Olympic flame arrives in Canada for marathon torch relay

Athens - The Olympic flame arrived in Victoria Friday ahead of the longest domestic Olympic torch relay in history leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. The flame arrived in the capital of British Columbia from Greece on a Canadian Forces jet over an hour later than scheduled and will now travel throughout Canada for the next three and a half months before the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on February 12.

The relay will begin in downtown Victoria with an estimated 12,000 torchbearers expected to carry the flame from Vancouver Island across Canada and back to the city of Vancouver.

The flame will be carried by various modes of transportation through more than 1,000 communities which include dogsled, Haida canoe, chuck wagon, seaplane, ice resurfacer and double-decker bus and flown as far north as the Alert forestry station in Nunavut.

The ancient lighting ceremony for the Vancouver Olympics was peaceful compared to the previous one held for the Beijing 2008 Games, which was disrupted by a series of human rights protests.

Unlike Beijing, Vancouver will only have a national relay after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to ban future international relays following the Beijing protests by Tibetan activists.

Canadian organizers have expressed fears, however, that some protests over "native American land" and seal hunting could disrupt the relay.