Canada
Pacific Rim National Park Reserve
Storm-watching from a cabin as twenty-metre waves detonate against ancient sea stacks.
The wave hits the sea stack and detonates — a twenty-metre wall of Pacific spray that hangs in the air long enough to photograph before the next one follows. From the storm-watching cabin, the glass vibrates. This is Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island's west coast, where the open ocean meets old-growth rainforest.
Pacific Rim is divided into three units: Long Beach, the Broken Group Islands, and the West Coast Trail. Long Beach offers 16 kilometres of unbroken sand backed by temperate rainforest, with year-round surf. The West Coast Trail is a legendary 75-kilometre multi-day hike through shipwreck-strewn coastline, requiring ladders, cable cars, and river crossings. Storm-watching season from November to February draws visitors to the lodges, where twenty-metre waves hitting the rocks can be observed from heated windows. Bioluminescent plankton light up the shallows on dark nights between July and October, glowing blue-green with each wave. Hot springs at the park's north end bubble into rock pools overlooking the open Pacific.
Solo
The West Coast Trail is one of the great solo multi-day hikes in the world — 75 kilometres of shipwreck coast, old-growth forest, and physical challenge that demands self-reliance.
Couple
Storm-watching from a heated cabin while the Pacific rages outside, followed by hot springs and bioluminescent beach walks — Pacific Rim does wild romance better than anywhere in Canada.
Friends
The West Coast Trail is a bonding experience — multi-day hiking, shared cooking, cable-car river crossings, and the satisfaction of completing one of North America's toughest coastal trails together.
- Storm-watching cabins let you sit in warmth while twenty-metre waves detonate against ancient sea stacks outside.
- The West Coast Trail is a legendary 75-kilometre multi-day hike through shipwreck-strewn coastline and old-growth forest.
- Bioluminescent plankton light up the shallows on dark nights between July and October, glowing blue-green with each wave.
- Hot springs at the north end of the park bubble into rock pools overlooking the open Pacific.
Fresh-shucked Fanny Bay oysters with mignonette, eaten at a shack on the Long Beach road.
Storm-watching hot chocolate spiked with local whisky at Wickaninnish Inn.
Dungeness crab rolls from Tacofino — the surfer food truck turned West Coast institution.
Jericoacoara
Brazil
Windswept dunes where the sun melts into the sea from a natural stone arch.
St Ives
England
Light so luminous it lured a century of painters to this harbour of turquoise shallows.
Tulpar-Köl
Kyrgyzstan
Alpine pools at 3,500 metres that mirror a 7,000-metre peak at dawn like shattered glass.
Philae Temple
Egypt
A temple rescued from rising waters, reassembled stone by stone on an island in the Nile.
Cape Dorset (Kinngait)
Canada
The print-making capital of the Arctic — Inuit artists carve stone and stories into polar silence.
Ferryland
Canada
Picnic on a headland above a 17th-century colony while icebergs drift past and puffins wheel.
Mount Robson
Canada
The Canadian Rockies' highest peak rarely reveals its summit — clouds guard it like a secret.
Thetford Mines
Canada
Open-pit asbestos mines swallowed half the town — the craters remain, eerie and vast.