Coffee and muffin for a healthy breakfast, nothing fried today. Left the Cambie with all my baggage and decided to walk to the Greyhound Station. Very nearly died walking with a full backpack in the heat (had suddenly turned into something of a heat wave), not a very sensible idea. Took a quick shot of the shiny science museum, which I’d never got to see.
At the station I caught the Pacific Coach Line to Victoria for $40, which included an hours journey over to the island by ferry.
Luckily enough I’d been to Victoria briefly before on a family holiday, so knew that pretty much everything in town was crowded along the waterfront, so found my hostel easily.
HI Victoria was clean and large, excellent showers and bathrooms, but unfortunately there were very few beds left so I had to bunk in a dorm with 40, yes, 40! other guys. That’s a lot of snoring and noise at night I can tell you.
Victoria itself is a very self consciously pretty town, kept in pristine order down by the water front for the tourists. Everything is green and pleasant and just so, but if you walk a half dozen streets back it looks much like any other largish Canadian town. Is a little bit like a plain woman wearing a veneer of make up on a date.
Chinese for dinner.
Decided to head for a localish ‘pub’ called the Sticky Wicket several streets away from the tourist area. The Sticky Wicket is a very strange place, being the Canadian idea of what a quaint English pub should look like. So everything is wooden, with strange nick-nacks on the walls, but the place is huge with a couple of pool tables. It looked to me how an ‘Irish’ bar must look to an Eireman.
Sitting at the bar, having a few drinks and chatting to those around me, (as you do in Canada) I ended up talking to a dude called Jason. Weirdly enough he’d lived in the tiny teeny town of Harps for a while, and we reminisced about its pubs and the strangeness of meeting someone else who’d been there. It is a small world after all it seems.
Got stinking drunk at a club called Luckys.
Luckily (no pun intended) it was directly opposite the hostel and the staggering distance wasn’t too far. Even having drunk endless tequilas I could just about manage it with a minimum of bumping into walls. Made good use of the excellent bathroom facilities that evening.
