Japanese version is after English 日本語は英語の後にあります。
It was sunny on day 2 at Parc National du Mont-Tremblant. Yay.
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| At the trailhead |
We started the day with hiking in the morning. We chose a five mile loop to climb up the hills near the Lac Monroe.
As you can see in the left picture, everything in the park is in French. Signs on the roads and trails, everything. All the cars, although not many, are Quebec number plates. Everybody was speaking French. It IS like France. It was a bit confusing, but most people in Quebec can speak English. Park rangers were able to talk in English to Mr.N.
U.S. and Canada is close. In particular, Canada is not far from Boston, and it is possible to drive in there easily, without inspection like at airport but only a couple of questions.
I traveled Europe several times and took trains and bus to go to different countries there. However, still I feel that kind of things are very weird. Growing up in the country of islands, going to a foreign country is you have to cross the long distance of ocean. It means that flying is necessary to go to a different country. Foreign countries are literally far away for us Japanese. More importantly, for Japanese, foreign countries are really far mentally.
If somebody is going to study abroad for example, people sometimes think that they can't see them for a long time, like a couple of years. A lot of couples break up. Japanese have extremely different concept of "foreign country".
With that background, it is confusing for me to drive in to Canada from the U.S. within three hours, then to be surrounded by French.
However, good thing is that those human-made invisible borders don't affect the beauty of nature. Nature doesn't care the border. The beauty is just there.
In this region of Quebec, there are so many lakes. On this hike, we hiked up to the points to look over the Lac Monroe and Petite Lac Monroe.
The picture above is from a viewpoint. The right lake is Lac Monroe, and the little one on the left is Petite Monroe. It was pretty. The trees are light green.
Another bonus from this hike was animals!
Actually there were two bonuses.
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| deer |
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| tail |
First one is white tail deer. On the trail just after started hiking, 4-5 deer were about to cross the trail. I stopped and they stopped. We looked each other for a while by standing. Their eyes were full of curiosity. I love their big black round eyes. They are sooooooo cute.
They are white tail deer. Their tails are white. When they are scared, the tails go up. This time they were down, that means they were happy with me!
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| nice pose |
The second one was a squirrel. There are many kinds of squirrel, but this one is my favorite. It's like Chip and Dale. Usually squirrels run away when humans get close, but this one didn't. He was looking at something so seriously. He was extremely focused. Wow. We should learn how to focus from him.
In the afternoon, we decided to kayak. Because the Lac Monroe was windy, we started kayaking on the Petite Lac Monroe, because usually the smaller lake was less windy. We circled the entire Petite Lac Monroe, but since it is petite, it was done within an hour. I wanted to go to Lac Monroe, but Mr.N said that it was hard to kayak there under the bridge between big and small lake Monroe.
There is a bridge between Lac Monroe and Petite Lac Monroe. The water is coming into Petite Lac Monroe from Big Lake Monroe. The bridge has two arches. It was very narrow and all the water is going through there from big lake to small lake. Therefore the current is fast. It did look hard to go to big lake from small lake by paddling against the strong current. I suggested going through, but Mr.N said it is unlikely to pass.
We tried.
We paddled very hard.
And then we paddled ever harder at the end.
We passed through!
Mr.N was surprised by the fact we did it. I believed we were able to!
This part, of course no picture, because no time to take pictures. This was really fun part kayaking here.
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| quiet water |
Great thing about this area is nobody is kayaking. It is extremely quite and peaceful. For example, there was not a single person kayaking on the big lake of Lac Monroe. I felt like the entire lake was for us to kayak.
Very pretty and nice area.
There are many lakes in this park. I found this park a good place to explore more to come back again.
At night, we had campfire. My favorite time. We cooked steak, Japanese sweet potatoes, and corn. It is always tasty when food is cooked over the fire.
In Japan, I used to cook Japanese sweet potatoes with burning leaves. It is signature thing to do in fall. Because Japan has clear four seasons, fall is full of leaves on the ground. People lake them, burn them, warm bodies, and cook sweet potatoes.
Because campground was full of leaves, it reminded me of the Japanese autumn memories. It was nice. After we got full, we went to bed.
カナダ・モントランブラン国立公園キャンプの旅、２日目。この日はラッキーなことに晴れ。ということで早速朝からハイキング。８キロのループを歩く。
トレイルヘッドには簡素な地図のサインがあったが（一枚目の写真）、もちろんフランス語なのでなんとなくわかるが完全には理解できない。
アメリカからカナダに入りフランス語に囲まれている。。。というのは非常に混乱する経験だった。
日本人にとって”外国”というのは”海外”という言葉に表れている通り、海を渡ることを意味している。陸続きでたった３時間のドライブで違う国に行き着くといのが不思議な感覚だ。しかもカナダに行ったのにフランス語。
ヨーロッパで電車やバスを使い色々な国へ旅した時もかなり不思議な感覚だった。
とはいえ、そう行った国境は人工的なもので目に見える線ではない。自然の美しさは国境を越える。
このケベック地域にはたくさんの湖がある。このハイキングでは丘に登りモンロー湖と小モンロー湖を眼下に見た（写真２枚目）。綺麗で神秘的な光景だ。
そしてボーナス。２つ！
一つ目はホワイトテールディア。訳すと白い尻尾の鹿。５−６匹の集団がトレイルに現れ興味津々で我々を見ていた。かわいい！！！！（写真３枚目と４枚目）。
そして２つ目はリス！リスも色々な種類があるが私が一番すきなのはやっぱりチップとデールのリス！かわいいーー（写真５枚目）。
午後はモンロー湖と小モンロー湖をカヤック。最初は小モンロー湖だけにしようと思ったが物足りなかったのでモンロー湖へ行くことにした。そのためには２つの湖がつながっている橋の下の狭い部分を通り抜けなければならない。大きな湖から小モンロー湖に水が流れて来ているのでそこを通り抜けるのは水の流れに逆らっていかなければならない。たくさんの水が狭い通路を流れているので流れはかなり速い！
我々はカヤックを一生懸命漕いだ。
やー流れが強い！
もうダメかと思ったが最後の踏ん張りで大きなモンロー湖へ渡れた！
最後の写真がモンロー湖でのカヤックの様子。とても綺麗で静かな湖。モンロー湖では誰一人としてカヤックもカヌーもしていなく、とっても平和で良い時間を過ごした。
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