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| CANADA |
AT THE DOCKS - LES ESCOUMINS
Abandoning another good story for a while, it's time to fuel up. For that, I need to turn off on the Rue Tremblay and there's an astonishing number of those in this area of the Province of Quebec.
Tremblay is the archetypical Quebecois surname, such as Smith in England, Jones in Wales and Dupont in France. But I'd love to know who the original Tremblay was. Remember that we have already stumbled across the heritage of Quebec's orignal Archambault .
But as an aside ... "you'll become accustomed to these" - ed ... I do recall a story about a University student in Quebec who sent off two applications for every job vacancy in the Province that he saw.
Each application form listed exactly the same qualifications and exactly the same work experience, but one was filled out in the name of Tremblay and the other one in the name of someone from an ethnic minority or from an immigrant background.
The results might have astonished some, but not the cynics amongst us, for the "Tremblay" received 10 times more invitations to interview as did his "counterpart".
When you are intent on pressing on, as I was in 2010, you don't have the time to stop and look at all the sights along the road. However I couldn't pass by this camp little camp just off the road on the edge of Les Escoumins.
This area has a large proportion of First-Nation inhabitants and in fact there's a Innu community, called Essipit, of 250 or so people just here. You might think that "tradition" is the order of the day looking at the wigwams but in actual fact it's quite a tourist-trap kind of place.
That much is very evident when you look at many of the sights around here. This particular teepee just here doesn't look as if it serves any useful purpose.
However, It did rather remind me of the time that I was up on the High Plains of Wyoming in 2002 attending the annual tea-drinking marathon organised by the Sioux nation. Next morning, the winner was found drowned in his teepee.
Furthermore, the local Tourist Information office did tell me, without any trace of irony or embarrassment at all, that to stay there, you "need to make a reservation". That's a poor choice of words, but it did bring a little smile to my face.
But much more interesting than anything that I've seen so far here in Essipit is this "STOP" sign at this road junction.
The ARRET written on the sign is quite self-explanatory, but I'll bet that you are wondering about the NAKAI that's written on there too.
I was too because it's not a word that I recognise. But I can make an educated guess as to what it might mean. Seeing that we are in an Innu community here, I bet that the word NAKAI is the Innu word for "STOP".
It's not the first time that we've seen a similar sign. You'll remember the roadsign that we saw in the Huron community in the back-end of the city of Quebec where the word ARRET is accompanied by the word SETEN, which I imagined at the time was the Huron word for STOP.
What caught my eye on the sign here though was that the word NAKAI was given priority over the word ARRET. This tears to shreds the Quebecois law on the priority of the French language, doesn't it?
This petrol station is quite a significant place that you will need to remember - although going back to what I was saying just now, you'll note the signs arranged in a totem pole arrangement. I said that the First-Nation presence here was quite substantial, but I wish that they wouldn't advertise it in such a tourist-orientated manner.
Petrol here in 2012 when I filled up was 138.4 cents per litre - a far cry from the 99.9 cents that I was paying in Ontario in 2010 and I do remember my jaw hitting the ground in at Manic 5 that same year when I paid 132.4 cents.
Why this place was significant back in 2011 was because this is where you needed to come back then in order to book your place on the ferry across to Trois Pistoles.
But all of that had changed by 2015 when I came here to cross over that year. Now, you have to pre-book your place on the boat. This led to one of those surreal discussions that you could never ever make up - it has to be true because it's just so unbelievable.
I'm not going to write it out because I've already done that before and you've probably read it. But just in case you haven't, you need to go to this page and read all about it here.
So now I'm now standing on the jetty of the ferry at Les Escoumins. This is the ferry for which I was searching during my voyage of 2010, for I'm big fan of ferries as you know.
Not that it's a good idea for my blood pressure of course, because every time I see one, it makes me cross.
And this one takes some finding. It's not very well-signposted and it's not the paved highway that you might be expecting. In fact it's quite off the beaten track - quite literally, because it's down some kind of dirt track at the side of the petrol station that we saw a minute or two ago.
Still, it hasn't deterred all these cars from turning up. They've clearly found their way here and this can only tell me that there's a ferry due to arrive in early course so I ought to be happy.
And I don't know why I'm complaining anyway because on the previous page I was complaining about the intrusion of modern suburban black-top highways into this corner of the world.
"Having my cake and eating it" is a phrase that springs to mind.
Sure enough, way out there is the distance is what can only be a ferry and my luck is in for it's heading my way.
You might think that it's actually quite close to here but one of the things that you can do with a decent camera
Here is the ferry at the quayside. In all of her glory, such as it is, because I have seen many better-looking ferries than this in my life, and we aren't talking about aesthetics either.
There was a guy in charge of marshalling the cars and I had to admire his office - it was the open hatchback of a small saloon car and he was standing by the side of it clutching a passenger list.
I went over for a chat and found him to be quite garrulous. I asked him a few questions and he told me everything that I wanted to know about the service.
