Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies by Charley Boorman Read Free Book Online

inscription written in Latin
     so as not to offend either country. That seems like a mad kind of sensitivity when you consider they spent months knocking
     seven bells out of each other.
    I was really interested to find out from Sharon how the Quebecois had managed to keep their identity, given that they spent
     so long under British rule.
    ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Of course the British wanted them all to be proper British citizens. No more Catholic Church, no more French
     language, no more French law. But then they were already worrying about the American colonies. They were conscious that if
     the Americans decided to come up and attack Quebec, they would have the French on their side. So King George passed the Quebec
     Act, which allowed the people to retain their religion, language and code of law. And when, in 1775, the Americans finally
     did attack, the French helped you guys defeat them.’
    Entente cordiale then, only not quite. Sharon told me that before the British finally left and the city returned to French
     rule, they lowered the walls by twenty feet just in case they wanted to come back some day and conquer it again.
    After our history lesson, we went walkabout. What a place! It’s so European, which was all the more noticeable after the colonial
     architecture we’d seen on the islands. It was like being in Paris – stone walls and turreted towers and people speaking French
     in shops and cafés. Walking the walls, weducked into the old jail under what is now a library. Some of the cells are still there – tiny stone holes with an iron gate
     across the doorway. I took a quick look inside one of them but found myself locked in when the guard, Maxim, closed the gate,
     switched off the light and then secured the wooden door.
    Solitary confinement for thirty days, that was what this cell had been used for. My God, it was dark. I’ve never experienced
     anything like it – it was horrendous. Maxim told me that if I really was there for thirty days I’d soon begin to lose all concept
     of time, and after a couple of weeks I’d begin to lose my mind. Yeah, I can see how that would happen: time to open up now,
     please.
Will someone open the door?
    Above the jail is a square room that’s dominated by a statue of General Wolfe, sculpted in wood by the Chaulette brothers
     in 1779. The British didn’t like the statue because it was a little short in stature, and of course the French didn’t like
     it because it was the guy who’d conquered their city. So they didn’t really care when two drunken ex-soldiers kidnapped it
     and took it across the Atlantic, where for three years it stood as the sign outside a pub. Finally somebody figured out what
     it was and eventually it was shipped back here.
    I was sorry to leave Quebec City; it’s definitely somewhere I will go back to. But it was time to hit the road once more,
     because Russ had something special lined up for me further north at the Saguenay Fjord.
    We took the bridge across the St Lawrence that’s a copy of Scotland’s Forth Rail Bridge, only this one is all road. The Canadians
     were adamant that the Quebec Bridge ought to bebigger than the Scottish one, and it is, although only by a metre. It took them a while to get it right, mind you; I was told
     that when they were building it, the construction collapsed on three separate occasions.
    The Saguenay – which means windy river – drains from Lac Saint-Jean, a beautiful mountain lake surrounded by fir and spruce
     trees: a hotspot for city-dwellers wanting to get away. There are all sorts of things you can do up here – sailing, kayaking,
     swimming – but I was meeting up with a mountain guide who was going to lead me up the Via Ferrata, which is Italian for ‘Iron
     Way’, to do some rock-climbing.
    There is a rock face on one side of the lake that’s been fitted with an iron cable hammered in with pitons. It’s actually
     a traverse rather than a climb, and my guide, Wade, told me the