Newfoundland has a very special place in our hearts. It’s not just the stunning landscape and unusual wildlife, but most especially the people. In amongst the ubiquitous ‘no hurry, there’s always tomorrow’ mindset and a degree of laid-back disorganisation, there is a huge depth of human kindness and so many friendly individuals who go out of their way to help and make things work. This first flashback hopefully gives a flavour of its appeal.
Our first visit to Newfoundland was in July 2001, about 3 weeks into what turned out to be a stint of nearly two years’ travelling round the world. That time, we came by ferry from Nova Scotia, first visiting the west and north of Newfoundland, before ending up at St Johns in the east. We travelled with big backpacks and no car or mobile phone. We were right at the tail end of the days when backpackers used ‘Poste Restante’ mail to communicate back home, when e-mail and slow internet cafes were becoming the heady (and frustrating) new thing, when it was quite normal to turn up in town and only then find somewhere to stay (no booking.com then – the current-day joy and bane of the backpacker).
From Port Aux Basques, our first destination was Deer Lake. We arrived by bus and walked 1½ miles uphill to a newly opened B&B run by a lovely couple called Art and Flo – we were just their second guests. Art was an artist (‘Art by Art’), who painted icebergs, lighthouses, seascapes and wildlife on handsaws, pebbles and the inside walls of their house – indeed, the house he had built himself, one room at a time. Our bedroom had a feather bed! Can you imagine the luxury after mostly camping on thin rollmats on hard ground?
Art and Flo were real characters – a laugh a minute – and took their hospitality responsibilities very seriously. As well as the ultra-comfy bed and delicious breakfast (things we’d paid for, although we hadn’t expected anything quite so sumptuous – breakfast here was fresh-caught, pan-fried trout, fresh strawberries and grapes), they also plied us handsomely with tea and muffins on arrival, doughnuts before bed, drove us out to the lake for a walk and, next day, to the insectarium and the Deer Lake museum, where Flo was a volunteer and spent some time showing us around (I still remember seeing some of her poetry in a book of collected works there, and a treecutter’s wooden pillow and the story that went with it).
We booked to stay with them again in a week’s time on our way back through Deer Lake. That time, there were more guests and it was a veritable party all evening, hosted by Art and Flo, with supper also thrown in (meatballs, chips and gravy plus tea and muffins). We insisted on walking to the bus stop when we finally parted next day (although Art and Flo offered to drive us, as did a random passerby who saw our two little pairs of legs poking out below two enormous rucksacks). Art said we should take one of his painted pebbles each as a gift, but we knew we were at capacity for both space and weight, and still with many months of travelling to go, so we had to decline.
Many years later, in May 2008, we went back to Newfoundland when May (our eldest daughter) was just 5½ months old. We stayed with Art and Flo again and it was simply marvellous, and this time we were finally able to take a painted pebble each! To this day, the pebbles sit in pride of position on the windowsill of the study where I write.
Back in 2001, on leaving Deer Lake for the second time, we took a comfortable bus to the capital, St Johns, on the east coast. After nearly 10 hours, we entered St Johns shortly before 10 p.m. Our first impressions were less than auspicious. There was no downtown drop-off, so we alighted near the university and tried to find someone to ask for walking directions to the hostel we’d booked for one night, prior to camping.
But the only person available was a taxi driver who tried to coerce us into accepting a fare (at inflated cost) by saying he wouldn’t tell us the way as it was complicated and we’d only get lost. Hardly! Dave’s internal compass is almost as good as that of a South African swallow migrating north for the summer. (Well, so long as he turns the right way out of the door.) We declined the taxi and set off in a random direction, at which point the driver relented and gave us simple directions that took us straight to our destination.
The hostel was empty when we arrived, apart from a barking dog, but they’d e-mailed us the door code, so we let ourselves in. They’d promised to leave a note of our room number, but hadn’t. We looked around, found a messy kitchen and bathroom, then a double bedroom saying ‘Reserved’, and guessed that was ours. Inside, the bed was exactly as someone had left it when they climbed out that morning, but there were clean sheets and pillow cases on the back of a chair, so we crossed our fingers that it was the right room, stripped the bed and made it up with clean sheets, and hopped in. The managers apologised profusely next morning for forgetting all about us.
It was a mile and a half to walk with all our heavy belongings to Pippy Park campsite, where we were headed next. When we arrived, they sorrowfully told us that all the pitches were taken. We looked so crestfallen that they took pity and added, “Well, we do have space in the camping field...” We couldn’t believe our ears. A camping field! Did this mean... No surely not... Could this possibly mean that, after three hard weeks of camping mostly on sharp gravel pitches in eastern Canada (don’t be fooled – those Canadians have a twisted, sadistic streak!), we would perhaps be allowed to pitch our tent in a field, a real field, on a soft bed of grass? The manager looked at us strangely, then confirmed – yes, it was an actual field with real grass. Now things were really looking up!
We went into town to eat a celebratory meal (in honour of the grass). We decided against the first restaurant we saw, ‘Good Luck - Sushi To Go’ (in case we’d used up our full quota of luck already with the grass), and treated ourselves instead to pea soup, cod tongues, scrunchions (deep fried pork fat) and boiled vegetables with coleslaw on the side, all of these being strange Newfoundland traditions.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Then and now: Amanda carrying daughter, May, around Signal Hill, St Johns, in 2008 and 2019. Both times, we set off from Quidi Vidi village and past Cuckold’s Cove. The first time, we travelled with a baby, a car full of bibs and washable nappies, a CD of nursery rhymes, and marched around Quidi Vidi lake singing ‘To Market, To Market [To Buy A Fat Pig]’ at the tops of our voices. The second time, we travelled with two growing girls, a stack of hairbands and a variety of electronics, and were raced uphill (and soundly beaten) by two children with strong legs. How things change.
St Johns was hosting the ‘International Fog Conference’ during our time there in 2001. Enticing as that was, we chose instead to go along to a Newfoundland ‘set dance’ in town. The dance moves were very tricky and it was mainly attended by a thin smattering of St Johns locals. We met a cheery fellow there, also called Dave, who said he knew a bloke who could probably take us south to Bay Bulls in a few days’ time, on his way home from work. If we could spend a night in Bay Bulls, we could probably hook up with a whale-watching tour the next day ... so that became our plan.
Over the next couple of days, we spent a (very wet) day on admin, then did a day walk of about 17 miles south along the coast, taking in clifftop views, overgrown woodland trails that saturated our trousers from the recent rain, ponds with beaver activity, and rocky paths lined with flowers of bunchberry, partridgeberry and blue flag iris and patches of wild strawberries. We lost the tricky path many times, and our feet were red raw and sore from wearing wet socks for two days running, but eventually we found ourselves stood at Cape Spear, the most easterly point on the North American continent, looking out to sea ... with our backs to every other human being on the whole of the continent. 17 miles was too far to walk back to the campsite, and there was no public transport, so we stretched our limited budget to a taxi home, then made a one-pot, campstove curry, swapping cooks halfway through without a proper handover, which meant we both, in turn, added the full quota of curry powder – yikes!
Next evening was our planned lift south. We headed to our pick-up point outside the architecturally beautiful supreme court bearing thankyou beers for Dancing Dave’s mate. But his mate wasn’t there: the mate had now allocated his lovely wife, Tammy, to drive us, the two mystery strangers who had appeared from nowhere and would disappear again to nowhere. She was waiting for us with Dancing Dave. It was very touching that they had made sure to hold to their promise, but Tammy was palpably nervous, telling Dancing Dave to remember our faces in case we were murderers. (Her unease, as a lone female, was not unreasonable, especially as she works at the court and will have come across many unsavoury types.) We thrust the beers at her, feeling they were not quite the right gift now, but maybe she could give them to her husband if she didn't like beer ... ah, yes, the husband who had just landed her this awkward driving job. Then she spotted our enormous black-cloaked rucksacks.
“Eh, what’s inside those?” she squeaked.
“Oh, nothing to worry about,” I replied, “Just a couple of dead bodies. The people we murdered earlier.” Helpful one, Spice.
Tammy was wonderful, taking us right to the door of our B&B in Witless Bay, to save us walking the last bit, even though it was an extra 5-6 miles’ round-trip for her beyond Bay Bulls.
Next day, we took an excellent whale and puffin watching trip with O’Brien’s from Bay Bulls, seeing humpback, fin and minke whales, and, before that, equally enjoying the more distant views of numerous whale spouts out to sea from the peaceful shores of Witless Bay. Magical for us, the locals wryly said, “Oh, those whales. Sometimes we can’t see the icebergs for the whales!” and more seriously, “We take the whales for granted here. Actually, they are a total nuisance at night with all their screaming.”
Tors Cove, just north of La Manche Provincial Park, May 2008. Who could have guessed, with icebergs plopped in the bays, that we’d be returning over a decade later and wild swimming in a waterhole amongst cliffs and wildflowers just two months later in the season.
Being car-less in 2001, O’Brien’s had kindly picked us up from Witless Bay and agreed to take us back to St Johns at a reasonable cost after the whale and puffin tour. Following a very short, part-night in some university accommodation there, we had quite a fiasco with our early morning, 5-hour bus journey to Gander airport for our flight out of Newfoundland. Our bus soon broke down and a second had to be summoned, which was very crowded and shared with a chap who recognised someone 3 rows ahead and kept trying to get their attention by throwing screwed-up balls of paper at them.
We arrived at the airport 7 hours ahead of our early evening flight (there was no choice: it was the only bus of the day). After many hours of tedious waiting, the departure time was at last approaching ... at which point, our flight was delayed in dribs and drabs for several more hours, with very poor levels of communication, before finally being cancelled altogether and rescheduled for 5:15 next morning. People found themselves with a poor choice of sleeping on the hard floor of the airport or battling tooth and nail for the few available taxis (one every 5-10 minutes) so as to grab 3½ hours sleep in a hotel, in both cases unable to access any of their belongings, which were stuck on the aircraft.
(For anyone who has seen the current stage musical ‘Come From Away’, when Gander became the emergency stopping off point on 9/11, with dozens of flights stranded there for days after being refused entry to American airspace and the population swelled to around twice its normal size, then take note – this was the level of disorganisation to be found just 7 weeks beforehand.)
We could have avoided all this nuisance at Gander. Our preferred choice had been to depart Newfoundland by taking the ferry for a few days along the south coast outports. So why hadn’t we? Well, we’d been to a tourist office a few days ago and they’d said, “Sorry, the ferry times have changed. We’ve got the new schedule book but haven’t been able to work out the times yet.” Fair enough. But the ferry times had changed two years ago!
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