Leaving Hotel Saint-Andre and my friendly hotel manager behind me, I head in the direction of Gare Central, for the three-hour train journey up the St Lawrence River. Canadian railway etiquette seems to operate differently from Britain - for a start, nobody is allowed on the platform until the train is ready to board. Instead, we all wait in the station concourse and when our train is announced, an orderly queue forms. I line up behind a couple, probably in their mid-60s, with bag-upon-bag of luggage. The queue shuffles forwards a foot, and the couple slowly shift their luggage forwards, before the gentleman suddenly spins around to talk to me. "Sorry we take so long," he drones in a thick, American accent. "We're from Santa Barbara - Santa Barbara, California... Or as Arnold Schwarzenegger calls it, Cal-eee-fornia." Arnie was only in the news yesterday for fathering a son outside of marriage, so I reply that he's in a spot of bother at the moment. "Oh yeah," comes the retort. "Or as we say back home, he's in the shit." I ask what the couple are doing at Montreal station, and he tells me that they're touring Canada by rail, "before going home to Santa Barbara, California." He returns the question to be, but obviously gets bored by my travel plans, turning around as I'm part-way through my sentence, in order to chat to his wife.
We roll out of Montreal and into the Quebec countryside, fields, woodland, and small towns. In tying to sport a difference between the British and Canadian landscape, I privately observe that in Canada, the railways aren't fenced off as they are back home. This is something of a prophetic observation, as moments later there is a sharp hissing from beneath the floor of the train. On the far side of our carriage, an American woman goes into hysterics and starts crying "on, oh my, oh!" The train rolls to a stop and there is great confusion, then the American woman speaks, almost in riddles. "There was a tractor. I saw a tractor and a trailer in the air. It was in the air." VIA railway staff, grave-faced, rush through the carriage, and a technician stumbles past our window. Lots of speculation is then followed by an announcement - our train has hit the trailer of a tractor crossing the line. The hissing noise was the emergency brakes, which must now be fully checked, along with the front of the engine, which has sustained some damage. Crucially, nobody has been hurt, and the atmosphere relaxes. After a minute or two, the conductor walks back through the carriage and is faced with a barrage of questions. "Did he have trailer insurance?" our Californian friend jokes. The conductor looks at him for a few minutes, straight-faced and serious, before a wry smirk comes over his face. "Well," he replies, "he may have to get a new trailer. He'll also want to change his pants." Much laughter around the carriage, and an hour later we are on our way again, passing the smashed up trailer.
 |
| Our moderately-damaged train at Quebec station |
Quebec City, UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, the only walled-city north of the Rio Grande, pulls into view. I step off the train and am swept into the tide of passengers rushing to the front of the train to see the damage - an unfortunate dent, which momentarily becomes the most-photographed object in the city. I don't have much time in Quebec, so losing an hour on the rails is frustrating, but at least my hotel is easy to find, the comfy, cosy Hotel le St Paul, which exudes old world charm, and contains what I think may be the most comfortable bed in all the Commonweath. Quebec is frequently described as being "more French than France", and it really does feel like a bit of a film set, so well-preserved, clean, neat, picture-postcard perfect. The Old Town is divided into the walled city on the high ground, and the winding streets of the low ground, the obvious starting point of which is the square Place Royale. Approaching the square, one simply cannot miss the immense Fresque des Quebecois, a huge mural recounting the early story of the city, and depicting at least 15 historical figures, along with many artists and writers. As I admire the piece, a harpist plays a melodic and haunting tune, encapsulating the softness of the early evening air, and I fancy that I can step into the mural, meet the painted characters, climb the painted steps and lean over the painted gate.
 |
| Fresque des Quebecois |
In the beautiful square of Place Royale, meanwhile, locals and tourists are taking it easy - it is Victoria Day after all (a national holiday here, making it all the more mysterious how the tractor driver managed to get hit by a train on a day where the service timetable was skeletal), and the bars and restaurants are full. Place Royale was first planted up as the garden of Samuel Champlain, the founder of Quebec in the 17th century, before later becoming a marektplace. A church, Notre Dame des Victoires, was built over Champlain's old home, which itself was destroyed by cannonball fire during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, before being faithfully reconstructed to its original architectural plan in 1816. More recently, it found Holywood fame through Spielberg's 2002 blockbuster Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.
 |
| Place Royale |
The promontory upon which Quebec City is situated is called Cap Diamant, so named because French explorer Jacques Cartier found glittering quartz stones here, which he mistook for diamonds. From this comes the French phrase "Faux comme un diamant du Canada", as fake as a Canadian diamond. After a fantastic night's sleep, I scale Cap Diamant, which is also accessible via funicular. Walking has its own rewards however, not least the many little shops along the way, including one selling vintage hockey wear. The lady behind the counter is only too happy to find me the correct size Quebec Nordiques jersey to try on, but she's surprised that I'd want to buy it. I tell her I'm from England, and she almost screams with delight: "and you know the Nordiques?" I tell her that not many people in the UK follow ice hockey, but she's over-the-moon none-the-less. What makes the Nordiques so interesting to me is that the team hasn't existed since 1995, when it was relocated to Colorado. The intervening years has done nothing to quell local passions, though, with the people of the city still fighting hard to bring a team back to their city. In fact, just a few weeks before my visit, 4,000 Quebec fans took a 550-mile road trip to watch New Jersey play Boston, out-shouting the home fans and turning parts of the arena into a sea of blue. As Vincent Cauchon, a Quebec sports radio host, said: "We just want to show the National Hockey League that Quebec needs a team... we had the same goal, in the same peaceful way, just to let the people know we won't give up and that we are the best crowd with our team."
