Tag Archives: Holiday travel

Tundra: birds are Go!

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Tuesday 27 September 2022 – The plan for the day was simple – get out on a Tundra Buggy and find polar bears. So, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and breakfasted, we got on the bus and Joe took us for a half-hour drive to the Buggy Dock

where number 15 was to be our chariot for the day.

We were a small group, so there was plenty of room to spread out in a nice warm cabin.

Our driver was “Buggy Bob”, a man of great experience in driving these great big things across terrain which is tricky, but not impossible; we would go along old tracks originally created by the military in the 1940s and not deviate from them in order to minimise disturbance to the local wildlife. This is Buggy Bob.

I reckon he looks a lot like Sean Connery in The Hunt For Red October, but Jane disagrees.

Anyhoo…

The ride in these great beasts is not the smoothest, as it’s over very rough terrain, including places where water has covered the trail.

I want to give you some idea of how ungentle the ride is, but unfortunately “buggy” also applied to the software for my stabilising gimbal which I use with my mobile phone. I couldn’t get the two to co-operate and so this is the best I could do under the circumstances. I will try to get you a better impression during tomorrow’s ride.

We covered about 25 miles in 6 hours, so progress is barely above walking pace. But it’s a good way of seeing the wildlife without the risk of attack from a disconcerted bear, and it’s warm (the temperature outside was about 4°C and the brisk wind was once again of the lazy variety, so it gets my vote).

The scenery is at times quite striking, with fall colours becoming more and more established.

We passed near the accommodation buggies of a tundra lodge offered by another tour company

and were near the Churchill River when an excited cry went up as someone spotted what might have been a Beluga Whale swimming along. So we stopped for a closer look. Many people were delighted to have seen these Belugas, but frankly I found it difficult to be greatly moved, as this was the scene.

The Belugas are the white flecks towards the middle of the picture. Even zoomed in, they don’t, to me, present a scene to get excited about.

There were apparently some Eider ducks to be seen, too.

If you zoom in, they are the little black dots just above where the waves are breaking.

There was more excitement as we saw bear footprints – an adult and a cub, apparently.

The next excitement was the sighting of a bald eagle.

Yes, there it is.

But then it flew away.

Jason, one of the tour leaders reckoned he saw a beaver.

It turned out to be a muskrat.

We passed a site where Frontiers North are establishing their own residential lodge in the midst of all this tundra.

This will be fully commissioned and operational within a couple of days to receive the first guests of this year’s Bear Season (basically October and November).

There was even more excitement as we saw a Tundra Swan – the second largest bird in North America behind the Trumpeter Swan, Mark tells us. In the end, we saw it was a family of two adults and four cygnets, who took one look at us and moved away, slowly and with dignity.

Mark diverted us for a while with an explanation of why these Spruce trees have grown the way they have – clumped together, bushy at the base and scraggy at the top.

The weather is the driver of this. Ice particles driven by the wind strip the upper branches back; snow covers the ground to a depth of two feet on average and stops this happening for the lower branches. The short growing season and the snow also prevents the normal conifer reproduction method of dropping cones with seeds in them. Instead, the branches grow round and back down to the ground and “sucker” new growth before themselves dying back. Apparently beneath the little “skirt” of branches the temperature can be up to 10°C warmer, helping the trees establish an underground network for spreading through the permafrost and providing a congenial microenvironment for small creatures.

We saw some snow geese. They heard us coming and flew away.

Later, we came across an unusual sight, which was a single snow goose, just wandering around seeking food.

Then someone saw a Ptarmigan.

Bob confirmed it as a Willow Ptarmigan. Excitement mounted as we saw there were several,

all with the distinctive cute feathery leggings.

The scenery continued to be striking at times.

In the photo above, you can see that the path leads in to water, and so we relied on Bob’s skill and experience to get us through safely.

And then it was 4pm and we were back at the Buggy Dock.

This was an opportunity for a group photo (to be published when I can get my hands on it). Notably, there was an armed Bear Guard on duty (shown here chatting to Bob) whilst we were outside the Buggy.

I can’t imagine why, because there weren’t any fucking bears anywhere around. To prove this, Joe took us on a drive round the back roads in the bus, past various locations such as the “golf balls”,

that once housed radar tracking technology for the rockets that were tested hereabouts, and the shipwreck,

the rotting remains of a ship called the Ithaca which ran into trouble in the 1950s when ice crushed the rudder into the propeller and has been abandoned there ever since.

