Me and The Beast go West

This week I started my awesome new job in Alberta with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute! These first few days have been really fun and challenging. It's been all training so far, but this training is FUN. We spent a whole day practicing riding around on quads, found stashes of candy in the woods using a map and compass, learned how to fend off a bear attack and I can now back up giant trailers.... well, sorta ;). 

Once I found out I had the job in Alberta, it was a pretty easy decision to drive out there instead of flying. I've always wanted to do a west coast road trip, and now was the perfect time. Plus I knew I'd want to have my car for more epic road trips on our days off from field work. One of my new co-workers sent out an email asking if anyone was driving from Ontario so I jumped at the chance to have some company for cross Canada adventures.

I started out from Toronto in my little Mazda 2 that I have affectionately (and yes, somewhat ironically) named "The Beast". We headed up to North Bay to pick up my new friend and co-worker, Jesse. Good thing he turned out to be super cool. He's a musician, hiker and camper and general lover of fun and adventure like me. So we pretty much immediately decided to do as much sight seeing as we could on the way, including some hikes and camping.



Me and Jesse

 

Jesse and The Beast at Lake Superior

 

The coast of Lake Superior, it was really snowy and icy!

Lake ice was pushed right up to the sandy shores

Typical Canadian road sign, keep your moose eyes on!

Jesse spotted a Lynx by the side of the road! I screeched to a halt and turned around to take a look. Thankfully it was still there, stalking a bird in the bush. This was the best pic we were able to get. Lynx are usually very elusive and hard to spot. My first Lynx sighting!!!!!!!!!

One of our first planned stops was this general store in Wawa, Ontario. They have world famous summer sausage! We were pumped for sausage!

But unfortunately we realized that this store, like many other of our planned activities turned out to be closed for the season. No summer sausage for us. Sad face.

But on the bright side, there was a giant Canada Goose statue right beside the store!

We continued driving, but the weather kept getting worse and worse... check out those snow banks near Thunder Bay! We had planned to go hiking and camping in Lake Superior Park, but the negative temps and the snow covering everything made us think otherwise. Sad face again.

The next day we visited Kakabeka Falls! Selfie time!

Kakabeka Falls is the Niagara Falls of the North

Icy cold!

Northern Ontario

Our last stop in Ontario was to see Husky the Giant Muskie! Remember kids, Husky says, prevent water pollution!

The weather got a bit better when we got to Manitoba. Blue skies and sunshine!

Hello Manitoba!



But as soon as we got to Winnipeg, we immediately got accosted by 3 homeless people one after the other. When one left, the next one came by. They had helpful parking tips and then asked for $20! I know I've been gone for a while, but I'm pretty sure the bums in Toronto only ask for change. What kind of rich bums do they have in Winnipeg haha!!??? Anyhow, we each gave $5 to the 3rd homeless guy who came by because he had an anemic wife who lived in a stairwell and was just short a few dollars to take her to go to see the Elvis impersonator show. I hope they had a great date night with Elvis!

 



After all those encounters we were a bit scared to leave our hotel which was obviously in the sketchy part of town, so we had these bevvies as our nightly entertainment before we got up enough liquid courage to go out again to face the homeless population for a night on the town, aka the all you can eat Indian buffet.

The next day we left Winnipeg as fast as possible and headed onwards to Saskatchewan. We stayed in Regina and woke up to a snowstorm, but we had to push on!

The plows were out on the highway

There were lots of trains in Saskatchewan

We took a detour to see a National Wildlife Area, and The Beast did pretty well on the dirt roads. Unfortunately this deer didn't do so well on the barbed wire.

Ferruginous Hawk

Swainson's Hawk  having dinner

Cows are such an underrated cute animal IMHO

Saskatchewan is full of farms and rolling landscapes and big skies. Beautiful!

The closer we got to Alberta, the better the weather got!

The Alberta sign and big trucks... a match made in heaven haha! It seems like EVERYONE in this province owns a giant truck. The Beast is about a quarter of the size of most of them haha!

