It was a much warmer night last night and we slept with one of our skylights open, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. We had no luck, but it was very nice to wake looking up at the sky through the pines. We got up early to have a shower before the rush of other campers who would be leaving early to beat the Labour Day traffic back home. Unfortunately we discovered that the campground had run out of water, and the showers were unavailable until a water truck arrived.
With our plans foiled, we had a slow breakfast and waited for the water to arrive. While we were sitting around, I made friends with a little chipmunk who had been hanging out on some logs behind our car. He was surprisingly comfortable, and sat just in front of me frantically cleaning himself. Once we were all sorted we packed up our campsite and drove 10km down the road to Canoe Lake.
Our original plan had been to hire a canoe from the lakeside store and paddle around for an hour or so, but we noticed a sign that said they ran guided tours of the lake daily from 1pm! We've never regretted taking a tour of a new place with a guide who knows the area well, as they always teach you interesting little facts and point out things you'd never have seen if you were exploring on your own. The lady at the counter wasn't sure if the tour was on today; she thought it had been cancelled due to lack of interest. Another guy ran off to check with the guide who ran the tour, and returned to tell us that we'd be the only people but we were good to go!
We had a couple of hours to kill before the tour, so we drove a few minutes further on to a small loop hike that took us to a lookout point over another of Algonquin's 2,400 lakes; Smoke Lake. Many of the walks in the park have little guide books that you can pick up at the trail head which tell you stories about the history of the location, and the various flora and fauna found there. This one focused mainly on the life cycle of plants on the forest floor, and talked about how the wildflowers have evolved specially to bloom in the very short period of time between the snow melting and the maples overhead regrowing their leaves.
Back at Canoe Lake, we sat in the restaurant for a Beyond Meat burger to give us some energy for the upcoming trip. Katie and I have been trying to eat vegetarian, following the idea of a whole-foods, plant-based diet. For the most part it has been really easy, as we enjoy cooking vegetarian food at home, and restaurants often have some really good meat-free options.
We met our tour guide Emma, from Tasmania, and two German ladies who had signed up to the tour at the very last minute. Emma was excited to meet some Kiwis! We spent most of the first half of our tour talking to her about our travels through Canada and the USA (she'd done a very similar road trip to our last one), and about food that we missed from back home.
For the first half of the tour, Katie and I were with Emma in a three-person canoe, and the two Germans were in a two-person canoe. The person at the back has the most control over the direction of the canoe, and has to constantly be providing steering input to correct the effect of their own paddling on the canoe's heading. Luckily we didn't need to learn this skill just yet, as Emma was sitting in the back of ours, but the other canoe had to pick it up on the fly.
The tour was a far better experience than we would have had by ourselves. The instruction we received helped us immensely, and would never have explored anywhere near as far. Our first stop was a place called Whiskey Jack, which was around a few corners down an inlet on the side of the lake. We didn't get out of the canoes here, but we floated around quietly for a few minutes looking and listening for any signs of wildlife. The lake was very shallow here, and Emma picked a lily pad to show us some weird jelly-like slime that coated the stems of the leaves.
Our next stop was on a small jetty on the other side of the lake, where we all hopped out of our canoes. Emma set up a small picnic, and we sat around talking about where we'd come from and what we'd seen while drinking tea and eating home-made chocolate chip biscuits. She showed us a canoe route map of the park, which was showed all the access points, major canoe routes, and portages. Portages are paths where you can carry your canoe and luggage between waterways, which let you get very far in to the park. Access to the park is almost entirely from Highway 60, so unless you're prepared to canoe and portage you'd only ever see a small amount of the full 7,600 sq km.
The spot that we stopped at was a memorial to a Canadian painter, Tom Thomson. He produced over 400 oil paintings of the Ontario landscape, most of which were in Algonquin Park. He would often go canoeing in the park for months at a time, painting and taking photographs along the way. Unfortunately, he met an untimely demise at only 39 years old, when his body was discovered floating in the lake near where we had stopped. At the top of the hill a cairn had been built with a plaque dedicated to him, alongside a totem pole which told the story of his life.
As we were leaving the jetty, the rain that had been threatening us all afternoon set in. It got progressively stronger over the hour long paddle back to the store, and by the time we arrived we were totally drenched. For this part of the trip Katie and I were on our own in the two-person canoe, and I had to learn the trick of the J-paddle in order keep us on track. It required pushing away from the boat at the end of every second or third stroke, which used some muscles which weren't used to this kind of activity and quickly got quite sore.
We finished the tour with a group photo, and lots of the staff laughing at how wet we all were. It was the last day of some of the other staff members, so while we were standing around the jetty we watched one of them get picked up and thrown, against his will, into the lake!