But no bears.

I took a couple more pictures of the town of Churchill as we headed back to the hotel, which add to its strong identity as a frontier town.

But no bears.

And that was it for the day, for me at least. After dinner, Jane went to a talk given by a trapper, but I stayed behind to deal with the recalcitrant gimbal and to see what photographs could be rescued from a day which had, apart from the bird life, featured a bear minimum of activity. We go out in the buggy again tomorrow, with our fingers firmly crossed for the polar opposite of today’s searching. I hope you will come back to find out how we got on.

A Chur-chilly Reception

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Monday 26 September 2022 – Last night’s briefing was, erm, brief and gave us one or two important bits of information and a chance to get a sense of the group of 12 people (mostly Australian) of which we will be part for most of the rest of this week (and also whether my ridiculously heavy backpack would be acceptable on a forthcoming flight).  As I said in my last entry, we had to be ready to leave the hotel at 0700, having breakfasted and tagged our bags so that Frontiers North, the organisation which will be shepherding us along, know what to do with them at the far end.

We trailed into the airport and checked in to flight MO144, scheduled to depart at 0900.  I had been advised that the best photo opportunities from the flight would be if I sat on the right hand side at the front.  Since it was open seating, I made jolly damn’ sure I was first on the plane, and selected my seat accordingly.

Photos from the plane shortly after take off emphasised how flat the Winnipeg landscape is.

We flew alongside lake Winnipeg

and this was pretty much the last even halfway decent picture I got until much later, for two reasons.  One is that the visibility (already visibly worsening in the photo above) didn’t improve; the other is that the bright sunshine, normally so welcome when trying for aerial shots, threw a distinct shadow on to my window through the aeroplane’s propellers.  This meant that I had a strobe effect in operation which conflicted with the shutter in my camera such that I had unwanted horizontal bars across any images I tried to capture.  I suppose it was a lesson learned, but actually I had no way of knowing that this would be a problem.  I amused myself by taking a photo of the aeroplane safety card, which was in no fewer than three languages.

The next opportunities I had for aerial photos came as the plane was on final approach.

when it became clear that the light yellowish/green things you can see on the landscape were actually trees.

Since these appear to be conifers but are changing colour this autumn, one can infer that they are larches.

Despite the captain’s warnings of a bumpy landing, we hit the deck quite smoothly and were soon in the terminal, awaiting our bags.

Not that we’re paranoid or anything, but I noticed that my bag was one of the last to come through, and the carousel stopped the instant Jane took her bag off it.  No matter – we handed them over to Frontiers North for them to deal with and went out into the biting cold wind  to the bus which was to be one of our main transports for the next three days.  The tour leader, Mark, carried on his briefing as we headed for downtown Churchill,

and our hotel, the Tundra Inn.

We had lunch at the associated Tundra Pub

with further briefing from Mark (right) with input from Jason (left) and driver Joe.

Joe then drove us around the area, giving us a chance to see some of the highlights of the Churchill area: a large scale inukshuk – an Inuit construction with a variety of possible meanings (landmark, signpost, waymark etc);

a Beluga Boat which has never actually been used for its intended purpose of watching Beluga whales but which is used by the locals as a gathering point for e.g. picnics;

the Complex – a 1976 construction which provides most of the municipal needs for this remote community – school, medical and dental facilities, kids playground, that kind of thing; the now unused grain elevator, which used to be a significant source of employment but is no longer economically viable for a variety of reasons;

and occasional reminders that Churchill is in Polar Bear territory, and the community needs to take care (the pickups are part of the Polar Bear Alert Program).

Yes, we’ve come here to see polar bears, but we want to do it in a planned way, rather than through an ad hoc encounter.  We were warned not to stray far from the bus and, if necessitated by an unexpected polar bear encounter, drop everything and make for the protection of the bus.  Frankly, it was so cold (just a couple of degrees above freezing) that the likelihood of straying far was limited anyway, but it’s a sobering thought that one could just walk around a corner here and be confronted by a polar bear.

The Churchill landscape is tundra, an environment where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons.

Can you guess which way the prevailing wind blows?  Today’s wind was one of those lazy winds that doesn’t bother to go round you; it just goes straight through.  That said, we have been lucky in the timing of our visit, in that the rather scrubby vegetation here is changing into its fall colours.

The orange of the plants is matched by the orange of the lichen on the rocks, making for a richly coloured, if rather low-level, landscape.