Awesome Alberta wildlife sighting: Pronghorn Antelope! This one had a particularly cool white afro.

We found a beer called Cariboos!

We tried to go to the Burrowing Owl interpretation center but it was closed for the season. So instead we planned to check out the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Brooks. Road trip miracle, it was actually open! Millions of years ago, this area was a dinosaur hotspot, and now there are tons of fossils being discovered all the time.

It felt like everything we wanted to do, including drive down this road, was closed!!!

Dino attack!!! Ahhhhhh!

Oh wait, he's friendly!

 

The badlands at the Dino Prov Park

Who knew we have cacti growing in Canada?!

The landscape was amazing

Wavy clouds!

A cool old grain elevator building

Oh no another dino attack!

The Beast posing with another beast... the biggest T-Rex in the world!

 

If you need me this summer, you can find me in my tent up north

I left Canada way back in February 2013. Wow, that feels like a lifetime ago now. Back then I still had a federal government job, a boyfriend, my own apartment and my iPhone (haha). My hair was a lot less blonde and my skin was a lot less tan. Back then when I left, I had no idea where I'd end up...but I knew I wanted to have some adventures!

Well, mission accomplished! In the 14 months since then, I visited 21 countries on 6 continents, with a few breaks at home in Toronto in between trips. But for last leg of my journey, I literally went around the world and spent 7 months away.

Here's where I went from Feb 2013 - April 2014

Hands down, it was the best decision of my life to go traveling. If you've even read one of my blogs, you know I had tons of adventures and the best time ever. But toward the end of the last 7 months, I was starting to be ready to go home. The decision to book that ticket back was made that much easier one day in India when I checked my email, and got the great news that I got a new job! I finally had a reason to stop wandering.

You might remember this post http://jontheflipside.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-endlessly-changing-horizon.html about quitting my job with the Canadian Wildlife Service from back in December. Well, obviously my bank account has been taking a major hit and is now at a below zero status. A new job is kind of essential at this point before I seriously need to start scouting locations to set up my cardboard box over a subway grate downtown. When I left CWS, I decided for the future that I am not just going to go for anything, I'm going for my dream job and I'm going to make it happen. My dream job is a wildlife biologist position. I've done that quite a bit, but it was always as an aside from my real job doing environmental assessments. I want to study wildlife, determine what is happening with their populations and make sure they are conserved, full time! I'm going for it!

So from Mabul Island in Borneo, I sat on a patio at Scuba Junkie over looking a beach for days doing up my resume and sending it off for seabird research assistant positions in Alaska, and wildlife technician positions in northern Canada. My Scuba Junkie friends even helped me with practicing bird calls and species identification with charades. I eventually had a Skype interview for the wildlife technician position from Mabul Island, but the connection was too bad for Skype to work! Noooooo! So I begged to reschedule and went back to the mainland and booked into the only hotel I could find with a secure internet connection, and it also happened to have a flat screen TV, a king sized bed and a hot rainfall shower. It was amaaaaazing after staying in a dorm with cold showers!! This time the internet connection worked and I thought the interview went really well! But then I didn't hear anything for weeks. WEEKS! It felt like forever. Then, finally, after about a month, that fateful email came in, and I finally found out I got the job. YAY!!

So I'm starting my new job next week. I'm going to drive from Toronto to Grande Prairie, Alberta where I'll be based. I was reminded of just how friggin big Canada is when I googled the route and realized it's almost 4000 km's and it will take 48 hours of driving to get there!! But it looks like I'll have some company for my road trip with one of my new co-workers, and I'm hoping to be able to visit some of my relatives along the way. Road trip time woohoo!!!

My road trip route

I'll be working for the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute as a Wildlife Technician. Basically I'll be living in a tent or trailer for most of the summer working in the wilderness looking at plants and animals all day! I'll be doing songbird point counts beginning before the sun even comes up, and then collecting a bunch of other samples of mosses, lichens and soil for later analysis. I'll also be doing fish surveys at some aquatic sites later in the season. I actually started out working on fish after I graduated from my undergrad degree, so I can't wait!!! I feel like this is a great step for me on my career path to becoming a wildlife biologist. It feels like everything is falling into place at the moment!



