Vancouver Island Part 2 and Salt Spring Island!!!

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Our next stop on our tour of Vancouver island was a few days in Victoria. Johnny was kind enough to let us stay with him in his sweet appartment which we used as a base to explore the city. We headed straight for downtown on our first day and visited the museum which has lots of First Nation's art but it was sad to see that many culturally significant totem poles had been "bought" by the museum to be displayed to the public rather than left where they were found to be continued to be used by the community. We then headed to a place called Fishermen's wharf which included a community of floating houses and the best fish and chips in town. The resident seals also paid us a visit and posed for the camera.

On the Sunday before Christmas we found a Baptist church which was great! We went back that evening for a Christmas service and sung carols which were amazing as they had a full choir all in matching blue robes and some of the singers were phenomonal.

After 3 days in Victoria we got up in the wee hours of the morning to catch a ferry to the pretty Salt Spring Island. We were a bit slow getting off the ferry due to a little tiff we were having and we missed the only bus for the next 2.5 hours! We certainly saw the folly of our argument when we realised it was 7am on a small island where everyone was still asleep. After enjoying the magnificant sunrise we decided to start walking/hitching across the island 40 minutes later we were picked up by a lovely lady on her way to work. Chris still insists our success was due to his epic hitch hiking strategies.

We realised that one could not catch public transport around the island as it only occured twice a day & it was quiet season so we had less options ie. we couldn't hire a bike. So we hired a car for the day and had our first experience driving on the wrong side of the road 😊

We then decided to hike one of the many mountains around us. We took about 2 and half hours return to scale Mt Erskine and were rewarded with sweeping views of the Island. To reward ourselves for our efforts we went to Salt Spring Island Cheese Factory http://www.saltspringcheese.com/ & it was intriguing to see the cheese making process & we bought some for a picnic lunch!

We then caught the ferry home & arrived back at our place in vancouver very late at night with 2 days to rest before our Christmas trip.



Ps. there will be more photos of chris next trip

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Photos

Mum - biggest gingerbread house ever!
and we made it... or not. It was a aprt of a christmas tree competition for charity we visited

Government building
All lit up for Christmas

The Sunrise on Salt spring island
After we missed our bus