Havre-Saint-Pierre

As I mentioned previously this cruise is what's referred to as an "expedition cruise" - you get off the ship and do active things like hiking, kayaking, etc.

This cruise turned out to be a little different and we found out too late.  On previous Silversea expedition cruises all the passengers would meet in the lounge in the late afternoon / early evening and would hear what activities were available for the next day.  You would then make your choice.  I cannot recall a time when we weren't able to get the activity we wanted.  There were times when a particular kayak activity was fully booked (they only have so many kayaks) but then your name would go to the top of the list for the next kayak trip. Very fair.

On this trip the fuckers did it differently, unbeknownst to us until later, we were supposed to go online, at their website, and choose our activities far in advance.  We found this out too late and by the time we did most of the interesting excursions were booked fully and they would not make room for extra people. There were always other shore excursions available but not always interesting ones.

Today was one of those days.

The activity available to us today was "a guided walk around the historic town of Havre-Saint-Pierre".

We joined the walk but after about half an hour we bugged out and just walked around on our own - the guide was useless. She admitted it was her first time doing a guided walk and we felt bad for her but it was pointless staying with the group.  

The town really had nothing to offer - just a shity little town.  A wasted day in reality. Except for the Shed-a-Morue...more on that later.

So this is what the town looks like from the ship. Not very pretty.

So we meet up with our guide and away we go.

These are some the "heritage"  homes our guide thought that we'd like to see.

And this is the graveyard she thought would be of interest.

It was somewhat interesting in the sense that maybe 20 years ago they took away all the headstones and planted grass and now they just have four large headstones with the names of all the people engraved.

I asked her why but her answer didn't make sense.  

The graveyard is where we said "enough" and we went wandering on our own..really not much to see in a shitty little town.

Some funky real estate.

A couple cute fishing boats.

So we see a lady pushing a baby carriage with a rabbit inside.  As we got closer we realized that this was our guide from earlier in the day. You may not be able to tell but the rabbit was fucking huge. And it was named Sea-Bu. Clearly a whacky woman!

A section of beach. I imagine it would be busy on a hot summer day...if they ever have a hot summer day here.

And the Shed-a-Morue  which, I guess means cod shed in english as morue is french for cod. But if you use a translate service cod shed translates as hangar à morue...I guess Shed-a-Morue just sounds better.

Anyway, inside the shed is a huge feast of seafood all paid for by our ship. Beer and wine are free too. There is a huge table loaded with all types of things...some appetizing and some disgusting.

And if you look close you will see there are no utensils on the table...you just pick up what you want with your fingers, put it on your plate and take it back to your table and eat it straight from your hand. I saw some folks pick up something check it out and then put it back...yuck!

And when the servers bring more food they just use their hands to transfer it from the trays to the plates. Very unsanitary.

I ate a few of the less disgusting things and sure enough I caught some sort of bug. It was a mild one though and never caused a great deal of discomfort.

They also had a pretty decent band playing cajun music. Real toe-tapping music!

Back on he ship I got a picture with Glen the bartender...he was also the bartender on the cruise we did last August across the Bering Strait.

And then John had to get in the picture as well.  These Filipinos are great guys.

That's it for Havre-Saint-Pierre.