Seeking An Extraordinary Life - A Travel Journal

A good night's sleep, and first thing I packed up my gear and went looking for net access before my Servas visit tonight. I decided to walk up from Maryland to the public library, which turned out to be a long hot stroll of over an hour. Halfway there I stopped to sit on a shady wall and enjoy one of the best burgers of my life from the stall of the friendly and quirky Mr Mike, who, when he found out I was from England, insisted on giving me a free Dr Pepper and that I try the Canadian delicacy Squeeze Cheese; "The England-Man must try the Squeeze Cheese!"

Fortified, I carried on to the library where I found internet access but no facility to upload my photos. Before leaving again to find a net cafe (I wasn't sure how much time I had or I would have updated the blog at least, a choice I later regretted), I ran into a fellow hitcher from the US, Frank, who was on a limited visa (due to lack of funds) and visiting Canada in his school holidays. A veteran hitch-hiker, Frank had a wealth of great and fairly disturbing hitching stories, including being stabbed in a bar in Mexico after trying out a Spanish "pickup line" his friend had told him - the girl's boyfriend had been violently unamused, and Frank never found out what he'd said to her.

After a fruitless search of the area for an internet cafe I was sweltering, and I collapsed in a Second Cup cafe for a strawberry lemonade smoothie (the best possible thing on a hot day) and to wait for time to get a bus to my hosts. When I arrived in their house on a beautiful TV-perfect leafy suburban street the Kirby family made me enormously welcome, treated me to a delicious meal of bison burgers and fresh salad (mostly from their own vegetable garden), a long evening of great conversation (and vicarious Nintendo with their two sons), and a comfortable bed in their cool basement.

Labels: bison, burgers, canada, hitchiking, hot dog, Mexico, servas, United States, Winnipeg

Today we rose early and were on the road by 7, alert for moose again. I'd now had 2 and a half full days of Ontario's forests, lakes, hills and rocky outcrops, and frankly the novelty had worn off a little, beautiful though it all is.

Nonetheless, more rock 'n roll and a serious truckstop breakfast (the only thing Eugene let me pay for the whole trip) kept us going, and the landscape began to flatten out and open up by lunchtime, until we were surrounded by the vast plains of Manitoba. Meanwhile the initially cloudy sky cleared, and the temperature rose to a sweltering 38 degrees C. The highway stretched out ahead in a heat haze so thick it reflected like a mirror, and on either side nothing but flat yellow grasslands punctuated by the odd farm, industrial complex or spare line of trees. We had hit the Prairie Provinces.

Eugene dropped me off on the red-hot pavement of Portage Street, Winnipeg, with a series of warnings - don't go up Main Street, look out for gang colours, be careful meeting people's eyes. It was a shock after easy-going Ontario towns to find Winnipeg presented as the dangerous big city, where you could be beaten and mugged any minute.

Having found a shady corner under one of the office blocks to organise my pack, slather on sunscreen and plan my first step, I descended what I thought was just an underpass to the other side of Portage, to discover an entire subterranean shopping area stretching in all directions. It was essentially deserted on this Sunday afternoon, and very cool. A team of cleaners padded through the dormant corridors pulling carts, their footsteps and the clink of their equipment swallowed up by the carpet.

I wandered past dozens of closed-up bank desks before finding a way up into the lobby of a major office building, where a payphone allowed me to call my first ever Servas hosts, the Kirbys. Leslie assured me that they would be happy to see me tomorrow night for dinner at 5pm, and to stay (for just one night as they were going away the next day, which suited my plans just fine).

After that it was back out into the light and stunning heat of Winnipeg city, and I navigated by the little maps on bus stops to Maryland Street where I found the hostel, a tall narrow guesthouse called Ivey House. The walk wasn't much more encouraging than my introduction to the city from Eugene. I got glares and blank looks or complete non-interest from three people I asked for directions, and rounding the corner onto Maryland I saw two latino boys run out of the supermarket on the corner clutching various items, then turn around and knock down the security guard who was chasing them.

Further down the street, outside the inevitable Tim Horton's, a small wiry man with no shirt, a deep tan and very blue eyes called me over. "Hey man, you look loaded down. Sit a minute". He was another Newfoundlander, a migrant labourer with a number of unspecified jobs on the go locally.

He too warned me about the dangers of Winnipeg, "Best city in the world by daylight, man...most dangerous city in the world at night. And the women...you seen the women here? Most beautiful women anywhere, man. But they'll take everything you got, leave you with nothing just because they can." He had several stories to illustrate his point, none of them printable here. I got the feeling, not for the first time here, that I was a convenient spectator for somebody else's personal movie performance.

