Yarmouth's a pretty quiet place, and I only hung around long enough to walk out to the lighthouse there. It was a long but pleasant walk through fields and fog shrouded fishing villages. While I've become quite used to my seemingly supernatural influence over the weather even I was impressed with myself when the fog which had been hanging around for the past hour or so lifted within seconds of me stopping at the lighthouse. And remained clear right up until I decided to leave. Spooky, eh.
From Yarmouth it was back to my east coast office, Halifax, probably my favourite Canadian city. I took the opportunity to broaden my knowledge of the town, which in Halifax means visiting some of the pubs I hadn't made it to last time. There was no question where I'd be the first Sunday night I was back though, I pretty much dragged a couple of girls from the hostel down to the Lower Deck with me for Signal Hill Sunday. They agreed it was a good night out, but I think were a bit freaked that I knew all the words to (and loudly joined in with) all the songs, including the local sea shanties and folk tunes. When I wasn't hitting the pubs (and learning valuable lessons about drinking with the Irish) I did find time to revisit a few of my favourite spots, and went to the Open Day at the Naval base, where we got an awesome free zodiac ride around the harbour and a short ride in an armoured transport. What with that, the jumping castles and fairy floss I was briefly tempted to join the Navy myself, but figured the real thing probably had less fairy floss and more shooting so gave it a miss.
Soon it was time for another anniversary celebration, Canada Day, and I think it was appropriate that my first Canada Day was in Vancouver while my second was on the exact opposite side as I do like the either end of the country the best. It was a very early start that day for a river running trip out at the Bay of Fundy with Matt (the guide for the Salty Bear tour around Nova Scotia I'd done last year) and some of his friends. This Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth, at about 17m. When the tide flows into the Shubenacadie River it actually forces the river's flow to change direction, creating a series of short-lived rapids. So river running is something like white water rafting, but you're in a zodiac so you don't have to paddle, just hang on for dear life as you are repeatedly buffeted by cold, salty, silty water. By the last set of rapids we weren't so much riding on the waves as just plowing through them, pretty much submerged up to our waists in the now submarine zodiac. It's a lot of fun, you get to run through each set of rapids a few times and then as the tide moves further upstream you move on to the next set which is forming and afterwards they give you a steak dinner with hot chocolate, an odd combination but it works for me. After that was done it was back to Halifax for the Canada Day fireworks and the big party down at, where else, the Lower Deck, with a big group from the hostel.
With the festivities over I was off to Newfoundland, along with Jess along with Mike and Sina who'd just done a Salty Bear trip with Jess. The four of us ended up renting a car together to drive across the island and had a brilliant time, we all clicked right from the start. Before starting out though we spent a few days in the capital, St John's, a really nice city with a beautiful little harbour. We wandered around the town admiring the multi-coloured houses, visited Signal Hill (the actual geographic feature, not the band) and sampled local delicacies such as Cod Tongues. We also went out to Cape Spear, the eastern-most point of North America and from there hiked about 20ks back to the city on the East Coast Trail. The Newfoundland coastline is gorgeous, lots of dramatic rocky cliffs dotted with the occasional seabird colony, and we were even greeted by a humpback whale waving to us from the sea while we were having lunch. We thought it was anyway.
Setting off on our road trip we started at the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, a marine sanctuary where we took a boat trip to an island which is home to thousands of kittiwakes, murres and puffins. The murres and puffins in particular were hilarious to watch, as the boat approached they'd go whirring away across the surface of the water, barely looking as if they could lift off at all, and would often stay so low they'd smack right into any large waves. We also saw quite a few humpbacks on the way, one was pretty much right under the boat although they all refused to start breaching despite our shouted encouragement. After a brief lunch stop in a town called Hollyrood (where we had some delicious chips and gravy - the Newfies really appreciate good gravy bless 'em) we headed down to see Bird Rock at Cape St Mary's. This was on one of the southern peninsulas of the island (the whole island is pretty much a series of peninsulas really, requires a lot of driving up and down to get to the good bits) and like the name implies, is a big rock jutting up just opposite some very high cliffs. It's home to lots of gannets, and was particularly impressive shrouded in fog, only just letting you glimpse the sea far below. We spent the night in a little town called Placentia - when Mike asked at our hotel where downtown was we were given a funny look and told we were in it . So we spent the night playing pool and playing the few songs we knew on the jukebox (we may have been the first people to ever choose the theme from Disney's Aladdin).
The next morning saw us make a short detour out of our path to visit the town of Dildo. I'm sure you can figure out why. We had our statue taken with Captain Dildo the fisherman and searched in vain for a decent breakfast (Newfoundland was the first place where you couldn't be assured of finding a Tim Horton's on every corner and we were all in withdrawal by the time we found on one on day 4). We headed north to the Bonavista Peninsula, stopping at the town of Trinity and for a short hike along the Skerwink Trail (supposedly one of the best in the world according to some magazine but I've seen better). We stopped in Bonavista for the night, a beautiful fishing town with probably my favourite lighthouse in the whole world and our first iceberg sighting, which we were quite excited about. They tend to drift down past Newfoundland from the Arctic Circle throughout the spring and early summer so we were lucky to just catch the end of the season. After watching a gorgeous sunset there we spent the night at a great little B&B run by a guy called Albert and his wife, who were hilarious to talk to.
