Seven days on Vancouver Island: an English tea room at one end, a rainforest with surf at the other

Start across the water from wherever you are staying. The British Columbia Parliament Buildings have faced the harbour since 1898, neo-Baroque under a copper dome, designed by a twenty-five year old English architect called Francis Rattenbury who won the competition and went on to build most of the waterfront. Free tours run through the day and after dark the whole front is picked out in thousands of bulbs.

Walk north into the old town. Bastion Square is where the Hudson's Bay Company fort stood and the blocks around it hold the oldest commercial buildings in the city.

Three blocks further is Chinatown, the oldest in Canada and the second oldest in North America, founded in the 1850s by miners coming north from California for the Fraser gold rush. Off Fisgard Street runs Fan Tan Alley, a metre across at its narrowest, once the way into the gambling houses and now the narrowest street in the country.

Eat in the neighbourhood. Victoria has far better restaurants than a town of this size has any right to.

The Royal British Columbia Museum sits beside the legislature and holds the province's natural and human history, with the Northwest Coast collections at its heart. Its third floor galleries closed in 2022 for a long rebuild and the museum has been reworking what it shows and how it says it since, so check what is currently open before buying a ticket. The totem poles in Thunderbird Park outside are free and always standing.

Lunch by the harbour, then get on a boat. Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are among the best whale waters anywhere: orca, a humpback population that has grown enormously since the 1990s, minke, porpoise, sea lions and a great many eagles. Trips leave from the harbour steps and run three to four hours.

You choose between an open inflatable, which is fast and cold and thrilling, and a covered boat with a heated cabin, which is the right answer in shoulder season or with children. Dress two layers warmer than the town suggests.

Come back cold and eat somewhere warm and loud.

Pick the car up this morning, because today needs one.

Craigdarroch Castle is fifteen minutes uphill from downtown: a sandstone pile with a tower and four floors of stained glass, built between 1887 and 1890 by Robert Dunsmuir, who made a coal fortune on the island and died before it was finished. His widow moved in and the family fell out about it for decades afterwards. It is a house rather than a castle and the staircase alone is worth the ticket.

Beacon Hill Park is on the other side of the centre and runs down to the sea cliffs, with peacocks loose in it, a Garry oak meadow and the marker for the western end of the Trans-Canada Highway at the bottom.

In the afternoon drive twenty minutes north to Butchart Gardens. Jennie Butchart started it in 1904 on the exhausted limestone quarry her husband's cement works had left behind, had topsoil hauled in by horse and turned the pit into a sunken garden. Japanese, Italian and rose gardens followed. It runs to over twenty hectares, it is unashamedly a show garden, and it is very busy: go late in the afternoon when the coaches have left, or on a summer evening for the concerts and Saturday fireworks.

Leave early. It is three hundred kilometres and four and a half to five hours, north up the sheltered eastern side and then west over the pass, and the second half of it is slow. Fill up in Port Alberni, the last real town, and stop in Cathedral Grove on the way, where a fifteen minute loop takes you among Douglas firs three metres thick and some of them eight hundred years old.

The road comes out at the junction with Ucluelet to the south and Tofino to the north, and the last half hour runs along the edge of the national park with beaches signposted off it the whole way.

Get to Tofino, drop the bags and go straight down to Chesterman Beach, which is a couple of kilometres of sand a few minutes south of the village, sheltered enough by offshore islands to be where beginners learn to surf and open enough to have proper waves. Watch the light go from there.

Eat in the village. It is small, the good places fill early, and several of the best are takeaway counters.

Today is the national park. Pacific Rim National Park Reserve covers the coast between Tofino and Ucluelet and is temperate rainforest running straight down onto open ocean: cedar and hemlock hung with moss, then a line of driftwood, then sixteen kilometres of hard grey sand with nothing between it and Japan. Buy the day pass and leave it on the dashboard.

Long Beach is the centrepiece and it is genuinely enormous. Walk a stretch of it, then take one of the boardwalked rainforest trails off the highway, which are short, flat and give you the forest at eye level rather than through a windscreen.

In the afternoon get in the water. Tofino has a serious surf culture and a row of schools that will put a beginner on a soft board in a wetsuit and get them standing up inside a morning. Cox Bay usually has bigger waves than Chesterman and is where the competitions happen.

Finish at the brewery in the village, which was the first on this coast and is the local living room.

The best day out from Tofino takes most of it. Hot Springs Cove is forty-odd kilometres north up Clayoquot Sound, reachable only by boat or float plane, and the boat trip there is half the point: an hour and a half through a maze of islands with a very good chance of grey whales, humpbacks, sea otters and bears on the shoreline at low tide.

From the dock a boardwalk of two kilometres runs through old-growth rainforest to the springs, and the walk is worth the trip on its own. At the end, geothermal water comes out of the rock at around fifty degrees, drops down a chute and runs through a series of natural rock pools to the sea, so you work your way down until you find the temperature you want. At the bottom pool the incoming waves hit you cold.

Take a towel, water shoes for the rocks and something to eat. Most operators do the round trip in six to eight hours; some fly you one way to shorten it.

Dinner should be the good one tonight. There is a kitchen on the water in the village doing serious things with what the boats and the forest bring in.

Ucluelet sits at the southern end of the same road and is what Tofino was before the surfers found it: a working fishing town on a rocky headland, forty minutes away and on the way home.

The Wild Pacific Trail runs along the cliffs there and the Lighthouse Loop, two and a half kilometres of it, is the best short coastal walk on the island: boardwalk and rock, big surf below, and the squat red and white light on the point from 1906. In winter this is one of the great storm-watching spots on the coast.

Then the long drive back east. Allow five hours to Victoria, or three and a half to Nanaimo if you are taking the ferry to Vancouver from there, and remember the road over the pass is slow.