I say when I go travelling that I am off in search of “a change of scenery”. In the case of Newfoundland this was quite literally true. A bonanza for this aspiring ‘geologist in my next life’.

The Bonavista Peninsula is a 3-ish hour drive from St. John’s, on the northeast coast. Travelling up the peninsula to our destination at its very tip, the town of Bonavista, watching the rocky land pass me by, I soon noticed a couple of things. What looked like fields between rock outcrops were anything but and there was not a farm in sight. Not one.

What I was looking at was a mass of land that long ago had its top layers scoured away completely by glaciers leaving whatever could exist on rock to face the windiest place in the country. There’s a good reason they call this island province “The Rock”

“Barren land” comes to mind when looking at this scenery. But look closely and it is not barren at all. Tiny plants grow around and in between the rock and small evergreen trees slowly crawl as if prostrated against the ocean’s winds.

The town of Bonavista couldn’t be more different from at home in Qualicum Beach on the west coast. There are no gardens at all. None. No trees of any significance, few bushes. All the houses are completely exposed to each other – you can stand on one side of town and have a clear view right across to the other. Low white or weathered picket fences partially surround some structures – with no particular function apparent to me, at any rate.

Privacy in this town must be pretty close to zero.

There is a big effort to restore the old saltbox houses and to preserve the historic look and feel of the place. There are many boarded up and abandoned looking old buildings, but the signs of change are around. Quite a few had been restored, or are currently undergoing renovation, to be resold or used for vacation rentals.

Ours was one of them, this blue house across the road from the ocean, separated from the beach from a weathered board fence – a wind/wave break.

In 1755 a massive earthquake in Lisbon, across the Atlantic, caused a tsunami that struck this coast line including Long Beach across the road from us. There are the usual reports of the water receding all of a sudden out of the bay and then 10 minutes later returning in full force flooding the open meadows on the shore. Today those meadows behind Long Beach are covered with houses. Sitting on the porch, looking out at the ocean view, thinking that one over…well yes indeed. We are definitely tsunami bait.

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The house we stayed in, about 700 square feet on 2 stories, was built at the turn of the last century by James Guy, a carpenter, fisherman and sealer and was a typical fisherman’s house for the time, probably serving as home for a family of 8. The property has stayed in the family and when it was acquired by the current owner it had been vacant for many years. It has now been beautifully renovated, restoring many of the features and woodwork of the original, while opening up tiny rooms for a more modern esthetic. There are views of the ocean from every window. The story of the restoration and more pictures are in this feature article here.

Then there are the puffins. A short distance from Bonavista in the community of Elliston, you can get up (not too) close and personal with the puffin colony that hangs out in the naturally burrowed rock of an island close to the peninsula where the humans can check them out. (Long lens and binoculars helps). People come to this small coastal community from all over the world to make the short trek along the cliff path to see these birds. There’s something about those faces. The word “cute” keeps coming to mind.

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Another claim to fame for Elliston. It bills itself as The Root Cellar Capital of the World. I find no evidence to suggest any other community is fighting for possession of that title

Cape Bonavista Lighthouse. The new modern one definitely lacks the charm of the old.

Bonavista is where, the story goes, John Cabot first reached land in 1497. He is described as the first European discoverer of North America. Except he wasn’t. He was preceded by the Vikings who actually settled for a time in what is now l’Anse aux Meadows 1000 years ago.

Well, then, let’s call him the first European whose name we know.

Except we don’t. John Cabot was actually Giovanni Caboto from Genoa, who shopped his expedition plans around a number of European capitals before the King of England took him on.

The replica of his ship, The Matthew, is now in a semi-permanent dry dock museum in the Bonavista harbour, undergoing a slow restoration.

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The modern harbour and its remaining fishing boats. In 1992 when the moratorium on the dying cod fishery was imposed, it changed a way of life in Newfoundland forever.

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On the last afternoon I took my camera for a walk to look at the old and the new of this town and to talk to some of the locals. I met a man, sitting on a bench in the rare minutes of sunshine that day, and asked him about the pond in the middle of town. Old Day’s Pond. I’d discovered its new-looking 1 km boardwalk around the circumference.

He had a story to tell.

Some years ago a channel was dug between what was an inland pond and the sea, intended as a protected place for fishing boats to moor or dock. It didn’t quite work out as intended, what with tidal flows and sediment shifts and so on. So the channel then became the outflow dump for the town sewage, probably on the hope(?) that the tides would just take it all away. Wrong. The pond became hopelessly polluted. “Oh the smell on a hot day!” my new friend remembered. “But it’s much better now” he continued, “It’s getting there”. Meaning? It looks like it’s been a success story, as the wildlife has returned and it is now a pleasant walk around this former cesspool, now a bird sanctuary.

