The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Canada’s unsung maritime city just got closer
With pubs, icebergs, fish and chips and new five-hour flights from London this summer, St John’s proves hard to resist for Mike MacEacheran
Newfoundland?” asked one of my friends, puzzled. “How the hell do you get there?” There is a reason why many of us – travellers like me, especially – love exploring a new destination. It embodies the sheer thrill of promise and, thanks to the return of direct flights from London Gatwick to St John’s this summer, a holiday in Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t as hard to come by as it once was.
So when the islands finally appeared on the surface of the glittering ocean framed by the plane window, there was a moment of pure joy. Far below, stirringly, was a land of puffins, whales and icebergs – a wish-list of travel experiences, in anyone’s book – plus scalloped beaches and bays that felt as far-flung as the moon. The really wild bit is that the flight across the Atlantic takes just over five hours – barely longer than it takes to fly to Cyprus.
To begin with, St John’s is a good place to learn more about the rest of Canada – but only up to a point. It has more pubs per head than any other province, but no ice hockey team (the Newfoundland Growlers went bankrupt a few weeks ago). Beer is made from iceberg water (more on that later), while the traditional cuisine is hardly the sort you would find at Tesco (chew over seal flipper pie, fried cod tongues and meat stuffing – called dressing – dolloped onto chips).
Newfoundland also runs half an hour faster than the rest of the country. Why? Just because. And it is a sucker for a daft town name: there is Come By Chance; Tickle Harbour Station; and, indeed, Dildo (look it up on a map). Always, there is a lightheartedness about this wicked little place.
Lighthouses are a motif here, too – so on my first morning I took a trip out to Cape Spear, Canada’s easternmost point. Last year, the BBC’s Race Across the World was filmed entirely in Canada and viewers will recognise it as the finishing post for season three. To my eyes, the beacon was a jack-in-thebox, popping in and out of the swirling fog. First, it was a ghostly silhouette, then a half-hidden skittle. Up close, it was a giant cherry-topped cupcake. Every so often, a signal blasted across the headland, then reverberated with a mournful echo across the sea.
With no one else around, gulls have taken up residence in the battery of
Fort Cape Spear, built during the Second World War when German U-boats skirted these shores. Here, icebergs carried by the Labrador Current streak across the horizon as they percolate south from the Arctic, and pods of minke whales, humpbacks and orcas breach the ocean below the sheer cliffs. In some ways, the history of the headland is always in danger of being overshadowed by its visitors.
British travellers tempted by the new flights will arrive in St John’s with a feel for the place already – and nowhere more so than downtown, where echoes of Old England and Ireland are rampant; it is a seafaring fantasia of sweet nostalgia. Fish and chips by the harbour is a given (the fish is encrusted in salt and vinegar batter at Yellowbelly Brewery). Another must is a pilgrimage along twoblock George Street to catch folk sessions that rotate through a succession of lively and loud boozers every night. It is a good place to be a karaoke singer or a bad dancer.
For a certain type of person, even more appealing is a skinful of Screech, Newfoundland’s wincingly-sharp moonshine rum. You need to be of a certain mindset to drink it and St John’s most famous ritual is the Screech-In at Christian’s Pub. Visitors are welcomed as honorary Newfoundlanders, albeit in a ceremony akin to a Monty Python sketch. You will think I have made this up, but first a cod needs to be kissed – on the lips. Then a slice of fried baloney, known as Newfoundland steak, is scoffed and a pocketful of ageold sayings recited – to my ears, each syllable was freighted with a singsong Irish twang. Tradition says a sou’wester hat has to be worn throughout and a shot of face-gurning Screech finishes off the routine.
It would have been rude to refuse, of course, and the night I visited was far from quiet. I was joined by at least a dozen other so-called “come from aways”, from Ontario, Nova Scotia, Alberta and even Hampshire, England.
Next day after breakfast – traditional cod cakes and strong coffee – I walked uphill to The Rooms, a museum designed as an interplay between land and sea. It resembles a gigantic fishing warehouse and is thick with memories, telling the story, among others, of the immigrants who settled in the mid-18th century. By 1795, two-thirds of St John’s 3,000-strong population was Irish