NEWFOUNDLAND: RAW, SAVAGE BEAUTY
It’s the only place in Canada with three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located within hours of each other
Lloyd Hollett is a beetles fan.
Praying mantises, too. Scorpions, butterflies, tarantulas — all manner of creepy crawlies and winged things except centipedes, which he hates.
That’s why they’re seldom seen at the fascinating Newfoundland Insectarium he opened 19 years ago in an old dairy barn outside Deer Lake.
Hollett’s house of bugs is one of many attractions, natural and manmade, drawing visitors to Western Newfoundland like, well, flies.
“The west coast has exploded,” says Laura Barry Walbourne of Go Western Newfoundland.
And for good reason, she says. It’s the only place in Canada with three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located within hours of each other:
Gros Morne National Park, where the theory of plate tectonics was proved on the bizarre landscape of the Tablelands;
L’Anse aux Meadows, a 1,000-yearold Viking settlement and the only authenticated Norse site in North America;
Red Bay National Historic Site in Labrador, where Basque whalers flourished for the second half of the 15th century.
It’s a curious place, this new found land of communities like River of Ponds, Cape Onion and Jerry’s Nose, where there are more than 300 unique dialects of the English language.
Gros Morne is said to have the highest density of moose in North America, says Barry Walbourne, who once saw 37 of them on the half-hour drive between Rocky Harbour and Cow Head.
There are 22 species of whales and dolphins in the surrounding waters, and 30 kinds of berries growing in the most inhospitable places, from marshy peat bogs to roadside ditches.
Seasonal berry-picking blitzes that are not only profitable (bakeapples, a.k.a. cloudberries, sell for about $75 a pound) but social events where locals brave swarms of bloodsucking black flies to collect the ingredients for a mouth-watering variety of pies, tarts, buckles, betties, scones, teas and confitures.
Of all the landscape in the west, perhaps the most forbidding is the Tablelands at Gros Morne, a 90-by-40-kilometre slash of Earth’s mantle that actually lies on top of the crust.
This moonscape was created about 450 million years ago when Africa collided with North America, pushing Earth’s insides out. Incongruously, a variety of feisty plant species has taken root in the rubble, including pitcher plant, blue harebell and pearly everlasting.
“The land here, it’s savage, it’s raw,” says Parks Canada interpreter Kirsten Oravec. “A lot of visitors are overwhelmed by the Newfoundland landscape.”
To fully appreciate the Tablelands, it’s best to stop first at the Parks Canada Visitors’ Centre at Woody Point and
sign up for one a guided tour.
Likewise for L’Anse aux Meadows. There’s really not much to see — just burbling streams, a bog boardwalk, recreated sod huts and green meadows leading down to the shore.
It takes an interpreter to hammer home the historical significance of the place, to which the Norse made four voyages over 25 years around 1000 BC. Locals were familiar with the unusual contours of the landscape there, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the grass-covered outlines were determined to be the remains of Viking buildings.
Less imagination is required at nearby Norstead, a replica Viking village, where costumed interpreters offer a glimpse of daily life among the Viking settlers. Women knit garments from handspun yarn, the menfolk practise their axe-throwing and pottery bakes in rock kilns. A massive boat shed there houses the magnificent Snorri, a 16.5-foot replica of a wooden Viking ship built to recreate Leif “the Lucky” Eriksson’s 2,400-kilometre voyage from Greenland to the New World. In 1998, a crew of 10 tackled the North Atlantic in the one-masted Snorri, powered only by oars and a 93-square-metre sail. They landed at L’Anse aux Meadows 87 days later.
To most Canadians, Labrador is an unknown quantity most readily associated with a dog. But no visitor should miss this resilient and beautifully bleak corner of Canada. It’s under two hours by ferry from St. Barbe to Blanc Sablon, over the 85 shipwrecks that succumbed to the notorious wind, fog, rocks and icebergs of the Strait of Belle Isle.
One of the highlights of Labrador, literally, is the Point Amour lighthouse. At 33 metres, not counting a nine-metre-deep foundation, it’s the tallest in Atlantic Canada and second only to Cap-de-Rosier in Gaspé as the tallest in the country.
The imposing tower was built 158 years ago, and built to last with limestone two metres thick at the base, 1.2 m at the top. At first, seal oil kept the wick burning, then kerosene, but since automation in the 1960s, the light that shines 18.5 nautical miles out to sea through the original Fresnel lens comes from 500-watt incandescent bulbs.
There are 132 stairs and two ladders to climb before reaching the cramped light tower, where the howling winds can reach up to 200 km per hour. Every time the light blew out, the keepers, who earned a princely $410 a year, had to climb those steep stone stairs to reignite it.
Downstairs, in the keepers’ house, it’s easy to imagine the isolated life they lived and the huge responsibility they had. Original journals record, in meticulous penmanship, each day’s weather, sea conditions, wind speeds, the times the light was lit and extinguished and other important details.
Once a week during the summer, the lighthouse hosts a cosy candlelit gourmet dinner, featuring locally sourced fish, vegetables and berries. A typical menu includes a spiced partridgeberry spritzer, butternut squash soup with Alexanders (horse parsley) and baked cod stuffed with scallops and cold water shrimp.
An hour up the coast is Red Bay, where evidence of a thriving Basque whaling community was discovered in1978 after a 28-foot whaling boat was found crushed beneath the wreckage of the Spanish galleon San Juan, which capsized and sank in 1565.
Underwater archeologists have determined that the Basques came every summer in search of bowhead whales and their priceless oil until the waters were depleted. Theirs was an efficient community of cooperages, rendering stations and “tryworks” where oil was boiled out of the blubber.
Some 25,000 artifacts were salvaged from underwater and on land and make up an outstanding display at Red Bay’s interpretive centre.
“The Basques were very adept at harpooning and processing the oil,” says Parks Canada’s Kirby Ryan, noting that the whales were about twice the size of the whalers’ boats. “They certainly didn’t lack courage.”
Back on the island, in the town of St. Anthony at the tip of the Northern Peninsula, icebergs routinely float in as late as August, and the whale-watching season is the longest in North America.
Up the road in Fishing Point, the Lightkeeper’s Seafood Restaurant offers up local fare such as moose sliders with rhubarb relish for $16.50 and bacalao, a Portuguese dish of pan fried salt cod, potato and onions, for $10. Next door, the Great Viking Feast is a touristy but fun dinner held in a sod-covered Viking longhouse decorated with moose antler chandeliers and long trestle tables.
Chieftain “Thorwald Herondson” convenes a mock Viking court of law while diners partake of capelin and cod tongues, moose stew, a traditional Newfoundland Jiggs dinner and cocktails of vodka and bakeapple syrup.
“There are no forks. Use your fingers,” says Thorwald at the start of the loud and rowdy evening. “And if that’s not good enough, use the fingers of the person next to you.”
St. Anthony is also home to the Grenfell Properties commemorating British physician Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, who brought decent health care in the impoverished and far-flung communities of Western Newfoundland and Labrador.
Although he died in 1940, Grenfell is still revered as a “writer, preacher, doctor, artist, teetotaller, lecturer, fundraiser and humourist,” says photographer and tour guide Doug Cook.
The properties include his gracious home, an interpretive centre and a handicrafts store featuring exquisite Newfoundland arts and crafts.
There’s just something about Western Newfoundland and Labrador, says Cook.
“People come here last,” he says, “and when they get here, they realize they should have come here first.”
Mary K. Nolan visited Western Newfoundland and Labrador as a guest of Tourism Newfoundland and Labrador.