Darwin's, the onsite café that serves up fresh soups, breads and smoothies, proves it's impossible to have a bad meal anywhere in this region. The Darwin part is a tribute of sorts, curios, art and an old microscope set up a corner of the café. When Josie charmed us with the free-range chicken eggs in her apron (“look how big this one is”), George commented wryly, “You spend thousands on plants, and the kids love to see the $2 chickens the most.”
We ended the evening with dinner at the Wickaninnish, a gorgeous hotel on a headland with rugged rocks to one side of the dining room and pure unadulterated beach on the other. Also post and beam, with floor-to-ceiling windows on an almost complete hexagonal shape, with a central fireplace, the restaurant offered a deep wine list and a menu of local delicacies. A scrim of running salmon in hammered copper separated off one seating area; a giant Haida Gwaii mask set off another. The sun (sun! again!) slipped down below a light veil of cloud.
If, like us, you're not into surfing, you can get onto the water by boat. You can take a Marine Adventure from Long Beach Lodge. We saw a sea otter or two and, strangely, cows grazing on seaweed. At the small village of Ahousaht on Flores Island, we met a crinkly, crusty woman who had once worked the commercial fisheries. She told us, “I like that Harper. He has good hair. I voted for him.”
Or you can get out in the waves by kayak. The next day, I got up early and returned to Tofino Sea Kayaking (the operator also runs a café called End of the Road, plus a well-curated book spot – everyone seems to work three gigs). Our guide Tim patiently coached five of us (a mother-daughter from Kerrisdale; a young German couple from Cologne) through the workings of the double kayak. Then we made our way under glorious sun through channels filled with bull kelp and kelp crabs, chittering kinglets, starfish, a luminous red-eyed medusa or two. The channel was busy: One of the original native dugout canoes – heavy, but impressively carved – carries tourists who paddle, 10 to a boat, giving them a hint of what transportation was like many years ago.
We were making our way to Meares Island, the site of the famous Clayoquot Sound clear-cut logging protest, which seems to have defined the residents. The mantra “the most biomass per square metre” in the temperate rain forest was repeated endlessly; the fact that the protest seemed to put Tofino on the map, while Ucluelet appeared to languish as a logging town, was also a point of pride. The Big Tree Trail boardwalk through Meares Island took us to the real old-growth cedars: Trees so big you can stand six or seven people inside; tree tops with multiple spires called “candelabra” and “cake-fork”; trees 1,000 years old or more called “Hanging Garden” or “Old Mother” (which sadly was felled by winds a few years ago). With hemlock growing right through the cedar “nurse logs” that fall and decay, it is a dizzying brocade of monster roots and twisted limbs – trees entwined and soaring, vine-like, up other trunks, everything searching for light. Layer in lush moss, the strange “witch's broom” wheeled form of branches, and Old Man's Beard lichen, and it's impossible not to think in fairy-tale terms.
Once I got my tree curiosity out of my system, it was all about the beach. We returned to the park and had a pair of wide-handled cruiser bikes delivered, from Tof Cycle, to the parking lot at Incinerator Rock. From there we cycled for two hours over a stretch of sand untrammelled by development any more sophisticated than the raggedy driftwood huts the surfers erect for shelter.
