ride offers aerial views of Vancouver, the Gulf Islands and Victoria Harbour.
If you ever find yourself driving through the California desert, keep your eyes peeled for what looks like an old movie set. Here, in the middle of nowhere, you’ll find one of the States’ best music venues. Pappy & Harriet’s was originally established as part of Pioneertown in 1946, when a group of Hollywood hoi polloi decided to create a frontier town that hid motels, restaurants and entertainment venues.
Harriet and Pappy took over one building in 1982, set up a Tex-Mex restaurant and brought in the bands. Park yourself in a booth, down a Bud and a quesadilla and prepare for a night of good music. It’s a popular spot for Coachella sideshows, hosts its own festivals and has seen the likes of Modest Mouse and the Pixies on its stage.
Imagine you just finalised the purchase of a nineteenth-century building when Superstorm Sandy takes its roof off and fills it with a metre of mud. That’s what happened to Jaime Wiseman, but that didn’t stop him creating Playland Motel, an out-of-town getaway at Rockaway Beach.
His dream? To reinvigorate an area that was devastated by constant closures, even before the hurricane hit. Each of the 12 rooms, curated by prominent artists and designers, has a distinct aesthetic. Already attracting a hipster crowd wanting to explore beyond its regular Williamsburg haunts, it looks like the punt has paid off.
The reason this is one of the parties you have to put on your bucket list is right there in its name: Willie Nelson. Regardless of whether or not you’re a fan of country music, the 81-year-old songwriter, author, actor and activist is an absolute legend. He first held Willie’s Picnic way back in 1973 in a field in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is outside Austin if your knowledge of Texan geography isn’t that good. Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Tom T Hall co-headlined, 40,000 people turned up (according to legend that’s about 35,000 more than anyone expected) and it all turned into a bit of a debacle. Thankfully, not at all phased by the chaos that ensued, Nelson continued what would become a tradition, even if it’s had the occasional year off now and then.
For the past few years, the event has been held in a large field adjacent to Billy Bob’s Texas, the world’s biggest honky tonk – and reason enough to visit to Fort Worth – with 6000 folks grabbing themselves a ticket to country-music heaven.
Make sure you… grab a handful of napkins. Billy Bob’s Bar-B-Que operates on site and, this being a picnic, you’d be mad not to stuff yourself silly on the Texan specialty.
Don’t… go too hard too early in the Texan sun. There’s a cool zone inside Billy Bob’s if you need it.
Had a David Attenborough film crew been on board they couldn’t have asked for a more perfect moment. We’re passing an outcrop topped with a light beacon. It’s surrounded by rocks and dotted by resting sea birds. Kelp rises and falls around it with the gentle waves. There are also a few harbour seals camped on the rocks enjoying the sunshine.
Suddenly a pod of orcas rushes the islet, sending a flood of water over the rocks. The seals hold firm as the whales swim off again. Then one, a cute little baby, decides to flop into the water, and the dorsal fins of two orcas cut through the water back towards it.
On the boat, there is a sharp intake of breath. Everyone, it seems, is slightly torn. Will the seal be safe or will we bear witness to one of those moments that reveals the horrifying-slash-awe-inspiring side of the natural world?
But there’s no sudden seal-like screaming or a slick of blood on the surface of the sea. Soon enough the whales rejoin their family and we’re left to assume the tiny seal lives to swim another day.
“They’re harbour seal specialists,” says Casey Brant, one of the naturalists accompanying us on this whale-watching trip with Victoria’s Eagle Wing Tours. Probably a good thing they’ve failed today, if only for the sleep patterns of the small children observing the action from the boat.
We’d only been out on Haro Strait for about half an hour when we first came across the pod. There’s not much to it, really. The captain simply looks for a cluster of other whale-watching vessels and heads towards it. Once there, everyone scours the surface of the water, looking for the telltale tall dorsal fins. For the next hour or so, we move slowly, trying to predict when they will next pop up.
There’s no way to tell where they’ll appear. Sometimes they porpoise alongside a research boat. Occasionally their huge fins cut through the water so close to the catamaran you feel as though you could reach out and touch them. None of them breaches or displays any of the surface-slapping antics seen on a wildlife documentary, although this isn’t uncommon. This pod is hunting and its prey – seals, porpoises and, very occasionally, minke whales – can hear, so stealth is the key to success. There’s another pod of whales seen in this area, and they’re a lot more boisterous, even when hunting, since they follow salmon, which can’t hear their splashing or underwater vocalisations.
The oldest whale in this particular pod is the mother and she’s the dominant member. All six are related and they’ll stay together until the mother dies. Her oldest surviving calf is a big male, 14 years old, with a nick in his dorsal fin. “But he’s the same as a 14-year-old boy,” explains Brant. “He won’t be an adult until he’s 18 or 19.”
After about an hour, the captain decides it’s time to head into the Salish Sea – we’re so far south in British Columbia it wouldn’t be surprising if we are in US waters – to see if we can spot any humpbacks. It’s October and the right time of year, but you can never be sure whether they’ll be passing through. It must be our lucky day though, because we don’t have to go too far before a spray of water signals a big guy off in the distance. We edge closer, watching as it moves through the water before one big arch sees its tail flip up then descend into the deep. These monsters of the ocean can stay submerged for as long as 35 minutes before they have to take another gulp of air. In all, we spot seven or eight within about 45 minutes, the folks on the boat oohing and ahing as each disappears beneath the waves.
