Grimsby Lincoln News

Grimsby Lincoln News

It’s that time of year and I’m sitting in my cold study holding the end of a branch to a candle flame.  Holding and holding…

Wait a minute, wait…let me explain.  I don’t have an annual tradition of indoor branch burning, nor am I doing this to keep warm – I suddenly realize how that sounded.  What I mean is, my study is cold this time of year and I’m sitting here preparing to write my monthly nature column (Gasp, upon re-reading this I just realized that this is my 100th column!).  To set the mood I have a two and a half foot long Australian sandalwood branch in my hand. It’s almost four and a half inches in diameter at one end, the other end graceful and wavy, and when I sit it on a table it looks like a piece of driftwood art with a couple of short branches angling out of it. I’m holding it to the flame to try and char the end to have the fragrant sandalwood incense floating through the room as I begin to write.  And there is a reason: I don’t usually do this as a ritual to write my column.

I’d been asked to speak to the Thursday at Ten members in Grimsby by Bev Jarvis, and we had decided it would be about “Eco Adventure Tours.”  The Thursday at Ten calendar said, “On November 28, we will listen to speaker Carla Carlson, who operates a highly rated Eco Tour Company in Vineland.  She will share with us her experiences in ecotourism in Niagara. Carla will follow up with a presentation of her wonderful adventures in Western Australia.”

I had earlier in the week found my box labelled Australia down in the basement and had the contents, including my sandalwood branch, laid out all over the dining room. Sorting through the contents was fun and brought back so many memories.  However, I was more than dismayed to not find the speech I wrote to go with the presentation I had made with photos, shortly after I had come back from Australia. I did that presentation for the Peninsula Field Naturalists, excitedly wearing my Australian bush hat and my brand new Rossi boots.

Now, to explain to you how I came to be in Australia. I had started my Niagara Nature Tours in 1996 after being downsized from my beloved job in Ornamental Entomology at Agriculture Canada, Vineland Research Station. In part I started an ecotour company because I had high hopes of travelling the world. 

Within three years my company was highlighted in the Canadian Tourism Commission’s “Catalogue of Exemplary Practices in Adventure Travel and Ecotourism.” This was published in 1999 as a lead up to the 2002 International Year of Ecotourism and because of that, the catalogue was circulated all around the world. And I indeed did get a couple of contacts through the catalogue, congratulating me. Time passed and it was now the winter of 2002, and six years into running Niagara Nature Tours, I had only done tours in Niagara with one foray in to Toronto.

I believe it may have been a February day (sitting in my cold living room), working on my computer, when I received an email from an unknown name, a Dr. Ross Dowling, an associate Professor of Tourism at the Edith Cowan University, in a place called Joondalup in Western Australia. With disbelief I read this most astonishing email that invited me to be the international keynote speaker for the Forum Advocating Cultural and Eco Tourism (FACET), for their 2002 FACET Conference Tourism Information Exchange.  He went on to say that they could pay my way but he was very sorry, however, that they could not afford to put me up in hotels, and that I would have to stay at BBs and in private homes.  Well, let me tell you, that was not a deal breaker.

I was so thrilled to have been recognized in such an official way, internationally.  Some of my experiences in my own back yard were not quite so uplifting, to say the least. The most telling story to relay was when an Eco and Agritourism Conference was being planned for Niagara-on-the Lake. Despite having paid $500 annual membership fees to Niagara Falls Tourism, and the Ministry of Tourism representative for Niagara having been to my office a year or so before when she had started her new wonderful important, high paying job (leaving after an hour of me explaining what Niagara Nature Tours was capable of doing, and with a binder of my programming)…despite these two women sitting at the table for the conference planning-committee, arranging speakers and tours for it…my name NEVER came up. When I heard about the conference I confidently called my Niagara MOT representative and excitedly asked how I could help, how I could be part of it, perhaps to be a speaker?  However she thought I could fit in, I’d be proud to do it. She made very short work of me, telling me I was not experienced enough and even raised her voice at me when I tried to explain what I could offer.  I was devastated. I was the only ecotour operator in Niagara and I had serious agritourism programming under my belt having worked at Agriculture Canada for 14 years, having graduated from the University of Guelph in Agriculture, and having conducted agricultural tours for about the past five years.  In fact as far as I knew, I was also the only agritourism tour company in Niagara as well.

But that’s another story.

So, on the 16th of May 2002 I stepped onto a plane that routed me from Toronto to Los Angeles, and to a stopover in Singapore. The Singapore Changi Airport has to be one of the most stunning airports in the world.  I wandered for hours past what seemed like miles of waterfalls, and lush container gardens dripping with orchids and exotic (native) plants. I just now Googled the airport and it says, “Our first terminal, reimagined and reinvented for an urban tropical experience.” Gosh, their website is stunning, it is worth a visit in itself.  It seems to be a self-contained city, within a city.

Then we were told that if we handed in our passports, that we could pay to go on a city tour. We stepped from the cool of the airport into the debilitating (79 per cent) humid heat of this highly urbanised republic, with very little primary rainforest remaining. I was standing 137 kilometres (85 miles) north of the equator!

We were whisked by an open-topped bus through a most stunning city of high-rises and, sitting beside a young woman who lived there, I learned lots about their city life of tiny living spaces and pretty good jobs. We were then plopped into a midsized boat, with a tarp over our heads protecting us from the beating sun. I wiggled my way to sit beside the local steerer of the boat, both of us perched precariously on the edge by the motor. He was delighted to talk with me as we floated through the city as in a dream, through canals perhaps and a sea, I can’t quite remember.

I spent so much time at this airport, waiting for the plane change that I decided to get my long hair cut, thinking it would be fun to say, “Oh, yes, I had my hair cut in Singapore.”  Who gets to say that? The problem with this idea was that Dr. Dowling and his wife Wendy then couldn’t find me in the airport, when they came to pick me up, because I was not the longhaired woman in the photos.

It took me two days and three nights by the calendar, to get from the Niagara peninsula to Perth, the capital of Western Australia. My Niagara Nature Tours had finally gotten me out of Niagara! I was now down under for the first time.  In 1989 I had been on the other side of the world, but on top, in India. I was now in for another life changing adventure.

Please call Niagara Nature Tours 905-562-3746 or email info@niagaranaturetours.ca if you would like beautiful Christmas Gift Certificates for the Niagara Land Trusts January 18 Niagara’s Amazing Winterfest of Waterfowl Tour of the Niagara River. Or for Carla’s Owl Prowl, either one a unique and wonderful Christmas present. Or for a generic Gift Certificate which can be used for any tours throughout the year.  Or, for her BB!

Carla’s Bonnybank Bed and Breakfast www.bonnybank.ca will be closed from Dec. 11 through to Christmas, because she is flying away with her mom to meet her sister Linnea and extended family in the Dominican Republic…for her first holiday in more than 18 years she figures…and her first tropical winter time going to a tropical country, type of holiday. She’s excited.

 

Grimsby Lincoln News