Island Living (updated 15/12)

Hello world travel fans!

Today for our informative update, it's time for a little info on Canada! Did you know for instance that tea-friendly, Granny-loving, English-wannabe city, Victoria is the capital of British Columbia? I didn't until we visited. Don't say you never learn anything reading this blog!

Despite its status as the North American capital of overpriced cream teas, Victoria is actually quite a cool place - having interesting cafes, boutique shops and a small, but characterful Chinatown (more of a Chinavillage, but hey). The biggest bonus to us just now, however, is the FREE internet (remember folks, cheap is good, FREE IS BEST!) we can get by hooking up our borrowed (in other words, temporarily FREE!) laptop. This is especially useful as we have quite a bit of time on our hands (because we're being incredibly lazy at times so have plenty of time to check out things like emails, football results, celebrity gossip (not really...). Anyway, because it's free, we're taking full advantage.

So the first stop on our tour of Vancouver Island after Victoria was the little town that could: Chermainus. In the 1980's the town's mill closed its doors and left the town without a major industry to support it. Faced with bankruptcy, the town turned to art for salvation and offered up the town walls to muralists. This decision proved to be the town's salvation as now thousands of tourists visit to see their famous murals. We stopped there on our way up the east coast of the island between Victoria and Nanaimo.


When we got there, the first thing that struck us was the freezing cold weather. We later found out that many Canadians come here during the winter because of the mild climate! Although when you hear that it's common for the mercury to tip -30 Celsius this time of year you can see why - it was a balmy +2 degrees here. Our time in Chermainus was spent trying to escape the cold (or perhaps warm?) weather by grabbing breakfast in a local cafe and tea in a local tea room. Everyone we spoke to in Chermainus was really nice and friendly and we had a great time talking to local people and trying to ignore the cold. Luckily it wasn't too cold to indulge in a spot of our favourite pastime - dog stalking!

We walked down to the waterfront and managed to track down a few dogs with owners willing to stop and talk. Our favourite was a 3 month old German Shepherd whose feet, tail and ears looked like they belonged to a much older dog. She'll grow into them though. We also stopped by local tea-room "Twisted Sisters" which was recommended by our Lonely Planet guidebook. It was started up a few years ago by twin sisters as "something to do". They were very impressed that they'd made it into the Lonely Planet and were very grateful we told them - apparently they didn't know already! Having tea there was a complicated matter as they have over 200 (ish) varieties (or varie-teas - ho ho). The vanilla earl grey I had was pretty good - although I think I prefer Dilmah. It was nice to try though.

In the next few days we'll be exploring more of the island and experiencing more of what is on offer here. We're already thinking that we'll need to come back at some point because we don't really have enough time to do the whole island justice - but I'm sure we'll be back in Seattle at some point.