Moving Down The Coast

Fri. 25^th September ‘26

We’re staying on the west coast today, but there is no simple coast road. Instead, as a minimum, we have to go back to Port Alberni (named after a c18^th Spanish captain). The Alberni inlet is Vancouver Island’s largest and essentially splits the west coast into two – it is a very crinkly island. Google offers us two routes – the shorter goes up to Port Alberni and then cuts through the middle of the island. The longer route goes past Alberni all the way back to Coombs and the east coast then south on the main road before cutting back west.

The longer (distance) route is nearly an hour quicker than the shorter one and that can only be because the shorter road is actually a gravel track and probably fairly windy at that. It’s an easy decision to vote for less time driving and therefore more time sightseeing, an earlier arrival and less stress. It also gives us a chance to see some of the sights that we didn’t have time – or the light – for a couple of days ago. Kennedy Lake is a prime example. It is the island’s largest lake, but two days ago we were looking straight into the sun at the viewpoint. The lake is still too large to properly capture, but at least we’re not having to squint.

Next up is the McLean Mill Historic Site, an old steam operated sawmill that operated from 1926 to 1965. These dates are both more and less recent than I expected given the power source. That the buildings are all made of timber is entirely unsurprising and there is enough of the factory in place to give us a feel of the workflow from the cut logs coming in one end, through stages of trimming and cutting to identically sized planks out of the other end. My abiding thoughts are: Firstly, it must have been incredibly dangerous to work here – steam power, big power saw discs and heavy logs and all. But secondly, how different is a modern sawmill?

We also had the chance to go through Coombs again and say hello to the goats on the roof of the market. They were still there, but not posing any better for our cameras so we passed straight through. There was something much more important on our minds (well, mine anyway) – lunch!! Google Maps shows another 4.8 rated café in the nearby town of Ladysmith. We are a bit wary after my last suggestion was very nice but service at funereal pace. This turns out to be much better. Yes, quirky – yam & peanut soup (actually quite tasty and with a bit of a chilli kick) – but much better service. As a bonus frozen home-made pies for us tonight as we are self-catering.

Before we finally start heading west again, we get to the town of Duncan. It is on Claude’s itinerary because of the Totem Pole Trail, but Janet finds that the trail starts at a Railway Museum. Sadly, it is a museum in the old railway station – so not quite the same thing. Anyway, we get to stretch our legs a little and examine the carving of the 40-odd totem poles as the trail winds its way through town. This is likely to be all the walking that we get to do today.

From Duncan, we can now cut back across to the west coast of the island. It’s an unremarkable though wiggly-waggly drive peppered with single lane bridges where you need to work out whether or not you have priority over oncoming traffic (not that there was much of that). Our only stop was at Fairy Lake to photograph the bonsai tree, the most photographed tree in British Columbia / Vancouver Island / Port Renfrew depending on where you look. Anyway, I suffered to get to the lakeside to take this picture so now it’s your turn!

And then we get to Port Renfrew. I expect that in 10 year’s time it will be a thriving town the size of Tofino, but right now it is a scattered hamlet on the Port Juan inlet off the Pacific coast. We had been warned that there is no mobile data, but that was OK because the apartment we’d booked had Starlink internet. Except that it didn’t. After some searching and head-scratching, we (I) accept that we’re going to be off-grid for a while and we’ll have to catch up with the blog when we’re back in civilization. There were a few other niggles with the apartment and the meat pies turned out to be not as meaty as we’d hoped – just one of those occasions where it could have been really wonderful, but it didn’t quite work out.