Holding tight on the canopy walkway at UBC Botanical Gardens
Sue and I visited the UBC botanical gardens this week. It was a scorching hot day and we had finished a short tour with clients in Vancouver so it seemed a great way to get out of the car and into the cool of the gardens. It helped also that Sue has developed a keen interest in gardening and wanted to check out the competition.
We decided to go on the canopy walkway tour. Not for the height scared this one. Imagine a rope bridge, suspended between trees. Big trees.
The walkways sway. Of course you are perfectly safe, but they sway. Our guide warned us to walk cat fashion (one foot in front of the other). This was against my usual duck walk – with large feet splayed out to each side (so Sue says).
There were only four of us on the tour, so it was very intimate. The guide was from one of the first nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island and she gave us a new perspective on the forest. I may have missed some of what she said due to the loud knocking sound coming from my knees, but I gather that the first nations used over a hundred forest plants for food, medicine and ritual purposes.
We can recommend the tour if you want to get a new perspective – literally – on the forests of the west coast. If you aren’t too scared to sway on the rope walkways like a modern Indiana Jones.