wanderlust

We have been fortunate to have several new articles appear over the last few months. Thanks to these writers and their publications!

Wanderlust
Dec 08/Jan 09

100 GREATEST TRAVEL SECRETS: WE ARE #1

"There was an iceberg in the bay a week ago - got some of it in the freezer if you fancy a drink"

I had barely paused in Deer Lake, my arrival point in Newfoundland, before driving six blinkered hours along the length of the Great Northern Peninsula and taking the boat across to Quirpon.

"Welcome to the island, my dear. Come on in and make yourself a cup of tea." Madonna, the lighthouse innkeeper had greeted me with typical Newfie exhuberance. But sooner had I stepped inside the wood-pannelled interior of the resorted 1922 building than I was quizzing her about icebergs.

"There was one in the bay about a week ago, I think," Madonna had said before plying me with pancakes and bakeapple jam.... At one point a squadron of gannets began plunge-diving for fish close offshore, folding their wings and hurling themselves at the sea in a salvo of black-tipped arrows. Porpoises then surfaced neardy, no doubt drawn to the commotion. And even when the feding frenzy was over, the sea was rarely a black canvas. Skeins of eider duck, puffin and black giullemot skimmed its surface, while kittiwake and gull pirouetted about the gentle swell.

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Zoomer Canada
March 2009

Newfoundland

PSST! MOST CANADIANS DON'T KNOW THAT WESTERN NEWFOUNDLAND IS A WINTER WONDERLAND

...Visits picturesque villages in the park - like Woody Point and Trout River - where fisihing boats are moored and lobster pots stacked. Contact Linkum Tours for accomodations or guided snowshoeing or backcountry skiing. (You may be trekking in T-shirts by late March). With luck, your guide will be Ed Engligh, 46, whose grandfather famously ran the SS Ethie ashore nearby in a 1919 hurricane, saving all 92 aboard. Ed's energy is legendary and his non-stop stories gruesome yet hilarious.

 

Coastal Living
June 2008

Of Ice & Men

Follow the path of glaciers and Vikings toward the untamed beauty of Canada's remote Northern Peninsula.

(Photo: John Sylvester)

Excerpt of text by Jeff Book

Standing atop an island cliff, Ed English looks out over the Strait of Belle Isle. “In March,” he says, “this looks like peppered porridge—a sea of ice floes speckled with seals.” Now, on a soft summer evening, it's a salty blue stew flecked with white froth from waves and breaching whales. In the distance float the glacial fragments that give this part of Newfoundland (newfun-LAND) its nickname: Iceberg Alley.
After the spring thaw, the Labrador Current (that's Labrador, visible across the strait) carries these massive ice chunks from Greenland, 1,000 miles away. They glide past Newfoundland's north and east coasts, shrinking as they melt. And Quirpon (kar-POON) Island, at the tip of the province's Great Northern Peninsula, makes an ideal viewpoint for both the bergs and the whales that arrive around the same time. Along with extravagantly long days and mild temperatures, they signal the sweet fullness of summer in this remote corner of North America.
A decade ago Ed bought the Quirpon Island lighthouse and its outbuildings, sight unseen. He turned them into a cozy inn, in a setting that, wrote one visitor, “Captain Ahab would give his other leg for.” Guests kayak among whales and icebergs. “Most of the bergs' ice is underwater, and they sometimes capsize or calve, so you have to be careful,” he cautions as we paddle near a “bergy bit,” the term for a house-size formation (that one day will melt down to a grand piano–size “growler”). Across the cove, seals speed through the water like sleek black shadows. Close encounters with dolphins and sea otters are not uncommon. Nearby, guests gather on the clifftop helipad, watching for the plumes of breaching humpbacks feeding just offshore, so close we can hear them exhale in the evening calm...

...Up near Quirpon Island lies L'Anse aux Meadows, the peninsula's other UNESCO World Heritage Site (with Gros Morne). Here, around 1000 A.D., Norsemen led by Leif Eriksson arrived from Greenland. Discovered in the 1960s, this National Historic Site yielded artifacts and the remains of sod houses, now carefully reconstructed. Interpreters in Viking garb shed light on the first known European settlement in the Americas, giving new meaning to “pre-Columbian.” What's more, because the Vikings encountered local natives, this marks the closing of the so-called Great Circle, the first meeting of peoples from Europe and Asia whose ancestors migrated from Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
The Vikings returned home after a few years. Like them, later European settlers had to learn to survive in a challenging environment. Given their historic isolation, Newfoundlanders might be expected to be wary of outsiders. Yet I found them friendly and welcoming, given to addressing friends and strangers alike as “my lad” or “my darling.” Travel around the Great Northern Peninsula and you'll find not only natural wonders, but also people whose warmth could melt an iceberg.