Toronto
Trip Start
Aug 24, 2007
1
28
47
Trip End
Oct 08, 2007
This morning passing through the small town of Foleyet, the sun is out and we have been and will be travelling all day through Ontario through the Canadian Shield ( 1,000 mile of exposed bedrock from 500million to 5 billion years old)- so named because of the hard surface of rock. The landscape consists of small trees (black spruce), some changing colour (aspen and birch), shrubs where there is some thin soil and lots of lakes. That seems to be all with the muskeg (a native Indian word for bog) in between. The muskeg is swamp like country that they say if you break the grass surface and sink in the bog it utterly stinks. The muskeg doesn't seem to support anything including the telephone line posts which are sloping at all angles. There are only a few scattered towns, relics of the old railway days when the steam engines needed water. These days the small towns rely on fishing, canoeing and hunting. The country does not look very fertile. One book described the country as Ontario means shining waters in the language of the Iroquios people and its an apt name as the province contains one fourth of the world's fresh water. "It is a land where nature started to say something and stuttered a thousand times. An extraordinary region where there is one small landscape constantly shifting ." There is a Japanese film crew on board, filming for a Japanese Train Travel program. We may appear on Japanese TV as they took some footage of us!!!!!!!!!!! The freight trains are extremely long here - over 100 carriages and we pass them every 30 minutes or so. We are running 3 hours late and in lots of places we have had to stop and wait for freight trains to pass. They seem to be carrying a lot of containers but mostly timber stacked on a frame on a sideless carriage. Sudbury marked the end of the "shield", and we could see the smoke stack in the distance - one of the highest in the world. Sudbury mines nickel amongst other minerals and is quite different geology to the Shield. Arrived in Toronto after midnight - over 4 hours late and Via Canada offer 50% off the next journey as compensation - where will we go? The Fairmont Royal York was across the road from the station so after checking in with others from the train and two other tour groups we got to bed about 2am
