About the Guide

Within these strange pages of whimsical fancy and fun are the late nights and sweat from all of us at Ocean Island trying to dish up what Victoria & BC is about. You'll find listings for places to eat, drink, buy stuff, chill out etc.

The guide is still and will always be in development, so if you know something that we don't, or if there's something in here that doesn't make sense, email Mike (who does the web site) using our contact form and he'll deal with it.

What is the Victoria & BC Guide?

The guide was developed by the Ocean Island staff to help our guests discover Victoria & BC and provide them with all the info they need to have the best time!

Although the Victoria & BC Guide was developed for our guests, we also want to make it available to travelers who are not staying at the Ocean Island Backpackers Inn, who are considering a trip here, or people recently moving to Victoria, and anyone else who's looking for info about this great place!

Why we put the guide together

One of the reasons we put the guide together is that there aren't really any other good resources of its kind, especially on the web. There are a lot of guides in web and print that list all the harbour tours, the christmas shops, where each and every Starbucks is... and completely miss so many of the things to do, places to hang out, and things to see that make Victoria really interesting - and make it the perfect home base while seeing Vancouver Island, the cute little islands that surround it, and the rest of British Columbia. Our guide is different because we list places entirely based on how we feel about them, and not based on charging them for listings or "enhanced listings" or getting commissions from them, which is how some of the other info sites work.

We’ve created the Victoria & BC Guide on a very tiny budget, and we’re not selling it or making any money from it, except getting commissions from a very few businesses, which are noted in the guide. Part of our motivation has been to promote Victoria, which benefits us indirectly as a hostel.

The guide might not be 100% up to date (not that most proper guidebooks are anyway). If you notice something that’s not up to date or is incorrect in any way, please let us know right away, and we’ll check it out.

Surrounding areas

We’re focusing mainly on Victoria, because that’s where we are, but lots of people who work and stay here have really good information about other areas that they want to share, and our guests are always asking us about different places they are thinking of visiting. So, we’ve started to include bits of info about other parts of BC (we include Seattle as part of BC, because we like it). For now it will just be bits and pieces of info here and there, as we come across it, and eventually we hope to have really solid, in-depth info about the whole area, especially Vancouver - so stay tuned!

If you want to send us info about places in BC (or about Victoria), please do, and if we use your info we’ll give you things like free drinks and food in our Lounge, or accommodation at our Inn. If you’re cute, we might even give you a kiss.

About the Editors

Kevin (the guy with the PowerMom shirt on the right), is our boss here at Ocean Island, he started the hostel and started the guide as well. He commissioned it to be written as a binder full of info for our guests.

Dorian (with the afro and white glasses), took the printed version of the guide, updated the heck out of it, turned it into this web site, wrote a bunch more content, and marketed it online.

Mike (not pictured) started working on the guide recently, taking over from Dorian.

Julia (on the left with the Star Wars shirt) has done a bunch of research for the guide, updated a lot of sections, did a bunch of writing, and generally added a lot of common sense to Kevin and Dorian's vision. Together they are... the V Team! Or... the G Team! Or the... something. Some kind of heroic thing. They're like the care bears (in their love of Victoria and you), but they're also like the Rebel Fleet (in their determination to save travelers from... not so much the empire, more like the proliferation of useless affiliate-promotion-sales-pagerank-6-link-factory sites about Victoria).