I woke to the sound of horses neighing nearby. It
was already dark by the time we reached the campground last night. I
knew we had driven through a holiday resort complex to get here
which has a hotel and golf course as well as the campground. In
daylight though it looks like it has a whole activity centre and
there were about twenty horses in two separate corrals. For some
reason they had found it necessary to electrify the fences. We are
not sure if that is to keep the visitors out and away from saying
hello to the horses or whether it is to keep the horses in.
PEI is split into three main
districts, Kings, Queens and Prince. They have three driving tours
taking you around the island and we started our day on the Kings
Byway Coastal Drive. The island itself is not huge, only about two
hundred kilometres long. Still switching into the smaller scale of
distances, what we thought would take us a couple of hours only took
about forty minutes.
From Brudenell we drove
through Cardigan and around Cardigan Bay, a long way away from the
Cardigan Bay I have been to back home in Wales, and followed the
coastal drive until we reached Fortune Bridge. This whole area is
agricultural land. The British separated the land into separate
plots which were then sold. Most were bought by absent owners and
the farmers were tenants having a hard life trying to make ends
meet. The land division was on a strip farm basis so the road
system, which follows the demarcations of the plots is a criss-cross
of long straight lines. The countryside in this part of the island
is gently rolling hills with woodland and forest thrown in every now
and again to keep some variety. The soil is a very rich dark red
colour
Our route took us past a
village called Five
Houses, which has grown in size and now has at least ten. At St
Peters we followed the road down to Greenwich to visit the National
Park. The visitor's centre was open and we went in to get a guide to
the National Park and information on the walks available to do. They
had a short film outlining the history of the island. Originally
joined to the mainland by a river, rising sea levels resulted in the
Northumberland Strait and PEI becoming an island. Alongside
the local Micmac Indians, Acadians populated the island as well as
Scottish and Irish immigrants. Evidence of the latter is very
obvious in the place names and the culture of the place.
On the beach
St Peter's Bay is also home to
a thriving cultured mussels industry and oyster farming is also
growing on the back of this success. They grow mussels here both for
eating and as seed to export to other parts of the world. In the bay
there are hundreds of small floats visible on the surface of the
water. Each of them marks the sight of a mussel "sock", a long
plastic netted tube into which the seed mussels are put. The mussels
hook on to the outside of the sock and feed and grow until harvest
time. In the summer this is a relatively easy process as boats
"simply" cruise up the bay, hooking the float and pulling the sock onto
a conveyor belt that pulls it up onto the ship. The winter harvest
is more tough. Holes are cut into the ice and a diver in full scuba
gear goes below the ice to retrieve the mussel socks. Fully laden
they look as if they weigh quite a lot.
This area of PEI is famous for
its sand dunes, which the National Park is here to protect. They
have information explaining how dunes are created by sand being
blown into sheltered spaces from rocks or clumps of seaweed. Marram
grass quickly establishes itself in the dunes and its root systems
help to stabilise the sand enabling other plants to also grow. The
plant life in turn attracts birds and other animals and soon a whole
ecosystem has developed. You can have a go at making your own sand
dune in a big drum with a fan that blows onto sand. They also had
the pelts from a muskrat and a beaver, very soft and warm.
Leaving the visitor centre we
drove another kilometre or so down the road to the start of the
local walking trails and walked along the Greenwich Dunes trail.
Although the dunes are protected they have made boarded walking
trails so that people can still get to see and enjoy the local
landscape. The route initially went through some open farmland and
then turned in through woodland. The wood was mainly of white
spruce. This tree was the least useful to local farmers and more
samples of it were left when the farmers cleared their land. As
such, it is now the most prolific tree as the land changes back to
non farmed land. Other species are taking root but it is a slower
process.
Through the forest the trail
then started on a boardwalk to the dunes. A large section of this
spans Bowley Pond, a freshwater pond that is only protected from the
sea by the dunes. As the level of the pond rises and falls the
boardwalk itself floats on small pontoons, quite a unique
experience. All along the walk information panels explain about the
local scenery, how it has developed and what flora and fauna you can
expect to see along the way.
Although the dunes are highly
protected here, they reminded us both of dunes we have seen in
Holland and me of dunes I have seen in Britain. In neither Holland
nor Britain are they protected and we are not sure whether that it
just because there are more of them or because we are not as
environmentally aware as Canada. The Canadians are very
environmentally aware - throwing out your rubbish is a complex
process and in some places there are four different types of bins you have to split waste
into!
Mussel farms in the river
We walked along the beach, a
long, wide beautifully sandy beach, reminiscent again of the coast
of Holland but also of Mahabalipuram on the East Coast of India
(although a bit colder!). Away from the water's edge the
sand was a light yellow almost white colour. The closer down to the
waterline you got (it was low tide when we were there) it changed
and became darker and more reddy in colour. The water was relatively
warm, tempting Stef for a paddle but not warm enough to go for a full
blown swim. We had also been warned that as it was a windy day there
was the danger of strong undercurrents and rip tides.
For most of the time we were
on the beach we could see no other people. The only evidence of
civilisation was footprints in the sand and marker buoys out to sea.
It was windy, but a warm wind, and also quite humid. We followed the
beach around the point and back into St Peter's Bay at some points
along the way walking through some very soft and spongy bits of
sand. On the Bay side, the colour of the water showed that the
shoreline dropped away quickly into a deep and wide channel. Pale
blue at the edge of the beach quickly changed to a very deep dark
blue.
Back on the headland we joined
the Tlaqatk trail back to the car park. This trail explained more
about the culture of the local people and their traditions in
fishing and farming. The headland had until 1985 been an active
working farm. It has now been left to re-establish its natural
environment and is now awash with colourful plants and shrubs. Blue
herons patrol the shore looking for food.
Leaving the park, we rejoined
the Kings Byway Coastal Trail heading for another section of the
park further west on the Island at Dalvay. Our campsite was just
inside the park at Stanhope. We went into the village to fill up
with petrol, had an unsuccessful attempt to find a local shop for
some water and then went and made camp for the night.
