 | CANADA - |
| CANADA - |
LEAVING THE LAKE
Having dealt with the town of Roberval, we hit the road and continue our tour around the lake.
One thing that I keep on seeing, and I must have seen dozens by now on our travels, are old Jaguars, the type dating from the 1980s and 90s. Most of them seem to be laid up too. One surprising thing about this, though, is that I don't recall seeing a more modern Ford-built Jaguar yet.
Another thing that I keep on seeing just about everywhere are signs for blueberries - bluets. You can't move without tripping over a sign. The man yesterday in the ice-cream parlour talked - and for hours and hours too - about blueberries and told me that this area was the blueberry capital of the world. And I can believe him too.
Something else that caught my eye as I drove through ... errrr ... where am I right now? ... "Chambord" - ed ... ohh yes, Chambord, is a sign for a railway station, with a neat little pictogram depicting people boarding a train.
How rare a sight is that in Canada? Passenger trains running over Canadian National lines and stopping to pick up passengers in small remote locations such as this?
About 8 kilometres or so south of Chambord we come to a river that I think might be the riviere Metabetchouane but don't quote me on this, and I suddenly find myself back in the alpine scenery, even though we are quite close to the lake.
And then, just 5 minutes later, I'm back in the agricultural zone again.
It's quite astonishing how quickly the climatic zones change around here, where the differences in shade and sunlight can make such a dramatic difference to the vegetation. It's this kind of thing that demonstrates that we are right on the very margins of the temperate zone here and the sub-arctic zone is a mere cock-stride away.
This town may well be Metabetchouan, although I'm not sure as I couldn't see a sign for it anywhere.
Whatever it might be called, Highway 169, the road that we have been following around the lake, by-passes the town and I'm not sure why because it was a pretty little place to visit and had quite an attractive lakefront.
If it is Metabetchouan, quite a few Canadian people will recognise it. Its claim to fame is that it is the site of a famous summer camp for children aged 12 and over who possess some kind of musical talent and wish to study intensively during the summer holidays. I'm told that the concerts performed by the students can be quite spectacular.
Now what do you think that that object is there in the middle of the road? European readers don't need to be told what it is but anyone from North America who might have seen this photo 20 years ago would be scratching his head in bewliderment.
It is of course a roundabout, or "traffic circle" as the North American Lady Who Lives In The SatNav keeps on telling me.
20 years ago, you would hardly have found one in the whole of North America, and I well-remember my delight when I encountered my first, at Pictou, in 2003 .
Since then, they have become status symbols in North America and every town must have one whether it needs one or not. It takes all the fun out of driving over here.
It doesn't take all the fun out of spectating though. Having a roundabout is one thing. Knowing how to drive around one is a completely different thing
.
Leaving aside yet another good rant for the moment, I need to be pressing on the Chicoutimi. The roundabout gives me several equally-good choices and so whatever makes you think that I chose the combined Highway 169/170?
Mind you, I'm not quite sure either why I did, because I could see absolutely nothing that would indicate the necessity to fit stop-lights on this road and to close it on certain occasions. That was a complete and utter let-down.
I stopped at a supermarket on the outskirts of Alma to do some shopping as supplies were running low. Rummaging around in one of the sale bins, I noticed a CD - The Best of Dolly Parton. It was definitely "Best" - this is not a typing error - but I didn't know that the best of Dolly Parton would fit onto a CD.
It does remind me of the radio news bulletin going back to the 1980s that announced that Dolly Parton had some kind of rash on her chest and volunteers were being sought to help her apply the ointment and rub it well in.
Of course, altruist that I am, I immediately phoned up to volunteer.
"Thank you, Mr Hall" said the voice on the other end of the line. "Would you please go to the United Nations Building in New York?"
"The United Nations Building in New York?" I queried. "I thought that she lived in Nashville Tennessee"
"So she does" replied the voice "but the United Nations Building in New York is where the queue ends".
Ohh yes - and guess what? It's THAT time of day again and whereas in Europe that would be the cue to be caught in a series of milking traps, here in North America it's school bus traps that you need to avoid.
However, I manage to find myself stuck in a couple of good ones on the outskirts of Alma and I have a whole series of school buses coming at me from all directions.
It's at frustrating moments like this with drivers that have much less patience than Yours Truly that doubtless led to the invention and popularity of the game of skittles. I could have an enormous amount of fun at moments such as this and it would certainly give the survivors something to talk about.
For the moment though, I'm much more interested in the school bus that appeared in front of me at one particular moment. It's a Bluebird and was achetée'd at Girardin. Isn't that the big place at Drummondville on the southern shore of the St Lawrence between Montreal and Trois Rivieres?
Leaving Alma (and it wasn't for a good few hours that I realised that I had forgotten to go for a look around the town) in the direction of Chicoutimi, I'm also leaving behind the pastoral scenery and the agricultural zone.
