 | CANADA - |
| CANADA - |
LA BAIE
Not far out of Chicoutimi I encounter the head of the Saguenay Fjord. The river goes off to the left of the photo.
Or that was what I thought at the time.
Subsequently, I was to discover that this is not the head of the fjord at all but a bay or inlet of the fjord known as the Baie des Ha! Ha! (mustn't forget the exclamation marks) and regular long-term readers of this rubbish will recall that we've met a Ha! Ha! before .
There are several different interpretations of the word ha! ha! but in this case, there can be little doubt that the phrase was intended to be used as a "dead end".
Of course, at my age, I know all about dead ends, don't I?
The town at the head of the bay is called, would you believe, La Baie. Rather like in Monty Python's Flying Circus
It's not the original name of the settlement however. La Baie is a recent conurbation formed by the amalgamation of three towns here - Bagotville (the furthest west), Port Alfred (the central part) and Grande-Baie, the furthest east.
The part at which we are looking is the old Bagotville. Right over there in the background is the southern shore of the bay
There's a good photo of the bay from here. You can see all the way down it to the Saguenay Fjord in the background, passing from left to right (or right to left).
As well as the grey skies, showing how much the weather has changed today, you'll also notice a ship in the photo. It's been ages since we've had a "Ship of the Day" and so we'll have to go for a closer look at that one in due course.
It's at this point that I remember that I have spent a lot of money just recently on a decent telephoto zoom lens for the Nikon D5000
I can even identify her too. she's the Nordpol - the "North Pole", quite a large bulk carrier. I can't however identify her home port and I can't see the flag that she should be flying.
One thing that I could see, but you can't because there was nowhere for me to stop and take a photo of them, was some railway locomotives. This is presumably the end of the line - the big Alcan aluminium plant that's here at La Baie.
I stop in the centre of Port Alfred and walk back to see if I can have some kind of view of the locomotives but I can't even see over the top of the railway bridge. I shall have to write this one off, unfortunately.
It wasn't a totally lost cause however, for on the way back to the Dodge I noticed this sign. And this was well-worth a photograph.
Leaving aside for the moment the matter of the Mission Internationale des Marins au Saguenay posting a sign in the accursed Anglais here in Quebec, are you allowed to say "Seamen" these days?
Should it not be "seaPERSONS"?
I suppose that I shall have to look it up in my Political Correctness Personual.
The Port Alfred bit of La Baie seems to have a great deal going for it. This building here, the Town Hall, is quite a magnificent pile.
Designed by our friend Alfred Lamontagne, who we met up the road at Chicoutimi at the Ancien Pensionnat des Soeurs de Bon Pasteur, together with architects named Gravel and Brassard, it dates from 1932 and is said to take its inspiration from the Palais de Justice in Quebec.
One thing that I do think is that it's a disaster that when they extended it to incorporate the local fire brigade, they added a concrete and glass monstrosity. We've seen plenty of places on our travels, most notably at Trois Rivieres , where they have extended a building with style and grace.
Why couldn't they do that here?
The aim of the design of the Town Hall was to complement the "Gothic Anglais" style of the church next door, also designed by Lamontagne, Gravel and Brassard.
It's quite a long way from being what I would call Gothic, but nevertheless it was built to this style to please the Anglophone owners of the paper mill here, so we are told. We aren't told who the owners actually were, but seeing as the church was built in 1927, one imagines that it might have been the Price Brothers.
The church, dedicated to St Edward, the "Confessor" whose death in 1066 prompted William the Conqueror to invade England, is no longer used for religious purposes, having closed its doors to its congregation for the last time in 2006
The plans of the church as drawn up show the tower to be on the left-hand side of the facade, yet it was built on the right. This kind of thing is not unusual in Canada, where the plans as drawn up serve merely as a guide to the builder. Cynics however suggest that the tower was placed to the right to signify the leaning of the community here towards Bagotville.
So while you are admiring the church and the Town Hall, I can tell you a little about the huge industrial plants here. As well as the paper mill, there was also the Ha! Ha! Bay Sulphite Company, founded in 1916 and a company called Dubuc had a big plant here.
Dubuc went bankrupt in 1924 due mainly to a major fire, of course, that destroyed all of the company's stock and its woodpile, all 220,000 cords of it that took 12 days to burn.
Following the bankruptcy, Alcan took over the plant and it was that company that built all of the port facilities here in the 1930s and 40s.
Large ships, such as the Nordpol bring the bauxite here for smelting into aluminium, taking advantage of the abundance of local hydro-electric power, and take away the newsprint that is made from local timber.
But why bring in the bauxite here to refine it?
It certainly is true that there is a considerable mount of hydro-electric power here but then that applies to many other places in Quebec that would be equally as good, as well as being much closer to the St Lawrence and the trade routes.
Was there a previous bauxite mine in the vicinity, hence all of the infrastructure was already here? Or was it a totally new venture designed simply to provide an inbound cargo for the ships coming to take out the wood pulp?
The ironic thing that I'm noticing today is just how dramatically the weather conditions have changed in the space of just a few days.
Last weekend, I was freezing to death in Québec in a big anorak, hat and gloves in the glorious sunshine.
Here today, in the overcast grey conditions and occasional flurries of rain, in the interior of Canada goodness knows how many hundreds of kilometres away from Québec City, I might be in just a fleece and I might be feeling the temperature, but it's really quite comfortable.
Here's our Nordpol again, riding things out at anchor presumably waiting for a return load. It's a much better view here and so I can tell you that she's registered in Copenhagen and thereore flies the Danish flag.
Built in 2002 by the Shin Kurushima Toyohashi Shipbuilding Company of Toyohashi, Japan, she grosses 40,000 tonnes and is owned by the Norden-Hellerup Company of Denmark.
Here's another view of the bay and you can see the town of La Baie over there together with all of the industrial and harbour installations.
One thought that was running through my head about the towns of Bagotville, Port Alfred and Grande-Baie merging - why didn't they call the new conurbation Ha! Ha!? That would have been quite funny.
It would also have been much better for the tourist trade, and probably much more appropriate too.
Before we leave the bay, I should mention that there's a notice here where I'm parked informing me that a fish called the bar-ray is being reintroduced into the area.
It's illegal to take one from the water and there are all kinds of notices about what to do if you catch one by mistake, including the most detailed ones about unhooking it and returning it to the water.
Sounds like they mean business.
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