 |
| Quebec Old Town |
 |
| Quebec Old Town |
The top of Cap Diamant is every bit as picturesque as the lowlands, and also makes an obvious spot for a military installation. Here the French built a defensive site called the Citadelle, which the British inherited when the conquered the city. It was the British that built a series of star-shaped fortifications here, with the intention of defending the city against an American invasion, and to serve as a refuge for the British garrison in the event of a public rebellion. As it turns out, the Citadelle never has been used in battle, but it did play host to the Quebec Conferences of 1943 and 1944, which saw Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and William Lyon Mackenzie King discuss allied plans ahead of D-Day. Since 1920, it has also been the home of the Royal 22nd Regiment of the Canadian Forces, the only French-speaking regiment of the Canadian army. Their motto, I Remember, is poignantly enacted every morning with the reading of a single page of a book listing all regimental servicemen killed in action. Battle honours include the Somme (1916), Vimy (1917), Ypres (1917), Passchendaele (1918), Flanders (1915-18), Sicily (1943), Italy (1943-45), the liberation of north west Europe (1945), and Korea (1951-53).
 |
| The Citadelle |
Beyond the west defensive wall of the Citadelle, the highland of Cap Diamant descends steeply down to the famous national Battlefield Park, the Plains of Abraham. I've been reading about this grassy space for weeks, for what happened here in mid-September 1759 pretty much changed the fate of Canada. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham followed years of imperial tensions across the world, not least in North America where a three-way balance of power existed between the British, French, and powerful Iroquois Confederacy (an alliance of several Native American nations.) This balance began to break down in the 1740s, and tensions reached new heights when the French expelled British traders from Ohio country. Backed by superior numbers and a more-engaged government in London (at a time when the French public were increasingly disinterested in the New France project), British forces led by General Woolf descended on Canada, capturing several forts and pushing up the St Lawrence River until they arrived at Quebec, ready to face General Montcalm's French army. The catalogue of errors which followed on the French side is almost unbelievable - British troops sailed undetected along the river; the French officer responsible for patrolling the cliffs was unable to do so that night because his horse had been stolen; when the British were at last detected, French guards assumed they were an expected supply convoy; when they were finally challenged, a British officer spoke such excellent French that all suspicion was allayed; a runner eventually took word to General Montcalm that the British had arrived, but Montcalm's aide assumed he was mad and sent him packing, before heading back to bed himself.
 |
| The Plains of Abraham - a peaceful recreational park nowadays |
As a result, Montcalm was rather surprised to learn that the British were in such an advanced position, and decided that a swift assault was the only answer. The British held their fire until their adversaries were in range and then, according to captain John Knox's journal, "gave them, with great calmness, as remarkable a close and heavy discharge as I ever saw." The shocked French line was shattered, but as General Woolf took a higher position to observe, he was hit twice, including mortally in the chest. General Montcalm, meanwhile, was struck by a canister whilst still upon his horse, and died the next morning. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham was over in only half an hour - yet it decided the future of the entire country, and in the Treaty of Paris that brought an end to the Seven Years' War, all of French Canada was ceded to Britain. However, there would be a sting in the tail for the British - the French would not forget this humiliation, and when the American Revolution began 16 years later, French aid to the American rebels was instrumental in the loss of Britain's American colonies.
 |
| Gun emplacements atop Cap Diamant |
Following the defensive walls further around, the Governor's Promenade clings to the cliff top, eventually leading to the Terrasse Dufferin, a great wooden terrace in the shadow of the mighty Chateau Frontenac, one of Canada's grandest hotels, built for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company in 1893. The hotel was built to attract wealthy travellers, and it maintains its luxurious image today under the Fairmont Hotels banner. It's a definite landmark, and has the title of being the most photographed hotel in the world. I can certainly feel the opulence of the place, the style and sophistication of a hotel that has, in its time, hosted such figures as George VI and Elizabeth II, Princess Grace, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, Charles Lindberg, Francois Mittterrand, and Alfred Hitchcock.
 |
| Chateau Frontenac |
My full-scale walk of the walls - and indeed my brief visit to Quebec - ends via the beautiful Quebec Parliament Building, where business is conducted almost entirely in French. I feel sad to be leaving after a mere 36 hours, but I'm glad I made the call to come here, for I nearly wrote Quebec off - it's awkward to get to, has no direct flights to anywhere useful, and means that in order to get to Toronto, I have first to take the train back to Montreal, in what will essentially be a nine-hour train journey. Still, as I stand watching the coastal supply boats load up on the beautiful St Lawrence, this all feels rather inconsequential. Let tomorrow come at its own pace - for this evening, I am breathing the soft airs of Quebec, one of the most unique cities on Earth.
 |
| Quebec Parliament Building |
 |
| The mighty St Lawrence River at Quebec |
Dans l'ensemble magnifique
ReplyDelete