Thankfully the afternoon proved much more interesting than my morning walk in Montréal with a visit to the Olympic Park, designed for the 1976 Olympic Games and a redeeming feature of our visit to Montréal since it showcases some stunning modern buildings.
Roger Taillibert, a Parisian architect created the famous stadium – rather affectionately (or not!) known to Canadians as the “Big Owe”, reference to the Can$1.61bn it cost to build and only recently paid off. It makes you realise just how well London did in staging the recent Olympics. Originally designed without a roof the 56,000-seat stadium is today used for concerts and big exhibitions. After many years of debate it was decided to add a roof that could be opened and closed. To achieve this required the construction of the top half of the Montréal Tower as it is known today which incorporates a system of cables and pulleys capable of lifting the hinged roof open and shut like a cap. As I understood our guide the roof was only operated in this way on a very few occasions and is now recovered and permanently closed.
The Montréal Tower, however, is impressive! It is the highest inclined tower in the world, rising to 175metres at an elevation of a 45-dgree angle. The promotional pamphlet states that the Leaning Tower of Pisa, by comparison only has a 5-degree incline. The first 92-metre stage of the Tower is built in concrete and the 2nd stage, completed in 1987, in steel.
So how does this tower stay up? Its all to do with the relationship between masses. None the wiser – then let me explain. The upper part of the tower has a mass of 8,000 tons that is permanently joined to the concrete base which in turn has a foundation thatreaches down over 12 metres below the ground with a total mass of 158,000 tons and serves as the tower’s centre of gravity – this is causing me a huge reminiscence to ‘A Level’ Applied Maths!! Not my strongest subject, so don’t panic if you still don’t understand how the tower stands!!
Whatever keeps it up Peg and I enjoyed the 2 minute ascent to the top of the tower aboard the 2 level, glass funicular railway that can take 76 passengers at a time and has an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the only funicular railway in the world that works on a curved, inclinedtrack. The panorama from the viewing deck stretches over 80 kms on a clear day and provides a splendid bird’s eye view of the Olympic complex with the award winning roof of the velodrome in the shape of a cyclist’s helmet – impressive but not as impressive as the London velodrome.
After a short visit to the Aquatics Centre – very reminiscent of the London centre but without the impressive wave roof we entered the ‘cyclist’s helmet’! – the velodrome having been converted to a impressive Biodome. Peg and I spent a very interesting hour strolling through recreations of steamy rainforest, freezing polar climates, the fertile forests of the Laurentian Mountains and the fish filled St Lawrence River. This Biodome just had the edge on the one I visited in Galveston USA in February of this year.
The final call on our tour was to the Jardin Botanique de Montréal. Ranked as one of the finest in the world, a truly deserved epithet for a northern city with such a brutal winter. Unfortunately we only had a short time to explore the 182 acres of gardens but if the quality of the specimens in the greenhouses were anything to go by these gardens would merit another visit.
So came to an end an enjoyable afternoon riding the funicular, spotting exotic animals in the Biodome and taking in some splendid horticultural accomplishments but I wasn’t sorry to see the skyline of Montréal recede astern as we left for a two day sail back downstream for our next port of call Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Another night on the St Lawrence River and another 90 miles upstream to the city of Montréal – the second largest city in Canada – but I have to say my least favourite port of call to date on this cruise.
Montreal sits at the confluence of the St Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers and geographically is as close to the European coast as to Vancouver – that just brings home how huge Canada is – the 2nd largest landmass in this world!! Founded in 1642 by French Catholics it became one of Canada’s first great trading centres. Today Montréal remains a commercial centre commanding the locks thatconnect the St Lawrence River with the Great Lakes. About 70% of the 3m population are of French descent, another 15% have British ancestry and therest derive from a wide variety of ethnic groups, including Italian, Greeks, Eastern European, South American and Chinese – Montréal has a substantial China Town section. Originally named ‘Ville Marie’ some historians contend that the city takes its name from ‘Mont-Réal’ (Mount Royal) – the 767ft, three-head hill that stands to the north west of this city that sits on the southern shore of the St Lawrence River and occupies a 30-mile long island. Apart from the cobbled streets in the Vieux (Old port district) the city is set on a grid pattern with the Rue Saint-Antoine running the entire length of the island.
The cruise handbook describes Montréal as combining “the finest aspects of the two continents (Europe and North America). Its North American skyline of glass and concrete (Rather less impressive than Calgary or Vancouver in my view) rise above churches and monuments in a blend of European styles as varied as the Montréal’s social mix.” The cruise handbook tells me that the city was ranked as the tenth cleanest city in the world in 2007, not an accolade that was easily recognisable to me this morning as I set out on an exploration of the city – lots of litter, sleeping tramps and vagrants scores of commuters shuffling their way from the Metro to downtown offices and cyclists – they like their bikes here and have a public bike hire system as in London – who think they have the right of way everywhere, including the sidewalks and leave their machines chained to any post of other upright object in a tangled mass of wheels, handlebars and seats!
