It hardly seems just over 8 weeks since I was whale watching off Alaska and British Columbia but I was glad to be ashore after the long days at sea and heading for another afternoon of whale watching out of Tadoussacwhich sits at the confluence of the Saguenay River Fjord and the St Lawrence River. Although the tour was listed as 8 hours we first had to drive the 100 or so kilometres from Le Baie – Port Saguenay – where our ship was berthed back to the mouth of the Saguenay Fjord. Like a few things we were discover on this voyage up the St Lawrence tourism is relatively new as thelocal economies struggle to overcome the closure of many paper mills suffering huge competition from China and some of the tours still need perfecting butmore about that in a while.
We first ravelled north to Chicoutimi to cross the Saguenay River to its northern bank and enter the Saguenay Fjord National Park. The Saguenay Fjord was used as a natural route by the First Nations people and Chicoutimi was the site of the first French fur trading post in the 1600s. Rapid colonisation followed and in 1898 a high quality pulp mill wasestablished which quickly gained a worldwide reputation – sadly the mill no longer exists.
Our route out of Chicoutimi lay through marshland on the river edge where we could see the first ‘v-formations’ of Canadian Geese beginning to congregate and feed up before their migration to Europe. Within the next few days millions of these wildfowl would be gathering at this spot. We wound our way along an undulating road in the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains enjoying the ever changing colours of the trees with some of the maples already bedecked in gorgeous rich reds and oranges to our first stop at the picturesque of Ste Rose du Nord described as the ‘jewel of the Saguenay River”.
We had wondered why we only had a 15-minute stop at this jewel – the tour company had miscalculated the timings and the bus now only had 30 minutes to cover 79 km to Tadoussac along equally winding roads! Of course we arrived late and instead of having one-and-a-half hours to find some lunch we had 35 minutes. Shall we just say that the ‘gannets’ on the bus made straight for the only restaurant within easy walking distance thusensuring that no one who hadn’t placed an order within 5 minutes of leaving the bus would be likely to receive any food and leaving the rest of us to fight for the odd sandwich in a small supermarket!
The mistiming continued since the guide insisted we were back on the bus for 12.15 to drive the 200 metres to the quay to board the boat. Inevitably we stood like ‘lemons’ awaiting the arrival of our boat the ‘Grand Flueve’ at 1.00pm. Since there were at least 200 people to board I soon realised that it was going to be a scrum to find a good position from which to view the whales and to get some decent photos but it got worse! See you in the next posting!!
The photo is of the oldest wooden chapel in this part of the world – Taddousac.
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