The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
WHAT TO SEE AND DO
littlelouis.ca; thehopewell rocks.ca (C$10/£6); capeenrage.ca (C$6/£3.50); fundytrail.ca (C$9/£5); nbm-mnb.ca (C$10/£6); whale-watching C$60/£36 via quoddylinkmarine.com. past. By the time I depart, the dry bedrock is exposed.
To drive west is to experience the bay’s fluctuations in temper. A sudden downpour assails me as I inspect Sawmill Creek Covered Bridge, the beams of this 1905 structure proving they can still protect a traveller. And the sky knee-jerks from murderous gloom to benign blue as I loiter on the ragged bluff of Cape Enrage. Since
1840, a lighthouse has stood here, warning sailors of the hostile currents below. The restaurant alongside is a more recent concept, slotted into what was the keeper’s house until the role was abolished in 1988. Within, chef Slawek Dobrzynski brings his native Warsaw to New Brunswick, cooking up Polish garlic sausages – alongside a decidedly more Canadian lobster poutine.
If this seems incongruous as I gaze at Nova Scotia, brooding across the bay, it is also part of the area’s welcoming vibe. Down the road, Alma is smalltown Canada at its prettiest – laughter echoing within the Holy Whale Brewing Company, another clapboard church, repurposed as a craft alehouse; family firm Kelly’s Bake Shop selling cinnamon-heavy sticky buns whose aroma billows into the street. Across the road at Cleveland Place, a friendly B&B, Jane Chrysostom makes me a breakfast of eggs and toast, and salutes the joys of home. “My husband and I once moved to New Jersey for work,” she explains. “But like many New Brunswickers, we came back again – the homing instinct is strong.”
A former timber town turned to fishing and conservation, Alma sits at the south-east corner of Fundy National Park, a tranche of protected forest which confronts me with a truth – that neither Steinbeck nor I would have been able to continue to drive all the way along this coastline. The shore is too fierce, overloaded with cliffs and chasms. Highway 114 concedes the point, cutting north-west through the national park – where autumn also seems to be struggling, making scant impact on the green stubbornness of the massed firs.
It is not until I regain the bay at St Martins that the season reasserts itself, setting fire to the leaves along the Fundy Trail Parkway. Here is a private road, hewn for tourism, which tries to tackle this formidable seafront, inching carefully back east amid crevices and crags. It does so not to ruin the vista, but to celebrate it – curling around Hearst Lookout, where the land plunges precipitously, and tip-toeing across the Great Salmon River. At an adjacent visitor centre, grainy photos show the waterway in 1929, scows propped on the bank, freighted with lumber. There is no such commotion now, just ripples on the surface, and signs for Long
Beach – where advice that “swimming is not permitted in this area” states the obvious, the bay churning and writhing beyond the shingle. I go east as far as I can, to a road-block and a board showing that the Parkway will be extended all the way to Alma by 2021. But inland – not by the sea. The cliffs have won their war with the diggers.
I have no choice but to turn and head west. St John is an interruption, a port-city of flyovers and ships – though one which hails the province’s marine life. fe. At the Museum of New Brunswick, k, the skeleton of a northern right whale – washed ashore in 1992 – fills out the he second floor, its bones extravagant ravagant curves, its jaw a vast masterpiece erpiece of evolution.
Sixty miles iles further west, St Andrews provides chances to admire breathing, breaching g examples. It is a resort town of splendid plendid neatness – holiday homes aligned gned in comely rows; a campground und by the beach; the gilded Algonquin gonquin Resort preening on its hilltop, as it has done since 1889. Four blocks beyond, King Street slopes down to the jetty – where pleasure boats push out into Passamaquoddy Bay, on a search for migrating ocean giants.
By now, Nova Scotia has been lost to the horizon; replaced, visibly, by Maine – the Perry and Robbinston of Steinbeck’s recollections almost tangible to the west. New Brunswick, too, displays its fractured soul – Pendleton, Mcmaster and Deer Islands thrusting flinty elbows into the depths. However, the captain of the catamaran Quoddy Link has a furtherflung destination in mind – the
Wolves, a roughshod archipelago where humpbacks are known to gather. So it proves, a pair of them – Sedge and Chevron – leaping and arcing above the silver swells.
If there is a sadness to the fact that these creatures creatur can be named and a identified so s easily, so few ar are their numbers, there ther is also a beauty to the scene that is underlined by every soar and splash.
On the left, meanwhile, autumn charms the sparse vegetation on South Wolf Island, glowing gently even here – knowing its moment is now.