Vancouver from the air: seaplane tours offering a bird’s eye view of wildlife and island living are a highlight of a trip to Canada’s Northwest
- Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, is within easy reach of many offshore islands as well as myriad inland lakes and rivers
- Scheduled seaplane services, charters and tours are a great way to see the area’s natural beauty, sleepy villages and privately owned islands
Still several blocks away on the walk down to Vancouver’s harbour, you can hear the distant hum of highly tuned turboprops as seaplanes taxi out, then accelerate to unstick themselves from the water and take to the air.
Lines of the ungainly aircraft, which look like overgrown insects in clogs, are moored outside the smart modern terminal at the water’s edge, where check-in is brief and free of hassle, and there’s time to sit in a comfy chair with a free coffee and admire the panorama before a short walk along a quay to board.
“I’m ready at the ball,” radios the pilot, after a short taxi to a fluorescent buoy. Then the engine noise climbs to a whine and the plane makes a short dash across the water before climbing over cranes and cruise ships, superyachts and sailing boats, for a drone’s-eye view of the cross-harbour Lion’s Gate suspension bridge connecting the leafy bulge of Stanley Park to the mountainous North Shore.
The highlight of a trip to Canada’s Pacific northwest is this opportunity to experience an antidote to the humdrum effortlessness of modern aviation, as well as to see the mountainous, island-strewn and fjord-riven coastline from the air – not from the high altitude of airliners, but from merely hundreds of feet up in a 14-passenger DHC-3 Turbine Otter seaplane, or something even smaller.
Vancouver’s harbour is abuzz all day with scheduled seaplane services to coastal hamlets and islands, and there are seaplane tours that range from a 20-minute circle over the city to whole-day expeditions to pretty spots with time for a picnic before returning.