Before that though, when the original pond was being dredged for the boat docking plans, they made a discovery. The land surrounding the pond is a section of peat, and they dug up a very well preserved man. A Frenchman, identifiable by his still mostly intact soldier’s uniform, preserved in the peat. Over 300 years old and lost from the time of fighting between the English and French to capture and recapture this land that was so significant through its proximity to the fishing grounds.

The last night in Bonavista I watched the heavy fog roll in. Everything on this rocky land was grey except for the odd pops of colour from some of the brightly painted houses. The rain came and was fitting. I felt that I had just barely scratched the surface of this place, which is true. I could have stayed longer for sure.

We returned to St. John’s for one last Saturday night before leaving Newfoundland. That night was a bit of a dream come true.

25 years or so ago I found an album called Gypsies and Lovers by a Newfoundland group called The Irish Descendants. I have been listening to it ever since, and indeed one of my favourite songs of all time, Cape St Mary’s, is on it.

Well it turns out that that very night, that very band was playing at O’Reilly’s on George Street and guess where I was. Propping up the bar, a matter of feet from the stage floor, listening to my favourites with an enormous smile on my face.

Could there be a better ending to a Fine Time in Newfoundland?

If you stand here, your back to the sea, the entire population of North America stretches out in front of you. And there’s nothing behind you until Ireland.

When I read this imaginative description of Cape Spear in a tourism brochure, I decided I had to see what that felt like, to be on the edge of the continent. This most easterly point is only half an hour outside of St. John’s, and we passed several drifting ice bergs driving along the coast road towards the lighthouse.

There, on this blue sky day, perched at the end of the prow-shaped wooden walkway, my inclination is not at all to look towards those North American hordes as it suggests in the tourism quote, but rather to look out to sea – to see what there is to see, maybe some early whales. I spotted an oil platform way out on the horizon (love those binoc’s) and was told by the park ranger that it had been sitting there for about 2 weeks.

This may be the most easterly part of the continent but it’s not exactly the end of the line. Three hundred kilometers further east offshore there’s another small city above the waves:

Hibernia. This off-shore oil platform is called a GBS, Gravity Based Structure, meaning it is actually cemented to the ocean floor 80 meters below. It’s been in operation for over 20 years – other oil platforms in the Grand Banks region are built to float. They are located right in the path of all those icebergs making their way through from Greenland every spring.

Which means, unlike the floating platforms, Hibernia can only stare helplessly at any giant iceberg heading its way. Well, maybe not so helplessly. The engineers built this structure to withstand the impact of a 1 million ton iceberg with no damage and a 6 million ton, estimated to be the outside size of an iceberg that could show up in waters of that depth, with repairable damage.

Plus, the iceberg tracking technology is even better than it was when the structure was first built and any problematic icebergs are dealt with 20 km out, where support vessels circle the iceberg with a giant lasso and tow it off its trajectory and give it a nudge in another direction. Works for the small to medium ones.

So sounds pretty unsinkable. Hmmm.

The supply and support base for the Hibernia and the other floating oil platforms is in St. John’s harbour, a few blocks away from where we stayed.

Day and night the support vessels went back and forth, from base to off-shore oil platform. Each platform always has at least one support ship with it at all times, shuttling supplies and staying close by to provide emergency support as well as any necessary iceberg towing duty in the spring.

The on board platform’s crew, 280 people, work 3 weeks on and 3 weeks off and commute to work by helicopter. Now before you start imagining helicopter riding to work, everybody who works there, everybody who sets foot on the Hibernia has to undergo intensive North Atlantic survival skill training, that includes how to escape from a submerged upside down helicopter in stormy weather. Not everyone passes survival training. If you don’t you can’t work there.

Safety on these big rigs and around the ships that service them is a big deal; there have been many accidents to learn from. The capsize of the Ocean Ranger platform in a storm with all 84 lives lost, was another of many tragedies of the sea the Newfoundlanders have endured over the years. The offshore oil industry has its share of accidents – I was reminded of that when I heard last week of 2 Norwegian oil platform workers who were killed recently during a safety drill.

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I love the accessibility of the port of St. John’s, open to view along the waterfront road and pedestrian walkway, separated by chain link fence only.

So where does all this fascination with ships come from?

