The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
CANADA ESSENTIALS
Nootka Sound, this is still a remote corner of Vancouver
Island. Certainly, swathes of the indigenous forest, the towering red cedars and
Douglas Firs, were plundered for timber. But the trees had apparently grown back, and the landscape left pretty much unchanged.
But getting to Resolution Cove isn’t straightforward. It isn’t easy even to explore Nootka Sound. Vancouver Island is one of British
Columbia’s most popular tourist destinations, but the vast majority of visitors stay in the southern half, heading down to Victoria (capital of BC), or driving over to the surfing resort of Tofino on the west coast. To get to Nootka, you have to take a seaplane (or ferry) from Vancouver to Nanaimo and then the highway north, before crossing the island’s mountainous spine and dipping down Nick Trend flew to Vancouver with Air Canada (aircanada.com), which offers two daily services from London with returns from £555.
In Vancouver he stayed at the Shangri-La (shangrila.com); doubles from £250. The seaplane transfer to Nanaimo was with Harbour Air (harbourairgroup.com), which offers returns from £82, and car hire was arranged through National Car Rental (nationalcar.ca). At Gold River he stayed at The Lodge (thelodgeat goldriver.ca), a fishing lodge, which also accommodates non-fishing guests – rooms from £230. A day cruise on MV Uchuck III (getwest.ca) costs £50. Several itineraries are available in the summer months, including some that stop in Yuquot and include an overnight stay – plan and book well ahead.
Nick’s trip was supported by Destination British Columbia (hellobc.co.uk) and Destination Canada (explore-canada.co.uk). to the tiny settlement of Gold River. It’s not a hardship. The road – especially the last east to west section – weaves spectacularly through a series of national parks, unfurling around classic vistas of forest-fringed lakes. But it’s a good four to five-hour drive.
Gold River itself is a tiny community, with a small harbour on a bay a few miles down the road. It mostly serves the lumber trade, but it also offers the best way to see Nootka Sound. As long as you plan. On certain days of the week an old wooden supply boat converted from a Forties US Navy minesweeper – MV Uchuck III – departs on a circular itinerary to service the handful of remote communities scattered around the sound. It takes 30 or 40 paying passengers, too, mostly Canadians, who camp out on the upper deck to enjoy what amounts to a panoramic cruise through some of their country’s most extraordinarily beautiful scenery. You can tell you are in for a treat as soon as you drive down to the quay and stand on the edge of the wilderness of sea, wood and rock stretching into the far distance. The forested sides of the mountains plunge steeply into the cold, dark water, there are almost no boats and the scars of civilisation are few, and easily ignored.
To a large extent, you have to take pot luck with what you see on the cruise. This is a supply ship, and its stops are generally determined not by the passengers, but by its customers in those remote communities. I was nervous. There was no guarantee we would pass Resolution Cove – it would depend on the day’s schedule. The captain, though friendly, was noncommittal when I asked him. “We’ll see, but it depends on how we go.”
At least the sun was shining. At least I would see one side of Bligh Island and get a sense of the sound and its network of channels. And there was lots of wildlife to look out for. One of the tragic consequences of Cook’s voyage was an explosion in demand for sea otter pelts, which fetched high prices in China when the Resolution sold the stock it had bought from the Muchalahts en route back to Britain. During the 19th century they were hunted to virtual extinction. Over the past 100 years, however, numbers have recovered well and they can (apparently) often be spotted “rafting” – floating on their backs in large groups, and holding each others’ paws to keep together. Pacific dolphins, Californian sea lions, grey and humpback whales and orcas also make their way into the sound. I was unlucky on all those counts, but I think I did spot a wolf, and, in the distance, a black bear that had come down to the shoreline to forage for seafood. And bald eagles wheeling high overhead were a common sight.
It was fun also to follow the rhythms of a working boat, watching the crew crane the supply pallets out of the hold Never run out of water on the high seas with this bottle with an inbuilt filtration system. £89.99, iconlifesaver. com Attach your binoculars to your smartphone with Swarovski Optik’s adapter for close-up images.
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and on to the jetties. We called at a floating fishing lodge and an enormous lumber camp where we spent a good hour watching outsize mechanical grabbers bundling logs together and dumping them into floating pens ready to be rafted together for the tugs. Then there were a couple of fish farms, and a remote settlement near Yuquot. To Cook, this was Friendly Cove, where the Muchalaht chief was based.
By now, it was getting late, but I knew we weren’t too far from Resolution Cove – we just needed to sweep a little further round the south of Bligh Island, rather than retrace our course to the north. I ventured on to the bridge for one last try. The skipper checked the chart, winked and reached for his Tannoy. “We seem to have a few fans of Captain Cook on board, so I’m going to take you back the scenic way,” he announced to the ship in general.
As we approached the cove, the Uchuck slowed right down so that we could have a good long look. There was the wooded foreshore, the rocky bluff in the middle of the horseshoe, the beach where the carpenters had worked. There was nothing else. This was the cove as Cook had first seen it. One of the crew began reading a historical spiel over the loudspeakers, but I wasn’t listening. My mind was in a strange place. I was back in the 18th century with the Resolution and her crew. But, confusingly, at the same time I was also in my childhood bedroom, staring at a map on the wall.
– a British Library (bl.uk) exhibition of art, charts and maps from his expeditions is open over the bank holiday weekend, but closes on Tuesday. The Royal Academy (royalacademy.org.uk) exhibition
which is devoted to Pacific art over the past 500 years, including some pieces brought back from Cook’s voyages, opens on Sept 29.