The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. "Do you want to go Tadoussac?" asked Girlfriend.

"Go where?" I said. "To tabarnak?"

"Tadoussac."

"Where's that?" I asked.

"It's a six-hour drive from here. It's a place to see whales."

So I said, "Yeah, why not."

That's how yesterday morning, I found myself renting a car to drive us to Tadoussac.

Now, I'm not the world's best driver. (The world's best driver is Lewis Hamilton, with 98 Formula One wins at the time of writing.) For example, when I was seventeen, I failed my driving test three times. On one attempt, I pulled out straight into the path of an oncoming car. Fortunately, the driver of the car slammed his foot down on the brake, narrowly avoiding killing me, the examiner, and the examiner's examiner, who was in the back seat.

But not to worry. I was sure that Canadian cars would be easier to drive than UK cars.

If I could figure out how to turn the car on, that was. I didn't know how the car was supposed to turn on. The rental car man hadn't bothered to show me. He had just assumed I knew. Which I didn't.

"How do you turn the car on?" I said to Girlfriend, who was sitting next to me.

"I don't know," she said.

And I don't know why I asked her. She didn't even have a driving licence.

So I looked at all the buttons. There were dozens of buttons, possibly hundreds of buttons. It was a NASA launch console.

Finally, I found a switch that said ON. I pressed it.

Nothing happened.

"Why would they make an ON button that does nothing?" I said.

After ten minutes of trial and error, I discovered, purely by accident, that you had to be holding down the brake pedal with your foot when you press the ON button. By doing this, the engine came to life.

Now for the gears. The gearstick said P, R, N and D. Never before had I encountered a weird gearstick like this one. In the UK, we all drive manual cars, where the gearsticks say R, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

R, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. That's simple. R is Reverse and 1 to 5 is the speed.

But P, R, N and D? What do they stand for? Puke, run, nod, and dance?

R was probably reverse. And I knew from watching American films that N would be neutral and D would be drive.

But what about P?

"What's the P for?" I asked Girlfriend.

"I don't know," she said, unhelpfully.

Oh well. As long as we didn't need to use the P, we should be fine.

So I put the car into D for drive. Now we were off, slowly, out of the car park.

About driving in Canada: they drive on the right, not the left. For someone like me, coming from the UK, this took some getting used to.

"Drive on the left, drive on the left," I muttered to myself as I drove out of the car park. "Drive on the left, drive on the left." That's when I noticed a car coming towards me. "Drive on the left, drive on the left... no! Drive on the right! Drive on the right!"

Talking to myself like that seemed to work. Because after that, I didn't once veer over the left side of the road into oncoming traffic.

I should have mentioned: cars in Canada are automatics which means you don't need to change gears. The car changes gears for you. This makes driving easy. In fact, a monkey could do it. A deaf-blind monkey with no arms and no legs could do it, as long as he had months of training to learn how to turn the steering wheel with his mouth and press the brake and accelerator with his tail. Driving a car in Canada is easy. It's just a shame it doesn't do the rest of the driving for you too.

"P means Park!" I suddenly shouted.

"What?" asked Girlfriend.

"P means Park. I just remembered."

"Oh."

Then after a few moments of thought, I said, "What's the difference between Park and Drive?"

"Well, Park is for parking and Drive is for driving," she said.

"Yeah, I know that. But what's the point of Park? Why not just have Drive?"

She shrugged.

Anyway, to get to Tadoussac, you have to drive six hours northeast along the Saint Lawrence River. Six hours. The idea of driving for six hours was an alien concept for me. In England, a much smaller country, if you're driving for six hours, it means you're hopelessly lost.

Soon we were on the Trans-Canada Highway. Not the Transgender Highway, that's something else. That's the highway you go on if you're unhappy with your gender and want a change. No, this was the Trans-Canada Highway, the world's longest national road. It goes all the way from one side of Canada to the other, a length of 7,476 km.

Thankfully we had a satnav to tell us the way, or else I would have gotten hopelessly lost and ended up somewhere far-flung like Mexico. It was 476 km to Tadoussac.

The thing is, Canada is full of vast, unimaginable distances. At 9.9 million kilometres squared, it's the second biggest country in the world. (Russia is the first.) The Great White North, they call it. But I don’t see what’s so great about it. I mean, it’s covered in snow half the time. Which is fine if you'd like to live in the land Beyond the Wall from Game of Thrones, I guess. Which is fine if you like snow I guess. But even if you like snow, you're bound to get fed up with it around the six-month mark.

By the way, Canada's also the country with the:

• world's longest coastline
• world's longest border (US-Canada border)

Despite its size, Canada is mostly uninhabited. Over 80 per cent of the country simply has no one there. You could walk around for months and encounter not a single human being. It would be like walking around Ikea when you need a member of staff to help you.

The satnav piped up: "Continue on the current road for the next 100 kilometres."

You realise how big Canada is when the satnav says things like that.

After an hour, it said: "Turn left in 10 kilometers."

A few minutes later, it said: "Turn left in 5 kilometers."

As we kept approaching the turn I wondered what it would be like.

"Turn left now," said the satnav.

Somehow, and even today, I'm still not sure how this happened, I turned right instead.

"Fuck," I said. This new road carried us off into a forest. We were heading away from the ferry we were supposed to take.