The next day saw us go back down and then up the next peninsula, passing through Terra Nova National Park on our way to Twillingate. We only stopped in the park briefly for a short hike to a place called Malady Head, relelntlessly pursued by mosquitos the whole way there and back. Twillingate, also on the north coast, was yet another stunning little fishing town set amongst rocky coves and the site of our second iceberg sighting. We took a boat out to see this one up close, kept busy on the way there trying to decipher our tour guide's thick Newfie accent (which sounds like a cross between Irish and southern US). The iceberg itself was pretty cool to see, pardon the pun, particularly seeing it in the light of sunset, sitting there bobbing away and occasionally letting out a short whipcrack sound. We got to taste a chunk we scooped out of the ocean. It tasted icy. We'd lucked out with our accommodation, staying in a few rooms at the office of an RV park (man the RV's over here are big, it was like being amongst a herd of elephants) so had our own personal kitchen to prepare a nice home cooked meal. Well the others did anyway, I was busy sorting out some of my clothes which were infused with maple syrup after bottle leaked in my bag, which left them all sticky but smelling absolutely delicious.
The next day we made it to the far west side of the island to Gros Morne National Park. That place was incredible, with glacial carved valleys and mountains situated right on the ocean. We stayed in a quiet little hostel which had only been converted from a hospital a few years ago, in fact our room pretty much still looked just like a ward, which was only slightly freaky at first. Moreso though was the rooms across the hall, which still had an extensive collection of surgical instruments sitting around, so we could have managed just about any crisis ranging from delivering a baby or conducting an appendectomy ourselves. There were more than a few references to the movie Hostel made that week too, and most of the others had quite strange dreams while there (I slept like a rock though). We were pretty keen to get out hiking straight away (that probably had a lot to do with the strange smell in our room too) so headed straight for the Baker's Brook Falls trail.
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Not only were the falls themselves quite pretty but we saw 4 moose along the trail, including 2 big bulls with a hefty set of still velvety antlers each and a mother and calf who we had to pass with a few metres of to get back to the car. I've seen quite a few moose by now (Mike and Jess were pretty much hyperventilating with excitement though) we were all glad to finally see some moose as Newfoundland has one of the most concentrated populations in the world and we hadn't seen a single one crossing the island.
Our second day in the park Sina and I decided to tackle Gros Morne mountain while Mike and Jess went sea kayaking. The hike to the 800m summit was the one I most wanted to do in the park, and while I generally keep a pretty good speed up when I'm hiking, with Sina setting the pace we were up and back in record time. The ascent includes a fun little stretch called The Gully, which is basically a scree slope of loose rocks and boulders you have to scramble up. It's not as bad as they make it sound but doesn't look like much fun when you're at the bottom looking up. The view from the top is well worth it though, particularly the view from the cliffs at the back of the mountain over 10 Mile Pond. After a frosty chocolate milkshake to celebrate we rejoined the others that afternoon for a final dinner at a nice restaurant, as the next day Mike and Sina had a marathon drive back to St John's to catch some flights. It was a very sad goodbye, even though we'd only spent a short time together we'd all bonded pretty quickly.
Jess and I decided to stay on in the Park a bit longer as there was still lots to see there, so we spent the next few days doing lots of hiking, including the Lookout Trail, a beautiful wildflower lined seaside trail called the Green Gardens and the Tablelands. These are hills made of rock from deep in the Earth's mantle. They're toxic to most plant life because of the minerals in them so are mostly bare and a delightful pumpkiny orange colour. For a bit of a change from walking we went on a boat cruise along Western Brook Pond (strangely enough they tend to call lakes ponds around there, presumably they call actual ponds puddles and so on). This is one of the most dramatic parts of the park, a long lake which used to be a fjord but it separated from the sea, so is now surrounded by steep cliffs along it's entire length except for one end. We also went sea kayaking around Bonne Bay one day, the first time I've done that. It was fun, but was windy enough to make it hard work rather than a relaxing paddle.
But eventually it was time to get going again, we spent one night in a place called Corner Brook, after all that time in the great outdoors we need a bit of civilization in the form of a trip to the movies and then it was time to head our separate ways. Jess was off to Quebec and I headed back to Halifax via 2 bus trips and a ferry ride. I had a quiet time there, caught up on some work and some more movies - man has this been a good summer to be a nerd, what with all these superheroes and cute robots and all that. Also did some catching up with more friends, Ben and his girlfriend Vikki, who I'd met on my Salty Bear tour and also seen in Jasper and Vancouver. They came with me to say my goodbyes to Halifax at the Lower Deck. While I'm sure I'll be back one day that will probably be my last visit on this trip at least. With that out of the way (and once I saw the Dark Knight, which completely blew my mind) it was on a place all the way west to Calgary. Boy was that strange to cover so much ground in such a short time, but I've after crossing the continent 3 times overland I decided it was okay to take the easy way for a change.
So that brings me up to date. Haven't done my travel map in a while so thought I'd better get that up to date. It's starting to get a bit crowded, need to fill in some of those gaps I think.
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