World Canada Quebec Percé

Bob & Maggie's Big Canada Trip

The Gaspe Peninsula Jun 13, 2008

Well, we last left you just as we were about to begin our circumnavigation of the Gaspe Peninsula (Gaspesie as the Quebecers call it). A very pretty and spectacular place – many small villages spaced around the perimeter of the peninsula.

A surprising thing about many of these villages was the absence of coffee shops and other shops – virtually every village had a “poissonier” ( a fish shop) but not too much else. Well, of course every village also had a church. The north side of the peninsula was mostly settled by people of French descent so the churches were all Catholic churches. By the time we got out to what they call “land’s end” (the eastern end of the peninsula) many of the settlers had been from elsewhere such as Scotland, Loyalists from the USA, etc so there were other churches as well as Catholic.

The other most common building I think were lighthouses. We spent several days getting to Forillon National Park which we enjoyed very much. In addition to the natural beauty that is preserved by the Park, much of the Park is devoted to telling the story of the settlement of Gaspesie and preserving evidence of the old way of life – which was completely dominated by fishing for cod. I had no idea that Gaspe cod ( or any Canadian cod for that matter) was sent across the world – it was in very big demand in the Mediterranean countries and France (Catholics had to eat a lot of fish in those days) and the poorer quality fish was sent to the Caribbean to feed the sugar plantation slaves. In some ways the fishermen weren’t much better off than slaves. The fishing industry was totally dominated by a few companies from the Jersey Islands – and they ran the company stores – which were the only stores. So the fisherman had to sell their fish to the Company and then buy their supplies from the Company store. Guess who made all the money! The National Park has done a superb job of preserving some of the old buildings, the equipment that was used to catch and dry the fish, etc. The whole story is well explained.

For my Okanagan readers – if only the Park opponents had ever actually been to a Park such as Forillon!

We saw some great scenery and several new birds at Forillon and a porcupine and black bear. Toffee enjoyed a 7.5 km walk one day (just under 5 miles for our US friends).

Thursday June 12 was easily one of the most spectacular days of the trip so far. But some background -the day before when we arrived at Perce we booked a trip on a boat tour around Perce Rock and Bonaventure. Island. The forecast was for sunny skies! During the night it rained and rained some more and then the wind started blowing, By 5:30am the rv was rocking so much you would have thought we were having a good time! As our 10:00am departure time crept close Maggie kept saying – no way! She was going to stay ashore. But when the boat left the dock she was on it and we both had an incredible time. The boat tour itself was fairly rough as the wind was still blowing very hard. The seabirds nesting on Bonaventure Island were just incredible - the cliffs were just covered with birds. The Quebec Parks people say about 250,000 birds nest on the island! We took the option of getting off on the island and hiking across the island (3.5 miles round trip) to the nesting colony of northern gannets. About 120,000 birds – truly incredible; the photos just don’t do this justice. The gannets are so graceful in the air but when they come in to land it is much more like a crash than a landing! And it is so crowded they can’t help but intrude on the space of other gannets who then snap and bite at them – very funny! When fishing, the gannets dive into the water from quite a height – up to 100 ft (30m); they just plummet down like a dive bomber and at the last second fold their wings back. When hundreds of them are doing this, it looks like small bombs going off in the water. The other 120,000 or so birds are mostly common murres, black-legged kittiwakes, razorbills and herring gulls with a few other assorted birds thrown in!

The whole thing is truly one of nature’s spectacular shows!