June 2001
Mrs R (Poppy’s school teacher from last year) is Canadian – and it turns out that Dave and I had visited her little-touristed home city of Moncton in New Brunswick nearly 20 years ago (in fact, she could well have been living there at the time). So, I thought I’d do a flashback to our time in that part of Canada – a longer account than normal, as I won’t be posting again until June, the other side of the school half-term.
We’d left home for Canada on 11th June 2001, on a budget trip that ultimately became nearly two years of round-the-world travel, encountering every variety of basic accommodation, an acute lack of privacy, physical effort (we walked 1500 miles in just our first year), extreme weather, being lost in the middle of nowhere with no help for miles around (no phone or GPS in those days), the inability to communicate in English with anyone but each other for weeks at a time, unexpected wild animal encounters (bears, snakes, sharks, piranhas), and coming uncomfortably close to being attacked by angry taxi drivers, caught up in riots, taken hostage, and bombed. The list goes on.
By great coincidence (and after we’d already planned our route), Dave’s parents had booked a guided fly-and-coach holiday to Canada, and this gave us the option to meet up for a few hours when we overlapped in the city of Quebec. Not surprisingly, Dave’s mum was anxious about our epic journey and, the moment she clapped eyes on us, she looked us over carefully, finally proclaiming with great relief, “Well, you look O.K. so far.”
I should point out that, at this point, we’d been away from home for precisely six days, coping with ravages no worse than clean hotels, decent food and strolls amongst the pleasant city parks, streets and museums of Montreal and Quebec.
We soon left the city of Quebec by coach and headed into the less populated areas of this French-speaking province. Our first stop was the village of Tadoussac, at the confluence of the Saguenay and Saint Lawrence rivers. On arrival there, we heaved our weighty rucksacks (complete with all our camping equipment) on a four mile yomp before we found a campsite that was actually open, halfway up a big hill.
It was a beautiful site, with panoramic views over Tadoussac Bay, and we enjoyed the lovely evening outside our tiny tent as we stood up cooking a well-earned dinner of spaghetti bolognese on our miniature camping stove. Everything was prepared, ready to eat, and we were ravenous.
At that moment, from nowhere, the air began to fizz and the heavens opened in a massive thunderstorm streaked with forked and sheet lightning. There was nowhere to shelter, so we yanked on our waterproofs and crouched in the recommended ‘lightning resistant’ position until the worst of the storm had passed. But there was nothing we could do to protect our dinner.
The two bowls of hot spaghetti bolognese had filled with rainwater and had become two bowls of cold, thin tomato soup with floating spaghetti remnants. But it was all the food we had, so we ate it (with plastic spoons as the air still felt charged). It continued to rain, and our bowls filled at almost the same rate we ate – a never-ending, continuously diluting bowl of cold slop.
We had noticed a few midges at the campsite, but were topped from head to foot in sweaty, non-breathable waterproofs, so didn’t worry about them too much. After a while, we started getting itchy and discovered that the midges had managed to bite us viciously and extensively on any bit of bare skin they could find – the backs of our hands, along our hairlines and hair partings, and around our eyes (one of my eyelids puffed up overnight from a bite).
Just before bedtime, the storm finally passed and the clouds became beautiful and rosy as the sun set. The night was now peaceful and we screwed up our sodden waterproofs in the microscopic entranceway of our tent and retired to our sleeping bags. Despite the pain emanating from one of my wisdom teeth and from my feet that had become sore and bleeding, I slept soundly ... until woken in the night by activities I wish I hadn’t overheard from the neighbouring tent.
Next morning was a new day, a fresh start. I went for a shower, armed with a few Canadian quarters, sighing contentedly under the warm, steady stream of water as I soaped myself up ... at which point, the water supply promptly ceased. It was a palava getting to the meter, naked and soapy, to insert more money. It was even worse when I discovered that all my other Canadian quarters were not actually quarters at all, but some other denomination of Canadian currency of a similar, but slightly different, coin size. There was nothing for it: I rinsed off in cold water in the sink.
When I got back to the tent, I discovered that, in my confusion, I’d put all my dirty underwear back on again, and was carrying what had been my clean underwear tightly wrapped (and now damp) inside my wet towel.
My sandal straps were proving uncomfortable, so I settled down to make adjustments with a needle and thread. The strap material was so thick that the only way to pull the needle through was by using a small pair of pliers (which I always take travelling). Halfway through the adjustments – snap! – the needle broke. I’d already broken two needles in the last few days and had none left. Time to head into the village centre to try to buy more needles. We were having to carry everything on our backs, so I only wanted a few.