Can't wait to get back out in the field!

When I started off on this journey back in Feb 2013, I had no idea how it would turn out. I was totally in love with Ryan and thought we would move to Alberta and continue our life together in the mountains. But obviously that didn't happen. When we broke up a year ago, many of you know, I was totally devastated and it was probably the worst thing I've ever been through. In the aftermath, I actually lost the ability to feel any real feelings, good or bad, for about 6 months.

But little did I know then what a blessing in disguise it would turn out to be. I came out of it with a bit of a thicker skin, a stronger ability to not give a fuck what other people think, and a better ability to embrace the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs. If me and Ryan had stayed together, I wouldn't have had the last 7 months of traveling - I would never had met all my amazing friends on the Stray bus in NZ, spent hours scuba diving underwater with sharks and sea turtles, seen my best friends on their honeymoon in Thailand, jumped over a burning skipping rope at the full moon party with 100000 other people on a beach in the middle of the night, worked with orangutans in Borneo and held hands with a gibbon, summited a 4000m peak, been attacked by monkeys with one of my best friends in Bali, been overwhelmed by the beauty and chaos of India, or almost had my legs fall off from tiredness trekking through the Himalayas in Nepal. None of that would have happened. It just goes to show how true it is that sometimes, the thing you think is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to you, can sometimes truly turn out to be the best.

I also want to say a special thanks to my amazing friends in Toronto, who always welcome me back into their lives no matter how long I've been gone. It is such a priceless thing to have those types of friends who you can not see in months, but then feel as if no time has gone by when you do reunite! You guys are the best, love you!




 

Oh, hello Mount Everest! My First few Adventures in Nepal

I made my way to Chitwan National Park in Nepal, in hopes of seeing a wild tiger. The tiger population in the park has been doing well over the last few years because of Nepal's zero tolerance policy on poaching, which is great news! But there are still only around 150 there, where there used to be thousands. My friends and I took a safari through the grasslands and forests to see what we could see...

 



This Rhino popped out of the forest to say hi... aka charge the jeep!!

 

The Rhinos here only have one horn, unlike the African ones which have two.

 

We also saw a few buffalo

 

Common Langur

 

 



Peacock in a tree

 

Mating dance!

There were no tiger sightings, but we saw 8 Rhinos in one day which was very lucky I think! We took a canoe through the park as well, mostly for birdwatching. But about 5 minutes into the trip, I looked down into the crystal clear shallow water, and my mouth dropped open in shock as I saw a giant crocodile swimming directly under our little wooden canoe! It couldn't have been more than 2 feet below us! We kind of forgot about the birds since we saw about 20 big fat crocodiles in the water and along the banks of the river on our hour long cruise!!

Linda in the back is really excited about the crocs!

There were actually tons of great birds around, like this stork

and this Grey headed fish eagle

The next stop was the foothills of the Himalayas. We woke up early, and made our way to watch the sunrise at the Annapurna range.

This view is worth a 5 am wake up call.

 

We had to have our chai tea!! (my new addiction!)

 

I even spotted a flock of those birds from Planet Earth that are the only ones able to fly over the Himalayas -
the Bar Headed Goose.

 

My wonderful group!

The next day we got up early again for a sunrise flight to see Mount Everest! We took a little Yeti Airlines plane to the highest point in the world.

Boarding time

Flight over the Himalayas from Kathmandu

 

My selfie with Mount Everest! Too bad you can't really see it... lol

 

This is Mount Everest! It was so cool that it was the only peak that had blowing snow at the top.
Can you imagine all the climbers up there?

 

Haha, they gave us a certificate for successfully viewing Mount Everest!!! I think that's pretty funny, but still, it was amazing to see it's peak popping out above the rest of the earth, highlighted by a cloud of blowing snow above all the other peaks. It was pretty magical.