To The Point

10-11^th August 2023

Short stays mark this portion of the holiday, a couple of nights and then another travel day, each taking us east. Apart from the necessary (and annoying) hop back to Toronto for our London flight we will continue east until we get home.

We arrive back on the Avalon peninsula wondering if the mist has ever left. It whirls around like white smoke, smothering everything one minute, lifting to reveal hills flattened by grey cloud the next. The road is by the sea but all we get are glimpses in fog-gaps, no horizon and hard to tell if we are looking at water or cloud.

We pause our journey for a walk around the Salmonier Wildlife Reserve, a rescue and rehabilitation centre for injured wildlife/native species. A boardwalk leads through woods and past enclosures that meld into the trees. It doesn’t feel like a zoo, the fences well designed to blend in, the aim to prioritise the animals’ welfare rather than humans’ viewing. Most creatures are well-hidden (including the moose – typical!) but a cute marten entertains us with his antics and a couple of balls of fur – one red, one white – curled beneath bushes are the resident foxes. As I watch the red ball a small pointed nose lifts and, for a few seconds, he stares directly at me. I hold his gaze, enthralled, until he decides I’m no threat and returns to his snooze. A huge bald eagle eyes us from a log, his head turning slowly as we walk by. An apex predator, he is unlikely to be afraid of us but, with a badly broken wing, he is unable to fly and will never return to the wild.

Off the main highway the road south is shocking, a patchwork of filled potholes, crumbs of fresh tarmac scattered around, brown water hiding depths of unfilled holes. We leave the sea and cross flat expanses of tree-less moor, small rivers scouring deep lines into it. It’s beautiful in a wild and bleak way, the mist lending it mood and atmosphere but truncating my view, and I’d love to see its full glory. Portugal Cove South, our destination, is on the southern tip of the peninsula, a tiny settlement of a few houses scattered along a couple of roads, our accommodation a one-room cabin on the seafront, less than fifty metres from the sea. It’s very well organised and stocked, fine for a couple of nights, but proof we couldn’t do tiny-home living permanently. A couple of seats on the small deck are dusted with rain, the water pooled on their wide arms wobbling in the wind.

It’s too cold to sit outdoors so we wander along the community wharf, a mass of concrete poking into the sea, yellow-paint-edged, with a large red building at the shore end. A foghorn blasts every half-minute, mournful and eerie. Next to the wharf, a creamy surf is halted by a steep bank of pebbles that masquerades as a beach, impossible to walk on without risking an ankle. A local woman, bright-pink-fleeced, waves and invites us in for ‘a can of beer’. We accept her invitation inside and walk into another fog, that of cigarette smoke, so decline the offered beer, feeling a little mean but unable to cope with the miasma. The walls are covered in mugs, hundreds of them, arranged in rows interrupted by pictures of her family. We chat for a few minutes, admire the collection and promise to add a New Zealand mug to it. She hands us a small piece of paper from a pile, name and address already written, and we understand why she has so many. My chest is tightening so we take our leave. We wander back in the drizzle, a seal curling in and out of small waves in the fading light, a bright green bouy bobbing close by it. The foghorn must be on a timer, its doleful bellow silenced as the darkness deepens.

You don’t travel halfway around the world and then not bother with an extra few hundred kms so we’ve made the trip down here to visit Mistaken Point, another UNESCO World Heritage site, and the oldest record of multi-cellular life on the planet. Darwin would have been thrilled, said one scientist in the introductory video, as it’s further proof of evolution where, as another scientist said, Things got big. The discovery was similar to finding the missing link in human evolution, although scientists are divided on whether these life-forms evolved into something else or, like the dinosaurs, died out. They lived on the seabed (around 1km down) so weren’t plants (no photosynthesis) and were destroyed by volcanic ash from an ancient eruption compared to that of Vesuvius, evidence of their existence permanently preserved in the same way as that of humans in Pompeii was.

The discovery of these fossils is so important that casts are made of them to preserve the images for study and future generations. Their precarious position, at the very edge of land and subjected to wild weather of all descriptions, means they are at risk of damage and destruction and therefore the only access is by guided tour, a walk of around 3km along a rough path. There is a no shoes rule and we are only allowed on the site in socks, a rough-hewn seat balanced on a couple of boulders soon surrounded by a dozen pairs of boots.

I stand on rock that was at the bottom of the sea 560 million years ago. All that is left of the inhabitants of that time are faint but discernible imprints, 3D outlines on the rock around me. Waves pound into the bottom of the cliffs, white foam sliding over great slabs angled by tectonic forces, spray spurting from a hole somewhere. The fog alternately masks and reveals a grey horizon, a yacht looming and disappearing eerily. The Flying Dutchman, says the guide. I hope not, I answer.

We wander around for half an hour, the guides pointing out various shapes in the rocks, some so faint we would miss them if we didn’t know what we were looking for. I’m in awe of those who first saw them and appreciated them for what they were, not just another ridge or depression in solid stone. We lace up boots and turn back along the wide path across exposed moor, wild and windswept. It is, our guide tells us, Hyper Oceanic Barren. However it is named, it is beautiful.