Food, friends on Bonavista loop
NEWFOUNDLAND: Outports feature postcard-like scenery, unique culture and attitude
To commemorate Canada’s 150th birthday, Driving is covering the country with a series of Great Canadian Road Trips, with itineraries revealing not just fun-to-drive routes, but also the pit stops, scenic views and local culture — all the things that make a road trip fun. This month Sarah Staples takes us to the far east — of Canada, at least — on a drive through some beautiful and friendly coastal fishing towns of eastern Newfoundland.
The rain may be coming down sideways, but that hasn’t stopped nearly everyone in Bauline, a town of 400 not far from St. John’s, Newfoundland, from heading outdoors to welcome the racers as they arrive. It’s the Targa Newfoundland’s “prologue” day: a practice stage before the official start of the five-day rally race that winds around The Rock every September.
Course marshals in yellow fishermen’s rain gear are standing by, clipboards in hand, as one by one, BMW M3s, Mitsubishi Evos and Porsche GT3 RSs rumble down the main street toward the town boatslip. There are many more volunteers here than cars. And there are hotdogs and pickle-flavoured chips waiting at the community centre, where everyone is about to gather for lunch.
Bauline is a fitting kickoff for my journey through southeastern Newfoundland. I’m taking a well-worn driving route called the Bonavista Peninsula Loop to check out some of the prettiest coastal towns in Canada, including Trinity and Bonavista; then I’ll keep following the coast north, to Twillingate.
I’ve been curious about outport Newfoundland ever since I discovered the classic 1974 cookbook Fat-Back and Molasses, which collected recipes passed down for generations. Bacon-wrapped squirrel cakes. Partridge soup. Hard times pudding. Sautéed dandelions. There’s even a recipe for jellied pig’s head that calls for sawing the head in half first with your bare hands. Surely people who could whip up suppers like these must be hardwired to overcome anything in life.
My ride is the newly redesigned 2018 Toyota Camry XSE with a sleek silver paint job, a bold front grille and a 301-horsepower, six-cylinder engine that’s easy on gas. There are useful high-tech safety features, too. An example is when I mistakenly drift over the median on tight, twisty roads and the car beeps me a warning to “Take a break!”
It’s surprising, at first, how little ocean there is to see on the drive. Highways like the TransCanada mostly traverse the Newfoundland Highland forests, more than four-million acres that encompass protected areas such as Terra Nova National Park, about 60 kilometres east of Gander. Open sightings of the Atlantic are usually a rare prize at the end of a rural road leading to an outport. You can imagine how isolated these communities once were, before the highways were built, hemmed in at the coast by an ocean of trees.
On my list of must-see places is Trinity, a postcard-perfect collection of 19th-century heritage-listed homes and saltboxes set on a spit of land shaped like a whale’s tale. The town is often used as shooting location for films and television; it’s so quaint, there’s even a cooper and a blacksmith. If I could, I’d hike the surrounding 5.3-km Skerwink Trail for a better view, but I reach Trinity with time for only a stroll and a few photographs.
Then it’s back to dodging potholes while keeping an eye out for any of the estimated 60,000 to 110,000 moose that live in the forests, all the way to Bonavista.
Once a poster child for hardships that many outports suffered following the collapse of the cod fishery, the town is experiencing a wave of business openings, led by its dynamic new mayor, John Norman. A geologist by training and a contractor by trade, Norman has been buying heritage properties by the dozens for the past seven years, restoring them, and is now leasing storefronts at discounted rates to creative young entrepreneurs, who he personally hand-picks to set up shop in Bonavista.
Dinner, for instance, is at Boreal Diner, already one of the province’s trendiest restaurants since it opened last spring on Church Street. Norman owns the hotel I’m checked into, Russelltown Inn. The next day, he shows me around shops where artisans are busy making sea salt, iceberg-infused soaps and shampoos, ice cream, naturally-dyed textiles, hand-loomed clothing, handcrafted gifts and more.
I leave Bonavista with a perfect crema on my cappuccino from Boreal, thinking that this is the new story of outport Newfoundland: an economy uplifted from within, and a town infused with fresh optimism for its future.
But there’s also a flash of hope that a more traditional life on the coast will continue. In Greenspond, a tiny out-island that’s one of the oldest communities in Newfoundland, I watch men clean their catch on the wharf. They’re participants in a limited “stewardship fishery” that’s allowed seasonally, now that the cod are slowly returning.
One of their wives, Mary Burry, invites me to lunch at her home. It’s delicious corned beef and potato stew and cream crackers, though in Greenspond — where the church was built a decade before Confederation — lunch is more properly cod dinner, she says.
The sky will start to clear soon, enough to catch a few twilight shots of canals running through the next town, Newtown, nicknamed “the Venice of Newfoundland.” And by tomorrow morning, in Twillingate, I’ll wake up to brilliantly blue skies and those brightly coloured fishing shacks, like you see in tourism ad campaigns peddling an airbrushed fantasy of Newfoundland.