Victoria

The Victoria Conference Centre
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From  Vancouver we headed to Victoria, on Vancouver Island, for a few days.  Victoria is similar in many ways to Vancouver, although much smaller.

We had a lovely few days, during which we visited the Royal British Columbia Museum, which was awesome and probably one of the best museums we have been to on our travels.  It has some fantastic (and very lifelike) dioramas, and is well  thought out, well laid out and easy to explore.

We also visited Fisherman's Wharf, where not only are lots of fishing and sailing boats moored, but there are a lot of floating houses (I think this is the best way to describe them, they are not house boats).  These were really cool, lots of them were for sale at very reasonable prices, but I am not sure I would feel comfortable living on one!.

The Parliament Building
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Thunderbird Park contains lots of amazing totem poles, unfortuntely these didn't come out very well in my photos, owing to the time of day and failing light, but you get the idea.  We also had a look a parliament house; we didn't get inside for a look but it looks pretty good from the outside, especially by night, although I wouldn't want to be the one paying the power bill!

Underwater World does exactly what it says on the tin, the highlight of this would have to be the live show, where an insane diver gets into the freezing water, and displays and talks about the fish / sea creatures.  These include a huge octupus which seemed quite happy to be handled, some huge crabs, and a very large starfish which 'attacks' the diver!

The Parliament Building by night (with some lights out!)
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We also went to the wax works, which was ok (the dungeons were very good) but the wax models of famous people (the royal family, Tony Blair and various others) looked as though they had been shipped from Madame Tussaurds in London when they had been replaced by the more up-to-date version.

Rob really enjoyed the Maritime Museum, wasn't really my cup of tea although I could appreciate that it was very well done.

Looking forward to heading off to Banff now, for snow, scenery and wildlife, the real reasons we came to Canada!