27/07/2024 – Back Home 7

I’m writing from Port au Choix, Newfoundland. It is a super-windy coastal settlement, about 2-hours’ drive from the Labrador ferry, which we take tomorrow evening. We plan to spend the day tomorrow at L’Anse aux Meadows Viking encampment site. It’s only a 5-hour round trip detour from the port, which is potentially a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Seize the day!

We took the ferry from North Sydney to Port aux Basques yesterday. It’s a 6-hour crossing, so we booked a surprisingly comfortable cabin. After a pleasant-but-uneventful hour scanning for marine mammals from the outside deck, we spent most of the crossing in our cabin, watching the Olympic Games opening ceremonies. They were incomprehensibly, intensely committedly, (and also achingly nonchalantly), ravishingly “out there”: what a prosaic Brit, like me, thinks of, with admiration, as quintessentially “French”. We had fun, providing our own commentary, reminiscing about the locations. The crossing flew by.

After 2 dinners in Newfoundland, it is clear that my options comprise “fries”, “onion rings”, “grilled cheese”. Although, last night only fries were actually available. Tonight, the grilled cheese was available, but tiny, so our welcoming waitress recommended I added fries to fill me up. She was not wrong. The poutine gravy is beef-based. There are bacon bits, chicken or ham in every salad, which is “tricky to pick out”… We return to Nova Scotia on August 9th. It’s clear I have another 12 days of fried, potato-based entreés to come. Not the first time this has been true in our travels. I spent the last week of the Camino subsisting on “Huevos fritos con patatas fritas”. Meanwhile, Carey is tucking into fresh fish with unfeigned delight.

The other thing we have noted, cuisine-wise, is that the road to riches locally runs through a Tim’s franchise. The only café available at/near pretty much every stop on the road so far, every single one has been crammed full of hungry punters, us included. Breakfast, lunch today were a muffin 6-pack.

I’m making it all sound very drab, even disappointing, but Newfoundland is wonderful! It is fabulously picturesque, currently lit by clear, sunny skies. The landscape is densely forested; peppered with lakes, brimming into the grass, many with blooming waterlilies; striking, flat-topped escarpments, with steep, sweeping sides and vertiginous cliffs; wind-whipped, white-capped seas.

We stopped at “The Arches” Provincial Park. We clambered across pebbles of marble, basalt, quartz and sculptural driftwood trunks, boles to reach rock arches, right on the shore at high tide.

We stopped at Port au Choix National Historic Site, muscling through the wind to reach the lighthouse. We spent an hour photographing a small herd of indigenous Newfoundland caribou. Although “at risk”, they are still wild on the island, where they have grazed for millennia. The name “caribou” comes from the Mi’kmaq “qalibu”, or “snow digger”, for how they forage in the winter. Our band of a dozen individuals included 3 calves, white-coated, surprisingly big beasts for being only, at most, 8–10 weeks old.