I have a persistent memory as a child, being taken by my friend Shauna Kamichick’s father one Sunday morning down to the docks in Montreal, where he took us for a tour on board two ships. One was Italian and one was Scandinavian and I remember the difference between them. Think lived-in vs. spic and span, exuberant vs. reserved, pets vs. none, morning wine vs not. They were both kind to us though and both were fascinating.

I have no idea how Mr. Kamichick came to be on board with a couple of little girls, what his work was for instance or any of that – I was a child. But I always remember bits of that day, especially when I am around ships. A very rare memory from that time. Maybe that’s where this attraction to watching ships all started.

Of course, it could also be hard wired.

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There’s just one thing that can lure me away from the garden in June…

Icebergs!

We recently returned from a trip to Newfoundland – travelling from our country’s almost most westerly island (next to Haida Gwaii) to the most easterly, a trip that took 2 days to get there and 2 days to get back.

Before we even touched down in St. John’s, with my nose pressed up against the plane’s window, looking way out in the distance for my first glimpse of the iconic Signal Hill and The Narrows, I spotted two icebergs – bright white shapes against the grey sea. Beside myself with excitement. After settling in to our vacation rental the first order of business was to find a boat to get up close and personal and so we did, booking for the next afternoon, that, with beginner traveller luck, turned out to be the only blue sky day we had. All week as we drove around the north east coast, we would spot icebergs constantly, around the next bend, the next cove. Thrilling in their novelty, although for the locals this is just another June seascape. For me, it never got old.

These giant pieces of ice are over 12,000 years old, fallen off the glaciers of Greenland and sent on their 3 year, 1600 nautical mile floating journey through the Davis Strait on the Labrador current. By the time they get to Newfoundland and warmer seas (that’s all relative) they are nearing the end of their lives and break apart into smaller chunks referred to as bergy bits and the smaller growlers, named for the crackling sound made by trapped air in the ice. (The Growlers is also the name of the local hockey team that had just won the championship when we arrived. Saturday afternoon on Bar Street George Street we found ourselves in the middle of an exuberant street party celebration with the champions themselves in attendance – loudspeakers, speeches, noisy fans and, of course, music.)

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Of course, the icebergs off Newfoundland are famous for another reason…

It was one of those icebergs the Titanic ploughed into 640 km off the coast of Newfoundland, back in 1912, a story familiar to everyone. At the Johnson Geo Centre on Signal Hill, a fantastic geological interpretation museum carved into the bedrock of the hill, a permanent exhibition of the Titanic disaster tells the story in a novel and fascinating way. A series of poster displays with photos, maps and old news articles highlights the tragic tale of that dark night and all that went wrong – from the ship’s build, all the way to its sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it rests over 3 km below the surface.

The poster story highlights what was said at the time, what was reported in the news back then, the lies, innuendos, and fiction making and contrasts it with the ‘true’ facts. I was a little surprised to see that kind of bluntness in a museum display – very provocative and refreshing. It is unsparing and even scathing in telling the story of greed, arrogance and power hunger. Of dangerous cost cutting and what now seem to be insane safety measures – no safety drills, not enough life boats or life jackets for all on board, lookouts without binoculars, and much more. The bad judgment of the owners (looking at you J.P. Morgan), builders and not least, the captain, the missteps by individuals on board, as well as the courage and heroism of some of the people on that fateful night is revealed panel by panel. A very human story of arrogance, weakness and ultimate fallibility. The premise is that the tragedy was totally avoidable. Yes, in hindsight. It is a masterful expose of the lies and spins coming out of the news of the day way back when, right up to the present (you wouldn’t believe the conspiracy theories around the Titanic on the intertube – no, on second thought I’m sure you would). Fake news is nothing new.

However, moving right along here, it is because those 1503 people died on the unsinkable sinkable that marine safety standards and requirements started to be implemented. A big, needed wake up call.

St. John’s

I loved the city of St. John’s.

We stayed in a vacation rental, a third floor apartment in one of the colourful jelly bean houses that lines the downtown hillside streets. From our place we had views from windows and balcony out over the harbour and I watched the scenery for hours. Ships coming and going through The Narrows, the changing light on Signal Hill and the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour, the shifts in weather – sun, cloud, wind, rain, fog – sometimes all within the same half hour.

We spent the first 5 days of the trip in St. John’s walking, gawking and eating – the usual vacation pastimes, before heading off on our road trip. The weather was cold, and most days were cloudy, foggy and windy – even the locals were complaining about it – “The coldest June since 1932”. Sure. Didn’t matter one bit to me – nothing rains on my parade.