Churchill is a frontier town, and its buildings show this very clearly. This is the high street, for example;

and the side roads show also very plain levels of construction.

It cannot be reached by road. The only ways in are by air or by rail; this is the train station building

which also houses the Parks Canada Visitor Centre.  The town has done a lot of work to brighten what might otherwise have been a very dull and workmanlike appearance with artworks, some commissioned from recognised artists.   Some artistic touches are light;

many are striking;

and some are wonderful large-scale adaptations of buildings.  For example, the town has a Polar Bear Holding  Facility, where bears that wander into the town, or are injured or become a nuisance are trapped

(on the left above is an old-fashioned type of trap) and held in separate rooms in this facility,

one end of which has been gloriously decorated by an artist specially invited for the task.

Another large-scale artwork was wrought on the wreckage of a cargo aeroplane which took off from the airport, but got into difficulties; the pilot crashed it safely (all the crew survived)

and, again, an invited artist has used it as a canvas.  The suspicion is that it was overloaded, hence it being called “Miss Piggy” – Too Fat To Fly?

There are stores, which tend to stock a wide variety of goods, from food to construction machinery;

there are churches and a post office and occasional other artworks;

and the whole place exudes a strong sense of community.  Fewer than 900 people call Churchill their home, but it’s clear from the number who have lived here for years that the town can exert a strong attraction.

It is home to Polar Bears International, a non-profit organisation dedicated to polar bear conservation.  Outside their building is a Tundra Buggy

another one of which will be taking us out to view the area’s wildlife over the next days.  Our final act of the day (dinner excepted) was to visit, and we were treated to an interesting and educational session from Kieran MacIver on the bears, their environment and the threat from climate change

which incidentally gave us a chance to understand how big a fully-grown male polar bear actually is.

Today has been our introduction to the area.  Tomorrow, we hope for an introduction to its polar bears (two of our group did a special helicopter flight and reported back that they saw bears in the area, so the prospects look good).  Will we get to see the bears we have come so far to seek?  Watch this space!

 

The Nelson Column

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Saturday 24 September 2022 – As expected, Jane had formulated A Plan for the day – a walk in the Old Town, followed by a stroll beside a canal which led to the Old Port.  Accordingly, we hopped the Metro to Champ-de-Mars (because we’re seasoned users of the public transport now, you see), and attempted to follow a self-guided walking tour that Jane had found on the interweb. This part of the day, overall, was not a success, partly because the route given by the website was either not very good or incoherent (possibly both) and partly because Montreal Old Town is, well, not really very interesting.  Perhaps it would have been more rewarding if we’d been able to organise a guide to regale us with fascinating historical and contextual nuggets, but, as it was, we didn’t find much to wow us.

There are some prominent buildings there, such as the Bon Secours market building, with its distinctive silver-coloured dome, which I assume is a tin roof with big ideas.

It looks like the sort of building that should house something monumental or religious, but actually inside it is a modernish market, with boutiquey shops.  Even the tourist tat is done quite nicely.

Other major buildings of interest, such as the Town Hall and the Basilica of Notre Dame, are shrouded in scaffolding and other paraphernalia of reconstruction, which renders them less easy on the eye.  Next door to the market building is the Notre Dame de Bon-Secours Chapel,

inside which, we were delighted to find, was a chamber trio playing at the far end – rehearsing for a concert, we guessed.

The chapel dates from 1771; it was a popular place of worship for sailors coming to port from the St Lawrence river and it became widely known as the sailors’ chapel. It has a lovely interior

with replicas of ships hanging from the ceiling as a reminder of this heritage.

And, er, that’s it for the Old Town, really.  We wandered about the rest of the area trying, and, we eventually realised, failing, to follow the self-guided tour.  It had one lighter moment when I spotted an illusion that the figure on top of the chapel was trying to operate a punt,

but beyond the Wheel and the Clock Tower (with the geodesic dome of the Montreal Biosphere museum, designed by Buckmaster Fuller for the US pavilion at the 1967 Expo, visible in the distance)

we couldn’t find anything particularly to detain us beyond this general kind of street scene

It was at this point that we found out that the “Galleon” by the Wheel was a kids’ adventure park.