Soon, as we head back toward port, chuffed with the day’s epic sightings, there’s one more treat. A huge flock of seabirds has spotted a bait ball and is squawking, flapping, diving into the water and blocking out the sun that’s dipping in the sky.
Really, it’s just another day on Vancouver Island on Canada’s southern Pacific coast. At 31,285 square kilometres it’s a fairly substantial chunk of land (about half the size of Tasmania), but it is most remarkable for its proliferation of wildlife. On its northwest coast is Port Hardy, home of Great Bear Lodge. There are also a number of small seaside towns, including Nanaimo, where visitors snorkel with harbour seals, and Tofino, our ultimate destination. After a few false starts due to weather – fog is common, making flying conditions difficult – we arrive to find the Queen of the Peak surf competition in full swing.
The wind is biting, but the cool weather doesn’t seem to put anyone off. In front of the Long Beach Lodge Resort, boards are transported along the sand via bike, wetsuitted women sit on logs of driftwood before their turn in the waves, and dogs scurry around chasing one another and begging for pats. Out on the water, pairs face off in the competition. We grab a bite from Tacofino and enjoy the action.
Apparently this is also a popular spot for beginners. There’s a long, soft slope out past the water’s edge and the waves break in water that’s not particularly deep. The guys at the resort’s Surf Club kit people out and take them for lessons. But the water temperature is only about 13ºC, so instead of splashing out we go for a wander into the forest with Josh Lewis. When he’s not teaching people to surf, he takes photos and leads eco tours.
Vancouver Island is split down the middle by a mountain range and we’re now on the wilder, wetter west coast. Just a few minutes’ stroll from the lodge we enter a temperate rainforest, where huge conifers reach toward the sunshine. “If they haven’t been removed by man, they’ve literally been growing since the ice age,” says Lewis.
This, he tells us, is the traditional land of the Nuu-chah-nulth people. They had a rich, varied culture thanks to the offerings of the forest and sea. “They only spent about three or four hours a day hunting and gathering,” he continues, pointing out salmon berries, which ripen early each year, and antiseptic deer ferns (the Nuu-chah-nulth saw deer who’d lost their antlers rubbing the wounds on the plants and soon realised why). There’s also a natural wildlife corridor here, where you can spot wolves, bears and cougars if you’re lucky. Today, we see banana slugs. Everywhere. “They make up 80 per cent of the biomass in the forest,” Lewis tells us, as someone spots yet another one sliming up a tree trunk.
Of course, when you’ve got some of the biggest red cedar trees in the world growing in your midst, commerce is never far behind. Protecting this forest and others nearby are local environmentalists and the Nuu-chah-nulth. In 1984, they erected a blockade on nearby Meares Island, with its 9000 hectares of pristine forest, to stop forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel from harvesting the land. It was the first time in British Columbia’s history a court granted an injunction in favour of an indigenous tribe and its land claim. As tourism has grown here, there’s been a change in logging practices, although there are only two remaining valleys in the lower third of Vancouver Island that remain completely pristine.
Back when the resources industries – logging and fishing mainly – were king, Tofino was a very different town. Howard McDiarmid arrived in 1955 as the town’s sole doctor, and saw the area’s potential as a destination for travellers. He pushed to have a road put in. “Until 1959 you could only get here by plane or boat,” says his son Charles, who’s the managing director of the Wickaninnish Inn, the luxury lodge he built in 1996. Now the town, which has a population of about 1850 people, boasts a craft brewery that makes bevvies like Hunt & Gather Kettle Sour, Kelp Stout and Spruce Tree Ale, a coffee roasting company, a store selling artisanal chocolate and restaurants like Wolf In The Fog, where chef Nicholas Nutting creates menus “inspired and influenced by the place, people and produce”. They are like the urbane cherries on the wilderness cake.
With Wolf In The Fog coffee firmly in hand, we wander down near the water. Kayakers are getting ready on one jetty as we head for Jamie’s Whaling Station. Tofino is one part of the Clayoquot Sound, where tiny islands and rocky inlets are home to some of Vancouver Island’s most introverted residents.
We take a seat undercover on the 40-foot Stellar Sea and cruise off. A light fog has lifted and the sun is beating down on the glassy surface of the Fortune Channel. We motor past salmon farms and fishing boats, staring out at the rocky coastline looking for our prize: black bears.
Normally these guys hang in the forest, but when the tide is low they come down to the water’s edge looking for food. We see a couple of rigid-hull inflatables, passengers rugged up in waterproof overalls and propped on seats at the front of the vessel, cruising the shore in vain. Lucky it’s a beautiful morning because there’s not much bear action.
It isn’t until we’re passing a vacant fishing shack that we spot her. It’s a mother bear with her cub. They’ve come out of the trees and are crossing a log, using their claws to remove the barnacles and whatever else they can find attached to the bottom of it. When they’ve scratched away all they can they continue on to the house, sneaking up on to the porch. “She’s going to be trouble,” says skipper Scott MacDonald. After all, bears and humans don’t play well together.
The mother and baby cross from the shack to a tiny outcrop on a rope and head back into the trees. As MacDonald manoeuvres the vessel to where we may be able to see them again, there’s another surprise. A big male bear has come down to a rocky beach opposite. He’s fat and glossy, a good indication food has been plentiful this season. If it continues that way, he may have another month or so before he beds down for the winter and begins his hibernation. Today, he’s flipping rocks looking for rock crabs and other creatures to eat. “It’s like bear sushi,” says MacDonald.
The big bear doesn’t pay us any mind as he lumbers along the shore. He’s safe here and, if the human residents of Vancouver Island have their way, he will be for many more years to come.
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