She plies her trade between here at Les Escoumins and Trois Pistoles across on the South bank of the St Lawrence - a crossing that's timed to take about an hour and a half or therebouts.
I expressed my surprise at her size - she seemed to be quite small for a ship on a major ferry route of this distance in these water, to which he replied "no, she's not very big".
And while we were admiring the view of the Appalachian mountains at the back of Trois Pistoles, I continued the questioning.
Apparently the service runs until the beginning of November and restarts "whenever the ice lets her". To that, I told him that I wasn't really surprised as I didn't think that she would be much good in the winter storms.
"Well, she isn't really" he replied.
And he did go on to say that they were having many more passengers while the St Simeon ferry is closed. Apparently they are rebuilding the quay facilities at Riviere du Loup.
Using the same formula as previously - the "crop, enlarge, sharpen, contrast" - only this time with the mega-zoom lens that I bought just before my 2012 journey, I can crop out something of the town of Trois Pistoles.
The church is always a decent aiming point in any Quebecois town, and this is the Church of Notre Dame des Neiges. I'm quite pleased with this photo. I think that it came out rather well.
But why the church? The answer to that is that on my 2011 journey I met someone who told me that he was descended from David Ouellet, the architect who designed it, and if you come with me on that journey instead of following the North Shore, you'll meet him too..
But while I was here, I went for a really good wander around to see what esle I could see.
If you remember a few pages back when we were waiting in the queue at Baie St Catherine for the Saguenay Ferry, I pointed out to you all of the iron oxide stains on the rocks.
I told you that that was indicative of deposits of iron ore, and that the whole of this region of Canada was teeming with the stuff. If you have a good look at the water just here at the shoreline, you'll see that it isn't blue but in fact it's a dark reddy-brown colour. We have our iron-oxide again, so it seems.
The rocks in the river must be teeming with the stuff and it's true to say that it was the mineral resources here and their exploitation that brought modern infrastructure to this area.
We have some nice depostis of marble somewhere in the vicinity too, and I wish that I knew where. This rock is being used to shore up the edge of the quay and protect it from tidal erosion. The builders won't have brought it far seeing as there is rock just about everywhere around here.
This has brown stains on it too indicating that water drenched with iron oxide has flown over it. It might be from iron ore deposits on the bed of the river, but cynics might say that it's rust off the Empress of Ireland. She was a huge passenger liner that sank on the other side of the river in 1914 after collision in fog with a freighter, with the loss of over 1,000 lives.
From a little further round the corner I can glance across the bay to the town of Les Escoumins in the distance.
I'll tell you more about the town in due course but I'll draw your attention to the electricity pylons on the crest of the hills in the background.
One of the natural resources of the area that was amongst the first to be exploited was the water power. One of the earliest hydro-electric barrages to be constructed was at the Chute-aux Outardes about 75 miles down the coast back in 1925 and from then on, the quest for more power has been unstoppable.
This has led to the development of much heavy, energy-voracious industry such as aluminium-smelting along the coast, but a great deal of power finds its way down to the cities of Quebec and Montreal.
We had another visitor turning up at the scene while I was here mooching around. She's a ship called the Nordkap heading upstream towards Quebec and Montreal, and the first thing that went through my mind was whether she was a sister ship to the Nord Pol that I had seen earlier on my travels.
Built in 2002, she's a bulk carrier and flies the Danish Flag. At 225 metres long and 33 metres wide, she has a draught of just over 12 metres and grosses 40,000 tonnes.
When I was here in October 2015 there was another ship sailing ... "dieseling" - ed ... downstream along the St Lawrence River. That was the cue for me to grab the Nikon D5000
Unfortunately, the wind was such that I couldn't hold the lens steady and so the photo is rather blurred - especially when I cropped and enlarged the extract - so that I am not able to tell you her name. That was rather sad.
With all of the issues that we had in October 2015 about the booking, I had to wait for ages for the ferry to come in. But sure enough, about four hours after I had hoped to be on board, our ship came over the horizon.
She's called l'Heritage 1and she displaces all of ... errr ... 456 tonnes and no more. I told you that she was built in 1973, which is ancient for a large ferry, never mind a little ship like this. She looked in poor condition the first year that I saw her and each subsequent year she looks worse and worse.
And now, we are going to have The Parting Of The Ways.
If you have been following my adventures for the year 2011 so far and wish to continue, this is where you leave our journey along the North Shore of the St Lawrence. You will be heading south and everyone else will be heading east.
I say that for the year 2015 too, because even though we are crossing over here to the south, we came from the east and so if you are going to stay on the drive along the north shore you'll now be driving over the route that we had taken from Baie-Comeau in 2015 but in reverse, if you know what I mean.
I wish all of you a pleasant journey, whichever route that you take, and you have no need to worry about being on your own because we will all meet up again, and even join our fellow-travellers on many other voyages that we have taken along the south shore of the river.
Have a safe journey
continuing on the 2011 and 2015 journeys
continuing along the North Shore
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