I looked up the French word for needle in our miniature 1950s phrasebook and went from shop to shop, asking in poor, outdated French if I could buy five needles. One shopkeeper finally queried what exactly I wanted by miming themselves injecting an arm – I was mortified that they (and everyone else I’d asked) might think I was a habitual user, so quickly mimed sewing actions. Ah, now they understood, but, no, they didn’t have any – they were a pharmacy.
Eventually, I found an old-fashioned crafts and sewing shop. The elderly lady there had sewing needles ... in big packs. I only wanted five needles, maximum. But she was enthusiastic – look, she would take a pack down and show me the big pack she sold. Unfortunately, in her enthusiasm, she dropped the big pack and scattered sewing needles all over the shop floor.
Poor old lady: I got down on hands and knees and spent a good 5-10 minutes picking them all up for her, whilst she watched (poor old lady? or wily?). Still, I thought I must have earnt some kudos. Surely, she would let me buy just five needles now (or maybe even give me five as a thankyou for helping her – there could easily have been more than that number rolled unseen under the counter). I looked appealingly at her and held my breath ... There was a pause ... No, I couldn’t buy just five needles. I could buy the whole pack or I could leave. There wasn’t much choice. I bought the whole pack, or what remained of it (I was desperate after an hour of scouring the village). I’ve never forgiven her.
The day wasn’t wholly unappealing. In the afternoon, we treated ourselves to a fantastic whale watching cruise on the St Lawrence River and partway up the Saguenay Fjord. At one point, we were all called downstairs for a video about whales and, just as it was about to start, I (we all) got the shock of our lives when the casually dressed, late middle-aged, French-speaking woman standing next to me suddenly stepped forward, as did a chap on the other side of the audience, and promptly got married just in front of me. Thank goodness I didn’t step forward by mistake!
In fact, this was the first of many weddings that featured during our travels. Sometimes, it was people popping out from nowhere to get married, sometimes a wedding that we were spontaneously invited along to at twenty minutes’ notice in our smelly clothes, sometimes a wedding that we had to travel half the circumference of the world to get to (courtesy of not just one, but both our brothers getting married about six months apart).
It was such a good boat trip that we weren’t even dismayed when, having paid full-rate for a whale-watching-cruise-cum-wedding, we went for a stroll by the water’s edge straight afterwards in the beautifully serene early evening sunlight and saw whales just metres offshore, almost within touching distance, completely free-of-charge.
On leaving Tadoussac, we travelled by ferry, bus and on foot to Sainte-Anne-des-Monts on the Gaspésie Peninsula. This peninsula featured small, neat, square weatherboarded houses with verandahs and either no gardens or gardens that were rarely fenced in. Part of the main coast road in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts was still gravel rather than paved.
We spent a few nights in the near-deserted youth hostel in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts. Whilst there, we enjoyed beautiful sunsets and the chance to cook our own nice evening meals in the hostel kitchen. On the downside, I got DEET all over my travel diary and a letter I was writing home, and had to rewrite both. The only other guests we saw at the hostel were at breakfast one morning, travelling individually. They were almost complete opposites. The girl was completely staid-looking with a plain haircut and conservative cheesecloth blouse – who, on closer inspection, turned out to have a pierced eyebrow. The lad was a skinhead with a nose ring and pierced chin, who seemed permanently to wear purple-tinted sunglasses, white earphones and a rude T-shirt – who carried a yellow teddy bear everywhere with him.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Circular walk climbing Mont Albert in Gaspésie National Park.
We wanted to walk in the spectacular landscape of Gaspésie National Park amongst grouse and butterflies and wild orchids. That was the main reason for coming to the peninsula. But buses to the park hadn’t yet started running for the 3 month season and we couldn’t seem to find a taxi service. The only option was to hire a car for 24 hours. This grated somewhat as we only needed it for transport to the park and back, and it still involved walking a total of 6 miles to get it booked one evening and collected next day, and was a much larger vehicle than we needed. But it was just about affordable, so we bit the bullet and agreed the rental.
However, when we took it back at the end of the rental period, it turned out to have cost a small fortune: they’d mis-sold us a high level of insurance cover, calling it a ‘deposit’ that we therefore thought was returnable, and then charged us extra for something they had previously called ‘free miles’. Being charitable, I might put it down to the language barrier (our poor French and their poor English), but I wonder...
Our next stop was a night in Cap Aux Os (named after the whale bones that are sometimes found on the beach there). The bus stopped right outside the hostel, so we didn’t have a long walk with our heavy bags, which was great as I was now suffering from stomach pains. A nature trail was advertised but nowhere to be found – it must have been out of town and everyone assumed to have their own transport – so we explored on foot a few miles along the quiet coast road instead, watching a couple of heron-like birds just inland and reaching an area of wild, purple irises on a small cliff top.
