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piss me off. What should have been a fun morning was rapidly becoming a
     pain in the arse.
    We were riding on land belonging to the family of one of the guys in the group, Denis Landry: the woods were his, the accursed
     enduro course was his and the wild blueberry fields surrounding the woods belonged to him as well. I had no idea there was
     any difference between wild blueberries and the cultivated ones, but apparently there is – the wild berries are smaller and
     sweeter. The season is short, about three weeks, and these fields would not be harvested until August. They don’t use pesticides
     or chemicals of any kind, and the berries are fertilisednaturally … as demonstrated by one of the riders, who took a pee in full view of the camera.
    ‘They do wash them before they send them out, don’t they?’ I asked hopefully.
    The going was easier once we left the enduro course. This was a good dirt road, leading down to another steep section of woodland
     bisected by a river that a hundred years earlier had been used by the logging companies to float timber down to the sawmills.
     I’d seen a similar kind of thing in Alaska. They’d build dams across a gorge to let the water rise high enough to load it
     up, then tear down the dam and watch the logs bob downriver to where they would be gathered at the mills.
    Denis took me through thick woodland to a spot where we could catch a glimpse of the gorge below. He described how when it
     was time to break up the dam, runners would ride the timber all the way down to the mill. Men with poles would walk the logs
     as they made their journey, shifting from one to another, fixing jams and making sure the timber ran freely. I imagined peeling
     off a rolling log and falling into the water with the weight of all that wood on top of you. With nobody to help you and a
     swift current like that, you’d be drowned in a heartbeat. That was a different time, when men risked their lives in this kind
     of country every day.
    There was no logging here now; this was a recreational spot where people liked to swim and go gorge-jumping in the summer –
     sometimes hundreds of feet into the water below. Rather them than me, I thought.
    We were soon back on the bikes and splitting the countryside in half, with rolling hills on one side and farmland on the other,
     the farmhouses built from white clapboard withmassive Dutch barns in the yards. A little further on we stopped in a forest that was littered with what looked like electric
     cabling. I’d never seen anything like it; a spider’s web interweaving the tree trunks throughout the whole forest. Suddenly
     it dawned on me: they were maple trees and the sap was being collected to make syrup. We were still out of season, so the
     pipes were not actually tapped into the wood; in season they are connected to a different hole every time the syrup is harvested;
     each hole is drilled a certain distance from the previous one and that way the tree remains unharmed. According to Denis one
     tree can produce sap for decades with no damage done whatsoever.
    The drained sap is collected in massive steel drums and taken to what Denis called a boiling evaporator. There it’s heated
     to a certain temperature, at which most of it just evaporates – what’s left is maple syrup. It takes forty litres of sap to
     make one litre of maple syrup, and there are no additives, no preservatives and no process other than the cooking. I had no
     idea that that’s how it came about. Maple syrup is one hundred per cent pure and it comes from these very trees. I gave the
     tree a hug. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, thank you. Without your maple syrup, I don’t know where I’d be.’
    Once we’d said goodbye to the guys and the bikes, we headed into Bathurst, New Brunswick, to jump on an overnight train to
     Quebec City. It was modern and we each had a very clean cabin, no bigger than a small cell but comfortable enough. Sitting
     down on the bed, I