Tag Archives: travel

Cycling Through History: The Trans Canada Trail

It’s a perfect day for exploring the St. Lawrence. We woke up to robins singing, the perfume of spring and sun streaming in through great windows, set in three foot thick, grey-limestone walls. The sky is brilliant blue and cloudless.

What’s happening outside our room on Rue de la Commune in the port of Montreal? Are the tall ships anchored? Are the voyageurs, the travelling fur traders, leaving in their canoes today to run the treacherous rapids further up river? They’re a raucous bunch and love to have fun. They boast about their strength and bravery with words and song. I wish I could go with them.

When the first European Jacques Cartier arrived in 1535, he was trying to find a route to the Western Sea that would take him to China and India. He couldn’t get beyond the rapids. Later, the story goes, in mockery of some who were still trying to find the route to China, they called the village at the west end of Montreal Island Lachine.

After a hundred and thirty years of squabbling about the rapids, finally, in 1825, a 14.5 km long canal, the Lachine, from the port of Montreal to Lac St Louis opened. It transformed Montreal, opening the river to navigation, providing hydropower and opportunities for establishing new industries and communities. For more than 150 years it served this purpose, then it was retired when the Beauharnois Seaway was opened.

Now the Lachine Canal is used for pleasure.

A path alongside it is an exciting link on the Trans Canada Trail, the world’s longest network of trails that will one day stretch more than 20,000 kilometres across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Please see  http://tctrail.ca/explore-the-trail/ for more detail and links.

Today I’m going to be an explorer and live the history. Ross and I will cycle a portion of the Trans Canada Trail from old Montreal to Lac St Louis, at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers. Then we’ll explore another route returning through the Montreal Islands.

We rent good bikes for the day at a shop near the hotel, cross the street to the canal and our adventure begins.

Cycling the path past factories with big signs and Canadian household names, like Redpath Sugar, transports us to the neighbourhood of Pointe Saint Charles and the steeples of Saint Gabriel and Eglises Saint Charles. The communities along the canal provided housing for the factory workers. The welcoming sound of church bells peeling and scores of families walking toward them in special Sunday clothes lure us off trail to stop and immerse ourselves in their community spirit.

Next is Atwater Market in the district of Saint Henri. Oscar Peterson, the much-loved Canadian Jazz pianist, grew up here. It’s a good place to stop for fuel – crusty, locally made baguettes, fresh fruit tarts, and tempting Quebec cheeses.

The path along the canal is paved and flat. This Sunday morning there are hundreds of cyclists, people on roller blades, some running, some strolling and many sitting on park benches alongside the trail taking in the action

In a couple of hours we reach the end of the canal, Lac Saint Louis, and take a moment to stop and breathe history.

After short loop around the end of Montreal Island we head back along the north shore of the St Lawrence and past a two hundred year-old stone Fleming Mill at the side of the trail. Parc des Rapides, long and narrow, filled with Sunday sunbathers and soccer players of all ages, flanks the Lachine rapids where adventurous kayakers are testing their skills in the turbulent waters. Their flashy, state of the art neoprene wet suits, have come a long way from the wool leather and fur the voyageurs wore, but the rapids are the same. Beautiful and treacherous.  

I’ve been worried about the part of the trail beyond the rapids. They call it “the ice bridge” and I need to cross it to the middle of the river where it meets with the Montreal Islands. Can I do it?  My imagination goes wild and leaps to waters of the icy St. Lawrence. On a bicycle. If the voyageurs can take the icy rapids so can I.  I must be brave. And adventurous.

But. No worries. The bridge is a fascinating type of icebreaker about twenty meters wide, with a paved path on it for non-motorized vehicles. Remember the old photos in Notman’s “Portrait of Canada” and the ice that filled the river and caused havoc every winter? It’s a good place to rest and think about the genius of people before us.

The trail through the islands is a long narrow country lane. As I cycle under the famous Montreal bridges the sounds of the river on each side block the traffic above. Do I need to tell you how awesome my experience is?

