Anticosti Island is one of those places I'd never heard of and then was astounded to discover existed. One beautiful fall day I found myself in Quebec province in a place called Tadoussac, a charming little town at the base of an enormous fjord joining the St. Lawrence River. As I usually do, I stopped in the Tourist Information office and looked over the color brochures and books for sale in the gift shop. I started absent-mindedly leafing through a coffee table sized book that had some beautiful photographs.
Suddenly I became excited without knowing why. These were strange images. What was this place? I chatted with the woman in charge of the office and when I mentioned the name of the place in the book, Anticosti Island, she became quite animated. According to her, it was a large island, over 120 miles long by 50 miles wide, in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, almost entirely wilderness. It was apparently very difficult to get to. Once there had been a ferry from a small town on the mainland to a village on the western end of the island, but it had been discontinued. There was no regularly scheduled flight service. I was intrigued . . .
I hate traveling in groups. When I'm traveling I like being spontaneous and making up my mind at the very last minute as to what I will do and see. Being tied to a group itinerary is not my idea of fun. I was a little dismayed when I discovered that traveling to Anticosti Island is virtually impossible without joining part of an outfitter's group. If one is willing to spend a small fortune, one can travel to the island, but once there the going is rough.
Traveling on one's own under such circumstances sounded like a very difficult proposition. Somehow I was able to discover the names of outfitters that organized trips to Anticosti. For some reason, one of them appealed to me even though their week-long trip to the island seemed packed full of activities – at least they covered, or so they claimed, more of the major sights of the island than the other outfitters. Also, the outfitters are apparently licensed to service different sectors of the island, and the one I chose seemed to have the best location. Besides, their emphasis was on the discovery of nature and wildlife on the island and I was very much in the mood for this kind of trip. The cost seemed high to me at first. I had never paid so much money all at once to reserve a place in a group and had all kinds of reservations about doing so. What if I changed my mind? What if I got sick? Ultimately, I made my decision based on the exchange rate: the Canadian dollar was so low that the trip actually cost one-third what I originally assumed it cost. As a matter of fact, I did get sick, but the outfitters were nice enough to put me on a trip that departed a couple of weeks after my original booking.
As a last minute addition to the group, for some reason I didn't fit on the small plane that left Montreal for Anticosti. So I found myself in the airport with a friendly woman named Marie who was also fated to take the long way there with me. She was a member of a Montreal wildlife organization and had traveled to Anticosti many times. Her enthusiasm for the place was infectious and I became impatient to get there the more we talked. But first we had to fly to Quebec City, then Baie Comeau, then Sept-Iles. I was beginning to wonder if we would ever get there. But we did get there, and as the small propeller plane flew over the water, I was amazed at the size of the island we were approaching. We landed on an airstrip that seemed to have been hacked out of the forest and was little more than a flat strip of gravel surrounded by trees. The adventure had begun. Please come back for the rest of this story and in the meantime, enjoy a sample of what Anticosti has to offer:
