A behind-the-scene look at Pre-WWI row houses
Think of it as a visit to the pits at a Formula 1 event or as a tour of a Russian Gulag with a labour camps historian. Exploring the back lanes of railway towns with an anthropologist is like acquiring a new map of Great Plains settlements. It can yield excitement, uneasiness, laughter, and certainly, a new appreciation for laneways. More importantly perhaps, there are paying guests with an appetite for hands on/behind-the-scene experiences great enough to try this out even locally. It's all in how the experience is staged.
"Having recently completed an MA archaeological thesis on urban settlement in Regina prior to World War I with a British university, I wanted to incorporate and interpret some of my more evocative findings through the excursions I have been marketing around Saskatchewan since 1998," said Great Excursions CEO Claude-Jean Harel.
"A couple of opportunities to do just that came up recently. I led a group of Saskatchewan housing experts on a field trip to Regina's Core neighbourhood. We looked at how the Core's grid layout affects activities such as crime, recreation and community development. Imagine 16 people (under a steady rainshower) carrying umbrellas and walking through some of the most notorious alleys in town, being part of an interpretation of the built environment and its significance today."
Harel adds: "in another instance, a group of 40 adult French immersion students were in the market for an urban field trip in a controlled environment -- one where I would communicate with them mostly in French so they could work on their fluency. I had identified a number of back lane types in Regina, featuring some characteristics my guests would find revealing about how the first inhabitants of the city used the lanes to barter, travel, to hide, to meet up, to keep their livestock or to use the privies. In many ways the back lanes were the backbone of the city in the early 20th Century-- all our guests were looking with fresh eyes at an environment they thought they knew."
John Brandon is a fellow archaeologist actively involved in cultural resource management in the province:
"You may know Claude-Jean Harel for his cheerful promotion of Great Saskatchewan places on CBC Radio and as the owner/operator of Great Excursions Travel Company. His training in anthropology and interest in spaces led him to study the layout of Regina and its effects on the perceptions of her inhabitants and visitors. Claude-Jean will show that archaeology, while the study of human behaviour through material things, needs not be limited to artifacts small enough to put in a bag."
The Regina Archaeological Society's Catlinite Tabloid writes:
"Every aspect of urban development throughout the history of the railway towns affected how residents perceived their home, yard, street, neighbourhood, network of friends, family and colleagues. These same aspects of urban development contributed to differentiating communities from the original site and landscape settlers came to populate. Drawing from his thesis, Claude-Jean uses spatial relationships in railway towns, along with the help of early photographs, maps, GIS and analysis to share with participants some fascinating aspects about the places in which they live. These findings may help those who are currently involved in revitalizing their railway towns tap into little known resources than can generate economic benefits locally."
One might say that back alleys are like a book that visitors and inhabitants learn to read over time. Saskatchewan artist Wilf Perreault has built a prolific career laying on canvas scenes of life in alleys. He started his journey in Saskatoon; he painted alleys even in Morocco. His work now on Regina is an important anthropological record; an invaluable gift offered for analysis, which is what the Back Alley Safaris achieve. Those same back lanes are dissected and their entrails exposed, through Great Excursions, as entertaining public interpretations -- as the newest and quirkiest tourism product to hit the market in Regina for quite some time.
This comes in the wake of a shift in the interests of travelers who are seeking more and more hands on experiences, even those who travel only locally. We all know that consumers are increasingly better educated. They have access to better research tools such as the Internet. The travel destination choices they make are better informed. If they can be convinced that a local resource such as back alleys can be the scene for a new type of urban adventure that will engage guests at an unexplored level, they will give it a try and willingly dish out what it costs to go on the journey.
There are a number of advantages to a product like this one. First, it provides an opportunity to integrate an additional product to local events such as rodeos, summer fairs or centennial celebrations. It also helps brand a tourism destination as authentic, thereby reinforcing the compelling quality of the tourism images that towns and cities are trying so hard to establish in the Great Plains region. Lets face it; our destination is relatively unknown to the rest of the world.
To dismiss Back Alley Safaris as a niche product that is unlikely to interest a broad range of visitors to the prairies would be to not fully understand why people travel: to escape, to immerse themselves into an unfamiliar environment, to gain new perspectives on life and to accomplish something memorable.
It may take some time before Back Alley Safaris are run regularly across the province, but when they were introduced last spring to the international travel trade in Montreal at Rendez-vous Canada, the country's oldest and most prestigious marketplace, more than a few buyers gave the nod to this promising new market-ready experience.
By the way, Rendez-vous Canada is hosted in Saskatoon from May 7-11 in Saskatoon this year and many Saskatchewan rural and agritourism operators are scheduled to attend as sellers.
For more information contact:
Claude-Jean Harel, CEO
Great Excursions
(306) 569-1571
Email: cj@greatexcursions.com
Web site: www.greatexcursions.com
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