victoria

Dates traveled: August 2013 – July 2015; May 6, 2017

Let’s start with the ferry ride: to this day probably my favourite mode of transportation. The first time I arrived in Victoria was when I moved there, dragging an oversized van full of my life onto the terminal for the final ferry of the night. It was dark over the ocean, so I didn’t get to appreciate the way everything looked that time, but in my many trips back to the mainland or the smaller islands around Vancouver Island, it really sinks in that you’re going to an island.

I still have mixed feelings about Victoria. If you haven’t been anywhere else in the area, it seems like paradise. It’s mountainous, green, temperate, has great views, and it’s a big enough city where there are things to do. There’s a reason why it’s such a coveted place to move as soon as you get married or when you’re in your final years.

The crazy thing is that it’s not one of the prettiest places on the island. The more remote spots, or even some of the places within an hour’s drive of the city, have what Victoria has but to the next level. Plus there aren’t nearly as many tourists (a lot of cruise ships stop at Ogden point, near the Parliament buildings in Victoria). And lately it’s gotten expensive as hell.

In the summer the green turns yellow from lack of rain. It’s sort of a Victoria paradox in that you desire the mild summer and break from the rain, but the earth around you is so obviously starving for moisture, which makes it less physically appealing. On the other hand, the winter is windy, wet and dark, yet in February while it’s still chilly, everything blooms so beautifully you wish you could live in the energy’s bright vivacity.

At the beach at the base of Cook Street, you look past open ocean to the Olympic mountains far in the distance, and on clear days you can see lights from Port Angeles, Washington, a small town whose number one tourist attraction is taking the ferry to Victoria. The sound of the waves beating the shore reminds me of a giant bathtub running constantly, meaning you have to yell to be heard when nearby the tide. For the younger folks, it’s like at a club on Friday night. It helps blur the noise and lets me think.

The beach is a beautiful place to sit during the day. It’s super dark at night, but some light escapes from nearby streetlights, across the water in Washington, and various ships passing. At night there are few people around, making it a sort of private environment, though when you do come across people it can be kind of freaky because you can’t see them until the last second a lot of times and the shadows play tricks on your mind. There was one night with Justin that I wanted to hike along the beach and overtop some rocks in the dark, but while we were walking he kept thinking driftwood was sinister people instead of inanimate objects, so we had to turn back before too long.

This beach and the areas surrounding it remain some of my favourite spots that felt like home. Walking to the beach from my apartment, I would pass through Cook Street Village, which is a small strip of activity that has all the necessary things you’d want in a neighbourhood without being much – restaurant, coffee, bar, pharmacy, convenience store, pet store, bookstore, grocery store, a park. The sidewalk turns into mulch the closer you get to the beach, which makes the 15 minute walk super unique, especially when the cherry trees or blooming or a peacock has wandered from Beacon Hill Park. I wonder how long until those things are destroyed, if there aren’t already.

Part of what I loved about this beach and about Cook Street Village is that they’re near popular places without being super popular themselves. One place that is a bit more popular that I still enjoyed is Clover Point. Cars park there to look at the ocean while people make out or think about death or whatever people think about alone in their cars. What I liked most about Clover Point wasn’t so much being there as it was looking at it from the beach. It had some of the only visible lights around, hanging lonely over a handful of parked cars. On my evening runs I would jog there and take a short break to try to remember what everything looked like around me. It felt like I was over-rushed with beauty that also had a certain sadness.

Close to Clover Point is Ross Bay Cemetery, which is a graveyard masquerading as a park. It wasn’t uncommon to see deer there or in the nearby streets. At first, coming across deer walking down the street and eating leaves in a graveyard is pretty special. I remember the first time I saw a deer – it was in Kenora, the place whose claim to fame is that it’s near the Manitoba border. After seeing a hundred or so, it’s not that I don’t like deer, and I still smile and watch them for a moment. But it has become normalized, the excitement washed off.

Beacon Hill Park sits on the south end of downtown, a close walk from where I was living. One side of the park runs alongside Cook Street Village. Though not as big or as famous as Stanley Park in Vancouver, I think Beacon Hill is nicer and more accessible. The trees are giant. There are several ponds with ducks, peacocks, and other animals wandering around. It’s not overly urbanized, which can make it feel like you’ve slipped into seclusion.

The guy who designed Beacon Hill ended up designing something called Central Park in New York right after. Every once in a while a body is found here, sometimes determined as accidental, other times dumped. Most often it’s filled with families and older adults, with its children’s petting zoo and multiple jungle gym area. It also has lots of small paths without artificial light, and of course peacocks.

The first time I went to the harbour I was pretty taken aback. Coming from central Canada, there weren’t a lot of nice harbours around. It stopped being as novel after awhile, though, and it was a prime spot for tourist crowds in the summer. It was nicest at night when it wasn’t very busy. I find it both special and eerie to walk around places that often are completely full of people when they’re almost empty. Feels like I’ve stumbled on some kind of history.

Right next to the harbour is the provincial parliament, normally draped in lights, and there’s also the main downtown strips. Like the market in Ottawa, it’s worth seeing, but living there it stops being as exciting pretty quickly.

Victoria has the oldest Chinatown in Canada. It’s not much though, to be honest. It’s a pretty small area, though it’s located downtown so it sees high traffic. The coolest thing is probably these narrow alleys that get gated at night. Some stores even have their storefronts in these alleys, though most the time it’s a back entrance while their main entrance is on of the main streets. I always meant to hang out on one of those tiny alley patios but never got around to it.

Towards the end of when Justin was living with me for two months, when he was more familiar with the area, he went out to take pictures without me more. Towards the end of anything it gets hard to produce new content. On his last few trips, you can really see how dead the grass is in Victoria summers, and the one lawn that is green I’m assuming gets watered. There are also more dogs in those photos, which rings rather true to the experience of Victoria.

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It’s like when vacationing to Victoria in the summer: you expect trees and beautiful landscapes, which there are, but you don’t expect dead grass everywhere or a general lack of blooming things. You hear that the west coast rains a lot, so you assume that means 12 months a year. Expectations aren’t always true – sometimes narratives develop based on part-truths. It does rain a lot sometimes, but that spirals into an over-simplification. Nothing so tenuous can be true all the time, because then what are we comparing it to?

Sometimes a fresh perspective can re-show you that where you live really is a nice place. Everywhere has things that make it enjoyable, you just have to be conscious of the way you look at them.