Category: travels

One more thing that blew my mind was Cité Mémoire, a project by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon. For the next four years, Old Montreal’s building facades, cobblestone streets and trees will be lit with multimedia projections inspired by the history of the city. Each projection can be activated by anyone using a cellphone app. My favorite, by far, is an Algonquin creation myth which comes to life in a narrow, cobblestone alley off of St Paul. As the story is narrated on one’s phone, accompanied by rhythmic indigenous songs and music, the street fills with seawater churned by breaking waves, ocean foam, and schools of tiny fish. The projections are interactive. If one decides to wade into the water flowing under one’s feet, swaths of red are left behind before they merge back into the dancing water. Towards the end of the story, living and breathing algae and colorful vegetation seem to bloom into the alley. It’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Teaser – Cité Mémoire 2016 from Montréal en Histoires on Vimeo.

The two flights to Montreal weren’t that great – tiny, shaky planes and lots of motion sickness and Dramamine for me. My hotel however is dope. Le Cantlie is situated in the middle of downtown, on Sherbrooke, right on the edge of McGill’s main campus.

I checked in around 5:30pm and met Pierre, my guide, soon after. He explained the city’s layout: the St Lawrence river forms its southern most border, Old Montreal sits on top of it, followed by downtown, and then the mountains. The city is named after a three-headed hill called Mount Royal. Its old port was considered the gateway to America and it transformed Montreal into a thriving commercial hub.

My first impression, after having adjusted to the serious level of cold that’s already entrenched here, was how artistic the city is. Every quartier or neighborhood is designed by different architects and artists based on their own unique vision of what the financial or entertainment or cultural centers of the city should look like. From buildings and public art, to benches, streets lights and trash cans – everything’s designed meticulously around ideas of community usage and engagement and a cohesive aesthetic mission. For example, a side street that was used for truck deliveries, Ruelle des Fortifications, was converted into a glass-covered promenade in 1992. It now links several historical buildings that have been renovated, creating a beautiful indoor village.

After the Royal Bank left Old Montreal for downtown in 2010, its magnificent Tower, which used to be Canada’s tallest landmark at one point, was left sad and abandoned. Not for long. The opulence of the building was preserved (down to its teller windows, beautiful floor tiles, intricately carved gold doors and sparkly chandeliers) when it opened this year as Crew Collective & Café. The cafe is great but what I loved even more was how start-ups, entrepreneurs and artists can rent space at affordable rates in the same building, whether for an office or a small meeting room paid for by the hour. It’s all about community.

Last post about Alaska: our visit to Ketchikan, named after Ketchikan Creek which flows through the town, and the capital of Native American totem poles. We visited Potlatch Park, built on the old fishing grounds of the Tlingit Natives of Southeast Alaska and home to some beautiful Native American art, and Creek Street, Ketchikan’s old red light district. It was built over water because it was too hard to blast away the rocky hills surrounding the creek, a common story in Ketchikan.

August 12, 2016: Helicopters flew us on top of Mendenhall Glacier, which is part of the Juneau Icefield. It was cold and windy up there and we were glad for our hats and gloves. The ice was as dense and spectacularly blue as ever, with tiny streams running over the surface of the glacier. Our guide showed us how to get into push-up mode and drink directly from a stream. Mendenhall Glacier is a remnant of the Little Ice Age which began 3,000 years ago. It is retreating i. e. its ice is melting faster than snowfall can accumulate to form new glacial ice. The glacier’s melt has created Mendenhall Lake, where we kayaked later that day. The lake drains into the Inside Passage thru Mendenhall River. As the glacier moves steadily away from the ocean, it presses against the mountains surrounding the lake, exerting immense force on account of its mass and weight, ripping off rocks, and pulverizing them within its compressed layers. Ground up rock forms silt and sediment, which produce abundant plankton life, which in turn sustains the crustaceans, krill, and larvae that feed numerous marine creatures including whales. A veritable primordial soup.

Later in the afternoon, we kayaked across Mendenhall Lake, a deep basin filled with freshwater from the glacier. If reminded me of Saiful Muluk, a mountainous lake located at the northern end of the Kaghan Valley in Pakistan, that feeds the Kunhar river.

The water was relatively still but it was cold and wet and extremely foggy. We could see Mendenhall glacier towering over the lake on our left and Nugget Falls, a waterfall downstream of the Nugget Glacier, right in front of us. We were the only ones on the lake at the time and in between paddling and orienting ourselves, I tried to absorb the lake’s grandeur and mystical beauty, its dreamlike abstraction and formidable physical history. It was like being in one of Whistler’s Nocturne paintings. Hauntingly beautiful. Sacred.

Yesterday morning started with the Mt Roberts aerial tramway in Juneau. Completed in 1996, this vertical tramway climbs 1,800 feet from downtown Juneau to the Mountain House, with stunning views of Gastineau Channel. Once we got to the top, we decided to ignore the light drizzle and go on a hike along one of the trails. The first thing that hit me was the smell: pine cones, wild flowers, damp soil, and drenched trees. Took me right back to Costa Rica’s rainforest. The Proustian phenomenon. It’s a fragrance that’s not just full-bodied and earthy but invigorating. The smell of life and death, permanently twisted together into a continuous band. A thick mist stretched over the tops of evergreens like a gauzy canopy that shapes and reshapes the landscape’s contours. Area wise Juneau is the second largest city in the US (2,701.9 square miles) with a population of 33,000 people, 30,000 bald eagles, and a large portion of Alaska’s 3,500 brown bears and 21,000 humpback whales (the whale population has rebounded from near extinction half a century ago). I find it quaint (and quite lovely) that Juneau is not accessible by road, one can only fly or sail into (and out of) the city.

Today we reached Icy Strait Point and visited the small village of Hoonah. We learned some Tlingit history thru music and dance, and a short play based on the story of the Raven. “The Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska have two moieties (or descent groups) in their society, each of which is divided into a number of clans. Each clan has its own history, songs, and totems, and each forms a social network of extended families which functions as a political unit. The two moieties of the Tlingit people are the Raven and Eagle/Wolf.”