I and my good friend Jack Klassen just finished a trip across Vancouver island. I and him have done trips before and this was one of the best to date. We drove nearly 2500kms over 6 days. Although this wasn’t the most amount of distance we’ve covered, but it felt by far the most meaningful. Taking your time and enjoying your vacation is really the way to go. I wanted to post about my trip, some pictures and some thoughts I had along the way.
Drive to Tahsis, BC
I took the plane from Waterloo, ON to Edmonton, AB and then to Kelowna, BC. It was a red eye flight and I had barely slept. Jack then picked me up from the airport and we started driving west. We had a brief pitstop at the interesting town of Hope, BC.
The then continued onwards to Tsawwassen ferry terminal, where we boarded the ferry to Victoria, BC. There was a special moment on the ferry when the ferry was in US waters and we got to see a beautiful sunset. We spent the night in Nanaimo, BC
The drive to Tahsis, BC was very picturesque. I have added some pictures below, but pictures don’t do justice to how beautiful it was. Tahsis is connected to the outside world with a 3 hour long drive gravel road to Campbell River, BC. The gravel road means high cost of living for everyday items, but it also means the place is very protected from rest of the world and general society.
Tahsis, BC – Place which time forgot
We managed to get a cool cabin at Tahsis overlooking the bay, just next to the water aerodrome. It was the perfect place to meditate and do psychedelics.
Tahsis is an interesting place of just around 200 people. It was a large logging town that has significantly downsized. Because the town was one large, lot of the infrastructure is still around. The place has a free swimming pool, free sauna and a $5 bowling alley, all of which we generously used. It even has high speed internet because of a pilot project that the government did.
On the surface it is very white and very rednecky, as you would expect for such a remote place. But people are nice and very personable. People are happy to see young people in town, since the median age is closer to 70. We even had fishermen gift us a huge fish that they had just caught – more on that later. The place is very peaceful. The place had 12 police calls over the last 10 years, with only one of them being actually necessary. As a result, there are no police in town.
When it comes to nature, the place is an absolute gem. I have never seen so much nature at one place. The fish were all 2 feet long, starfish were all 3 feet, we saw beavers, seals, eagles. We cooked the fish that a fisherman gave us and it was so fresh that it tasted like chicken.
Tahsis is anti-thesis of modernity and the ills of it. It’s so remote so is shielded away from rest of society. It felt like the only place in Canada where I haven’t seen a pride flag. It’s Canadian in the right kind of ways – peaceful, friendly people and lots of nature. The cash registers felt straight back from 1980s. I remember they used to use similar cash registers in India to tally up the totals when I was a kid. Tahsis felt very disconnected from rest of the world. Iran and Israel could be having a thermo-nuclear war and it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
Coming back to meditation and shrooms, I and Jack were talking about how internet is no longer a force for good. It is no longer fun or interesting or a value add. What has happened is that most of content on internet from independent websites is disappearing because of incentives. All human generated content is on social media, which is subject to whims of algorithms that dictate how content should be prioritized. As a result, it is not very different from algorithm generated content. In simple words, if you are not generating meaningful self hosted content, you are the dead internet.
Social media is also poison. Because of the amount of time that people spend on it, they end up thinking like algorithms, which are optimized to make money for big tech companies. If you think are the resistance, then you have spiritual confusion from thoughts that the algorithms have pushed your mind with. The best part of the trip is that we barely touched electronics for the whole week and it was actually great. I ended up quitting most social media and putting all my focus on building up my blog, which was neglected earlier. Quitting social media and reducing my phone, internet usage has really made a positive impact in my life.
Holberg, BC – Mysterious, remote town
We spent the next couple of days in Port Hardy, BC, but it wasn’t anything particularly interesting other than some drama about some mentally ill person masturbating infront of Jack’s ex-girlfriend’s house. We went looking for dinosaur fossils close to Holberg and ended up returning the next day to spend the night and to say it was eventful was a huge understatement.
The place has all the right ingredients for a very mysterious place. The place has no internet, cellphone coverage and is the most remote place in Vancouver island. It also is a site for a buried military airport and has an area allocated for secret military operation. Most places are only accessible by logging roads. There are also lots of interesting stories how the military found an object the size of a bus inside the bay. The place also has a very cursed energy.
We did bit of exploring of the area and it has a very weird energy. We ended up at the RCAF Holberg gate, but turned back as we were not allowed into there. We also heard weird radar like beeps and something in the bushes so we headed back as we were in the middle of nowhere with no cellphone coverage. We did see a huge black bear on the way back.
Jack then dropped me off by the rusted dock and I was just relaxing there alone when I saw something mysterious swimming in the ocean. I initially thought it was either a bear, moose or possibly an orca, but experienced outdoors people living by our cabin said it was none of those things and they couldn’t explain it either.
We spent rest of the night by a camp fire. By the end of the night, Jack said he saw a ghost. I thought I saw a shadow figure, but wasn’t sure what I saw. Jack said he got chased by a ghost at night. I’m not sure how much of that is true, as I was trying to get some rest. Jack was spooked enough to want to drive out by the night.
The next day we drove all the way back to Kelowna, BC. On the ferry back, we were greeted by an Orca whale which came to say hello.
We were tired, exhausted and hungry when we got back to Kelowna. Also both of our bank balances were running dry, but hopefully the stories to remember should make up for it.