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| Queen Charlotte, Haida Gwaii |
Queen
Charlotte is the largest town in Haida Gwaii, but it still feels pretty small.
We were staying close to the harbour, which also had the large and helpful
tourist information office, the Ocean View Restaurant with the great pizza, a
lovely little café called Queen B’s, where we failed to resist the nice looking
– and equally nice tasting – cakes, and a few other little shops and eateries.
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| Volunteer celebrations, Queen Charlotte, Haida Gwaii |
This is also
where the ‘town square’ is, complete with a small stage. We were quite pleased
to discover that there was due to be an event on; it was a celebration of the
volunteers in the community, and it was to have live music, food stalls, a
cake, and a presentation to a specially honoured volunteer. It sounded
interesting, and we were told everyone was welcome, so we decided to stick
around to check it out.
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| Queen Charlotte, Haida Gwaii |
Well, a few dozen people turned up. There was a band, and they were OK, at
least until the vocalist let another band member have a go at
singing, when it went a bit south for a few songs. There was a food stall, and
there was a cake. They couldn’t cut the cake though, because that honour was
for the person being presented to, and she hadn’t arrived. I don’t know whether
or not she knew that she was supposed to be receiving something, so had to turn
up, but an hour and fifty minutes into the two-hour event and she still hadn’t arrived. Oops.
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| Skidegate, Haida Gwaii |
Further down
the road, was the supermarket, and a few more places to eat, including a nice
little shop/café/ice cream place called Junebug. That is pretty much it, but it
covers all the necessaries, and we were pleasantly surprised at the quality in
the places we tried.
There is no
public transport on the island, and as you’ll know from my post about our
arrival here, taxis are few and far between, so hitchhiking is commonplace.
That would probably have been how we would have got between Queen Charlotte and
Skidegate had we not managed to hire a car.
We had saved
Skidegate and the nearby museum for our last day, as before we knew we were
getting the car, it seemed easier to just make one trip in this direction, and
then we would be in the right area to get the ferry from Skidegate in the
evening. Having the car made things much easier though, as it’s a reasonable
distance between Skidegate town, the museum and the ferry terminal, and as it
turned out, there wasn’t a suitable café in Skidegate, so we still ended up
driving back to Queen B’s in Queen Charlotte.
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| Model of old Skidegate, Haida Gwaii Museum, Haida Gwaii |
Skidegate is
the second of the two sites that the Haida people moved to when they abandoned
their villages. The Haida Museum has a great little model of what the village
would have looked like then, and while it is certainly very different now, you can
still see the basic layout of the properties around the bay.
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| Skidegate, Haida Gwaii |
There isn’t
much to do in Skidegate itself, but then that wasn’t really a surprise by now,
based on everywhere else we’d been. We checked out a couple of touristy shops,
looked at a couple of totem poles, and that was about it. Our favourite thing
in Skidegate was probably the old rusting fire engine that was sat on the grass,
gradually disintegrating, with a tree growing out of the top.
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| Old fire engine, Skidegate, Haida Gwaii |
We had also
been told, by someone we’d met at the Airbnb the previous evening, to sneak a
peek into the shed next to the fire engine. It was locked, but there was a
small opening at the back that we could peer through. Inside, were the
blackened remains of a totem pole, which had presumably been rescued from a
fire at some point, but were now lying forgotten in this shed.
The main
thing to do here though, is to visit the Haida Gwaii Museum and Haida Heritage
Centre. We did, but I’ll talk about those in the next post.
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| Burnt totem pole, Skidegate, Haida Gwaii |
For now, I’ll
leave you with the rather unfortunate incident that happened to Nic, as we were
about to leave Queen Charlotte. We were walking back to the car, and passed
under a lamppost. Just as we did so, Nic got splattered with bird poo. But this
wasn’t just any old bird poo, this was courtesy of a bald eagle that was
sitting on the lamppost.
Now bearing
in mind that a bald eagle is generally between 70cm and a metre tall, with a
wingspan of around two meters, you can imagine that they produce quite a lot of
poo. It wasn’t pretty. Thankfully, because we had the bags in the car, Nic was
able to grab a change of clothes and go and use the tourist information office
loos to clean up and change. The eagle just sat there.
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| Old fire engine, Skidegate, Haida Gwaii |