The eerie skeleton of Buckminster Fuller’s American pavilion for Expo ’67 dominates the forested view ahead and eventually the trail widens into Park Jean Drapeau on Saint Helen’s Island and Ile Notre Dame. I dip onto the grand Prix Race track, Circuit GillesVilleneuve, for a few metres (and for my record) before winding my way between the trees around the ‘67 Expo site. I cross a nearby bridge to old Montreal.

Fifty Kilometeres. Cycling the Trans Canada Trail, connecting with the communities alongside it and living in history is energizing. And warms my heart with pride.

I’d love to hear your stories about travelling on the Trans Canada Trail.  Please comment or simply send your the links.

 

Coming next: Confederation Trail

 

The Wonderful www.

Dear Travel Musings readers

This Travel Musings blog started as an experiment. I had finished the first draft of my manuscript about travelling the Silk Road but wanted to keep writing.  So on a cold, dark Saturday afternoon in Calgary last November my writing group friend, and master of blogging, Leanne Shirtliffe, www.ironicmom.com,and I had coffee at the Good Earth Café where she helped me set up a web log on WordPress. Without thinking, I was suddenly launched into the whole wide world. The www.

It’s more fascinating and fun than the tech-less me could have dreamed.

Every morning I click on to my WordPress stats and there you are on the map. You have viewed Travel Musings 1,450 times, from thirty-one different countries and you keep me thinking/wondering about who you are and where you living. You also keep me writing.

Now it’s time for me to move from India Travel Musings to musing about places closer to my home. As one French writer said, travel is not the search for new sights but for a new way of seeing everything, old sights included. With this is mind as I visit new and old sights in Canada and the USA during the next three months, I’ll post a vignette every couple of weeks. So stay with me.

Perhaps you’d like to share your experiences about seeing a familiar sight close to your home. Do you recognize the places in these pictures?

I love reading your comments and emails. And I love to look at my WordPress world map every morning.

 

Best wishes

The Maharaja’s Palace and Jazz: Just Stop Your Busy Day and Take Five

This story sums up my experiences in Incredible India even though I wrote it over a year ago. The message is to stop your busy day, and just take five ( for me, take five minutes). It’s a wonderful world. 

“Have you heard about the three things you must have to drive safely in India?” Our driver chuckles. “Good brakes. Good horn.”

“And the third?” I ask.

“Good luck.”

I quickly decide to save myself from the terror of driving in India by looking only out side windows and only when necessary. The car brakes and swerves around elephants and camels with wide loads of wood and rebar strapped on their backs. We honk at India’s holy cows lying not-quite-on the median of the new four-lane highway, but in the shade of beautiful bougainvillea landscaping. Through the Aravalli Mountains, we twist and blast our way around blind corners. I note that Hindu temples are strategically situated and they prompt me to squeeze my eyes shut and ask the powers that be for a long life.

In due course, we swing south off the highway and careen along a gravel road surrounded by forest reserve owned by the Maharaja of Dungarpur. Twenty minutes later we veer off through a gap in the trees and come to a dusty stop in front of the royal residence that will also be our hotel for a few days. Our driver phoned a few minutes ago and the Maharaja’s nephew is waiting for us. After a few quick namaste’s and welcomes, his assistant, the hotel manager, leads us toward our room.

“This is the office,” he says, as we pass beneath the stuffed heads of four of tigers, six wild boars, several deer and one sloth bear. “We have wireless in this room and at the pool,” he adds.

We walk into the adjacent palace courtyard and around an exquisitely carved temple surrounded by water, to one more interior courtyard. In the middle is an enormous white marble dining table set for thirty people. Carved into the centre of the table is a long rectangular pool filled with lotus flowers and goldfish. “This is where you will eat breakfast and dinner,” the manager tells us.

There are surprises everywhere, giving me that being surreal-world feeling again.  

