A CANADIAN FERRY TALE

There’s a certain deeply rested, neither-here-nor-there look that people get on a long ferry trip when their sole occupation is gazing at the scenery. I saw it last month on the passengers’ faces on every ferry I took along the coast of British Columbia in western Canada.

And I took many ferries on this trip from Vancouver to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where I visited the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. You could say that Gwaii Haanas, the eerily beautiful homeland of the native Haida people, was my destination. I had booked a two-day boat trip to see remnants of their art in the long-abandoned villages on cedar-and spruce-covered islets.

It took me four days to reach the Charlottes by ferry, through sunshine and fog, in fair weather and foul. As I sailed, I gradually came to appreciate that getting there can be a pleasure that’s distinct from--but almost as good as--being there.

I had to wake before the sun to catch several of the BC ferries, and sometimes I was frustrated because I had little time to explore promising places like Prince Rupert, a cosmopolitan town of about 17,000 just south of the Alaska border. I napped on the floor of the ferry lounge or on deck when it was warm and sunny, ate institutional food from ferry cafes and often wished for an attendant to tuck a blanket around me on a chaise, so I can’t say it was exactly like seeing Canada’s Inside Passage on a cruise ship.

But it was considerably less expensive than a cruise, totaling less than $150 for all the legs of my ferry journey: across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver to Victoria (where I caught a bus and rode 300 miles north to Port Hardy on the north tip of Vancouver Island), 300 miles north from Port Hardy through the Canadian Inside Passage to Prince Rupert, then west across Hecate Strait to the Queen Charlotte Islands and finally over Skidegate Inlet in the Charlottes to start my boat trip.

And, too, the U.S. dollar is worth about $1.50 Canadian, which meant I never had to scrimp to travel economically and could occasionally splurge without, of course, being ridiculous about it. I could order the most expensive entree and lodge at the best hotel in every town I passed through without breaking my budget.

Though I flew into Vancouver, the trip really started in Victoria, where I stayed at the 476-room Fairmont Empress, the very model of a grand hotel. My time there was too brief: I reached Victoria in late afternoon and left by bus for Port Hardy at 5:40 the next morning.

I was too late for the hotel’s legendary tea, with scones and Jersey cream, and I didn’t have time to tour the Royal British Columbia Museum across the street (although I saw the totem poles, many of them Haida, in the museum’s front windows and strolled along the Inner Harbor, with its hanging baskets of petunias and begonias). But I did take time for a martini in the Bengal Lounge downstairs, which opened as a reading room for gentlemen in 1912, four years after the Empress began serving guests. A tiger skin hangs on the wall, and a curry buffet, excellent but milder than any I tasted in India, is served all day.

My generous-size room cost $160, unheard of for a luxury hotel in the U.S.

As a bonus, I found the bus station right next to the Empress’ rose garden.

In the dim light of early morning I caught the bus to Port Hardy, the jumping-off point for my 17-hour ferry trip through the Inside Passage. A grueling 10-hour bus ride took me past the cockles and shoals of the Gulf Islands, through tunnels of trees and areas clear-cut by loggers, through towns like Nanaimo, where blue hydrangeas burst with color and a bus-station bacon, cheese and egg sandwich put Egg McMuffins to shame.

At Campbell River, two-thirds of the way up the island, I saw the first of many nutty, small-town B.C. monuments: a wooden logger atop a pole that decorated a local bus stop. At Woss, about an hour north of there, I saw what is thought to be the biggest burl, or lump, on a tree in the world. And in Port Hardy, at the north end of the road on Vancouver Island, I laughed over the carved carrot on the waterfront that commemorates a local campaign to get the Canadian government to build a road to this town instead of dangling carrots in front of its citizens.

Port Hardy has a vaguely down-at-the-heels air. Nevertheless, accommodations there get tight the night before a BC ferry departure, which is why I landed at the Thunderbird Hotel. It’s near downtown, served by a shuttle to the ferry port and agreeably priced: $58 for a double. But the Thunderbird is no beauty spot; it’s on a commercial intersection, and its shabby rooms smell of cigarettes.

Still, my brief stay in town was a trip highlight because of dinner at the Sportsman’s Club near the bus stop. My plate of Vancouver Island oysters, lightly dredged in flour and pan-fried, was thoroughly memorable, and not only for its price of $12.40.

It was overcast and chilly the next morning when I left for the ferry port across the inlet from town and boarded the Queen of the North, one of the biggest ships in BC Ferries’ fleet. It can accommodate up to 750 passengers and 157 vehicles, and has some of the features of a cruise ship, such as a buffet restaurant, bar, gift shop, children’s play area and video arcade. It also has 90 plain, functional cabins (with sinks and toilets, and some with showers), which cost about $30 for the 17-hour trip.

I spent the first three hours fast asleep in a two-berthed cabin on Deck 6. (It was too chilly to sleep on deck and too noisy to curl up on the floor of the lounge.) When I woke up and went outside on deck, the sun was shining on the Inside Passage and the Queen of the North was passing the lighthouse on Addenbroke Island. I attended a program on whales given by two young B.C. Forest Service naturalists based on board the ferry to entertain and educate the tourists, watched part of the afternoon movie (“The Wedding Planner”) and dined on salmon and Caesar salad from the buffet line for $14.70.

