Forest hikes, idyllic beaches and plenty of wildlife – this remote island is an undiscovered paradise

Molly Codyre

Published: July 16, 2026 at 10:19 AM

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With forest hikes, idyllic beaches and plenty of wildlife, this remote Canadian town offers a chance to truly switch off

For more slow travel inspiration, check out our coastal roadtrip through Croatia, luxury sleeper train journey through Peru and one writer's experience exploring Cape Cod by bicycle.

The 'town at the end of the road', as Tofino is nicknamed, lives up to its slightly haunting moniker. The journey to get here is an experience all on its own: you take the ferry from Horseshoe Bay in north Vancouver, pulling out from the mainland into an archipelago layered with mist that threads the needle through islands covered in douglas fir and sitka spruce. If you're lucky, you might catch an otter sluicing through the water along the shoreline while seabirds soar overhead.

Driving through the forest

In just under two hours you'll pull into Nanaimo on Vancouver Island's east coast. From here you drive for three hours into the interior of the island through dense deciduous forest, along the shoreline of emerald lakes and past gushing waterfalls as civilisation slips further and further away. When you eventually pop out onto the west coast, it's easy to see why it feels like the town is set at the edge of the earth.

Found at the end of Highway Four, also known as the Pacific Rim Highway, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island, Tofino seems to rise suddenly out of a forest that is home to some of the oldest trees in the world. Occupying the tip of Esowista Peninsula, stretching out into the Clayoquot Sound, the town itself is protected from the whims of the Pacific Ocean but its surrounding beaches bear the full brunt of this wild body of water, creating a haven for surfers, with waves curling and frothing on the shore of temperate rainforest.

Red dock house with pier over the harbour water in Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

The birth of Tofino

While the Tla-o-qui-aht people have been living along the Clayoquot Sound for thousands of years, Tofino was first populated by European settlers in the 1850s. The town quickly grew with a booming logging industry and a growing commercial fishing industry, earning it the nickname Tuff City. The opening of the logging road to the general public connecting the town to Port Alberni in 1964 brought in a new wave of tourism, visitors drawn by the town's immense wilderness and limitless swathes of coastline. It's the great waves on those beaches that eventually drew in a bohemian community and many more tourists along with them.

These days tourism is the main economic driver of the area with more than a million people visiting each year, the majority coming in the summer to make the most of the long days and access to the ocean. But a growing number are visiting in the cooler months, too, for a bubbling industry – storm watching.

Credit: Chris Pouget

An autumn arrival

It's the promise of this that has us travelling down Highway Four on a crisp autumn day – that, and fewer crowds to navigate around. Making our way out of Nanaimo, we follow the curving road through to Port Alberni, pulling into J&L Drive-In for burgers to fuel the next 125 kilometres of driving through deep wilderness. Serving up the platonic ideal of a perfect burger, J&L Drive-In is like a hallmark from a bygone era, one where you pull up to burger joints in your car, have your order taken at your window and your food delivered, all without stepping a foot outside the vehicle. In fact, being slingshotted back a few decades, or centuries, seems to be a defining element of this road trip.

There are few places left in the world where you can drive through forests as robust or as old as the one that sits between Vancouver Island's east and west coasts. The douglas firs and western red cedars that line the highway are hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years old. They have stood as stoic witnesses to the area's development and tourism boom over the years. The same trees I drive past, full of a bacon cheeseburger and marvelling at the way the light dapples through the early autumn ochre leaves, were still standing there when this road was built and, even earlier, when this land was home to bears and cougars, and the indigenous community who may have been passing through. You can feel echoes of that history all around you on the drive and it seems with every passing mile the modern world is left well and truly behind.

Credit: Graeme Owsianski and Destination British Columbia

Heading out on the water

While you could easily just visit Tofino for a couple of nights, see the beaches and tick off a few hikes, this is the kind of town you want to stay a while, slip into its rhythms and let nature drop your cortisol levels in the process.

We arrive with seven nights ahead of us and, in order to fully contextualise the town, head out onto the water of the sound on our first day, courtesy of Ahous Adventures, owned by the Ahousaht Nation. The clouds that were pouring with rain just minutes before clear all of a sudden as we motor out into the sound, shining a spotlight on a vibrant double rainbow as a burst of water in the distance grabs our attention – a gray whale surfacing briefly before diving back into the inky depths.

We watch her come and go for a while, her enormous body languidly skimming the surface at regular intervals, her fluke briefly flying into the air, before turning to head around Wickaninnish Island, towards the open ocean. Swell rocks the boat as we peer at a pair of bald eagles perched in a tree, and mangled piles of bull kelp float past. The tour continues through the broiling sea before we turn back into the sound, quietly flying along placid waters keeping our eyes peeled for enormous floats of sea otters, barking seals and shoreline animals foraging for food. Apart from the odd fellow tour boat, there is no civilisation to be seen until we start to make our way back towards town.

Dock and the harbour water in Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

Discovering Tofino's food scene

We make a beeline for Adriana's, a pizza shop that serves whopping NY-style slices and bouncy focaccia sandwiches to refuel. Food in Tofino has developed in line with the city's tourism, splitting off into two key factions: easy grab-and-go food that you can inhale between surf sessions or hikes along forest-laden coastline, and restaurants that tend to serve Pacific Northwest-centric food that makes the most of the region's abundant larder.

One of Tofino's most famous exports, Tacofino, falls into the former camp. With 12 locations across Canada, this much-loved Cali-Mexican joint started out in 2009 in a food truck at the back of a gravel parking lot on the road into Tofino. It quickly became a cult favourite, slinging tacos and burritos, inspired by the owner's travels across California and Mexico.

We return time and time again across the week for crunchy beer-battered fish tacos and piquant, moreish tortilla soup. Just like we return to Wildside Grill just in front of it for seafood chowder and sticky Korean chicken bowls. In town we make a few trips to Shed for cheeseburgers and the best house beer – brewed in collaboration with Tofino Brewing Co up the road.

Wildside Grill decorated with Christmas lights in late November in Tofino.

Time for dinner

Dinners take place at restaurants like Ombré, where dishes like beef carpaccio with local chanterelles and rye campanelle with chicken jus bring a Mediterranean-accented slice of autumn to the plate, or the waterfront Shelter where vaulted ceilings and enormous windows drink in the view of the sound beyond, and Vancouver Island oysters and whopping plates of local fish soup are washed down with Okanagan chardonnay.

The food and drink in Tofino inherently reflect this curious town that has sprouted in the middle of the wilderness but, paradoxically, feel far more international than you would ever expect from somewhere so remote. It feels like a metaphor for the place itself: somewhere that whispers with its history and feels steeped in the stories of its past. The kind of town where whales regularly glide through its waters, bears amble down forest paths a stone's throw from the main street, and a cougar is known to pop up in a local's garden on occasion – and yet somewhere that, like a siren song, attracts residents and visitors from across the world.

It might take a while to get to this surf town at the end of the road but, once you're here, time slows down, and when you do eventually emerge back onto the Trans-Canada Highway, it'll feel like you were gone for a lifetime.

A surfer standing in the distance on the beach in Tofino Canada

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Molly Codyre

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