Cycling from Duncan to Victoria in Canada - Cycle Touring Blog

By Dave Briggs · Published 2009-09-20 · Last updated 2026-07-18

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This bike touring blog post was written about the day's ride between Duncan and Victoria. Another puncture, but fortunately I was getting good at fixing them by now!

Cycling out of Duncan

(Blog post written: Sep 20 2009)

I found it hard to focus today on the cycling, as my mind kept wandering.

The beauty and the curse of cycling, is that you have plenty of time to think, and I use this time to work through my thoughts and find my centre, but today it just wasn't happening for me.

Not that it was a bad or hard day's cycling, just that I was thinking of things irrelevant to the task at hand.

Whether the puncture I got later on was due to lack of concentration or negative thoughts attracting negative actions I can't be sure, but one thing is certain, no bicycle tire is going to stay inflated when punctured with a two inch nail!

Fixing a bike puncture

Fortunately, I was only a short distance away from a layby, so I changed the bike inner tube away from the mayhem of the road, which wasn't helping settle my mind either. The break did me good though, and I started again in a fresh frame of mind.

I saw a guy collecting drinks cans from the roadside on his bicycle. I'm not sure if he was doing this for the monetary value of recycling them, or just to clean up the countryside, but either way, it was a good sight to see.

Arriving in Victoria on bicycle

I managed to get into the correct part of Victoria using my usual combination of luck, ignorance and no maps, and found the backpackers I had booked.

The room is a bit cell like (actually, most cells have windows, this does not!), but certainly not the worse I have stayed in.

I stocked up at the supermarket, bought two new inner tubes, and went on an eating frenzy. Tomorrow, I catch the ferry to the USA. There, I will start cycling the Pacific Coast Highway.

(Some blackberries I ate along the way!!!)

Dave Briggs
Dave is a UK travel writer living in Athens since 2015. With 20 years of firsthand travel experience and over 80,000 km of bicycle touring across six continents, he's been blogging at Dave's Travel Pages since 2005. Every guide is based on places he's actually been.

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