Though part of BC Ferries’ mandate is to provide a link with the outside world to towns that can’t be reached by highways, most of the passengers on the Queen of the North seemed to be tourists. On deck, they were working on their tans, reading or just standing at the rail and wearing that placid ferry look. A Denver schoolteacher I chatted with said, “It isn’t often I have a day with nothing to do but watch the clouds.”

I had traveled the Inside Passage on Alaska State Ferries, which stop in wonderful towns like Sitka and Petersburg, cruise through pods of humpback whales and usually stay close enough to land to see bears, eagles and snow atop the Coast Mountains. Except for its string of lonely, lovely lighthouses, Canada’s stretch of the Inside Passage isn’t as scenic as Alaska’s until you pass through Tolmie and Grenville channels, near the end of the voyage north. (Fortunately, it stayed light until almost 10 p.m.)

We docked at Prince Rupert about midnight. From the port, which also serves ferries to Alaska, I took a shuttle bus downtown to the Crest Motor Hotel, where a pleasant room with a picture window awaited me.

Strung out along a bluff overlooking the water but reached from the interior by the Yellow-head Highway, Prince Rupert is a fishing, logging and transportation hub. I wanted to tour the Museum of Northern British Columbia and have coffee in the funky Cow Bay neighborhood, but I had just enough time the next morning to do a little yoga in the hotel’s health club, sit in the hot tub and have breakfast before heading back to the dock to catch the ferry to the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Shallow, 60-mile-wide Hecate Strait separates Prince Rupert and the mainland from the Charlottes, an archipelago of 150 islands with a population of 5,800 on the western side of the Inside Passage. There’s little to see except water, and it takes seven hours to make the crossing, which is often plagued by foul weather. Still, locals favor the ferry because it costs only $17 one way (compared with $144 to fly).

They are a hardy lot, mostly fishermen and loggers, who have learned to deal with their isolation. One islander, returning from a monthlong vacation in Vancouver, told me it was so hard to get to and from the Charlottes that she was never leaving again.

Still, a handful of tourists regularly make the trip in the summer to see the islands at the edge of the continental shelf. Graham, the main island, has about 60 miles of highway that run between the town of Queen Charlotte City, near the ferry dock, and Masset in the north. Moresby Island to the south has less than 20 miles of paved highway, one town, an airfield and a boat launch called Moresby Camp, reached by a welter of rough logging roads.

I settled into a snug room with a harbor view at flower-festooned Premier Creek Lodging here in this slow-lane town of about 1,250 that looks as though it has not changed since 1930. It has a few B&Bs; and shops, including the Rainbow Gallery, full of north Pacific coast flotsam and jetsam, a bakery, floatplane dock and visitors’ center. I dined on seafood chowder and halibut steak at Howler’s Bistro across the road from my hotel and rented a car for exploring Graham Island the next day.

The drive took me along the east coast of the island, past miles of rocky beaches and through forests where loggers had been at work. I stopped at Bottle and Jug, a pottery shop near the hamlet of Tlell owned by an English couple, and walked on 20-mile-long North Beach near Masset, a stunningly wild beachcomber’s paradise, open to the weather caldron of the north Pacific.

On the way back, I toured the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, with fantastically carved totem, mortuary and house poles from Haida villages like Skedans, Tanu, Cumshewa and Ninstints in the south. These places thrived before contact with Europeans in 1774 but were abandoned about a century ago because of smallpox, a disease that devastated the Haida nation.

Before European sailors and traders arrived, about 6,000 Haida, living in villages in the Charlottes that cleaved to rocky beaches like barnacles, made war on their neighbors, held feasts called “potlatches” and revered forces of nature symbolized by such creatures as the raven and the bear. By 1900, fewer than 1,000 Haida had survived repeated smallpox epidemics and lived in two remaining villages, Skidegate and Old Masset.

My two-day boat trip, which cost $241, was all about seeing abandoned villages in Gwaii Haanas Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, managed jointly by the Canadian government and the Haida people. Pristine since logging was halted in 1987 after a heated confrontation on Lyell Island between lumberjacks and Haida, the reserve covers the southern half of Moresby Island and surrounding islets. A Moresby Explorers van met me and seven others at the ferry dock on the island’s north side. At Moresby Camp, a 45-minute drive south, we donned rubber boots and cumbersome rain gear before setting out in a roofless Zodiac. We needed hoods and gloves and had to huddle to keep warm on the water, chiefly because of the wind.

But it was a good trip, highlighted by picnics on rocky beaches, killer whale sightings, a dip in the thermal pools on Hotspring Island and an overnight in a cozy float camp on Crescent Inlet (with three basic rooms where guests bunked together, a kitchen, living room, bathroom and kayaks). We saw evocative totem and house poles in the abandoned villages of Skedans and Tanu, guarded by Haida watchmen who live in these isolated spots from May to September.