I wish I could say it was the grey overcast morning that gave rise to my poor impression of Montréal but after nearly 2 hours of wandering round I found little to marvel at - quite the contrary I found it a rather soulless and desolate place of boring concrete and bricks and how itever won the right to stage the 1976 Olympics will forever remain a mystery to me – although Peg and I had a very interesting and rewarding trip in the afternoon to the Olympic site but more of that in another posting.
Unfortunately I didn’t enter the Basilica, which proved to be a mistake but having failed to find shops on the main street of Rue St. Catherine I suddenly remembered that a fellow passenger had told me that because of the severe winters many of he shops are located in subterranean caverns!! After a couple of false starts I eventually found my way into this vast complex underground but sadly it proved to be as equally drab and uninviting although I did have a rather good cup of coffee! One thing the caverns did have was a vast range of cuisines on offer from Lebanese, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, French and of course the inevitable Poutine (Chips with cheese curds and beef gravy).
Again my guidebook describes this complex - rather optimistically in my opinion as a ‘hotbed of fashion’ – I found the clothing on offer very conservative in drab shadowy yellows and greens – nothing bright to lighten the subterranean dullness and not a patch on the fashion conscious Chinese in Shanghai!
Disappointed I walked back to the ship hoping for better in the afternoon when Peg and I were to visit the Olympic site.
Back to my afternoon that began with a visit to the Boréalis Museum, housed in the filtration and pumping plant of the now defunct C.I.PPaper Mill. The mill itself has long been demolished and is currently being redeveloped as Technology Park alongwith some new condominiums that appear to be the most popular form of residential accommodation in Canada. An investment of over 7 million dollars has transformed this plant into an interesting museum paying tribute to Trois-Rivières as the ‘pulp and paper capital of the world’. Short video presentations tell the story of the lumberjacks, raftsman and workers who supplied the mill with logs and transformed them into pulp and eventually paper.
The lumber would be cut in in the winter in harsh, cold and snowy conditions, the trees being easier to cut without rising sap and the logs stacked on the ice by the Saint Maurice River. In the Spring the ice and log stacks would be dynamited sending the vast number of logs on their journey down the river to its mouth and the meetingpoint with the St Lawrence. The lumberjacks would return home in April and as one of our guides ventured this probably explains why so many Canadians have their birthday in December!
The rafters would live in cabins on the log flows undertaking the highly dangerous job of keeping the logs moving and dynamiting logjams. I had seen a demonstration of log rolling on Grouse Mountain above Vancouver back in July and it was interesting to note that one of the reasons the C.I.P Mill closing was because people still crossed the river Saint Maurice on the logs in the Spring – a highly dangerous activity!
The wood used in the C.I.P Mill was produced from Black Spruce, one of the softest woods that only really required to be chipped, crushed and mixed with water to form the pulp from which the water is eventually squeezed to form a continuous stream of paper. This soft pulp was ideal for newsprint and mainly supplied to the USA. Harder woods required heat and chemicals to break down the wood fibres and inevitably this led to high levels of pollution in the rivers. So a combination of environmental awareness and strong competition from papermaking in China led to the closure of the this and 2 other plants in Trois-Rivières in the early 1980s.
I was interested to learn, or perhaps more accurately to be reminded, that wasps create their nests from finely chewed wood – pulp - which explains why I get so many wasps nests in my all wood house walls at home – they have an infinite supply of Western Red Cedar (From British Columbia) shingles on my roof!
The visit ended with a rather spooky visit to the underground reservoirs where the vast quantities of filtered water requiredwere stored.
The next visit was to the Forges du Saint Maurice, a Canadian National Historic site again located on the Saint Maurice River, which provided the power to drive the vast waterwheels (See the photograph of a replica wheel) that in turn drove the bellows for the furnaces and the hammers for forging the iron. Founded in 1730 the forges were in use for over 150 years and formed the basis of one of the most important and largest industrial communities in Canada. The range of industrial and consumer products manufactured at this site was enormous from domestic stoves, to cauldrons, cannon balls to cast iron rails and train wheels that were used to finally create the Confederation of Canada via the Canadian Pacific Railroad and another link with my Rocky Mountaineer train ride earlier in July when I had seen the site where the ‘last spike’ was hammered into the sleepers joining the east and west coasts of Canada.
