August 28 Shipping News

We’re in Port Aux Basque on the SW point of the island of Newfoundland. THIS is the Newfoundland I expected! Wild and windswept, grey and cosy (inside). This is scenes from Shipping News thank you Annie Proulx. And the shipping news is? Two ferries leave here per day for the 6-7 hour crossing to Nova Scotia. And the news? The two ferries before the one we were due to leave on were cancelled because of high winds. Could be rough sailing so we packed sea sick pills and sick bags - be prepared in case it was a rough crossing. It wasn’t .... phew! We boarded and it was a smooth crossing. We were lucky as they were forecasting a tropical cyclone for the next few days.

Apart from the niggling concern about the ferry crossing to Nova Scotia, it was wonderful - wild, windy and 50 shades of grey. 

Next day dawned relatively calm and so beautiful in the early morning sun. 

Our ferry arriving - a good sign. 

August 17-21 A few of Iceland’s flowers

Can’t leave Iceland without showing you a few of the flowers we saw. The first few were growing on the acrid soil of the sulphurous springs. Tough little things! I also saw thistles/dandelions and lots of wild Angelica 

Woolliness is common in Arctic and cold climate plants as it helps to insulate the stems and leaves from the cold wind.



Darling little Forget-me-nots at the waterfall.

‘Arctic’ raspberries

Eye brights. They are only a few millimeters - so tiny.

One of the mustard family

Bilberry

Bear berry

And my fav the campion by whatever name. Look at the insect-like wangly bits waving to the insects to come explore.
Yarrow. I saw both white and pick.  The locals say - wash your face in yarrow water to stop wrinkles. Hmmmm !



A dainty posy. Each bud is a cluster of tiny furled petals. Exquisite

Thrift. We saw this in both Scotland and Ireland

August 23-25 Newfoundland-Labrador

So where was I? Heading out of Iceland bound for St John’s, Newfoundland. St John’s which was founded in 1497, is one of the oldest cities in North America and is capital of Newfoundland-Labrador. It’s located in the region of Avalon, the little squiggly bit in the east of the Province poking out into the Atlantic. We were looking fwd to wild windswept cliffs looking over the Atlantic, the wildlife etc ..... ‘Shipping News’, 50 shades of grey! We found it - almost, the weather was unseasonably warm and sunny.

We took a couple of tours along the north east coast including Cape Spear, the most easterly point in North America. And no, it’s unlikely that we’ll get to its opposite number in the west of North America. 

St John’s and Newfoundland-Labrador has quite a history. From the Portuguese, French and British after cod fish for hundreds of years - rock salt locally mined was critical to the cod industry and dried salted fish was exported all over the world -, Italian inventor Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal here at? ‘Signal Hill’! The Germans mined iron ore out of the 600 million year old iron rock until WWII! and during the war giant cannons were mounted at Cape Spear. 

Although the city is expanding north and south along the coast, Downtown is very quaint, houses are built of timber and they are painted all the colours of the rainbow. Then we hopped on a bus to take us via the scenic route passed the famous Gander to Port aux Basque some 13 hours west there to take a 7 hour ferry trip to Nova Scotia. We went from a largely Irish-French heritage to a Scottish-French heritage.  

It was an interesting bus trip passing by steep mountains, rocky outcrops, forests of Spruce, Birch, Larch and wild flowers galore. The island seems water logged with large expanses of bogs, ponds, rivers and lakes. No wonder it’s green! And it is still rising out of the ocean, rebounding a few cm a year - a hang over from the last ice age and the subsequent melt. 

The crossing to Nth Sydney yesterday was calm - the calm between storms! A tropical cyclone is expected to hit later today as we head NW to New Brunswick.

A bientot!

All houses are timber and they can choose their own colour. In fishing villages they paint their houses the same colour as their boat/s. Easy to ID who owns what!

Jelly bean row. The colours are vibrant - so lovely not seeing dull ‘heritage’ colours everywhere.

Pink of the Newfoundland flag for the wild Irish rose

The breeze was not behaving but I included this pic to show you the original Newfoundland-Labrador flag - pink green and white. Newfoundland was called Vinland by the Vikings - a land of vines, but actually they were berries.  Newfoundland-Labrador was once a colony and its flag was white for the wild English Rose, pink for the Irish rose and green for the trees of the region. You still see it flying particularly in the small villages.

White for the wild English Rose

And green for the trees, but there are abundant berries. This is Alder and they make wine with these. They also make many different berry wines.

The port of St John’s is very deep so large commercial vessels come and go with their loads. Big cruise ships also can dock. It’s an interesting port with piles of rock salt awaiting loading.

The wee harbours and bays are extremely picturesque. Many of them have been the location for a number of movies. This is Petty Harbour.

