 | CANADA - |
| CANADA - |
PETIT SAGUENAY
This is what it's like down at the bottom of the road from Petit-Saguenay. There's a little harbour here and quayside called, as you might expect, the quai de Petit Saguenay.
We have a car park for about 20 cars and although there's a sign that says "no caravans and no trailers here", I'm sure that they don't mean a Dodge Grand Caravan, and so I park up here for five minutes with the aim of going for a quick look around, despite the now-torrential rain.
What I do notice is that, despite the torrential rain, this little corner where I've stuck the Dodge is quite sheltered from the wind as there's a little cliff right behing the car, so it's nothing like as unpleasant as it might be. There are also all kinds of facilities to hand on this quay and the view would be quite stunning if only the rain would stop.
I therefore make an executive decision that no matter how much the idea of stopping overnight at Baie des Rochers was tempting me, this is where I'm going to be staying the night.
Mind you, I almost (but not quite) changed my mind about that.
A short while after I had settled down, one of these boy-racers in some kind of souped-up saloon car came down here and made quite a racket, roaring around presumably to impress the young female passenger that he had in his driving seat. However he cleared off before I was able to go outside and assault him.
And I was alone down here when I arrived, despite what you see in the photograph above. That mobile home came down a little later. He's pulling a trailer, which is of course forbidden here, but he took no notice whatever of the sign.
He spent about an hour manoeuvring his mobile home and trailer around, trying to find the best spot for the night. It was quite a performance too, seeing as how we had -
and there were three or four times when he nearly ended up in the water.
In the end, after much ado about nothing but providing me with a good hour's-worth of free entertainment, he ended up back where he started.
It should be fun watching him try to turn round yet again in the morning when there will probably be many more people about. Rule number one in circumstances like this is always to park your vehicle so that you are ready to leave.
With the issue of the evening's entertainment having been dealt with, I can turn my attention to the matter of cooking my evening meal.
Cooking is quite simple here. One gas ring, one saucepan and that's my lot. All kinds of stuff are put in together and cooked together, and then I eat out of the saucepan. Finally, I boil up a little water in the saucepan and use that to ... errr ... wash the saucepan. Nothing could be simpler.
I can't remember what I had for tea, but I do remember that I put some of the IGA "Complement" spicy sauce on it. That tasted exactly like the hot taco sauce that I buy sometimes in LIDL here in Europe, and so while I was eating my tea I mulled over the idea of some huge factory somewhere churning out huge lakes of the stuff, bottling it, and shipping the bottles to all corners of the world.
Later that evening, in the dark, I went out for a gypsy's. The rain is absolutely lashing down now and there's a hanging cloud all around the fjord and where I'm parked. It doesn't 'arf remind me of home.
But I'm glad that I'm in the Dodge and that I'm not in a tent at all. That would be impossible in this weather. Just imagine trying to change a tyre in it too. I was lucky that I picked up my puncture when I did and not an hour or two later
Next morning, the rain has stopped and so I can show you exactly where it was that I was sleeping. Can you imagine waking up to this view out of your side window, even though we still have a heavy mist that the sun has not yet dispersed?
Not only is the view so magnificent, I have to say that this was one of the best nights' sleeps that I have ever had while I've been on my travels. I was out like a light and didn't wake up at all.
While I'm waiting for the kettle to boil for my morning coffee, I can tell you something about the Saguenay Fjord, seeing as we've been driving around it for the past few days.
The valley is, as I didn't doubt for a minute, a glaciated valley. And it must have been some glacier too as you can tell by looking at the rounded tops of the mountains. That's typical of erosion by ice rather than wind, and so the glacier must have been thick enough to have covered the surrounding mountains.
The fjord itself is 100 kilometres long and in some places it's as much as 900 metres down to the bedrock. Of course, you don't have to go that far down to reach the bottom because nowhere is more than 275 metres deep. The difference is accounted for by the depth of sediment, and proves the point that I was making a day or two ago about the haydro-electric dams silting up.
On the subject of sediment, the fjord is a dark brown murky colour because of the amount of vegetation that is in it and the slow rate of decomposition. There's also a considerable quantity of iron in the surrounding mountains and a great deal of that is washed into the fjord.
Furthermore, it makes me wonder what kind of remains, human or animal, are buried deep in the sediment and never likely to be rediscovered.
It's not a fanciful idea either.
During World War II, a German submarine was sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the mouth of the Mississippi. Despite the shallowness of the water at the site of the sinking and the exhaustive nature of the searches, no trace of the submarine has ever been found.
In the 1960s, after yet another abortive search, "experts" concluded that the sunken U-boat had been overwhelmed by the amount of sediment deposited by the river - and that was over a period of about 20 years. Imagine what might have happened here over a period of 1000 years.
The fjord is tidal, with tidal heights varying between 3 and 5 metres, and I can actually prove this to you.
The road down to the fjord follows the river, also called the Petit-Saguenay. When I came down here last night, there were a couple of men fishing in this picturesque river and so I stopped to talk to them, like you do ... "like YOU do;" - ed ... and take a photograph.
Anyway, returning to our moutons as they say in Quebec and other Francophone places, when I was leaving the quayside in the morning to continue my journey, I stopped here again.
It was somewhere around this spot where those men were fishing last night and so I took another photo. If you compare the previous photo with this one, you'll see what I mean about the tide.
The tidal part of the fjord is salt water and as this comes upstream with the tide, there's fresh water from Lac St Jean and the tributary rivers flowing downstream. Consequently there's a layering of the water in the fjord, with the fresh water in the upper layer and salt water in the lower layer.
As an aside, the river down to the fjord is said to be quite a good salmon river, or so our intrepid fisherment told me. But they didn't tell me how many they had caught and I didn't ask because it's not the kind of thing that you do to a fisherman. The size of a fisherman's catch has a lot in common with the size of a coach driver's tip. It increases the more times he talks about it.
Now that I've eaten my breakfast and have my coffee to sustain me, I can go back on the road and finish off my journey to rejoin Highway 138.
I have to stop at the village of Petit-Saguenay to have a look at the church though.
It's quite a modern church and brick-built too, which is quite rare for this part of Quebec. Its modernity makes me wonder about the fate of the previous church because there surely must have been one - European settlement here began in about 1848.
The cynic within me ... "you, Eric? Surely not!" - ed ... immediately suspects a fire. That's the usual fate of almost every church in Eastern Canada, but I've no evidence whatever to support that wild guess.
You can see to the side of the church and clearly contemporary with it, another building. You can't see the join between the church and this building and they are both in a similar style so it would seem to be linked to the church. It may be a church hall or a presbytery or something.
However, this building at the side is up for sale. That's rather bizarre. What is happening with the church in Petit Sageunay then?
I did mention that European settlement began here round about 1848. It was in that year that William Price, father of the Price Brothers about whom we have talked so much, established a sawmill here.
As his empire began to grow, Petit-Saguenay was for a while the administrative centre of his operation. The village is a far cry from the subsequent headquarters of the company , isn't it?
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