We drove down the coast to Percé today. On the way down the coast, we got a great view of the Gaspe peninsula and Forillon Park from the other side of the cove:
It was a beautiful drive down the coast. As we got near to Percé, the road got very hilly, and then all of a sudden there was the most amazing cliff:
This picture doesn’t even begin to show how enormous this was – it literally looked like half the mountain just slid off into the sea. A few minutes later we got to Percé, and saw the rock:
You can actually walk out to it at low tide (along the beach) but there are all these warning signs about falling rocks. We saw people doing it anyway, but as neither of us is that crazy we voted for admiring it from afar.
All the rocks around this part of the peninsula are limestone and composite, and they look really fragile even from far away. Apparently the sea is just eroding it all away – all along the beaches you can see the sea undercutting the rocks. It makes for a crazy beautiful landscape but you’ve got to be a little nuts to take a stroll along the beach.
We had a nice walk around the town. We ran into not one but two giant moose statues:
Which clearly we are enjoying a little too much.
We took a slight detour back towards Gaspe, and drove up this insanely steep mountain road. The view at the top was so worth it:
That’s Bonaventure island, which is a national park, just to the right of Percé rock. You can take a ferry over for some hiking; apparently one of the world’s largest gannet roosting areas is on the island, but we took a pass on that. Seabird colonies are not exactly fragrant in a good way.
Driving back we got one last look at the rock from across the cove:
Last but not least – we have absolutely no idea what this is about, but there’s no way our visit to Gaspe would be complete without this guy:
It seems a fitting end to this part of the trip.