L: We’ve now been walking and hitching lifts for the better part of an hour and a half which has taken us to the midpoint of the island. Not too shabby. As we continue down the dense forest road ahead of us, I hear a truck slow down behind us complete with the unmistakable sound of Robert Plant howling out of the speakers. My first thought, our chariot has arrived. The truck pulls over and with the window rolled down, the driver asks us, “Where you boys headed?” I poke my head in and reply “Paradise Point.” He chuckles and tells us that he’s not only driving in that direction but can also drop us off right at the trail-head; the only question is: “Do you have a problem with me having a beer while I drive up?” No problems here. We throw our packs in the back, Santiago hops into the box (with a backrest of dreams made from our bags) and I climb into the cab with our new amigo, Darcy. Before we take off, he wanders to the back of his truck, opens up his freshly stocked cooler and gives us each a cold one. Windows down, Zeppelin cranked, a beer in hand, and a beauty of a man driving us right to where we need to be. If you were to draw up an ideal plan for the weekend, you couldn’t have even come close to how well it had played out for us so far. The folk of Galiano deliver hospitality in spades. We begin to chat about his life preceding this beautiful summer day, the tough commute between the “shitty“ (city) and the island in the early days of establishing himself here. “It was a tough go to make ends meet,“ he remarks. But at the end he has just this to say, “I‘ve found paradise.” He’s spot on.

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