Oh, Ottawa

I know that I'm not known for punctuality, but on this trip I have been pretty good in arriving on time for my flights. All excepting Toronto to Ottawa, which is the closest I came to altogether missing a flight. It might have been the fact that I had to buy and repack my suitcases, or insisted on watching Batman Begins before leaving town, or that I'd had a huge weekend just past, or all three, but I have never come so close to missing the flight. The bumper-to-bumper traffic didn't help. Toronto may look and feel like Melbourne, but there are many things that are very Sydney-like... including the traffic.

Every Canadian I have met on my trip has asked me why I am going to Ottawa. I guess it's a little like someone travelling 15,000km and going to Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. But we have a family friend in Ottawa, which worked out really well because I got to see a side to Canada that I would otherwise have missed in the big cities. Teena used to teach with my Mum at the Primary Correspondence School in Brisbane in the 70s. A Canadian, she returned to her country in 1980 after five years in Australia. When I was younger I used to write to Teena, as she wrote me. But apart from sporadic phone calls over the years no-one in our family has seen Teena since 1980! I was nervous getting off the plane to see if I could recognise Teena, and worried I'd front up to people who'd look at me strangely when I greeted them. But sure enough it was easy, as Teena as hardly changed.

Once out of the airport, Teena drove me around Ottawa. The landscape is very different to Toronto. Instead of that city's sprawling concrete jungle, Ottawa is a lush, green, well-planned and very beautiful, quaint little city. Located at the very edge of Ontario, the Ottawa River divides the metropolis that combines Ottawa with Gatineua, a city just across the river in Quebec. The pride of Ottawa's landscape is the Rideau Canal. Extending for more than 10 kilometres, the canal punctuates the city's landscape with narrow waterways emptying into small lakes. When the canal reaches Ottawa's downtown area, the waterway descends 24 metres through many locks, so that boats can meet the water level of the Ottawa River. On one side of the canal is Parliament Hill, and on the other the Chateau Laurier. This latter structure, now a Fairmont hotel, is a stunning example of the many steep-roofed hotels that dot the Canadian landscape from coast-to-coast. These hotels (like that in Banff Springs) were built by the Canadian railway more than 100 years ago, with the purpose of creating a tourist rail market. As well as zipping around Parliament Hill, Teena showed me 24 Sussex Drive (where the Prime Minister lives), the Governor-General's house, and not far from these places we also visited a very expensive area with huge stone mansions. It was here that Teena showed me the dignified and graceful home of Michael Potter, a multi-millionaire who founded I.T. company Cognos. It's right across the street from the huge ugly "Paradise Waters"-esque mausoleum owned by Michael Cowpland, who founded Corel (which later bought WordPerfect). The curious thing about this area is that as wealthy as the owners might be, none of these houses had fences or gates. Anyone could walk right up to the door and ring the bell. Canada feels so safe when compared to even a relatively safe place like Australia.

I spent my first day in Ottawa sleeping in, and relaxing at Teena's house. I then caught a bus to the downtown area, or "town" as we might say in Brisbane. The strangest thing about the bus ride is that I could not work out from the houses and apartment blocks whether I was passing through a good or bad area. Teena explained to me a few days later that the Ottawa city council requires that every new area have four types of housing: middle-class semi-detached houses, public housing, apartment blocks, as well as the big homes. Consequently the city doesn't really have ghettos. And the city's people are forced to live and interact with people from other socio-economic backgrounds.

I managed to do very little even once I'd made it downtown. I checked out Parliament Hill from the street-level, and visited the Rideau Canal locks, and wandered into the Byward Market area which has lots of fresh-produce and arts & crafts stalls. Not a lot of the stuff on sale is my thing, but it was quaint and pretty. And that was my day. That evening Teena and I enjoyed a wonderful home-cooked roast dinner she'd prepared. We had talked about seeing a film, but were both so exhausted we called it a night at 10. Mind you, this was only about 20 minutes after the sun set!

On my second day in Ottawa I hurried to make up for the time I'd lost the day before. I visited the Art Gallery, which has a fantastic permanent collection as well a very good Renaiisance exhibit at the moment. On the way to the Art Gallery I had to walk past the new, huge American Embassy. It occupies an entire block, and to the annoyance of Canadians, the Americans have blocked off a lane on each side of the building with concrete flower beds and bollards to prevent vehicles passing too close.

At 5pm I met up with Teena and she took me on a little car drive through the Gatineau Hills. This is a huge national park on the Quebec side of the river that has lakes, forests, and ski slopes. We stopped off at the estate of William Lyon Mackenzie King. He was Canada's tenth Prime Minister, and held the job longer than any other person in any other country in the Commonwealth. He was also a little queer. Although he never married, his queerness can be attributed to holding seances with his dead dog and dead mother, seeking political advice from the latter. If it works, it works I suppose. Who are we to judge?

Teena dropped me back at the Museum of Civilisation, which is Canada's national museum. A lot of the museum's floor space is devoted to the history and experience of the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis people, who are collectively Canada's aboriginal people. This history takes into account life before and since European settlement in Canada. From a visitor's perspective, it looks like Canada has reconciled relations with its indigenous people, but I understand that this is not really the case. There is a lot of resentment and bitterness arising from how these people were mistreated. And in many ways, it reminds me a lot of Australia. Even in Canberra one gets the idea that Australians are tolerant and progressive and have reconciled things, as far from the truth that might be.

The most engrossing part of the museum, IMHO, is the top two floors which document European exploration and settlement. Like something one would find in an theme park like Dreamworld, the floor space is divided into perhaps a dozen small little spaces that recreate a specific part of Canada at a specific point in its history. These are often streetscapes, and easily fool the eye into thinking that one is actually there. One of the spaces, that I like to think of as the Wild Wild West set, had little shops that you can enter. The contents of these shops were ripped in entirety from actual shops that closed down in rural Canada some time ago. For example, there was a traditional printers shop (even imbued with the heavy scent of printing press ink) that was transposed from Winnipeg where the store shut down in 1995.

My last night in Ottawa was to be an early one. I had arranged to meet up with people in Montreal, and we were going to need an extra few hours to take in the special itinerary that Teena had planned. We left home around 7:45am, and headed to Montobello. This small town looks like Rural, Anywhere, but is famous for its log cabin hotel. This establishment is again another example of the railway company's 19th century entrepenurship, but is unlike most others because of its wood construction. The core of the hotel, containing the lobby and bars, is a hexagonal-shaped building with a four or five storey atrium dominated by a central stone fireplace. The hotel rooms are located in wings that radiate from from each of the building's six edges.