I'm climbing up now into the mountains and I've rediscovered the forest. Here on this dual carriageway with the rocky scenery, the mountains, the pine forests all that kind of thing. you can see what I mean. Isn't this a change from the last couple of hundred kilometres that I have been driving?
There's a railway line here too, and so it must continue all the way on to the industrial zone at Chicoutimi.
I make my way down to the bank of the Saguenay River as haven't forgotten that I'm supposed to be looking for that waterfall across on the other shore. Instead however, I stumble right upon a dam and a hydro-electric plant.
It wasn't entirely by accident, I should say, as I knew that there would be one somewhere in the vicinity. I'd read in the newspaper this morning that Québec Hydro was in dispute with Alcan about the electricity supply from "the dam" here.
"Here" by the way is Chute-a-Caron. That's where I am right now and the factory up there is, I reckon, the big Alcan aluminium plant that is here.
And what makes me think this? Easy. I have seen a sign with the name written upon it.
There is however also a Bowaters paper mill in the vicinity - you may remember that we saw them both from the other side of the river on our way in, and so I hope that I'm not confusing the two sites.
Many people applaud the creation of hydro-electric projects and in particular, how environmentally-friendly they are compared to other forms of energy creation. And while they do have their advantages, they also have a few disadvantages that could eventually lead to a major environmental disaster.
I did mention earlier today that the Saguenay River carries a huge load of sand with it down to the St Lawrence and, as we saw, created a massive sandbar. However, now that the dam has been built, the sand can't travel downriver, and so what is happening to it all?
The answer to that question is that it is building up at the back of the dam wall, slowly filling up the lake and slowly cutting the capacity of the dam. Sooner or later, although not in our lifetimes, there won't be a lake at all but just a huge sand-filled depession.
To give you an idea of what I mean, in the Saguenay Fjord, it is in some places as much as 900 metres down to the bedrock from the surface, but yet nowhere is it deeper than 275 metres. The difference is accounted for by the depth of the sediment that has been deposited on the bedrock over the passage of time.
Of course, in the Saguenay Fjord, it's taken thousands of years to deposit all of that. But on the other hand, the Saguenay is relatively fast-flowing, and a fast-flowing river has the potential to carry a great deal of silt with it, meaning that only a relatively small amount is deposited. Here in a reservoir behind a dam, the water comes to a dead stop and there is no potential at all, so all of the silt will be deposited.
There was something else that caught my eye while I was down here taking photographs of the dam. Away in the distance was a quite modern road bridge taking a load of traffic over the narrow gorge in the river. Can you imagine how that gorge would have looked and the power of the water that would have gone through there before the dam was built?
In the foreground however is something much more exciting and I shall have to go for a closer look at that.
And I was right too. In the foreground of the previous photo is a magnificent iron box-girder bridge of the type that you would see by the thousand on any railway line and which replaced the original timber trestles.
This doesn't seem to have been a railway bridge however - the steep bank down to the river on either side seems to rule out that idea. The asphalt on the road bed seems to indicate that this was being used as a road bridge over the gorge until it was superseded by the modern suspension bridge to the right.
There is however a railway line in the vicinity as we know, for we encountered it on our way into town. It should be on the western side of the river and so I wandered up there for a look around.
I came across the railway line at the top of the bank and followed it dilligently for about a quarter of a mile, but then it simply disappeared into a big hangar at an industrial unit up and that was that. No locomotives to be seen, unfortunately.
I still have another task to perform while I'm here.
You may remember that when I drove up the eastern side of the Saguenay River I encountered the top of a rather magnificent waterfall, but there was no way to go down to the bottom to see what the fall looked like.
The only way therefore to see that was to look across the river from the eastern side and so I set out on my mission.
The result was, unfortunately, rather predictable. I never did find my waterfall.
However the drive was well worth the effort and I saw some beautiful countryside and lovely river scenery, and I even ended up with an excellent view of St Charles de Bourget and its church of 1915, so that was an unexpected bonus.
It wasn't until much later that I realised that I could - indeed should - have approached this problem much more scientifically.
My Sat-Nav has a facility to display the longitude and latitude of any given spot and this is correct to within a couple of hundred metres. I should have noted the latitude of the waterfall when I was there, and then driven up the western bank until I reached the same latitude and then looked across the river and in theory it would have been right there in front of me.
Still, you live and learn.
The next issue to deal with is the one about accommodation. There are a couple of camp sites in the vicinity and so I set off, guided by The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav, to call upon them.
As you might expect, however, there is not one of them in the area that has opened yet, and there was no-one around anywhere whom I could ask to see if I could slip on into a quiet little corner.
So much for out-of-season tourism in the area. I shall have to think again about my accommodation for the evening.
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