December 10, 2019

Orcas at The Royal BC

By roadsrus

The Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria is so exceptional that Ruth and I have been in it several times.  But it wasn’t until the last trip there in 2019 that I understood how it operates from year to year.

There is no bad time to visit The Royal BC Museum, but I would wait until at least May of 2020 to go there.  Those who go earlier will be restricted to its permanent galleries.  There are 3.   They deal with natural history, the formation of British Columbia, and, best of all, its native citizens in the First Peoples Gallery.  Since its founding in 1886 this museum has collected more than 7 million objects.  It earned the designation of royal when Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Phillip visited in 1987 and she approved the name change.  Each year The Royal BC Museum mounts one blockbuster show.  The current one is about the Maya and is subtitled “The Great Jaguar Rises”.  It closes at the end of this month.

We saw “Race to the End of the Earth” about Antarctica in 2013.  The next year the Royal BC Museum became the first stop for an exhibit from the Swedish History Museum that contained 500 Viking artifacts and told the story of these restless explorers.  Other blockbuster shows have been about the Titanic, Egypt, and Leonardo da Vinci.  The Royal BC museum is between Victoria’s 2 most famous landmarks, the Empress Hotel below and the British Columbia Legislative Building, at 675 Belleville Street.

This year, I learned that this royal museum always has a Wildlife Photographer of the Year show that results from an annual competition.  Now in its 54th year, this contest results in animal visions taken by the world’s best nature photographers.  It travels around the world from its home base, London’s Natural History Museum, and is a visual stunner that we were lucky enough to see the last time we were in Sydney, Australia.  It will be at the Royal BC from February 14 until March 29, 2020.  Families love this show.   It will be followed by The Royal BC’s big event of the year “Orcas: Our Shared Future”, which will be on view from May 15 until the last day of 2020.   We saw some of these splendid predators swimming in the Strait of Juan de Fuca on our way to Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands in October, 2019.  Orcas have also been historically known as Killer Whales, and their communities have a complex social structure that will surely be explored in this show.

If you’ve put off a trip to this magnificent city and museum, 2020 might be your best opportunity to see both.  Orcas sound like an excellent subject for a major exhibition.

Hank

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2019 at 11:59 pm and posted in British Columbia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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