Having exhausted what we could see of the entertainment possibilities here, we decided to go for Part 2 of The Plan – the Canal.  To do this, we hopped the Metro again, to Place Saint Henri, and then walked down to the Lachine Canal, which connects Lake Saint-Louis to the Old Port, our target for the walk.  The canal gets its name from the French word for China (la Chine). The European explorers sought to find a route from New France to the Western Sea, and from there to China and hence, optimistically, the region where the canal was built was named Lachine.

Jane had read that the canal had been the subject of some gentrification (not unusual for waterside locations with an industrial history).  Initially, there wasn’t much evidence of this, but before too long we saw the unmistakeable signs of what would once have been a warehouse or similar.

This turned out to be Merchants Manufacturing, a mill which has a reasonably chequered history, including being expanded to be the second largest cotton factory in the country.  Further investigation showed that it was now a very substantial and not unattractive apartment complex.

The canal then displayed signs that we were approaching another nexus of civilisation

and then we found ourselves at Atwater Market, which is quite substantial and was quite busy.

Just as Jean Talon’s market had introduced us to aubergines and cauliflowers of unfamiliar colours, this one showed that squash can come in a variety of colours

as well as the more common orange of the pumpkin.

Every year I’m astonished by the ubiquity of pumpkins in this season.  Surely you can only eat or carve so many?  What happens to all the rest?

As we went back to the canal, we passed a “flowerbed” which actually contained only edible plants – a nice touch.

We passed another suburb which had a canal-side chess den

and seemed to be preparing for some kind of local festival.

Evidence of the industrial past increased as we neared the city.

We passed one of the hydraulically-operated locks

which, I was pleased to note, was being kept clear of leaves and other debris by the lock-keeping staff,

something which I wish could happen in the UK, where the appearance of many otherwise charming locks is spoiled by accumulated crud, both natural and man-made.

We also discovered that the canal path was part of the Trans-Canada Trail, the scope of which is absolutely vast – 

28,000km in total, meandering all over the vastness of Canada’s interior.  To give this some context, the circumference of the earth is just 40,000km.

Further evidence of previous industrialisation mounted as we carried on.

as well as of the gentrification process which is making this walk so much more pleasant.

There is a clear cycle path which is sometimes separate from and sometimes on the same ground as the walking path, thus requiring vigilance on the part of pedestrians wanting to cross the path e.g. to take photos.

The landscape clearly shows what a massively industrial area this once was.

Looking left, we could see the part of the city where our hotel is – you can just spot the dome of its next-door neighbour Basilica among the tower blocks.

There’s a boat converted into a spa

and a clearer view of Habitat 67, a project designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie and built for Expo 67, a World’s Fair held here from April to October 1967.  It comprises 354 identical prefabricated concrete forms, arranged in various combinations and divided into three pyramids (I’ve only shown two here because there was a stack of containers in the way of the third).

Safdie’s goal for the project to be affordable housing largely failed: demand for the building’s units has made them more expensive than originally envisioned.  Good old market forces, eh?

And then, there we were, in the Old Port

which gives some views over the city

and even makes the Old Town look reasonably attractive.

By this stage, it was nearly 3 o’clock, and so we decided that an early (for us) lunch was the order of the day.  There’s a square in the Old Town, Place Jacques Cartier, which features several restaurants, so we headed there, and Jane suggested we try Jardin Nelson, a restaurant on the ground floor and courtyard of the erstwhile Nelson Hotel – all of which, I suppose, take the name from the version of Nelson’s Column which stands at the top end of the square.

This turned out to be an inspired choice, as we were led to a table in the flower- and greenery-bedecked courtyard

which allowed us to hear the really very good jazz trio who were performing

without being overwhelmed by their volume.  We had an excellent poké bowl lunch and then tottered back to our hotel, once again via the good services of the Metro.

And that was it for Montréal, really – a city whose undoubtedly charming scenes just fail to overcome the downside of the scruffiness, graffiti and quotient of beggars and derelicts of the place. It occurs to me that we visited these eastern cities in the wrong order, largely as a consequence of our itinerary evolving over the space of three years, getting modified every time the trip was rescheduled.  Our route (you’ll remember, because you’ve been paying attention) has been from Ottawa to Québec City to Montréal.  I think a better (and more logical) route would be Ottawa – Montréal – Québec City, where the charm of the final destination might erase the less-than-distinguished memories from its predecessor.

Tomorrow sees an interruption to our eastward peregrination, as we head back to Winnipeg as part of ticking an important tourist box.  It involves an early start. To find out more, please join us over the next few days.  See ya later!