CANADA’S COOL CUSTOMERS
Spying icebergs up close will send shivers down your spine
ANEW tourist craze in Canada is to get up close and personal with icebergs. These huge beasts snap off the glaciers of Greenland and trundle south past the coast of Newfoundland, the country’s most easterly province.
They call it ‘iceberg alley’ and the time to witness this awesome spectacle is during the month of June. You have to chug your way out to sea to get up close. My guide and I idle the engine of a rubber boat in front of a dazzling berg the size of a stately home. I don’t smell almonds, as some say you can. But I can feel its chill.
Little waves slosh at the feet of its cliffs. There is a huge swimming pool at its base that’s been sculpted into the ice. Green sea pours over the lip like an infinity pool.
The freshwater ice, once snow, is unpolluted beer Sometimes some from 10,000 it. by you man. years hear They old, the make quite icebergs there’s fizz a thunderclap and pop. Occasionally and they split. Rarely, but lethally, they roll over. The ensuing tsunami would flip any boat nearby. I ask if that were to happen, would the coastguard helicopter come for us. ‘ Yep, in plenty of time to retrieve our corpses,’ says my skipper with black Newfoundlander wit worthy of Annie Proulx’s best- seller The Shipping News. Even in June the water is so cold you’re dead in three minutes. After flying direct from London to St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, I take a short flight to the town of Gander and hire a car. The search for bergs begins around two hours away at Twillingate, an outport in the north of the island. But unseasonal pack ice prevents us — and the despairing crab fishermen — getting out to sea. I listen to the local radio in my B&B. One headline story is about a woman cautioned for driving while knitting. Another goes into detail about a rogue moose vandalising a lay-by bin. I have more luck seeing bergs on a drive south east, at a harbour village aptly named Happy Adventure. Chuck Matchim, my guide, and his family run the local hotel and restaurant — and it’s fabulous. Their speciality is snow crab, the sweetest meat I’ve ever had from a shell.
On the way out to the iceberg in his boat, Chuck shows me bald eagles and seals whose heads for some reason you want to put a bowler hat on. It must be howlingly vile in winter. Even in high summer, you can get all four seasons in a day.
Anyone in the area should make a beeline for the haven of Salvage, a tiny harbour and the spot I’d like to buy a house and die in. Here, the white mountains sail past, then go south, break up and melt.
They are nature in the raw. Perhaps because the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, there’s a morbid quality to them. Their vast bulk, a turquoise shadow below, is as thrilling as it is creepy.
You never think you’ll meet an iceberg up close. When you do, you’ll never get it out of your mind.