Fri 02 Aug 2019
Dave got up early and walked about 2½ miles in a loop heading north, collecting wild strawberries for breakfast. This would have been fine, except that he overshot the campsite on his return and, leaving the path to push his way through dense trees and undergrowth, suddenly found himself emerging into a small clearing that turned out to be someone else’s pitch. Unfortunately, it was an occupied pitch, the incumbent couple enjoying a romantic breakfast in previously splendid isolation. To avoid looking like a Peeping Tom or a madman, Dave decided that his only option was to saunter through with a cheery wave and make it look as though it was the most normal thing in the world to have a man burst out from a thicket behind your tent.
We de-camped and I noticed a tiny, silver square under our picnic table, possibly looking like something electronic. Last night, I had copied our photos from my phone to the little SD card that I carry around in my pursebelt as a backup (wifi has been so poor whilst camping that I’ve been unable to use a cloud service). I checked to make sure that it wasn’t my SD card – no, that was still in my pursebelt – then popped the silver square into a little bag in the car in case someone came looking for it. 40 minutes later, about to leave the site, I realised there was no point keeping it – of course no-one was going to come looking for it – so I put it in the bin next to our pitch. I was to regret this decision before 48 hours had passed.
We drove 12 miles north to The Arches Provincial Park, just outside Gros Morne National Park. We were surprised to find the sea arches parallel to the beach in a bay, rather than on a headland, as is more common. Apparently, it’s because of the part-glacial formation of the initial rock fractures, prior to buffeting by waves in the sea and compounded by a freeze-thaw action at these latitudes.
Dave discovered that we could climb on top of the arches, so we all did so, followed by a few other people who decided to risk it after we’d checked it out. Although only 10 m high, it did involve a near-vertical climb using small ledges as hand- and foot-holds, so Dave, Poppy and I took care and descended backwards. Conversely, May trotted about on the little cliff face in a pair of shorts and flip-flops and somehow managed to descend the vertical section facing forwards whilst also carrying my water bottle in one hand. That girl is a mountain goat.
At The Arches, Poppy, wearing sensible shoes and clothing, descends the small cliff face backwards with care. In contrast, May The Goat hops to and fro in shorts and flip-flops.
Eating lunch on a patch of grass in The Arches car park, we came across Mel and her autistic daughter Sofia, over from the UK and motorbike-camping their way around eastern Canada for seven weeks. Mel and Sofia had some wonderful stories and Mel posts to Instagram @adventurewithautism and writes an ‘Adventure With Autism’ blog, so do look it up.
We drove down to Berry Hill campsite, Dave put up the tent on our designated pitch surfaced with sharp gravel (a Canadian specialism), and I went off to do our first machine laundry wash in ten days. Another spread-out campsite (like Shallow Bay), Berry Hill requires a bit of a hike to reach any of the facilities: even more inconvenient when carrying a washing load.
For those travelling long-term, the anticipation of regaining a whole set of fresh, sweet-smelling apparel cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, however, there were no instructions on the top-loader machine and I couldn’t remember if the washing powder was supposed to go on top of the clothes or in the bottom. I opted for the latter, 50:50 that I’d get it right. I got it wrong. Our clothes came out not only still dirty, but also reeking, especially the cheesy and now-wet socks that might just as well have completed a week’s walking in the rain rather than have passed through a wash cycle.
There wasn’t time to repeat the wash cycle as we wanted to go for a walk in the sunshine, so I thought the best bet would be to hang everything up to dry (and air out the smells) at our pitch. 4 people, 10 days of washing and just 30 clothes pegs: not a straightforward combination. On top of that, the washing line cord that we always carry around with us turned out, on this occasion, to be too short for this sheer number of clothes, particularly as we also had our waterproofs from yesterday’s rain still to dry, so I had washing draped over bushes, tree branches and the tent. It took ages getting everything hung up.
