13 Oct, Friday - Tofino Camping

After much discussion and planning, we decided to go ahead with the Tofino trip. There were 15 of us altogether- 10 taiwanese people, 4 singaporeans and 1 chinese. The taiwanese did most of the planning for us because they were the ones who came up with the idea of camping at Tofino. All we did, was to listen how their plan was and just copied them. Many people thought we were crazy to go camping in this kind of cold weather but i am so happy that we went for it in the end. It was so so fun and the experience was worth it!

Becky was in charge of getting the tent and all of us managed to borrow sleeping bags from friends so we didn't need to rent that, save some money as the weekend rates for sleeping bag was $19. Expensive!

Becky and Jt went downtown to grab the rental car and they were in charge of getting the bbq food and stuff. They went to walmart hoping to grab bbq stuff but Walmart turned out to be disappointing becuase they were all stocked up for the halloween and didn't have much bbq stuff available. So they drove down to thrifty's to grab the bbq stuff instead. It was a mad rush against time for them as they had to go back to our place to get me and grab our stuff, then rush down to school to pick up Tian and Garry and pick the stuff in jt's room. Then we had to rush back to thrifty to meet the taiwanese at 1pm. My taiwanese friends were late so we decided to set off first.

Tried to read a bit of harry potter, half blood prince. Borrowed it from B but have not gotten down to reading it. It was a long the drive to Tofino, took arround 4-5 hours. The view along the drive was beautiful!
JT was a fantastic driver! She drove non-stop except for a short toilet break at Port Alberni. We reached Tofino at around 6pm and had planned to camp at Pacific Rim National Park. But the campground turned out to be CLOSED! Apparently the camp season is over so they closed it up and they did not put this information in their website!

But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as we found a nicer and cheaper camping ground at crystal cove. Free firewoods, nice toilets, clean and nice camp site.

The first thing we did was to set up the tent. JT and Becky was responsible with the administrative stuff. So me, garry and tian tried to set up tent. Luckily it was not the triangle army style of tent. We were initially afraid that it will take us a long time as none of us had real experience with tent but it turned out to be unfounded as the tent was really easy to pitch. We just figured out the structure and inserted the bars into plastic hooks.

After we got the tent up, the sky was beginning to turn dark so we divided the work up. Gary, me and Tian started the fire while becky and jt prepared the food. I love starting up fire but I got quite anxious as we were only left with a few matchsticks after trying to burn the firewood. Then I decided to use paper instead, the paper from the bag of coal, tissue paper, serviette. Apparently, they caught fire and were more lasting then the matchsticks and were able to burn the stupid firewood.
Our BBQ was SUPER FANTASTIC! It was the best bbq JT and Becky ever had in their life. I didn't think it was a real bbq. We were supposed to bbq meat over that fire, the fire wasn't hot enough, so the meat took about 2 hours or so to cook. We bought those pre-marinated beef and chicken, it became almost like a slow simmer kind of thing.

The beef was allowed to broiled in its juices for over two hours, so it tasted great. But i'll probably never get anything like that again, as no one has the patience to bbq their food for 2 hours.

And there was the super nice roasted marshmallow. The fire was good, the marshmallow was slightly browned so that it's crispy on the outside and when you bite it, the inside just melts in your mouth. Best marshmallows i ever had! Though I have to say, I am not really a marshmallow lover. Besides that, we still had sweet potato, corns, hotdogs and dessert- bbq banana with marshmallow and hersheys chocolate! I like the chocolate banana. But I think we used the wrong chocolate. We used chocolate chips, took so long to melt!

We were all super full from eating, and we packed up the stuff and prepared to sleep as we wanted to get up early the next morning. All of came super prepared so we actually didn't find it cold... i was wearing like four layers of clothes, gloves, socks, scarves. Took my winter turtle neck and the warm pants. Wore the warm pants over my jeans. I looked so ugly and fat. Although I took the thinnest sleeping bag, I still felt pretty warm.

But Garry and I stayed out and chatted till 3. Apparently, our conversation was heard by the rest. So sorry! We disturbed them from sleeping. But it was a really good feeling to talk to a friend, in the cold weather, in front of a warm fire. Very wonderful experience. Poking the firewood, see the ashes flying up. We even lay down on a bed of firewood. Too bad the sky was cloudy, if not, lying down and watching the stars would be good. A super good experience!

As the both of us stayed awake, we were nearly frightened twice. We didn't cleared our rubbish in the designated bins, but the rubbish was tied up in plastic bags and was left on the tables. While we were talking, we heard some noises and we just looked at each other. After shining the torchlight, we saw 2 eyes. At first, I thought it was a bear or cougar. It was really freaky. Then we saw that it was a cat and garry chased it away. The next animal that came along was a big fat racoon! It was so huge and we could see that it will be destructive. The racoon was pulling the bag of rubbish off the table, must be fat from finding food this way.

Then when jt tried to poke her head out of the tent to ask us to keep quiet, she made some noises. When we heard the noise before seeing jt poked her head, we thought the racoon was back and trying to gnaw the tent. It was so hilarious! haha..