Best of all, we met Chief Cumshewa, a.k.a. Charlie Wesley, an octogenarian who moved back to Cumshewa village, about an hour east of Moresby Camp, a year ago with his wife, Caroline. He told us he was tired of giving speeches and that there wasn’t much left to see in the village. Still, he graciously showed us the empty site of his grandmother’s cedar plank house, surrounded by pink foxgloves.

Bill Reid, a renowned Haida carver who died in 1998 and is buried in Tanu, once called the lost villages of Gwaii Haanas “memories of memories, images as faint as Atlantis, as remote from us as the lives of those who built and lived in them.”

But he and other contemporary Haida artists have kept the memory alive, as I discovered when I got back to the Vancouver airport on my way home. The departure level contains Reid’s large-scale bronze of a Haida canoe. In it are crowded, Noah’s Ark style, all the creatures of Haida myth: eagle, raven, mouse woman and bear with his human wife.

I stood for a while, entranced and a little envious. My elliptical ferry journey along the B.C. coast was finished, but their mythic journey would go on forever.

Guidebook: Cruising Canada

* Getting there: To begin a ferry trip, you can fly from LAX to Vancouver on Air Canada, Alaska, America West or United. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $202. You can get to Victoria by ferry for $19.10 from downtown Vancouver or $21.78 from Vancouver airport, one way. Contact Pacific Coach Lines, telephone (800) 661-1725 or (604) 662-8074, fax (604) 681-1515, Internet https://www.pacific coach.com.

You also can start in Seattle; there is nonstop service from LAX on Alaska and United. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $178. From Seattle, there is ferry service to Victoria on the Victoria Clipper, tel. (800) 888-2535 or (206) 448-5000, fax (206) 443-2063, https://www.victoriaclipper.com, $120 round trip or $75 one way, with packages and advance purchase rates available.

Laidlaw Coach Lines runs buses from Victoria to Port Hardy. Tel. (800) 318-0818 or (250) 385-4411, fax (250) 388-9461, https://www.victoriatours.com; $71 one way.

Hawkair, tel. (866) 429-5247, https://www.hawkair.net, and Air Canada, tel. (888) 247-2262, https://www.aircanada.com, fly between Prince Rupert and Vancouver; the lowest-priced one-way fare is $113 on Hawkair.

Air Canada also flies from Sandspit in the Queen Charlotte Islands to Vancouver for $375 one way.

Harbour Air, tel. (250) 627-1341, https://www.harbour-air.com, has service from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Prince Rupert; $143 from Alliford Bay near Sandspit, $98 from Masset.

* For information on ferry routes, schedules and fares: BC Ferries, 1112 Fort St., Victoria, B.C. V8V 4V2; tel. (250) 386-3431, fax (250) 381-5452, https://www.bcferries.com.

For the rest of the season, The Queen of the North sails from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert on even-numbered days in August, odd-numbered days in September and Oct. 1, 3, 5 and 7; southbound sailings from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy are on odd-numbered days in August, even-numbered days in September and Oct. 2, 4, 6 and 8.

* Where to stay: The Fairmont Empress, 721 Government St., Victoria, B.C. V8W 1W5; tel. (800) 441-1414 or (250) 384-8111, fax (250) 381-4334, https://www.fairmont.com. Doubles $160 to $321.

In Port Hardy I toured and liked North Shore Inn, Box 1888, 7370 Market St., Port Hardy, B.C. V0N 2P0; tel. (250) 949-8500, fax (250) 949-8516. Ocean-view rooms $56 to $79.

Crest Motor Hotel, 222 1st Ave. West, P.O. Box 277, Prince Rupert, B.C. V8J 3P6; tel. (800) 663-8150 or (250) 624-6771, fax (250) 627-7666, https://www.cresthotel.bc.ca. Doubles $97 to $104; a good choice in Prince Rupert.

Palmerville Lodge, P.O. Box 21028, Prince Rupert, B.C. V8J 4P2; tel. (250) 624-8243, fax (250) 624-6006, https://www.palmerville.bc.ca. A floating B&B; with lodgings for 12 on Seal Cove just north of town; $37 per person, including transportation by boat; $23 for a seafood dinner.

Premier Creek Lodging, Box 268, Queen Charlotte City, B.C. V0T 1S0; tel. (888) 322-3388 or (250) 559-8415, fax (250) 559-8198, https://www.qcislands.net/premier. Hostel beds and hotel rooms; doubles $36 to $57.

* Where to eat: The Sportsman’s Club in Port Hardy, local tel. 949-7811, has meat and fish entrees for about $13. Howler’s Bistro in Queen Charlotte City, tel. 559-8602, has a casual menu, including pizza.

* For more information: Tourism British Columbia, P.O. Box 9830, Station Provincial Government, Victoria, B.C. V8W 9W5; tel. (800) HELLO-BC (435-5622) or (250) 387-1642, https://www.hellobc.com.

Canadian Tourism Commission, 550 S. Hope St., 9th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90071; tel. (213) 346-2700, fax (213) 346-2785, https://www.travelcanada.ca.