Once he found out I was heading west, he wanted to tell me all about wild animals, and he was out to beat anything I had been told. You heard we got bears out here, right? How big do ya think they stand?" I hazarded seven feet. "Ten feet man, nose to tail, honest to God." He spoke slowly, squatting with his forearms on his knees, breaking off between sentences to gaze off into the distance with those blue eyes. "And you can't run from a bear, man. You can't climb a tree...three girls were out camping last year, a grizzly bear found them. Two of them ran, and the other climbed a tree. Big tree, about the size of that one there? They came back with help, that grizzly pushed the f***in' tree down. They found pieces of her all over."

"Now a mountain lion - you don't have mountain lions, do ya? Ever seen one? Well, a mountain lion will grow about 11 feet long. And you won't even see them. You'll see the one in front of you maybe, you won't see the one behind you comin' round to tear your guts out". I suspected my new informant had seen Jurassic Park. "And a mountain lion will attack you in broad daylight on Main Street". He continued in this vein for some time, taking real joy in his role and in the descriptions of bloody carnage which would ensue and the hopelessness of my position. When I finally made my excuses and began to lift my pack he said "But hey, man, don't let me scare you, you know? You're doing a great thing, you'll have a great adventure. You just be careful."

Arriving at Ivey House I was signed in by Van the caretaker, from Calgary in Alberta, a chunky man with a soul patch and a permanent expression of slight worry behind round glasses. When I told him about the dire warnings I'd just heard, he was immediately eager to allay my fears. Nine times out of ten a bear would just run off if you clapped your hands and shouted. Unless it had cubs nearby. Or it was sick, or very hungry. Or it was one of the very few bears which had developed a taste for human flesh. Oh, and it was equally important to look out for wolverines and badgers, because they would really hunt you if they were ticked off.

He did have some practical advice too. The best way to run away from a bear, apparently, was to run and jump, run and jump, because they have poor eyesight and snuffling around to pick up your scent again slows them down. And if you can find a hill, run down it, because a bear's front legs are shorter than the back and they don't like running downhill. "But in the end it's just about taking care and being respectful. The bear doesn't want trouble, he just wants to go on with his day. If you don't tempt him, you don't cook food near your camp, you don't aggravate him, you'll be fine."

Somewhat heartened I went to my room (with air conditioning! Joy!) and just lay around most of the evening as my core temperature slowly returned to a halfway normal level.

Labels: Alberta, Canadian Prairies, Grizzly Bear, hitchiking, Manitoba, ontario, Tim Horton, travel, Winnipeg

I was up at 6am this morning with the intention of getting an early start. But by the time I'd updated the blog, got my kit together and walked to the bus station, waited for the next bus (they're hourly) out to the north end of town and ridden on it, it was twenty past 10. My aim was to reach Thunder Bay by night, but assuming I would have to get several lifts with gaps in between I reckoned that would be a stretch and I might have to deviate to Marathon for the night.

However, half an hour after I dropped my bags on the shoulder and stuck out my thumb a wine-red Chevy pickup pulled in and I struck gold in Eugene, who had come that morning from the other side of Sudbury and was heading for Thunder Bay that night! Eugene is a driller and blaster on a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories, living in Winnipeg, Manitoba but he's originally from Newfoundland which is where he had just been, on a yearly trip to visit his mum and family.

He's a really big guy, in his fifties but in good shape from lugging mining gear around, he has an impressive set of tattoos including on his forearm the Matthew, the ship which founded Newfoundland, and he smokes Players, a lot of them when he's on the road. He also loves the music of the 60s and 70s, and is obsessive about the British Invasion.

We spent many happy hours of the trip flipping up and down between stations on his XM satellite radio for an endless string of rock n roll greats, do-wop, rock and funk, singing along in chorus and vying for the loudest yells of "ROCK 'N ROLL!!" (with appropriate gestures) when a particular classic came on. Singing along to "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" with fifty-something diamond miner while barrelling along the trans-Canadian highway has been one of the odder experiences of this trip.

Right now Eugene's getting a nap (he's been driving since 0530) in the truck, and I'm sitting at a picnic table somewhere at the meeting point of hundreds of miles of forest, several hundred miles of Lake Superior and the incredible stretch of perfect blue sky. There's a cool breeze blowing across my sunburned neck and...there's not really anything else to say.

Later

Eugene was fairly refreshed after his nap, and reckoned he'd try to push on past Thunder Bay before the end of the day - he also offered to take me all the way to Winnipeg in the morning, which I gladly accepted. We pushed on, fueled by and endless supply of Pepsi bottles, chocolate and crisps, and collapsed for the night in a motel at Ignace, not far from the Manitoba border.