Next day, we were to catch a bus out of Cap Aux Os. We were packed and ready to leave, so I thought I’d ring my mum quickly as there was a hostel payphone and we were overdue for a catch-up on news from home (none of which turned out to be good, least of all the rental situation of our house in Reading despite all the careful plans we’d put in place). The phone call didn’t connect well and I promptly got charged several (non-returnable) dollars for 5 seconds of silence, before nervously making a second expensive, but thankfully successful, phone call.
The short call finished, we were out by the roadside in good time, patiently awaiting the bus. It had been 40 minutes late reaching this stop the day before, so we could be waiting for some time. Then a passerby told us that the bus had come along early today and sailed straight past without stopping as there had been no-one outside the hostel. No? Seriously? We needed to be on that bus to connect with our coach out of the town of Gaspé, further round the peninsula!
In disbelief, we headed back inside the hostel. The staff there were absolutely great and rallied around to find someone who could drive us to Gaspé straight away and would only charge a small amount more than the bus would have cost for two people. We were back on track ... until our driver got stuck behind a slow carnival procession on the outskirts of Gaspé. Just when it seemed all chance of connecting with our coach was lost, the parade stopped and turned off the route, and we made it to our coach with just minutes to spare.
That evening, we reached Campbellton in the province of New Brunswick in the Canadian Maritimes. This was the first English-speaking settlement we’d encountered since leaving home two weeks ago – two weeks of continuously struggling to communicate in the beautiful, sophisticated but often less-than-accommodating, French-speaking Quebec province of Canada.
We were surprised and very relieved to find that the Campbellton Tourist Information office was open until 9 p.m. even though it was a Sunday and still early in the tourist season. The staff there were very helpful, giving us free maps and directions to a nearby youth hostel set in a lighthouse that had only opened its doors to visitors a few days before.
The hostel was spotlessly clean, the manager made us a welcome pot of coffee on arrival, and we were able to buy food from a nearby convenience store. We were very content. The only other guest was a young guy on such a tight budget that he couldn’t afford even the rock-bottom price being charged by the hostel and instead asked to pitch his one-man tent on the small patch of grass outside the front door at half-price, which the manager kindly agreed to.
We noticed house numbers in Campbellton going up to 29,800 (can you imagine?) and many models (cows, girls with parasols, mules and carts) decorating front gardens – reminiscent of the erstwhile British proclivity for garden gnomes, although these constructions were larger than gnomes. We wandered along the waterfront and came across the ‘big mama’ model of them all – a large, stainless steel salmon forming a fountain that shimmered attractively in a small plaza: Campbellton’s big fish.
Campbellton was lovely – friendly and tourist-orientated, with banks able to change travellers’ cheques without commission charges (a big headache for us so far), cars stopping to let pedestrians across the road, and locals stopping to offer help to any visitor who looked lost. The travelling life didn’t seem nearly so difficult now and it would have been nice to stop for longer, but we needed to press on. Next stop: Moncton (also in New Brunswick).
After we’d bought our bus tickets, the Campbellton bus station staff let us leave our rucksacks, so that we could wander round town until the bus left later that morning. Unfortunately, the bus driver we finally ended up with turned out to be a total misery, with a real chip on his shoulder, surely not a resident of Campbellton. He wouldn’t confirm where the bus was going nor where we needed to change buses for our connection to reach Moncton. He rudely snapped, “Mind out of the way – some people here have work to do,” then loaded everyone’s bags onto the bus, except Dave’s and mine, the only rucksacks, which he made us load ourselves. We were relieved when it was time to transfer to the next bus with a new driver.
Part of the route to Moncton was dual carriageway, which repeatedly went over level crossings, none of which were gate controlled and few of which even had stop lights. The onus was on the cars and buses to stop and check for trains before crossing – and this is exactly what happened. A continual acceleration to 60 mph followed by braking to zero at the edge of every single level crossing and then re-accelerating to 60 mph. It seemed a very strange concept for a dual carriageway.
We liked Moncton. It was the most similar place to home (Reading in the UK) that we’d been so far – a large, down-to-earth place, pretty in places and with some nice countryside around; probably not a major drawcard for tourists, but offering those visitors who did stop by a genuine experience of what local life was like.
Just as in Campbellton, Moncton had a really good Tourist Information office. They booked us into ‘Downtown Bed and Breakfast’ just round the corner, a B&B set in a lovely big house on a quiet road just off the main street, where we had a room on the upper floor, sharing a bathroom. We checked in, then went for a stroll along a cycle path beside a river with big mudflats topped with seagulls. I was reminded strongly of my childhood home in Faversham (in Kent in the UK) and the tidal mudflats of Faversham Creek and nearby Conyer Creek. The surrounding landscape also felt similar to that around Wageningen in The Netherlands, where I’d carried out part of my university studies many years before.