We set out for our walk along the Bakers Brook Falls Trail from just outside the campsite. It was a pretty boardwalk across bog dotted with carnivorous pitcher plants (the emblem of Newfoundland), wild strawberries and bogland flowers, with mountain views all round and culminating in the impressive, multi-tier Bakers Brook Falls. On the way back, although tired and hungry, we decided to detour off the boardwalk on both the extra walking loops that were marked, which made our walk about 7 miles in total.
The first loop went into the ‘moose exclosure’, a sectioned-off area where moose cannot enter and the variety and bushiness of the vegetation is so much greater than where the moose graze voraciously. Various signboards on the boardwalk explored ‘Moose: Steak Or Mistake’ as moose (which are native to other parts of Canada) had been introduced in the early 20th century to provide hunting meat for the Newfoundlanders. But, with their only predator, wolves, having been cleared from the island, the moose population had exploded, to the detriment of the native plants and animals and biodiversity.
The second loop was very scenic and passed right beside a boulder-strewn lake called Little Pond, with the large, part-vegetated, bare-topped Gros Morne mountain looming off to one side. Here, on the stony path at the edge of the pond, we watched a segmented, black creature, 30-35 mm long, wriggling strangely along. For weeks, no-one could identify this creature (I took a short video), but I finally managed to contact a specialist via one of the Gros Morne rangers and she identified it as a rare spot on land of the larva of a predacious diving beetle leaving the water to pupate. Meanwhile, May and Poppy argued vociferously about which of them was allowed to paint the stunning Little Pond when we arrived home in September. It didn’t come to blows, but there was shouting and stomping and sulking, and they wouldn’t agree they both could do it. (You can guess ... so important at the time, and we’ve now been home for 3 months and neither of them has painted it. Although I believe there have been a couple of false-starts.)
We returned to the campsite ... and, despite the sunshine, the washing I’d hung up was in the deep shade of our pitch and hadn’t dried at all. It was still dirty, smelly and as wet as when we had set off for our walk. I finally gave up and, whilst Dave cooked a rushed tea (tomato pasta, of course) for our tired and starving brood, I took down all the washing, dragged it back to the laundry and dumped it in the drier. 45 minutes and CA$2 (about £1.20) was all it took to dry. It even improved the smell as ‘essence of cheese’ was no longer concentrated just in the socks but diluted more mildly throughout the whole wash and now combined with the fragrant undertones of overheated fabric. We would smell thus until the next, hopefully more successful, laundry session.
We have friends, Zach and his family, who live a few miles from Berry Hill campsite and who we had been hoping to visit. So far thwarted from either a visit or even making contact – through a mix of unexpectedly having to camp much further north at Shallow Bay (nearly 40 miles from their house), constantly rushing around, Dave being ‘under the weather’ with mild sunstroke, very poor wifi and not a great phone signal either – the first communication we had managed was a brief e-mail yesterday that we weren’t even certain had sent.
I looked at my phone to see if I could send a quick follow-up text or ring Zach, but the phone signal didn’t seem any better here than at Shallow Bay. Obviously, we were still too remote. Exhausted, and with an early start planned for tomorrow to climb Gros Morne mountain whilst the weather forecast was still decent, we decided that the best option was to drop by Zach’s house after tomorrow’s climb, before returning to the campsite. We all dropped into bed and fell straight to sleep, with no-one, not even May, showing any inclination to stay awake and read half the night.
Postscript: my phone didn’t pick up a signal the next day either, but then we did spend most of the day up a mountain. On the third morning, I regarded my phone again. The signal was no better but, looking closely, I noticed something else. It seemed to be saying ‘No SIM’. I opened the phone and, there, where the SIM should be, was a blank space. A space about the same shape and size as the tiny, silver square I had found under our picnic table the morning we left Shallow Bay. It must have fallen out when I backed up the photos. I had lost, found and then made a conscious decision to bin my very own SIM card! Now, we really were incommunicado.
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