Nanaimo's Super Healing Island

There are many interesting places near Vancouver, and Nanaimo is one of them. It takes about 3 and a half hours by car and ferry. Book ferry tickets online in advance, drive from Vancouver to the terminal, and arrive 40 minutes to 1 hour early to queue.✨✨ The ferry has restaurants and shops, and the entire trip takes less than two hours. 🍉 Before docking, there will be a broadcast announcement, and everyone returns to their cars 🚘🚘to drive off in an orderly manner. We booked a seaside detached house away from downtown on Airbnb, so we planned to wander around downtown first before checking in. 🍘🍘 Downtown isn’t big, and even on weekends, there aren’t many people—you can finish exploring in less than an hour.🌵🌵 My daughter was attracted by the street graffiti, while I popped into The Vault for coffee. It’s a vintage and artistic spot where you can see all kinds of stylish people with unique outfits.☘️ 🥾 Fun activities: ❌ Digging for oysters 🦪: We didn’t bring tools for digging oysters. Even though there are oysters everywhere here, we chose to eat them at a restaurant instead. 😣😣 But we bought an oyster knife, got a dozen oysters, and learned how to shuck them in no time by following tutorials on Xiaohongshu.👍👍 ❌ Mountain biking 🚴: This is a popular destination for mountain biking, but we had no gear and the kids are still young, so we’ll have to save this for another time. ✅ Hiking: We slept in every day, so we missed out on long-distance trails, but the easy hiking routes we chose still surprised us a lot. 📍 Ammonite Fall: A very beginner-friendly trail, 4.5km in total with almost no elevation gain. You can walk right up to the waterfall and play close by. 📍 Little Qualicum Fall: A zero-difficulty trail—you can enjoy the waterfall without breaking a sweat. The only difference is that there are fences along the way to prevent accidents. 📍 Kin Beach: A peaceful and beautiful beach with a huge heart-shaped wooden sculpture. In the distance, there are endless snow-capped mountains. It’s lovely to sit here and watch time pass by.🌴 📍 Neck Point: Be sure to go to Neck Point at dusk to watch the sunset. The back view photo on the cover was taken there—isn’t the pink-blue backdrop stunning? ✅ Courtenay town: On the second day, my knee swelled up (from wear and inflammation), so our planned hiking route fell through. But we unexpectedly had a chill afternoon in Courtenay. 😍 Delicious food: ✅ Ocean 7: The best restaurant of the trip. At dusk, the sea outside is pink-blue, and the interior is warm with lights. The food is also quite elegant. 🫢 Not-so-good food: ❌ Nori: I don’t get why this restaurant is so popular. It has no soul of Japanese cuisine at all—everything except the sushi is terrible! Later, I checked and found out it’s run by Korean owners, so... ❌ Locals: A Western restaurant with high ratings on Yelp, but the food is really disappointing. Especially the black truffle beef pasta—it’s the dark king of innovative fusion dishes.🍢🍣🍦 #NanaimoGuide#Travel#OutdoorHiking