Canada: Québec City & whale-watching along the Saint Lawrence river at the Baie Sainte-Catherine (Mon 11th - Wednesday 13th August)

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My last stop on the Canadian tour before flying back from Montréal was also the most picturesque. Québec City is famously one of the oldest European settlements in North America and is inevitably one of the most touristic, as demonstrated here with the horse and carriage photos - herds of Canadians and Americans flock here with their cameras to get a flavour of 17th-century Europe without leaving their own continent. The city is surprisingly full of tourists even from the region of Québec itself - its old town seems to attract the same kind of intensely touristic crowd as certain parts of Bath and York in the UK. Despite the tourists, it's a beautiful and very photogenic city. My friend Joanie, who I met in Strasbourg, took the time to show me around the city a bit when I arrived, taking me on a walk past the dominating Château Frontenac (a hotel that Elizabeth II has stayed in which appears on all the postcards) and on a walk along the city's old ramparts which look over the Saint Lawrence river.

The one full day that I had in Québec was spent not in the city itself, but rather on an action-packed whale-watching trip on the Saint Lawrence. The bus picked me up from the hotel early in the morning, I hopped on and joined the hordes of camera-toting French Canadian senior citizens, and we were driven three hours north of Québec City past some incredibly picturesque scenery in the countryside along the Saint Lawrence river and in the Laurentian mountains (including the Montmorency falls, which, despite not being as vast and wide as Niagara Falls, are technically higher!) On the way the driver flitted between a heavily Québecois-tinged French and near-perfect English to tell us about the surrounding landscape and, of course, the whales themselves. He was knowledgeable enough that by the end of the tour we knew which kind of species to expect, why they come this far into the estuary in summer (answer: to eat - which they don't do for the other 6 months of the year in winter), what they eat (mostly the enormous supply of krill in the Saint Lawrence estuary) and, in some cases, even the individual whales' names. We stopped halfway at a dairy farm to get lunch and to stop for what the driver kept referring to as 'wee wee wa wa' before getting back on our way. At the Baie St-Catherine - where the estuary spans 14km from coast to coast and begins to become saltwater - those who wanted a peaceful ride boarded a whale-watching cruise, while those of us who wanted something a bit more fun (myself included) donned warm red coveralls and crammed into small Zodiac speedboats where the boat drivers told us in thick Québecois accents about what we were seeing. In the space of two or three hours everyone on my boat was lucky enough to catch sightings of two humpback whales, Blanche Neige and Gaspar - these are the whales whose tails feature in the photos, as humpbacks show their tails just before they dive - a fin whale and a sperm whale (both quite rare sightings) and several minke and beluga whales. On the way back towards the dock the driver took us through some impressive Canadian fjords, too, all with impeccably sunny weather continuing for the whole trip - a day very well spent!

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