The Maharaja shot ninety-nine tigers in his day and they are all here, almost hidden, their heads staked high on the walls. The family now pride themselves on being conservationists. A team of young museum curators are in the ballroom with ancient royal clothing organised on the floor ready to catalogue for a family museum. At the door there is a fleet of mountain bikes ready for guests to ride around the estate’s vast nature reserve. The tigers are gone but I’ve been told there are a few deer, fox, and wild boar bounding about.

A curtained archway behind an immense locked wooden door leads into a gigantic room. Ours. For us, filled with an eclectic assortment of memorabilia from the sixties, it has the stamp of home. A low arch leads to a marble balcony overlooking Lake Galbsagar and its finely crafted temple island.

This is my place. My armchair is waiting.

Lake Galbsagar is a mirror; the sound of swarming water birds – herons, storks, cranes, egrets, ducks – fills the still late afternoon air. My Maharaja, Ross, scouts out his battered blue metal water bottle and pours for us. India’s favourite Scotch Whiskey. Black Dog.

Am I in heaven?

“Yoohoo. Hello there. Be sure to come for before-dinner-cocktails with us at 7 o’clock,” Maharaja’s niece-in-law calls up to us as she walks along the lakeside path below and waves.

The royal family’s friendliness is infectious and we are eager to join them. Sober or not.

Later, with difficulty we work our way through the dark, back under the stuffed heads, the dim eco lamps, and down the stairs to the big dining room.

Candles fill the courtyard but no one is here.

“Hello. Where is everybody?”

A young man with a tall white chef’s hat peers around a partition at the back. “No. No. It’s not here. Follow.”  He leads us through a giant doorway into a damp muddy field. The night is black even though the stars are out and the moon is full behind the trees. Something alive scuttles across in front of me. I stifle a scream; it’s a chicken. I scramble through what appears to be a vegetable garden with my fancy new, but cruelly uncomfortable sandals. I struggle to keep my culturally appropriate Rajasthan Bandhani, a colourful tie-dye sarong, wrapped around me as I trudge through the “we water at night,” save-the-environment mud.

In the distance I see a dim light shining from another one of those low-watt eco bulbs hanging on the end wall of a long shed which Ross says is the old stable. I’m still struggling to keep my clothes wrapped while choking back laughter at the ridiculous situation I find myself in. Why didn’t I wear jeans?

“Hey. Stop a minute.” Ross croaks in a hushed tone. “What’s that I hear?”

The noise, it sounds like snare drums, intensifies as we get closer to the shed.

The door opens. Louis Armstrong’s gravely voice resonates through the old stable, “It’s A Wonderful World.” The Maharaja’s family is beaming with delight. I recognize the manager, even though he’s wearing a tux now.

Where are we? I’m confused. Then I realize this is a surprise the Maharaja has for us. It is his new museum and it is filled with his old, shiny, like-new antique cars, elegantly spot lit.

The family walks with us between rows of vintage cars and at the end we enter a glass room and sit at a sixties style bar.

Surreptitiously, our favourite jazz pulsates through the old stable. The crack of snare drums, the tingle of cymbals vibrating, the soft rhythmic strike of piano and the silk smooth saxophone playing the melody in “Take Five” brings a flood of memories.

Start a little conversation now.

Just take five.

Stop your busy day and come out to see that I’m alive.

Just take five.

This music we listened to often in 1965, as we dreamed of travel, was composed by Paul Desmond a few years earlier while he was touring with the Dave Brubeck jazz quartet along segments of the Silk Road in Turkey, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Take Five” was inspired by the melody nomads played one day while walking by the open door flap of his tent. After the group finished their tour, Dave Brubeck and his wife wrote lyrics for the music.

“Why do you go? Why do you go back?” people ask me.

Because I can’t close my story.

I say.

Just stop your busy day and take five.

It’s a wonderful world.

Next Post: Where Travel Musings has taken me. What’s next?