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The Pacific Rim National Park , the single best reason to visit Vancouver Island, is a stunning amalgam of mountains, coastal rainforest, wild beaches and unkempt marine landscapes that stretches intermittently for 130km between the towns of Tofino in the north and Port Renfrew to the south. It divides into three distinct areas: Long Beach , which is the most popular; the Broken Group Islands , hundreds of islets only really accessible to sailors and canoeists; and the West Coast Trail , a tough but increasingly popular long-distance footpath. The whole area has also become a magnet for surfing and whale-watching enthusiasts, and dozens of small companies run charters out from the main centres to view the migrating mammals. By taking the MV Lady Rose from Port Alberni to Bamfield or Ucluelet or back, and combining this with shuttle buses or Laidlaw buses from Victoria, Port Alberni and Nanaimo, a wonderfully varied combination of itineraries is possible around the region. Lying at the north end of Long Beach, Tofino , once essentially a fishing village, is now changing in the face of tourism, but with its natural charm, scenic position and plentiful accommodation, the town still makes the best base for general exploration. Ucluelet to the south is comparatively less attractive, but almost equally geared to providing tours and accommodating the park's 800,000 or so annual visitors. Bamfield , a tiny and picturesque community with a limited amount of in-demand accommodation, lies still further south and is known mainly as the northern trailhead of the West Coast Trail and a fishing, marine research and whale-watching centre. Unless you fly in, you enter the park on Hwy 4 from Port Alberni, which means the first part you'll see is Long Beach (Hwy 4 follows its length en route for Tofino) . Long Beach, rather than Tofino, is also the site of the park's main information centre and the nearby Wickaninnish Centre, an interpretive centre. Remember that a park fee - $8 per vehicle per day - is payable at the park entrance. Weather in the park is an important consideration, because it has a well-deserved reputation for being appallingly wet, cold and windy - and that's the good days. An average of 300cm of rain falls annually, and in some places it buckets down almost 700cm, well over ten times what falls on Victoria. So don't count on doing much swimming or sunbathing (though surfing 's a possibility): think more in terms of spending your time admiring crashing Pacific breakers, hiking the backcountry and maybe doing a spot of beachcombing. Better still, time your visit to coincide with the worst of the weather off-season - storm-watching is an increasingly popular park pastime.
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