Vancouver Island part two - Tofino

Our next destination was Tofino - as the crow flies, not a huge distance to travel, but reaching it by mainstream roads involved doing what amounted to three sides of a rectangle. Given the scenery most of the way, this was no hardship. I was also very keen to visit the famous Cathedral Grove.

We arrived mid morning or so and already then, the limited car parking was mostly full - but we just found a space. As expected there were a fair few visitors, but it didn't stop us from being in complete awe of the massive and somewhat chaotic collection of trees. The light was somewhat dull but a bit of drizzle added a little atmosphere, with occasional sunlight making contrast hard to handle. Most of the time you walk on boardwalks, which of course bounce with other visitors passing by, so using a tripod was also tricky.

I did my best! And the image above was probably my best of our all too brief visit - a bit of relatively watery sunlight just giving that bit of depth and definition. I had in mind the wonderful paintings of Emily Carr of this same woodland, though trying to emulate is another matter! It really is impossible to do justice photographically, particularly with one short visit - but we were so glad to have had the chance to see the magnitude of this ancient forest.

We continued to Tofino where we stayed in a lovely hotel just on the edge of the water, yet within walking distance of town. Although quite touristy, it had a lovely feel to it. We had booked kayak trip for the next day with Paddle West Kayaking and spent a lovely few hours kayaking around the bay and onto Meares Island, which itself has some wonderful old growth temperate rainforest.

It wasn't really practical to take photographs whilst we were on the water, what with sticking within our group and managing currents, etc, but I did get a little opportunity on the lovely Meares Island. Again we walked on boardwalks and saw some fabulous old trees - in particular some massive cedar. I'd like to have spent longer, but then that is true of pretty much everywhere I visit on holidays!

It was a thoroughly enjoyable trip and we saw plenty of birds as well as another extraordinarily cute sea otter. Being only a four hour trip, we had plenty of time later to explore some of the beaches, ending up at Comber's beach - a beautiful and vast expanse of sand, windswept and with the usual mix of birds and driftwood keeping our interest as we walked along much of its length.

The sand patterns alone could have kept me busy for hours, left to my own devices, but I was glad we kept moving as we came across a very entertaining flock of sandpipers feeding at the shore, running, flying and generally taking no attention of us.

The strong sunlight and my lack of bird photography skills made things a challenge, but I tried to use a reasonably slow shutter speed to capture a bit of movement. I think it's a technique that lends itself better to softer light, but it was fun trying and we just loved watching them - such characters!

We had an evening meal booked so had to tear ourselves away eventually and head back to town. The following morning, we got up early to visit Tonquin beach and to walk parts of the Tonquin Trail - a variety of roadworks and no entry signs made things a little confusing, but we did eventually find our way to the beautiful woodland trail and then down to the beach where we were again blessed with a bit of sea fog!

Early light and fog is of course a wonderful combination - one I very rarely seem to encounter, but it's quite hard to make the most of it when visiting somewhere for the first time, so headless chicken mode was employed! In reality it was just beautiful to be there and, being quite early, it was quiet - a real treat.

The fog appeared to be dissipating only to come back even thicker for a while, all but hiding the view out to sea. It was wonderfully eerie and atmospheric.

We returned to the forest trail and found ourselves walking much further than we'd anticipated - had we not had to check out of our hotel mid morning, who knows how far we might have got!

It was all a bit awe inspiring - just so different to anything we have at home and both woodland and occasional vistas out to sea were a delight. So many amazing trees and once again so hard to find ways to photograph them, particularly once the fog had left us.

It was a fabulous walk, but all good things must come to an end so we returned to the hotel, checked out and continued our journey. Our next hotel was in Ucluelet, which is only half an hour or so further south on the coast, but we'd identfied another couple of other walks we wanted to do en route.

The first of these was the Forest Trail - which involved two short boardwalk loops through temperate rainforest. Both trails were absolutely stunning, even the areas that had lost the old growth trees; photography was challenging with a bright sun high in the sky, but the backlit woodland canopy was just breathtakingly beautiful.

Backlighting is a wonderful gift, even if highlights were a little tricky to tame in such bright conditions! We then moved a little further south still and did the Shore Pine bog Trail which was a complete contrast but no less fascinating - very different from our bogs back home and I loved the Shore Pine trees - great shapes and textures.

We finished by doing a much longer walk from Wickaninnish beach to Florencia Bay, which looked gorgeous, but we found ourselves running out of time to explore properly and vowed to return to the bay another day.