So… Remember when I said this was going to be a train trip across America?
While that was certainly the original intention, Amtrak’s stupid timetables have again come in the way like once before, so I had to get creative to make my way from Seattle to Vancouver.
The obvious alternative would have been to take the bus…
Instead I decided to celebrate the last leg of this trip by doing something completely crazy.
I flew.
On a Seaplane.
There are however no seaplanes flying directly from Seattle to Vancouver.
So I went to Victoria (on Vancouver Island) and then connected on to an Helicopter. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? 😀
This was my first time on both a seaplane and an helicopter, and thanks also to the amazing weather it made for a day to remember for sure. My only mistake was to sit on the wrong side on both rides (pro tip: if you do the same trip, sit on the left side behind the pilot, the view is better from there 🙂 ).
I must say I enjoyed the ride on the Seaplane best, probably because although this was clearly not Patagonia, we had no storm chasing us and we eventually made it into port safely it still made me think of a book I really loved, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “Night flight“.
What added an additional twist of suspense to the the trip was that I had totally missed the fact that Canada now has an ESTA-like system. I applied yesterday morning 2 hours before my flight and kept my fingers crossed… And luckily the confirmation email arrived right as I was checking in for my seaplane ride.
Victoria itself is quite a cute town. Had I planned the trip a bit better I could have probably spent my few hours there going whale-watching, but even strolling around the city and checking out the very impressive exhibit at the Royal British Columbia Museum was very enjoyable. This museum does an incredible job at telling the history of BC, starting from the Native Americans that were here before the Europeans arrived to the first explorations of the area and its colonization and development in the last 200 years.
Another pleasant surprise was the incredible tikka seared Pacific tuna in tomato tamarind masala I had at Fishhook, quite possibly the best meal I have had on this entire trip (so yay once more for the unexpected, unplanned stops of this trip that turned out to be pretty amazing!).
In the evening, once I finally made it to Vancouver (the city), I decided to round off this crazy day at The Shameful Tiki Room.
At first I thought the oddest thing in the room was the couple on a date sitting behind me, with the guy in a full Jack Sparrow costume that immediately made me think of this:
This was however before I started a conversation with the Russian guy who moved here 7 years ago to skip the military service and is now working in an Italian bar (where he is affectionately referred to as “Pippo”), his girlfriend from Sweden who has only been in Vancouver for 3 weeks and their French-Canadian buddy… We definitely outdid Jack Sparrow in terms of being the weirdest group in the bar, and had a lot of fun drinking mystery bowls and shots of Fernet (as far as I remember :D).