Western Canada: Salt Spring Island

Continued from
Touring Farms and Wineries on Vancouver Island
and
Amuse Bistro on Vancouver Island

Salt Spring Island is a perfect day trip from the southern edge of Vancouver Island in British Columbia.  

Take your car across by ferry and either wend your way straight across, stopping to taste local wine, cheese, and baked goods, shop for t-shirts and stuff from the Far East, or just have a good time getting as lost as you can…on an island.  

From the Southern Vancouver Island town of Crofton (small and sweet, save for a nearby oil refinery), we lined up in our car for the ferry across to Salt Spring.  This was a Saturday in late May 2008, and next to the ferry dock, a small farmer’s market was in full swing.  Some little girls had made some righteous sock monkeys, and there was even a massage booth, but we chose to bypass the market in favor of the Old School House Museum.

The Museum is little more than a collection of old stuff that has the common thread of having once belonged to someone local.  There’s a metal ice crusher from 1910, a soy sauce pot from a Chinese railroad worker, a typewriter used by a former reporter for the town paper, and even a complete 1940s train set.  

We were greeted by a cheerful, 70-something woman working the counter, who encouraged us to sign the museum guest book and tell her where we’d recently been.  A lifetime Crofton resident, she herself loves to hit the road and find old churches to photograph, and found her all-time favorite in Yosemite.

The Crofton Ferry to Salt Spring Island’s Vesuvius Bay takes only a quick half-hour.  Along the way, be sure to wave to kayakers and seaplanes, and know that there will be plenty of small children and scampering dogs to watch if the view of the sparkling water ever gets boring.  For the best view, leave your car, head up to the non-smoking half of the third floor deck, and point your face into the wind.

Salt Spring Island is the largest of the Gulf Islands, and has most of the tourist industry locked down.  This is the land of the small B & B, but jarringly incongruous modern hotels are starting to pop up in ferry-adjacent Vesuvius Bay.  What brought people here in the first place is a real live salt spring on the north side of the island, and many people now come for well-reviewed spa accommodations like Hastings House.  

But more than anything else, Salt Spring is powered by the artists who fled here during the Vietnam War, seeking a gentler, more peaceful way of life.  It’s a test group for what society might have been like if the 60’s had never ended.  

The road in to the big town, Ganges, is peppered with signs for Buddhist centers and holistic massage therapists, and once you’re there, there’s a distinct hemp comfort shoe-glass pipe-yet field greens vibe.  There’s even an ongoing, protest-worthy struggle between The Man and The Itinerant Wanderer:  Much of the home-owning community flees Salt Spring en masse for a town in Mexico at the first sign of winter and rents to 1/3 of the island’s workforce; these renters are then summarily displaced when the good weather returns.  More high-season housing is clearly needed, but with the island increasingly populated by vacation homes, summer can be an impossible time to for both business owners and workers.

Lucky to arrive on a sunny day, we headed straight for the big Saturday Market in Ganges.  It runs from 9am to 2pm; having taken the 11:10 ferry from Crofton, our timing was perfect to visit the market and then have some lunch.  (We had sugar-cured salmon with red pepper jelly, and you guessed it, field greens, at Mix Fresh Flavours Cafe on Mouat’s Landing, by the marina in Ganges Harbour.)  

The huge market is proof that this is an artisan-based economy, with pottery, glass, jewelry, fabrics, knitwear, and miles more for sale.  Adam went straight for a local t-shirt printer, and ended up buying a black shirt with the symbol of a red rooster.  (The compliments he’s since received for it have been saucy, to say the least.)  My own favorite section of the market offered wheat/gluten-free baked goods — a star attraction all over Western Canada, really — including one booth where I could safely eat six different wonderful things.  Just the words Chocolate Sparkle bring a tear to my eye.

Beyond the market, our favorite shop was a big blue Victorian house trimmed with strings of Tibetan prayer flags, selling Far Eastern beads, clothes, jewelry, housewares, and organic/fair trade lotions, soaps and perfume oils including the owner’s own Lloyd’s Salt Spring Organics.   

Having tapped Ganges for ourselves, we felt ready to taste some wine.  There’s only a very few wineries on the island, and we only made it to two — Salt Spring Vineyards and Garry Oaks, conveniently set just about next door to each other.  

Salt Spring Vineyards is full of beauty, hope and excitement, but their wines are, in a word, awful.  

They wrinkled our noses and went down sour, but it’s so pretty here that we really wanted them to be good.  The tasting room is set on a narrow road lined with artist’s studios, amidst a garden in a gorgeously converted barn overlooking a little pond.  The logo is fun, the people are lovely, there are even two friendly dogs wandering around the property.  

However, their tastings of local products – bread, cheese, chocolate, red pepper and olive dip — are amazing.  You might even be tempted to skip lunch in Ganges, come here to buy a picnic, and eat it in the vineyard gazebo.  Just stop by Garry Oaks first to pick up some wine.

Garry Oaks, named for the region’s ubiquitous tall trees, offers, in addition to some mildly interesting reds,  a very good white blend of Gewurtztraminer & Chardonnay called Prism.  While there, you can ask to see their wiccan prayer circle out back, where they go to request good weather for the vines.  The circle didn’t do them much good in 2007 when every winery in the Vancouver Island area faced having to cut and leave 2/3 of their fruit in order to preserve a decent 1/3.  Output was drastically reduced, even though the wines themselves were often just as good as in 2006.  Garry Oaks, and every other winery, were so far facing a healthier season in 2008.  

There are lots of other things to do on Salt Spring Island — including the Salt Spring Island Artist’s Studio Tour and blue cheese tasting at Moonstruck Organic Cheese Co. – but we chose instead to head over to the Swartz Bay ferry and on to the town of Sidney by the Sea.

 

Continued in Sidney by the Sea

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