Drive a lot, see a little

The colourful houses of historic St. John's

Day 15: St.John's ~ Bonavista ~ Sandringham (520km)

It's amazing, thinking about it now, that the Newfoundland & Labrador tourism guide is as thick as it is. But kudos to the writers and publisher, who have managed to do so much with so little. The Nova Scotia guys have nothing on them.

I am really glad that I have come and seen this corner of Canada and experienced the Rock. The locals have been very friendly, St. John's has a couple sights of interest, and there are opportunities to take in rare spectacles of nature, such as icebergs and giant whales. The vast majority of Newfoundland, however, is uninhabited wilderness. Hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres of rock, moss, scrub and trees, with the odd lake or pond thrown in. Outside of St. John's and Corner Brook, the villages are small, sparse and plain, with few or no amenities at all, and you really wonder how and why people live here. As much as we have tried to believe our guide that a few small houses on a bay is a "charming and traditional fishing village", once you arrive at the cluster of five rather plain residences with nothing else to see, do or learn, you start to wonder why you drove 90 minutes off the highway to get there. You take a boring picture so that the time is not completely wasted, and after a few minutes are back in your car again. It may be a fine way of life (to each his own), but interesting travel it does not make.

Bonavista is a collection of squat clapboard houses dug in against the wind on a rocky peninsula of northeastern Newfoundland. Few of the buildings are more than one storey and all look weatherbeaten by years and years of driving wind, rain, snow and sea-spray. 'Quaint' and 'picturesque' are not words that enter the scene. The town was once a big fishing village but like so many other places in Newfoundland it suffered heavily when the North Atlantic cod fishing moratorium was imposed in 1992. It was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive. And so they chose tourism.

But what do you do when there's nothing to see and nothing to do? You start shovelling. And so the entire Bonavista Peninsula was turned into (on paper, anyway) a fairyland of rustic, traditional fishing villages where, as we were told by the woman manning the tourist office on the the TCH, one could spend "weeks" discovering all the wonders that these little places have to offer. After passing through countless of these tiny treasures, we are thoroughly unconvinced. It's like taking a trip to the next street over in your own neighbourhood. Look! Houses. People live there! Whoo-hoo.

Bonavista, sitting on the very tip of the peninsula, does a good job of dragging hapless tourists off the TCH and through these towns so that they can visit nearby Cape Bonavista, where a statue of John Cabot overlooking the coast stands above a plaque that tells of his 1497 landing in English, French, and Italian (his name was, after all, Giovanni Cabotto). Did he actually come aground there, "discovering" the New World for the King of England? No, and if you read the plaque to the end, it even says that Bonavista was chose arbitrarily as a symbolic landing spot for the Italian explorer. It could have been any of the thousands of points along the north or east coasts of the province. And as we sat on the rocky cliffs eating our packed lunch, watching the ocean smash against the jagged shore, any plausibility to the idea that Cabot had actually been there was further removed from our minds, for he and his crew would have surely perished just trying to get near the shore. I'm interested to find out whether the story and the Cabot statue were erected before or after the 1992 cod moratorium. I'll have to look that up.

The highways in Newfoundland have been exceptionally good. But then, if you've only got one, it's easy to put all your transportation resources toward its maintenance. Despite the miles and miles of empty wilderness, the speed limit is set at 100km/h, and the Newfies follow that pretty closely. Why do they drive so slowly here? Well, when there's nowhere to go, there's no rush to get there.

With a post-11AM departure from St.John's this morning and the lengthy detour to Cape Bonavista, we realized we wouldn't make our goal of Twillingate by nightfall, so we find ourselves here in Sandringham (population surely under 100) on the Eastport Peninsula. There's nothing here but a few houses, one cafe and a diner, our only dinner option. Tomorrow it's on to Gros Morne, and we may just get the tents out of the recesses of the trunk.