This is Cape Spear. Quite rugged. The rocks extend many kilometres out to sea.

Not the guns of Navarro, the guns of Cape Spear. They were raised from their hidey hole by huge lead counter weights
We walked through some of the tunnels where 1200 soldiers were based during the war. All open and airy now but I can imagine the air would have been fetid and damp back then. It reminded me of the rabbit warren of tunnels inside Gibraltar.

Quidi Vidi harbour. Very quaint. The morning was calm and the reflections beautiful - the silence created a special feeling about the place. There were once large fish plants here but no more.

These tiny structures are called Stores. They are where fishermen keep their tackle etc. I reckon they’d make a rather cute weekender.

Logy Bay where Caplin spawn - caplin are similar to sardines, .

Logy Bay where I wandered looking for the right colour and shaped glacial stones to put in my pockets as Worry Stones.

Torbay. The colours of the cliffs fascinated me.

This is Flat Rock where the fishermen could easily haul their boats up beyond the high tide mark. It is also the place that saw a visit from the Pope. The people built a religious grotto in honour of the visit.

Pouch Cove I believe the most northerly settlement on the NE  coast. Very rugged.



We’re on the bus travelling across the island of Newfoundland to get to Port aux Basque. Love these signs! We didn’t see any moose (or taste any meat!) but there are supposedly around 100,000 moose on Avalon Peninsula.



The ferry was bigger than the little expedition ship we had sailed in a week or so earlier!

The  island of Newfoundland is on the right with St Johns and Avalon on the extreme right. Nova Scotia and the Cape of Breton are on the left, the Arrow marks North Sydney where the ferry docks.

August 17-21 Snaefellsnes Peninsula - a magical place

The Snaefellsnes Peninsula is breathtakingly beautiful - oh dear I think I’m starting to repeat myself. I would be very happy living there - for a time! That stunning little piece of Iceland is over 14 million years old which in earth terms is fairly young but remember this is a continually emerging land mass. In fact the peninsular region, together with the Westfjords in the NW and the SE region, are the oldest parts of Iceland with chunks of the edges of the tectonic plates still evident. 

The Peninsula once saw massive amounts of volcanic activity - it has 56 craters and the massive Snæfellsjökull volcano is still active - but relax, the latest eruption occurred some 1700 years ago! Across Iceland, there’s an eruption every four years (on average). And we all remember Eyjafjallajökull the one that shut down airlines inn 2010 - and no I can’t pronounce it. Icelandic is a very old language dating back to old Norse. 

Snæfellsjökull is rather special, apart from its haunting beauty. Remember the movie ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’? ‘They’ found the entrance to a passage that led to the center of the earth on the Snæfellsjökull glacier! It’s actually a very challenging and rather dangerous volcano to climb. This unique place is also believed to be one of the seven main energy centres of the earth. Many Icelanders will recount stories of the mystic energy of this ancient glacier and any doubt cast on this is frowned upon. They say that one simply has to experience it to understand it.

The whole peninsula is a breathtaking place with dramatic vistas. I tried to keep the number of pix down but .......... I’ll leave you to browse. 

This and the majority of these pix are taken from a moving vehicle so there could be some fuzziness but you’ll get the picture I’m sure!!

Drainage trenches were dug around and through most of the fields we passed in mid 1900s to drain the very boggy land. This is apparently causing problems with greenhouse gas so the government is taking action to fill in some of them.

The communities are remote and there are few villages on the peninsula, and elsewhere in Iceland. So churches are scattered  around on private property. They even broadcast the services locally for people who can’t get there - due to weather etc



This looks brown but the field is covered in gorgeous pink flowers - fireweed.

Poor pic through window but this is to show you lava covered with moss.  The lava fields are extensive and are all covered with moss but other plant species are starting take root.









One of my favourite flowers - the Sea campion, Geldingahnappur in Icelandic. I saw them in Greenland and Newfoundland and also in Ireland and Scotland last year  - makes sense I guess.





We stopped in a tiny village with an extraordinary restaurant ‘Sker’. The chef is a local but trained and worked in a 3 Michelin star restaurant. The cod was fresh caught and served with hollandaise sauce and a warm salad. Yum. Cod is the big fish here - last night we had cod tongues as an appetiser. Not bad!



Lava lava everywhere

These are the Lifting Stones. Fishermen were paid according to how much they could lift. Lindsay would go broke!

We walked through jagged lava rocks to a black beach.





Near the waters edge I came across this rock face which looked like it had stone roses embedded. Or maybe that's just my overactive imagination.



I can imagine living here!

Lindsay scared himself peering over into this deep sea cave. Yes of course there were birds down there he wanted to see !!



Basalt columns

We drove through this 6km tunnel under a fjord. Cut hours off the journey.
Thank you Nice Travel for two marvellous days of sightseeing.