Welcome to Newfoundland

10th July 2023

My first thought in Newfoundland is how friendly the welcome is. We’re queuing at the airport to collect our hire car when a man from a rival company offers to help us as he can access their system from my desk. He’s friendly and chatty. First time on the island? He asks, noting we’re here for a good long time. We’re used to indifference, even casual rudeness, from hire car company staff and it’s nice to have someone friendly greet us at the beginning of our holiday.

My first visual impression of Newfoundland is colour. Fog is drifting about as we leave the airport but it doesn’t mask the houses, which seem to come in all colours rather than the various shades of white or grey I’m familiar with in New Zealand. It’s much cooler than Toronto and the fog lingers, fading occasionally before returning. I heard someone describe it as like breath: it lifts with the inhale and falls with the exhale. Whilst we’re in St. John’s for two nights it seems no one inhales.

Inland from the coast, where most of the settlements including St John’s are, Newfoundland is a mix of trees, rocks, and water. The forest immediately screams foreign to my eyes, the trees pointy and of the fir/spruce variety, millions of Christmas trees squished together. They are interspersed at regular intervals with ponds, which can be anything from the definition I grew up with (small) to a mass of uninterrupted water stretching to a bank far away, where a line of grey or brown stones rings the edge before the green of the trees begins again. Brief flashes of sunlight glint from the surface, which is still unless the wind catches it and dances across in ripples. For brief interludes the trees disperse and grassy uplands emerge, rock-strewn and wild, my kind of territory. It reminds me of the southern English moors, Dart and Ex. Rocks are everywhere and it seems Newfoundland is a huge rock, the road hewn through it and revealing layers laid down over millennia. 

We pause our journey to visit Brigus, described as a ‘must see’ by various guidebooks. Shame they forgot to sign the road to it, causing us (and another car, we notice) to drive half an hour out of the way. It’s a picturesque little town by the sea, but the beauty for me lies in the stunning coastline, craggy cliffs hugging the entrance to the bay, a rocky promontory poking out into the sea by a pebbly beach. Colourful houses nestle against a backdrop of green grass strewn with grey boulders.

Back on the highway the clouds suggest a retreat and we glimpse flashes of blue sky. To my disappointment, as we near the end of the Bonavista Peninsula and our home for the next few nights, the blue disappears. Clouds roll over and the fog that greeted our arrival on the island falls low to the ground.