The satnav calculated a new route for us. This new route added an extra two hours onto our journey. I kept looking for a place to turn around but there wasn't one. On either side of us was a thick forest. What fairytale secrets lay within? I don't know because I sped past them. There could have been all the fairies and imps of FernGully in those forests but I wouldn't know. Probably no one does. I'm sure there are parts of Canada that no one has ever visited because the country is just that big.

In 1819, a British man called John Franklin led an expedition into the forests of northwestern Canada. According to the book Into The Wild:

"Their food ran out. Game was scarce, forcing Franklin and his men to subsist on lichens scraped from boulders, singed deer hide, scavenged animal bones, their own boot leather, and finally one another's flesh. Before the ordeal was over, at least two men had been murdered and eaten."

The part about the boots gets me the most. I'm fine with cannibalism but eating boots? I can't imagine how hungry you'd have to be to eat your own footwear. There can't be that many calories in a pair of Nike trainers, surely?

Franklin survived the expedition, by the way. Then, instead of cutting his losses and switching to a safer career, like lion taming, he went on another expedition in 1845 to the Canadian Arctic. He and his 128 were never seen again. It seems they all starved to death.

Canada's a dangerous place and don't forget it.

Eventually, after a whole day of driving - yes, a whole day of driving - we got to Tadoussac. Somehow Girlfriend and I were both tired even though we'd both been doing nothing but sit all day. It felt great to get out of the car and stretch.

With wooden houses painted bright colours, and with forest all around, Tadoussac looked more like Canada than any place I had been to so far. Which wasn't many places really.

We went inside the hotel. Our host was a man with a Quebecois accent that was impossible to understand.

"Say poo ongess moi on de poo inglay don kay."

I was nodding along like the Churchill dog but I couldn't understand a word.

"Essay poor sah keh mo too pay ah bleesay"

He was talking to us animately but I had no clue what he was saying. He could have been telling us in explicit and graphic detail how he fisted his wife last night and I wouldn't have known.

The Quebecois accent, by the way, is like if a normal French person got hit on the head and lost some basic brain function meaning he could no longer speak properly. That's what the Quebec accent sounds like. It's also very nasally as if your nose is blocked by a cold. To be fair, most Quebecers probably do have colds all the time given how cold Canada is.

Somehow, Girlfriend seemed to be following along. She was even replying to things he said, to my amazement.

After the conversation, I ask Girlfriend, "What did he say? What did he say?"

"He was telling us about the whales."

Whale watching

Tadoussac is one of the best places in the world to see whales. The Saint Lawrence River is full of krill. The krill attract the whales, the whales attract the tourists, and the tourists attract the whale watching tour companies. It's the circle of life.

So today we were going on a whale watching tour.

First we had to put massive orange coats on. I don't know why. If you fall in the water, the whales will still eat you. The orange coats will just make you look like a twat while you're being eaten.

In her wisdom, Girlfriend booked a tour with a small boat, "to get us closer to the whales," she said. So about twenty of us climbed into this small boat. The boat was already swaying back and forth. If a whale tried to knock it over, we'd stand no chance. We'd all be in the water while the whales picked us off one by one.

Once we were all in the boat, the driver turned on the engine and we were all flung backwards into our seats. The boat crashed through the water. Waves smashed against the boat, spraying cold water across our faces. I put my hood up.

Now, whales unnerve me. It's their size. The largest whale, the blue whale, is the biggest animal ever to have existed. They're bigger than dinosaurs, and some of those dinosaurs were really big.

And a whale's tongue? It weighs as much as an elephant. I'm not sure who found that out. You'd need some pretty big scales.

Now we were going to see not just one whale but several.

After half an hour of driving, the driver stopped the boat. What had happened? Had he run out of fuel? Were we going to die?

We sat in silence for a few moments, the boat gently bobbing up and down, water gently lapping against the sides. The driver said nothing. If we were going to die, then he wasn't going to tell us.

There was nothing but blue sea and blue sky. Sea and sky, sea and sky, and then- we heard it. A cry like the bellow of a dinosaur. There was a gasp someone from the boat. Then there it was: a whale's back, glinting in the sun. Then slowly, as the whale dived back down, its tail emerged, as slow and gentle as a lover's caress. Finally, the tail dipped back into the water and it was gone.

That was the first whale we saw and it wasn't the last. Whales kept coming up for air. Every time a whale appeared, everyone went "Oooooooh". Click click click click went their cameras. I don't know why people took so many photos. Didn't they know they can just search Google Images for "whale" and get better photos than they could possibly take?

Soon I was taking photos with my camera, just like everyone else. I found myself poised with my camera, ready and waiting for the next whale to come up. Where would it be? Anywhere was fine, except under our boat.

Another whale surfaced. Click click click.

"I wonder what it's thinking?" asked a woman to my left.

That was a weird question. I don't even know what people are thinking, let alone whales.

"I bet it's thinking about the universe," her friend said.

Fuck off they're thinking about the universe. Whales don't know what the universe is. They're probably thinking about how hard they'd have to ram our boat to send us all into the water.

We got back to dry land, all still alive and with all our limbs attached. Girlfriend and I got back into the car.

"That was fun," I said, as I drove the car out of the car park.

Suddenly, Girlfriend shrieked "Car!" I slammed my foot on the brake just as an oncoming car sped past us down the road. I'd almost driven into it. It was like my driving test all over again.

This goes to show that my driving is more dangerous than any whale.