Canada, North America
Travel
Galiano Island — A Place Frozen in Time an Hour From Vancouver
By MATT GROSS | The New York Times
"Like most people on Galiano," she said, "you come for a weekend and you stay for your life."
From the ice-cold waters of the Strait of Georgia, the 150-mile-long waterway that separates Vancouver Island from mainland British Columbia, the eastern shore of Galiano Island looked untouched by man — if not by nature. The sandstone shore was curled and carved by centuries of storms and waves, and beyond it rose the spruce, fir and russet-trunk arbutus trees that cover much of this skinny, 19-mile-long island. South of where I swam was a sheltered cove, Pebble Beach, protected from the wind, its namesake pebbles warmed by the unclouded sun. Under the water lay thick-bodied ocher starfish, and on its surface floated the bulbous heads of bull kelp.
The only sign I saw, one afternoon in early August, that human beings lived on Galiano were the not-so-bulbous heads and not-so-thick bodies of Heather, Noah and Miss Mae, the 20-something strangers I'd met five minutes before, who themselves were floating in the water in a prehistoric state: They were naked. Pebble Beach was, as Noah put it, "the nudie beach," and I, following the lead of these locals, was naked, too, hovering in the warm water near the surface and hoping not to freeze.
Skinny-dipping with strangers might seem a little weird, even a bit louche, for a first-day tourist experience, but on Galiano, it took on a surprising innocence — an atmosphere that persisted as the trio, along with their friend, Tia, who'd stayed clothed on the shore, brought me to Noah's home for beers and homemade blackberry-blueberry pie. Then, as the light was beginning to fade and the shadows' chill settled on us, we followed a path through the woods that led to Retreat Cove, a secluded inlet where a single sailboat bobbed in waters flecked gold by the sun. We drank, enjoying the day's last rays, and then I left them alone, hiking to the main road and heading for my bed-and-breakfast.
The year 2009 may be drawing to a close, but on Galiano a low-budget trip takes on the open-ended feeling of summer 1979. Skinny-dipping aside, this is a place out of time. Cars are mostly unnecessary: everyone from farmhands to restaurant workers gets around by thumb. (And "everyone" is itself a stretch: Only 1,100 people live here year-round.) Shiny blackberries hang from dense roadside bushes, unmanned stands sell paper bags of “transparent apples” (great for applesauce), and fat oysters sit in shallow waters, turning every trip to the beach, up a small mountain or down the street, into a foraging expedition from hunter-gatherer days. >>> Go to Full Story >>>