The last few hours were serious moose country, with warning signs everywhere, and we moved slowly for safety as it got dark, each of us watching tensely on our side for the dark shape of a moose ahead - standing high on their surprisingly spindly legs, moose are prone to running out in front of vehicles, and are perfectly positioned for the heavy body to come through a windscreen, often killing the occupants. Highway 17 is prime moose country, bordered by long bands of thick trees which break up into the swampy lakes known as muskag, full of green shoots which the moose love.

Labels: canada, hitchiking, Lake Superior, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, ontario, Thunder Bay, travel, Winnipeg

On the recommendation of Gilbert, I went to the bus station rather than walking out of town (it could have taken up to two hours to get to the Route 17 exit). I had a half-hour wait before the first bus, but when I asked the driver if he ran out to Route 17 he immediately deduced that I was hitching and warned me that Sudbury was a pretty bad place to start.

Nonetheless he dropped me at the best spot on his route next to the highway, refused to let me pay for the journey and even tracked down and radioed another driver who would pass through that area later to move me along to a better spot if I hadn't found a ride - and gave me a free ticket for that journey too.

The advice turned out to have been correct - Sudbury was a rotten place to start from. It took me from 06:45 to about 09:30 to get my first ride.

At about 09:00 two other hitchers, much more lightly packed, came out of town, corrected my technique (make the rucksack more visible, if they can see you have good stuff they're more likely to believe you're a real hiker) then walked on along the shoulder to find a more promising spot. I was about to follow them when a black van pulled up, and I was rescued by David, a handyman from the nearby housing complex who was on his way with a vanload of tools to break up a car his brother had found for parts.

He wasn't going far but he dropped me at a more promising location a few miles along where the highway and a bypass met, offered to buy me coffe and when I insisted I was already buzzed from Tim Hortons' fine product forced a bottle of Powerade and two packs of Mentos on me instead.

The new spot was great - within ten minutes of relaxed thumbwork I was picked up by Tanya in her rather wellworn and wheezing white compact. Tanya was in her thirties, very kindly, bubbly and constantly excited, had two kids whom she adored, a wonderful ten year old boy and a beautiful seven year old girl, and she had started her own charity with the aim of stopping child sexual abuse (I had seen the billboards earlier).

She was going to take the kids to Disneyland this year and Hawaii the year after, and if anyone ever touched her children she was going to stab him with a blunt plastic butter knife because she wanted it to really hurt and she was working as a mental health nurse and her son had 42 pets because she just couldn't say no to him, not ever.

Tanya dropped me at a motel by the turnoff to her town, and I thumbed for about half an hour before Jerry arrived. Jerry was a classic Canadian rock dude in jeans and flip-flops, terminally laid-back, and driving a severely dented and worn Chevy pickup with custom blue metallic gear knob and pedals.

He was also, as it turns out, about to run out of petrol, due to the taped-off concrete patch I was standing next to which should have been a petrol station (and had been the last time he came through). We rode for a good few miles towards Jerry's hometown of Elliot Lake, the only sound the Millencolin album blasting out of the CD player as we both willed the engine to finish one more revolution.

When the pickup finally rolled to a hault on the shoulder, Jerry hitched up the road to get a can of petrol while I watched the car. It was stunning weather by now, endless acres of that incredible blue sky over head with just the occasional flat cloud drifting over, and the crickets were filling the air with a flat electrical hum.

When Jerry got back he took me round the backroads of his hometown "Man, we're so late anyway, my friends all worry whenever I get lost of run out of gas, they'll probably think I'm dead or something" "So this happens a lot?" "Oh ya, man" he gestures at the petrol can in the back "I've got, like, a collection of these things, I should probably keep some in the car, huh?" We had one exciting moment when my door opened as we turned left "sorry dude, it does that sometimes" and then he dropped me by a restaurant on the road out of town.

I had a long wait on that road, which was quiet, before I was picked up by Gloria, who was Ojibway, had a family with two kids after a series of failed and tempestuous relationships, and was doing okay now with her wonderful husband Chris. She dropped me by the park where she was picking one of her kids, having taken me half the remaining journey, and the last stretch was courtesy of Gary, a retiree travelling into Sault Ste Marie (my destination for today) in his classic original Winnebago campervan.

Gary was accompanied by his beautiful Nova Scotia golden retriever Meryl, "the only real Canadian breed of dog", a friendly animal who spent most of the journey hanging her head over the seats and paddling about in the back of the van, paws clicking. His wife was following behind in the car and they were going to a wedding in the Sault.


Gary dropped me in the centre of town and I walked back to the Algonquin Hotel, where I got a single room for $28.00, dumped my gear with enormous relief, wrote up last night's post and fell into bed.

Labels: Algonquin Hotel, canada, hitchiking, Sault Ste. Marie Ontario, sudbury, Tim Hortons, travel