A few hours’ drive northeast takes you to Kingfisher Pacific Resort & Spa, perched on a long, rocky, sunrise-facing beach on Vancouver Island’s east shore, near the towns of Comox and Courtney. This spa has been a wellness landmark for two decades thanks to its subterranean hydrotherapy circuit, a sequence of hot tubs, grotto waterfalls, and rain shower pools. In late 2024, it unveiled its Healing Caves, a 75-minute private journey through a succession of multi-sensory chambers, starting with a steam room scented with plumeria and threaded with a cool waterfall. I enter a glowing pink salt cave, and a cryotherapy chamber where the walls dissolve into LED footage of arctic glaciers. I then undergo full-body red-light therapy, and finally, a storm pool where I swim beneath simulated wind, rain, rolling thunder, and a screen crackling with lightning. It’s like being shipwrecked in the Pacific but considerably warmer. Only three of these immersive spas exist in the world (the others are in Macau and Milan), making this a rare and fun adventure, particularly if the weather outside is looking moody.
I drove on, the trappings of urban life tapering off as I cut West between the towering cedar trees of Cathedral Grove and along the aquamarine Taylor River. Suddenly, the highway straightens and I catch glimpses of the ocean between windbeaten coastal pines as I approach Tofino. This remote outpost town, built around the turn of the 20th century by fishermen and otter trappers, lies in Clayoquot Sound, a region of richly forested mountainous islands and glacier-carved fjords, and the territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth, the collective name (translating to “all along the mountains and sea”) for the 14 First Nations who have lived among some of the largest intact coastal rainforests on Vancouver Island for five thousand years. In the 1980s the Nuu-chah-nulth won an injunction against the provincial government to protect the 2,000-year-old trees from being turned into toilet paper by the forestry industry. In the ‘90s, they led an anti-logging demonstration known as the War for the Woods, one of Canada’s largest civil protests, and they now run one of the Canada’s best-known Indigenous Guardian initiatives, stewarding the land and ocean as they have done for generations.
This is a region where eagles perch in lichen-draped hemlock trees; black bears and orca pods are easily spotted, and pink sunsets streaming over innumerable secluded coves. It’s in one such cove that off-shore builder Mike Mavis constructed his charming float home Moon Jelly Bathhouse and the bath house moored beside it, which he ferried me to 15 minutes by skiff from a Tofino pier.
