Victoria BC - the garden city

30 September 2022

Victoria is a 95-minute BC Ferries trip from Tsawwassen, the ferry terminal south of Vancouver, to Swartz Bay, on Vancouver Island, followed by a 45-minute bus ride south into the city.

Our hotel was very conveniently located a stone’s throw from the charming Inner Harbour, an historic fishing and shipbuilding area rooted in trade dating back to the coastal First Nations. It’s a bustling place with cruise ships, recreational boats, ferries, and float planes gliding in and out: ideal for walking and people watching and very close to the city’s historic downtown core.

Overlooking the harbor are BC’s graceful Parliament buildings, a Victoria landmark. We missed the guided tour but had breakfast there in the wood-panelled dining room before embarking on our walking tour around downtown Victoria. We especially enjoyed the historical Cook Street Village, with its European feel, eclectic stores, coffee houses, gourmet grocers, clothing boutiques, Brit-style pubs, and creative eateries. The neighbourhood spans five blocks between Oscar and Leonard Streets and has a real, old-world ambience. Johnson Street houses many handsome heritage buildings as well as Canada’s oldest Chinatown.

High tea in Victoria is a long tradition and so we booked a traditional English afternoon tea at the iconic Fairmont Empress hotel, a stately brick Edwardian frequented by royalty. The dining room and service were both suitably elegant but at a price tag of over 100 Canadian dollars per person, we had been expecting more than a plate of pastries, finger sandwiches and flaky scones.

An hour away by bus from Victoria is arguably the island’s biggest draw, the celebrated Butchart Gardens: 55 acres of showy displays of flowers, blossoms, shrubs, and trees meticulously manicured and landscaped, plus an enormous Chinese dragon. We spent a delightful couple of hours strolling through probably the most beautiful gardens we have ever seen with our two preferences being the classic rose garden and the Japanese garden.

Back in Victoria, we checked out the Royal BC Museum with its focus on First Nations Art and artefacts as well as on natural and human history through a social and environmental lens. We also checked out an immersive IMAX movie, one of only 35 such state-of-the-art systems in the world. But our most poignant memory of our short stay in Victoria was when we stumbled into an event at the museum to celebrate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Canada has a dark history with regard to the treatment of the native population. For more than 100 years, Canadian authorities forcibly separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and made them attend residential schools, which aimed to sever Indigenous family and cultural ties and assimilate the children into white Canadian society. The schools, which were run by churches from the 1870s until 1996, were rife with physical, mental and sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of violence. A handful of survivors from these schools related their traumatic experiences as children there to the audience with their pain and grief still very much apparent today.