Killer Whale Highlights of 2013.

Over the winter Geordie put together a lovely highlight reel from the footage I took over April through to October of my days on the water.  Working at Wild Whales Vancouver I got lots of opportunity to show off these animals and take their pictures.  Not only killer whales (both Bigg's and Southern Residents) but also humpback and minkes whales, harbour seals, steller and california sea lions. I need to work on my bald eagle footage.  Geordie really liked the jumps that I was lucky enough to get, especially as I don't see that kind of activity every day.  They are a bit statisticaly overrepresented in the video.

I hope to take lots more footage of orcas and all the animals out there.  I already have started on a collection for 2014 showcase.

The Noses of BC: An Art Retrospective

Kathryn has a long standing tradition of putting up with my nonsense, and part of that tradition involves letting me take pictures of her patting the noses of anything vaguely nose-pattable that we come across in our travels. Here's a selection of my favorites since we moved to BC. First off we have a statue of some otters in Victoria with eminently pattable noses.
There's a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver not far from the library which inexplicably has a giant statue of a cow in front of it. This creates a prime opportunity for nonsensical nose patting.
And rounding out the set, this native spirit carving resides at the back of the art gallery and was crying out for some attention this summer.
There's a giraffe sanctuary and possibly a tame rhino coming up in Africa, so look forward to more nose stroking in the coming months :)

Victoria Wax Museum

There's a branch of Madame Tussads wax museum in downtown Victoria and since I'd never been to the one in London, Kathryn agreed to have a look around it with me. And nothing says dead-eyed zombie stares like the Royal Family.
Of course you can't have the kings of earth without representation of the king of heaven, so there was a neat display of the last supper with a light traveling through the scene while a voice-over talked about each apostle.
And like any respectable wax museum they had the obligatory hall of horrors with people being impaled and burned at the stake. I forget if the George Bush dummy was in that section or the Hall of Presidents....

Miniature World

Our whirlwind tour of Victoria in 2009 tried to take in the majority of the museums and cultural collections of the city. One such place which had been described to me by a co-worker as "the best place in the world" was 'Miniature World', a small museum connected to the Empress Hotel.
The small size of these photos doesn't really to justice to the scale of some of the displays, the train photograph below is only a snippet of a diorama showing Canada from coast to coast with a train running the length of it every few minutes along with lights for day/night and detail crammed into every inch.
The displays ran the gamut throughout history from World War 2, to the Middle Ages to an entry display of a space station which was gorgeous but sadly too dark to photograph well enough to share online.
I found that the macro mode of my camera helped capture these miniatures with a sense of scale and depth which I very much enjoyed experimenting with but which may not come across as well in such small pictures.

Hoidy-Toidy in Victoria

With Christmas just over and our African expedition on the horizon I'm going to be posting some of our favorite undocumented adventures of 2009 for the next little while (since we got into blogging late and unless you were there when we went its all new to you anyways).

Being the capital city of BC and a history several hundred years old, Victoria is home to several fancy and elaborate buildings, a few of which we were able to tour in our visit in May. The Empress Hotel was built in the early 1900s and has played host to all manner of royalty, celebrities and whatnot.
And how could you be fancy and semi-british-hoidy-toidy without having afternoon tea? Kathryn and I found the time to feel posh for a few hours while munching on scones and biscuits. Since the tea is bottomless and the tab is big we probably had about 7 pots and got some tea bags to take with us afterwards.
Designed by the same man as the Empress Hotel, the Victoria Parliament buildings are very nice but not radically different from the rest of the parliament buildings in Canada. One nice addition is the lights on the exterior which are turned on at night (as shown below). We took a tour of the interior and saw all manner of fancy carvings and stained glass, but if you've seen one legislative interior you have likely seen the same general things.

Craigdarroch Castle

If you were a wealthy magnate living in turn of the century Victoria and wanted all your children to have such lives of uncomparable luxury that they all drank themselves to death, became lesbians or went insane then this was the house for you.

The family that owned it managed to go from out of control wealth to poverty and foreclosure inside of a few generations and the house ended up in an auction and eventually became a museum and music school.

There aren't too many buildings with approaching castle status in Canada so when we found ourselves within walking distance of the next closest thing we had to go check it out.