We woke up to the ping-splat, dribble, ping-splat, dribble of driving rain outside our Nanaimo hostel window, the first real downpour of the trip.

And it would come on the day we planned to go camping on the coast.

With a daughter coughing from a chest cold, I quickly changed plans, extended our stay by a night, and found a good diversion: a quick and easy hike to gorgeous Englishman River Falls.

The sun peeked through the drizzle
as we looked down the pretty canyon of the
Englishman River, northwest of Nanaimo.

Legend has it that local tribes once found the skeleton of a white man along the river near the waterfall, giving the river its name.

In the half-hour drive from Nanaimo, the rain had diminished to sprinkles. We found the walk to the upper falls very short and easy, with a bridge over the river for viewing.

Here, the river spreads out into shallows about half the width of a football field, then plunges into a slotlike chasm in the rock, no wider than 5 or 6 feet as it passes under the bridge. It's amazing that the narrow passage can hold all the water; it must be very deep.

Shaggy green moss carpeted the rocks above the shoreline, giving a bumpy green frog-skin look to the shoulders of the chasm.

As Lilli and I stood and looked downstream, the sun broke through and drew out the glorious emerald-turquoise of the deep water, and Lilli gasped (and squeaked a bit, to tell the whole story) as a rainbow suddenly materialized over the gorge below us.

We enjoyed a pleasant half-hour amble to a lower falls, through a forest of cedar, firs and madrona -- or arbutus, as they call it here (though my daughter pointed out that "Arbutus" sounds like the name of somebody's mother-in-law).

The falls is in a provincial park, so there's a parking fee of $1 per hour. The park is 9 kilometers south of Highway 4, the road between Parksville and Port Alberni.

Because the falls itself was too big to capture without a good wide-angle lens, I shot some video:

My videos this week have their ups and downs. (See the Tall Totem segment.)