(Mrs R – that means Moncton feels like a mix of Reading, Wageningen and Faversham/Conyer Creek. We reached India 18 months later and, there, one of our favourite cities was Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which also reminded us of Reading – and thus, by deduction, Moncton? So, there’s a holiday bucket list if you fancy touring the ‘Monctons of the World’...)
We ate out at a nice restaurant in Moncton called Graffiti, as recommended by our B&B landlady. To contain costs, we only ate out once a week on our travels, so it was a real treat sitting down to fillet of sole, speciality sauces, rice and Mediterranean salad, with tiramisu for afters. Halfway through our meal, one of the waitresses dropped an entire tray of glasses straight from the dishwasher, which smashed and scattered everywhere over the restaurant floor and under our table.
Back inside our room, I noticed that our door had two locks, only one of which we had a key for. Rather worryingly, the second lock looked as though it could be accidentally operated from inside and trap us in our room, unable to get out without the key (even to reach the bathroom). Surely, this couldn’t be the case. I started fiddling with the lock. Dave told me not to. I wish I’d listened. Click! The lock sprang across. I was right: there was no way to release it by hand, no key inside the room, and quite possibly no key in the entire house. We were locked in, perhaps forever.
Dave glared at me. I glared at the door. Far too embarrassed to call out and ask for help, I needed to find a way out of this mess. Luckily, I had a basic toolkit in my rucksack. I pulled out a small screwdriver and, with great care, was able to unscrew and remove the lock, and replace it intact the next day in such a way that the landlady would never be able to work out how we’d escaped. (She wouldn’t credit that we were carrying a toolkit – I’ve yet to find a single other backpacker who carries their own pliers and screwdrivers.)
(Dave says that I share certain similarities with our good friend who is a secondary school chemistry teacher – and reluctantly I can see his point. Trapped in our room, I didn’t do the obvious and call out for help, asking for a key. No, I chose to remove and replace the lock. In the same vein, our friend once worked with an over-zealous lab assistant who wouldn’t allow any of the highly qualified chemistry teachers, nor even the head of department, to access the chemicals cupboard in order to do their jobs, keeping it locked at all times. Did our friend try reasoning with the lab assistant? Did he seek an overruling from the school head? Did he try to get hold of the key, just once, and get a sneaky copy cut? No, he bought a lock-picking set and taught himself to pick locks!)
The lady who ran the B&B here was lovely, and we had a nice chat with her at breakfast next morning (being careful not to mention the door lock, of course) and with her other guest, a middle-aged, white man from South Africa. Both had insightful and even heart-rending stories to tell. She originally came from a gypsy family and, apparently for no reason other than this, had once been strip-searched coming through Heathrow airport.
The man’s story was particularly distressing. Like a million (out of four or five million) whites and affluent blacks who had already fled the country, he was trying to get his family out of South Africa after violent crime had escalated in Johannesburg (women raped, killed and their cars stolen on the way back from grocery shopping, HIV rates running at 70% - not the official 25% figure - based on routine arrival tests at the hospital where his sister worked, his daughter’s boyfriend shot dead in front of his own mother just days before he was going to propose to his daughter on Valentine’s Day). It was unbelievable.
We took our leave and walked the mile or so out to Moncton coach station with all our heavy bags. Just as we arrived, I realised that I was still carrying the room key from the B&B that we’d just vacated. I was feeling very unwell, so Dave kindly raced it back to the B&B whilst I waited with the bags and arrived back at the coach station just before our coach left.
What a relief he’d taken the key back. He said that the landlady, on seeing him, had announced that we’d left something behind, and hurried off to get it. She returned holding our damp, limp face flannel tentatively from one corner, unsure what it was. Dave explained.
“Oh, a face flannel, is it? I did wonder. Anyway, I’d already put it down the garbage chute, but fished it back out. Here you are.” And she promptly thrust it across to him.
Unbelievably, yesterday’s miserable bus driver had somehow managed to turn up in Moncton, and was the driver we would be with for today’s onward journey towards North Sydney in Nova Scotia. This time, he did deign to tell us where the bus was going and the transfer we needed to make (in Truro), albeit with incredible sarcasm. When we reached the transfer point, we went to get our own bags to move them to the new bus, remembering how rude he’d been with refusing to load them yesterday – only for him to avoid eye contact and mutter in a threatening voice, “Leave that rucksack alone. We do the transfer.” And the plaque on the wall above the drivers’ heads on New Brunswick buses? ‘SAFE – RELIABLE – COURTEOUS.’
And thus we left Moncton and New Brunswick and headed to the next of the Canadian Maritimes: Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, before moving on to Newfoundland. But those are stories for another time.